Race Based Politics in America

A few days ago I heard an extensive up-to-date report on conditions in Kenya. Remember the rampages of destruction after the recent elections that threw-out the current government which refused to disclose the vote and so its own defeat?

Charlie Clements* spoke to us of the terror engendered by the attacks of one tribal group upon another in the weeks that followed. Kenyans who had been living together in peace for all the years of their independence, intermarrying, doing business with one another were suddenly forcibly splitting families apart, destroying one another’s homes and businesses. Hidden tribal grievances suddenly broke into the open and the true nature of peaceful, reasonable Kenya , the democratic beacon of African hope, was called into question.

Or was it? Last night a young man connected to the Kenyan girls schools that my church supports reported to us that all is well back home. The girls are in no danger. Peace prevails. All is normal. ...Oh, yes, food is now very expensive. And, yes, the high school senior we were going to send to university is no longer planning to go to a Kenyan school. She will [suddenly] be going to Uganda ... ‘because the schools are better there.’

The discussion of Race in America led by ministers of the United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalists this Sunday morning suddenly seems, to my mind, illumined by the Kenyan experience.

Undiscussed, unaddressed racial issues suddenly erupted in our homeland, too, thanks to 24 hour TV news shows’ blatant abuse of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Right Wing attempt to smear Barack Obama’s quest for the presidency.

Leave aside for the moment the dirty Rovean politics and the unprincipled, incompetent so-called news people blathering on our TV screens. Consider, instead, how race divides us. Still divides us — despite all the earnest effort of the last 40 years.

Like our young Kenyan friend, we long to believe in Peaceful America, the America we love, where ethnic differences do not divide — “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” [No, no, ‘Illegal Immigration’ is not about race.] And in our longing for the America of our dreams we conspire with ourselves to not notice the police profiling and racial fear that fills our mammoth prison system with young black men. [Just to name aloud one small affront to decency.] And, now, along comes disgraceful politics in our homeland, too, and what just cannot be is exposed for all to see.

See all those happy white and black faces cheering the hopeful change Obama embodies! That is our America! That is who we truly are. The hundreds of hours spent by political operatives pouring through Jeremiah Wright’s 30-plus year sermonic history just cannot represent who we are as a nation. It’s just too evil... too anti-American in values. It just cannot represent the America, blessed by G_d, and beloved in song at baseball parks all across the nation. Can it?

*Dr. Charlie Clements, head of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, speaking at Andover Newton Theological School, upon his return from a fact-finding mission to Kenya, where he met with local, non-governmental groups in Nairobi and elsewhere.

If I Ever Loved You — Justin Currie

As you can see, Peter and Justin had a great time on their tour across the country and northern Europe, but now its just about over — for awhile anyway. Hopefully they'll play around LA while they rest up. Peter has a film score to get back to, but I'm sure that won't keep him in the house if Justin wants to play. Will he be just 'too busy' when it comes time to jet off to record at London's Abbey Road Studios? [What do you think?]

I hear the title track on Justin's new release, "What is love for?", playing on my supermarket's speakers. It feels really weird trying to take in such heart felt thoughts while shopping for peanut butter and crackers.

My own fave is "If I ever loved you". I guess I could image writing something like this in response to my own sometimes strange apprehensions of life:

I try to figure what has gone
I seem to look the same
Maybe there's a tightness around my eyes

Sometimes the evening comes
I think I miss someone
And then I realise

That, if I ever loved you, shouldn't I be crying?
Shouldn't I be cracking up
And drinking all the time?
Yeah, if I ever loved you, how come I feel alright?
How come the nights are so easy
And the mornings look so bright?

When I hear Justin sing this, I don't hear him questioning his love for 'her'. He believes that he did love her. His question is about his own reactions: "Why am I not crying? Why am I not cracking up? I'm taking this loss in stride — what is going on in me?" The singer is discovering something about himself that he didn't know before the break-up and is confused about who he really is as a result. He accuses himself of not being conventional in his emotions.

No wonder the song is interesting; not just your usual pop fare.

Can the conflict in Israel/Palestine really be transformed?

Today started at 9am with a discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian situation led by our friend, Rachel, who is just back from a two week visit to the area as part of an Interfaith Peace-Builders delegation.

This is not an easy way to begin the day. It’s not just that The Wall is such a reminder of Berlin and of our own Mexican paranoia. It’s that the situation looks so hopeless.

According to our news media and the implications of the Israeli wall, there appear to be two countries at war — Israel and Palestine. But, when you look at a map showing Palestinian and Israeli settlements, you are confronted by a mammoth intermixing of communities that defies boundaries — Israeli enclaves have been constructed seemingly everywhere. The Wall looks more like a resource protector than an actual political boundary — more like a dam preventing Columbia River water from ever being shared with Mexico.

I’m sure there are many explanations for how this disaster came to be. But, just this brief look, that Rachel provided us, into how people are actually living, was enough to break the heart. “What hope can there possibly be for transforming this conflict that is not just a bloodbath?”

I have been reading, rather naively, John Lederach’s The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, hoping to expand my own theories of conflict transformation based on experience dealing with what turnout to be comparatively petty church conflicts. Vicious as church politics can become we ain’t no Somalia or Ireland or South Africa. I am not a little humbled just meditating for a Sunday hour on the quest for peace in Israel/Palestine.

The fact that, even with his international experiences, Lederach can continue to hope and argue for the possibility of transformation — not merely resolution or management — of conflict like this lifts me a little out of the feeling of hopelessness I carried away from Rachel’s descriptions of life on the ground in Palestine.

Quote of the week

"JOYFUL VOICES OF INSPIRATION is an enthusiastic community of singers who [sic] celebrates and shares the joy, power and message of gospel music. The group rejoices in the diversity of its membership and encourages singers of all ages, cultures and religious affiliations. The singers and the director [James Early] strive to create a family-like environment in which they support and mentor each other.

"The choir seeks to promote appreciation of gospel music as both an inspirational medium and important musical art form. Members believe that by singing together in energetic, spirited performances they can bring joy and inspiration to all present. The group strives to support and participate in charitable events through their concerts and performances."

The Attack on Jeremiah Wright & Trinity UCC

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.

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.

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.

"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!

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."

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."

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.

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.

Cooper at 2 1/2 weeks since the accident

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.

Ice Palace

"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.

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.

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?"

Out of the Many — One

This week’s Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey release seems to have captured the media’s attention, perhaps because, like so much else in American life, it defies their either/or perceptions. It turns out that not only are we not a Christian nation; we can’t even be called Judeo-Christian — too many Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, et al.

It appears that the Unitarian Universalist experience of religious identity reflects the American landscape better than we might have imagined. Our identity cross-section is different in many ways, but our diversity mirrors the nation. How well are we dealing with our diversity?

Some of us are still trying to absorb the possibility that we may be classified as Protestants! Who knew? I did hear a reference to the Christian Bible during a worship service the other day. No, it was not during the Christmas Pageant Service — that was largely a Christmas-like stories from around the world sort of adventure.

In our church we hear occasional reference to Christian or Jewish scriptures, just as the preacher may call upon Buddhist or Sufi thought at other times. There are even periodic movements to have our various religious traditions celebrated more intentionally. But, mostly, our diversity seems to be taken for granted and not explored very closely. Often we seem, like Barack Obama, to be a little embarrassed by our heritage, rather than eager to celebrate it.

In any case the Big News about our many religions background is not the multiplicity but the seeming ability of parishioners to put together a more or less satisfying spiritual practice based in multiple sources.

The modernist drive to find the single truth all must believe will find no satisfaction among us. How ironic is that — given our Humanist bent for the last couple of decades!

But the post-modernist embrace of the many may help us build a sturdier religious platform as we become more accustomed to not knowing with the old, should we say arrogant(?), certitude.

The Storm Is Passing Over

Two nights ago we brought our dog home from surgery — both right-side legs shattered by confrontation in the night with superior forces (automotive). The stillness is wonderful as we sit or lie in our peaceful house; together at last after our five days of forced separation.

Sometimes the soft sounds of Peter’s latest songs lull us. Sometimes the silence cradles our stillness and rocks us gently home to our stronger selves.

The nights are hardest for him, and so for us. So much can go wrong when you can only shuffle along leaning against the walls for support while your splinted and pined together limbs splay about striving for a control that never comes.

We are so dependent — he on his gods; I on mine. But the storm is passing over, as Dr. Tindley* says: “O courage, my soul, and let us journey on, for tho’ the night is dark, it won’t be very long.” We’ll pull ourselves along with hope as our guide and our soul’s resolution as standard bearer.

“By and by, when the morning comes,
When the saints of God are gathered home,
We’ll tell the story how we’ve overcome,
For we’ll understand it better by and by.”

*Charles Albert Tindley (1851-1933) composer of such other black gospel standards as Stand by Me, We’ll Understand It Better By and By, and the original version of the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. Tindley’s songs were the inspiration that led the great Thomas A. Dorsey to begin writing his popular blend of spiritual and hymn with blues and jazz underpinnings.

Quote of the week

"It is not a matter of seeking stillness — stillness is everywhere to be found. It might help to shut-up."

Dog Down

It happened as I was walking down the driveway toward the back of the house looking for our housemate to see if she would like to come out and see the lunar eclipse we had been emailing about. It was about 10:30, the night was reasonably cloudless, and the earth’s shadow was well across the moon’s surface.

And, then, there was the high-pitched cry of the dog being hit and the screech of tires and the shouts of neighbors out on the street for the moon. Teenaged boys came running from our house and a neighbor’s doorway. Adults are already encircling the dog (my dog, our dog) lying frantically in the street. “No! No! No!”

We lifted him by blanket into the back of our wagon. The gurney came out to meet us at the curb. Multiple fractures. One leg a mass of shattered bone ... another more modestly useless ... blood ... one deep gash ... other multiple abrasions also filled with crumbled asphalt and road dirt. Beautiful x-rays. Ugly messages. We went home to lick our heart wounds. Cooper remained with the tubes stuck in him and the kindly vet monitoring his breathing and heart rate; vigilant for signs of internal bleeding.

Now we wait for the surgeon’s call. Now we field the phone calls of empathy and advice we have solicited; the knocks at our door; the cards in our mail box. The remorseful concern of our neighbor who drove the car that brought our Cooper down — the single car that passed unhappily through the dark theater of our night.

How are we going to care for our buddy who, no matter what the outcome, will not walk on his own for weeks, for months? Both his injured legs are on the right side. Will he be able to even stand while his body works to heal? There are thirteen steps up to our doorway from the street. We don’t know if he will even have half of that shattered rear leg when at last he comes home to us.

As we drove home, the moon was nearly out of its once-in-a-decade eclipse. Our sun’s light glowed from its surface. The two planets and a star still accompanied it through the night sky. We turned inward — each to his or her source of strength and compassion. Now, for another night, we wait while Cooper’s bruised lungs recover their capacity before the anesthesia comes. Now, he waits, alone, with his blanket, where our love cannot warm him.

Keeping an Open Place at the Table

These days, when I walk from the parking lot to the main office door at our Massachusetts church, I automatically check the rainbow flag to see if it is still flying proudly. You know the sun has been assaulting those bright colors all summer and winter. Spring winds will be especially cruel. One part or another of that rainbow flag is torn loose with such regularity that repairing its destruction has become just routine maintenance. New flag, new pole even. But still it flies.

Rather like a metaphor for life, isn’t it? The attack on gay and lesbian and bisexual life continues every day across America, and folks like us have to keep rising up to the challenge and maintaining the flag so that it may continue to fly bravely and proudly.

I feel the pride when I see the rainbow flag outside our church door, because I feel, also, the pain we had to brave in order to get to the point where we could agree to fly it, and, then, continue to shoulder our way through the consequences of our decision.

It was 1997 when we voted to make a place at our table for gay and lesbian folks. What a change that has made for our community!

As I think about the changes that face us in the future, I remember this one big change in our past.

The thing that surprises me most about our decision is how good it has been for our life together. I mean, I never really questioned whether it was the Right Thing. That has always seemed abundantly clear to me. But I hadn’t really appreciated how Good it would be; what a tremendous asset to our community all the new people would be!

I knew we were supporting good people (usually families), but I didn’t really appreciate how good, or how loving and thoughtful, talented and dedicated these new people who flocked to our church would be.

I hadn’t anticipated how alive it would feel because of their presence; how it would not just be the people here at the time of our decision that I loved, but a whole new crowd of exciting presences.

And, then, I began to notice other, apparently unrelated consequences, like: “Hey, we’re pretty good at this welcoming stuff when we put our minds to it! I’ll bet we really can welcome everyone just as our hearts tell us we want to.”

The more we welcome, the stronger we actually become. The more able we are to make a place in our life for others — even older long term members whom we haven’t felt all that much at ease with; even kids crying in the morning services and clogging up the basement classrooms.

Perhaps we don’t have to circle the wagons as we thought to protect this precious life together because others will treasure it just as much as people have in the past; maybe more so, because they haven’t known it before out there in the world of sixty hour work weeks and arrogant disregard.

Well, I am a very conservative person and I don’t want to ask you to push this one idea too far; I just wanted to outline what I think are some of the consequences of opening up our life to others.

I have gone through virtually every major change in my personal life kicking and screaming: “I want things to stay the same!” And, sometimes, I have believed that I need to hang onto even the things I hate. I can be so stubborn it takes a good smack from a 2x4 to get me to change direction. But, now, I am sad to see so much of our country hanging on to hateful ways, and wonder how to smack the whole stubborn populous up the side of the head.

The Anthem video revisited

I have continued my search for more info about Caitlin Davidson and Dylan Cunningham who were responsible for the video of Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Anthem’ that I cited a couple of days ago (see below, Feb 14). As best I can figure out, they put this show together for a Filmapalooza at their high school in New Brunswick, Canada. Dylan put a re-cut version of the video to Soundgarden’s ‘Fell on Black Day” — maybe, he didn’t care for Cohen so much after all... maybe, he just wanted to prove he could do it. The original 48 Hour Filmapalooza is the oldest and largest timed film competition in the US, but I’m guessing this one was strictly Tantramar Regional High School.

In 2007, 31 US cities participated in this now international Filmapalooza project with over 17,000 participants. According to the organizers, "the competition is a race against time. On Friday evening, filmmakers draw a genre from a hat. Before the final kick off at 7 PM, a character, prop, and a line of dialogue are assigned and the filmmakers are off. They rush off to write, shoot, and edit their films. The final masterpiece is due by 7:30 PM sharp, on Sunday. Films screen at local theaters just days later. Everyone on a team must be a volunteer, and although some teams are fiercely competitive, many teams look at this as a chance to have a high-octane get-together with friends. The 48 Hour Film Project was started by Mark Ruppert and Liz Langston in Washington, DC, six years ago."

Maybe Cait or Dylan will write and we will find out more about their project.

Living with the land

By the time I entered sixth grade my father had begun to come into his own in the business world, and our family came to summer on some of the small lakes in Western Massachusetts near our home.

The first year we tented by one of these nearby lakes, perhaps with the thought that we could actually live there all summer long and my father commute to work. But the land was flat, and the development was new, and my father sold this land after the first year. And we began to rent a cottage well up in the Berkshire hills at a place called Big Pond.

There the woods were old and it was four miles by winding, climbing dirt road from the main highway to the northern shore of Big Pond where we stayed in a cottage owned by Orin Handler. The Handler’s and the Grimes’ were the only houses you could reach by road in this part of the lake. There had never been anyone but Handler’s and Grimes’ on this road since it was cut, but Harold Grimes was planning to sell some of his shorefront property, and we were there to consider adding our name to theirs on the small sign that marked the road.

Any old New Englander would be familiar with the cottage we stayed in there — the big porches extending off living room and dining room through creaking French doors that were usually open to the breeze off the lake. The doors were closed most nights as the temperature fell even in June and July.

Then, the smell of oil fired stove would permeate the air and nestle around us as close as the heat itself, and we children would be hustled off upstairs to a loft looking down on the living room fireplace, the wicker furniture, the wooden rocker you could get on and ride like some wild stallion galloping across the plains until your mother cried out in fear that you would tip over.
Overhead was nothing but painted roof. The walls were wood paneling. The windows were hinged like cabinet doors and you looked out on the long slope of front porch roof and the lake’s waters beyond.

When the thunder storms came, as they frequently did during our days on Big Pond, the rain would come in a rush across the waters at the edge of the wind that drove it and engulf our house and thunder down on the shingles only inches above our heads. From the second floor you could see out over the whole lake as the lightning flashed its eerie white light and its tentacles snatched at the houses out on the island in the center of the pond.

My father and I built what was called a surf board in those days — a vague cousin to what you would see at the seashore today. For me it was a pretty much unsinkable craft that I paddled by hand and by foot along all the shoreline and around the shore of that island at the center of Big Pond.

The actual building of the eight or ten houses out there was a source of considerable fascination until the transporting properties of ice debunked the fantasies. The one house which most drew my explorer’s eye stood alone on a small peninsula of rock dropped by glaciers in retreat up past Hudson’s Bay long before my time. Isolated even from other islanders, I wondered at what sort of folk might suddenly emerge from within to challenge my small intrusion into their secret lives.

Orin Handler and Harold Grimes were a kind of old time Yankee you can still find in upstate Vermont or perhaps in other recesses of the country from which they have failed to be eradicated. They were men my father felt at home with and in this case admired, for they were country men but of class and culture. There were not many such men, I suspect, in my father’s world and there were certainly no others like them in mine. Their families were long off the farm — perhaps merchants or seamen from Boston or New Haven who first came here for the cool of summer and, then, stayed on in Springfield or Northampton.

I found their books shelved on the long wall by the fireplace and stacks of “Boy’s Life” magazines up under the eaves. And an image of the life they led there burnt itself in my small, expanding mind. I peered through their windows and poked about in their boathouses, for they rarely actually lived there any more, and in later years I longed for their life — for the ease of their manner, the ready chair by the fire where no person was truly a stranger.

At first my wish was just to be there, to experience again a way of living they provided and which I, too, could admire and rejoice in. But, then, a greed for a style of life I could only experience but not myself provide, took over and consumed me. And it is here in this reduced and ruined form that I now find myself, and you experience me, grappling with the spirit that seemed to direct their course, and enveloping myself in every mud puddle, sinking slowly down into the earth from which I came and which so clearly shaped their lives.

The land is neither hostile nor welcoming in and of itself. But it does seem to contain within it something of who we are at our deepest core — a connection to the spirit of the life that animates everything — not as some detached, external mechanism, but in some extremely personal, intimate form in which I recognize what I want to be — not merely who I am but the special form only we humans can attain but which requires so much of us, so much effort to draw it out and is yet so easy and common when it comes.

I speak here of the water and blood from which we were born and which now courses through our bodies, an oddly unfamiliar presence from which so many around us are actually fleeing. It repulses their nostrils; it is too coarse a salt to set at their table. And yet to separate from it is to abandon life itself. Here we are bonded by some inexorable fluid oozing from within each of us like sweat or mingled blood, like the warmth that comes from within the fire.

I saw this life coming across the lake in the fire of stars and moon and lightning flashes. I felt it shimmering on the surface of rocks beneath the surface of the water. It welled up around my toes when they dug down into the sand at the water’s edge. It slipped across my palm on the bodies of escaping fishes. And I experienced its remains in the Handler cottage and in the gnarled arthritic fingers of my father’s hand clutching at tools they could no longer grasp.

In those summers by the water my eyes, too, stretched out to embrace the life around me and I was in no way alone, though I may have seen no single person up close in a day or a week of exploring. Through all the angst and anguish of my worst teenage years I experienced there the same at-homeness in my element that my father and I understood in the presence of the Grimes and Handler men.

Not when skulking down paths after dark through woods, where only the infinitesimal difference between trodden grasses and wild reveals direction; not even in the company of the most alien of god’s creatures (teenage girl) did I loose that sense of oneness of self and land — an experience never known down in my flat-land school or home, and that was to desert me so completely in the years of work and suburban life to follow, until I came here to live on my island in the Charles where the abandoned rocks, small birds, and marshes surround me as they did in the Berkshire hills, and the surface of still waters mirrors the golden trees of fall and me.

Quote of the week

"I find it appropriate, even interesting on occasion, when other people express opinions, but my own seem oddly embarrassing."

Beware! Justin Currie

Be careful Justin Currie! You may be able to handle the Black Thunder* served up at Glasgow’s “Persian’s Forehead” pub, but here in the new Fortress America we look askance at any foreigner ordering any beer but Bud Lite.

When you fly into Nashville (or wherever) to begin your tour of the pubs and music spaces of America, you will not be able to see the shinny glint off our new wall along the Mexican border, but, be assured, our ever-ready border guards will be waiting to frisk you. Let us pray they do no more!

Beware! When hired guns hear your cock and bull story about being born in a van near Paisley in a “hailstorm so vicious that it took a team of panel beaters a month to separate [your] forehead from the roof”, not even your pale American keyboardist may be able to rescue you from the collective terror with which our chest thumping politicians so gleefully besmirch our beloved soil.

Above all refrain from unseemly co-mixing with other Scotsmen (notorious for their libidinous skirts and bad whiskey) or musicians (all suspect, except for country western singers, for any may be supporters of the Far Left 's coddling of God’s enemies in our innocent midst).

Not that we wish to seem unfriendly! We welcome your self-labeled “thunderously dreary dirges”. Your sonorous wailing of “What is love for?” on your just released record is well known here, albeit in a pained sort of way. My only wish is that I could hear better the finely played tones of this American keyboardist, Peter Adams, whom you attempt to drown out at your tour engagements.

Finally, should you prove able to pass our ‘fair and balanced’ border inspection — perhaps by disguising yourself in suit and tie, we rejoice at our brief opportunity to applaud your tired versions of withered hits in this your latest American tour (April 13 — April 27). G_d willing, see you at Joe’s Pub!
*A vile mix of Guinness and red wine...gag.

Justin Currie & Peter Adams at Joe's Pub, NYC

Mostly along The Charles — Waltham Winter

Winter

And ready for Khidr* the green ancient, my interior
tastily decorated with empty
wine bottles, a stack of four inflated truck

innertubes with Christmas lights dangled down inside,
two bags of Portland cement
turned too hard anymore to use, two two-gallon

kerosene containers, a plastic bottle of bubble-making
juice, and a package of
hummingbird food waiting for March.

— Coleman Barks, Tentmaking, 2001

*The Green One (of Sufi and pre-Islamic lore) is an emissary of the G_d, full of the eternal liveliness and freshness of wisdom ‘drawn out of the living sources of life.’ See http://khidr.org/ Perhaps Al-Khidr is connected to the Green Knight of Arthurian lore? How does the Celtic Green Man's earthy nature parallel these visions?

Cheerios in the Knees

Limitation

Unbridled freedom is really only suited to a dreamworld. It may be something that a child wants, but restraint of some sort is always applied to truly human behavior. That is to be expected, even welcomed. For it is precisely the application of restraint or limitation which makes us human (“a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor”). Limitations are the means by which we are humanized. Otherwise we are in danger of growing into pint-sized primitive gods (i.e., tyrants) — that is the great fear of Genesis One.

Limitation and self-awareness are the two things the human couple must acquire before leaving the idyllic life in the Garden at Eden. These are essential to their effective life as part of the earth. Without limitation and awareness they will be like unformed gods — loose cannons with no effective constitutional restraints.

As long as the G_d doesn't care about anything beyond himself, he doesn't have to adapt. But as soon as she wants relationship, she has to learn how to do it. Awareness and acceptance of limitation is the means.

One of the many biblical storylines misrepresented by the orthodox is this great one about how the God-Who-Seeks-Us learns to accept the limitations which are essential to relationship. The same limitations which apply to human life, the G_d accepts for himself because she too wants relationship. The G_d’s Sacrifice is the same as that required of Adam and Eve and Jesus of Nazareth.

Limitation is not the end of joyful human life; it is not something to be discarded or bemoaned. It is the essential means by which we grow and develop. There are no exceptions to this rule — it applies even to the G_d because it is a reflection of the G_d's own nature (i.e., the Way Things Are). Limitation doesn't just come from the outside; it moves out from within. (“I will write my Law in their hearts.”)

That is what makes Yahweh a great god and worthy of worship. He is not Perfect, and does not claim to be. He is in fact by nature opposed to the abstraction embedded in the notion of Perfection. He is Real, instead. Her name is “I AM”, not John Calvin or Tom Delay. I don’t know exactly how this works out in practice, but it seems to me that the essential business of religious people lies in trying to figure it out. A religion which constantly rejects the lessons of experience is always missing the point regardless of how brilliant it may be.

So, I am going to start from this possibility — creative life arises out of noting , accepting, and using limits. Growing-up is learning how to deal with them. Pushing limits is heroic and admirable, but so is learning how to live within the edges.

Change

The edges may be moving, changing — just like the rest of life. Expecting to find even a limitation the same today as it was yesterday is preposterous. That is why Laws and Creeds don’t work in the long run — they just can’t keep up with change. A religion of Absolutes is doomed in application. What is the point in maintaining a belief system which in order to withstand the test of use requires a falsified view of reality?

Our science teaches us a few things about living with uncertainty — it’s a lot easier once you give up the illusion of Absolute Truth. There is really nothing to be said about Transcendent Being for it is by definition outside the knowable world –– such life is present only in a place like the Garden or Heaven down by the river. If we go there, we are dead.

Yahweh does not wish to stay in the Garden. He won’t stay dead. That is why he is known as Immanuel —“G_d with us”. While pushing the couple out of the Garden results in travail for them, it is not in fact a punishment if you believe that life in this world is something worth having. Calling the Expulsion from the Garden punishment is to take the child’s point of view as definitive. Their trauma in the World is only a mirror of the G_d’s own experience of living; it’s not something special to humans.

Yahweh may be a sky god, but our earth is, of course, part of the sky universe. Separating Sky from Earth is a false distinction in the 21st century. A revisioning of the G_d in our life story will require special attention to this, I think. The old Earth based religions of Europe could not withstand the power of the Christian Sky-god religion and there is no point in trying to go back to a failed vision. What we need is a vision of the G_d which corresponds to the world we experience, and an interpretation of this known world that reflects our growing understanding of the G_d. In our world sky and earth are one; neither is more or less natural than the other. What would a transcendent experience be in an all natural universe?

The G_d changes and lives in a changing world. Such a god also embraces limits (“I have come to put an ax to the tree.”), because it is limits which make possible a perceivable world, and, so, a world about which it is possible to reflect and communicate.

Word & Image

Yahweh is the god of word and image. They are the means by which he describes and experiences. He uses both in his efforts to create, deal with his need for change, and explore the edges of his current limits. Language is his means of connecting, ordering, and extending relationships. (In the overpowering experience of the G_d’s Spirit at Pentecost everyone understands everyone else’s language.)

His connection with the creative word is established immediately in Genesis One. John’s Gospel story treats him from the point of view of Greek ‘Word’ images. The G_d uses the written word in his first Commandments and it is by means of the word that he stays connected to his creatures in and out of the Garden.

He uses breath (the means by which his word is delivered) to bring his clay male/female figures to life in the second Genesis creation story.

Both word and image are connected, then, by this breathing which is called the Spirit of God. The Spirit must, then, be a rhythm (among other things). The rhythm of life is the breathing of G_d.

In today’s music world rhythm-based music is proclaimed by traditionalists to be distinctly different from melody-based music. This is the false result of peculiar either/or thinking. Poetry is rhythm based melody. Suppose G_d breaths to a rock-and-roll beat as well as to the drone of Gregorian chant?

It definitely muddies the water when you start using this both/and way of combining ideas and experiences. But isn’t that the way we really experience things in this century? It is a gift to be simple in the midst of complexity, and, it seems to me, that a proper understanding of the G_d will reflect that gift. We are looking for the ‘elegant solution’. And we are seeking it, not by ruling out things, but by drawing them in.

The Anthem

In their workshop, 'Soul Signals:The Spirituality of Midlife', the Revs. Martha Niebanck & Larry Peers [First Parish in Brookline] encourage new perspective on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories we write reveal the movement of our lives and suggest the particular future toward which we dream or might dare to dream thanks to the crack in everything.

"Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen, 1993

Caitlin Davidson and Dylan Wendell Cunningham created the visuals for this video. I wonder who they are and what their story is. Why did you choose this Cohen song?

Alarming Adventures Now 50 Years Old (or more)

It is about 9 am and I am setting out on what has become a daily trip around the shore of what is known as Big Pond in the town of Otis, somewhere deep in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts. My mother knows only that I go out exploring on the surfboard that my father and I built — (Well, let’s be honest here. I picked out the design; he built it, with me standing along side fetching tools as needed. As an adult, I actually built another one of these surfboards in the same basement of our family home, but without my father’s supervision. He was much too capable a craftsman to be able to tolerate my amateur fumbling efforts. Let it be noted that my board floated as well as his and was never known to crack-up on a rocky shore.)

This was a rather large and cumbersome 1940’s style board; nothing like the sleek designs of the ‘80’s. But I could lie across it, and, with wetted goggles securely in place, view the rocky bottom of Big Pond in immense detail, square foot by square foot.

I began these artistic inquiries around the beachfront near the summer cottage that my father had also built, but each day I move further and further afield, slowly circumnavigating The Known World. I say these were “artistic explorations” because all I really cared about were color and shape and what the academically trained painter calls architecture. Truly, I know nothing of minerals or of the slippage of tectonic plates or of glaciers creeping back and forth.

I move out past the Spencer’s house on the point, a wonderful old musky, dark abode of the elderly, and, thence, into the uncharted territory beyond, paddling eventually to the largest spring source of this incredibly cold and deep summer home I love. And, then, I press on further still, working my way around the blocade of rocks rising up, suddenly, to just beneath the surface of the water — a death trap for motorboats. This is totally forbidden territory. And, then, in a surprising turn of bravery, I head straight out toward the center of the pond, where an island of perhaps a dozen houses beacons.

Roaring deathtraps drawing skiers or bearing fishermen cross my path; an occasional sunfish, too, sails swiftly past before disembarking its young passenger in a burst of unbidden energy. (I will not speak of this adventure in my home, now or in the future.)

I peer into the boathouses and the front yards of the island people, and note the manufacturers and horsepower of their docked motorcraft. I view the faded green and white stripes of their wooden lawn chairs, and wonder at how they mow their lawns so neatly. It seems odd to my inexperienced mind that in this idyllic playground, so far from city formalities, mown lawns yet exert their tyranny.

Some of the inhabitants are curious about my origins and I am drawn inevitably into fraternization with them. I continue on even to the dark back side the island, and, then, to a little isle just off its coast, where there is evidence of wood fire and beer drinking.

My mother, as usual, has not really noticed my absence. She and my younger sister, Lois, are busy with the things domestic women find endlessly fascinating — sewing and cleaning and discoursing on the minutia of their lives. They would smile condescendingly, but without comprehension, at the magnitude of my adventures. They would be alarmed.

Miles and Miles of Heart

The spiritual journey that is Jung’s endeavor requires more than thought or feeling or intuition or practice, for these habits of mind cannot unaided sustain the necessary effort against the forces of indolence and despair that the journey inevitably provokes. It is the heart that sustains in the darkness.

Jung is well aware of the Buddhist, the Daoist, the native Shaman, but everywhere he is faced with the failure of European (and American) Christianity. He pursues the ongoing revelation the orthodox seek to abandon. How shall we deal with Christianity’s neglected problems — the supposedly irreconcilable opposites in human nature, the soulfulness of matter, the undervalued and maligned feminine in us all?


“In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”
— C. G. Jung, 1934

The Unreconciled Opposites

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us, according to Jung, to a better understanding of ourselves. We are able to recognize our unhappy, reprobate selves first in others. Happily, being exposed through the bright light of awareness, we have the opportunity of addressing the ‘terrorists that threaten our way of life’ for they live in ourselves as surely as in others. We are not merely separate individuals; we participate in a shared humanity. “We make our own epoch.”

Donning the white coat of religiously sanctioned purity only perpetuates division within and without. Blaming some Satan for ordinary evil behavior shirks responsibility at the expense of our young men and women trapped on the battlefield where personal ignorance and hubris first deployed them.



“In our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.”
— Emma Jung, 1955

The Soulfulness of Matter

Supposedly ‘dead matter’ has an awfully nasty habit of biting us from behind. Super high tech aircraft shake themselves into oblivion after hundreds of hours of over-deployment in murderous occupation. The ordinary paring knife slips to the detriment of the already agitated cook’s finger. A polluted earth chokes and howls in dumb reaction to human misperception. That which grows lives as surely as we who tread upon it. There is a reason for the neglected garden’s failure to produce fruit.

Perhaps there is something to be learned from the so-called primitive’s deference toward nature, the prayer for forgiveness before the slaughter. It is not ‘superstitious’ Native American exploitation of resources that is creating a dustbowl in our West or changing weather patterns all over the earth.

The Rejected Feminine

Here it may be objected that at least within Roman Catholic Christianity the feminine has not been banished to the world of crybabies. But see how emasculated is this virgin mother of us all! The harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine that Emma Jung so urgently extols can surely not exist apart from equal respect and justice.


Carl Justav Jung
Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

Getting the Song Started

Poems, like songs bellowed and squawked at the tops of trees,
Belong up there in the air, riding high waves in the breathing of god,
Entering through ears alive to their sound,
Turning round and turning round
Through human fears and lost options,
Opening daises and blue crocuses in snow crusted brains.

Sing songs for the workmen hunched at dark benches,
For the doey eyed child afraid to leave home.
Breath in the flutter of birds to their nestlings;
Breath out hundred mile streams of unrest.
Make stories from barked orders and whined grievance —
High tales of new stars birthing like gods in the night.

— Oscar Handler, “A Bevy of Lies”, 1938

.... When I see them, they are standing in the glow of a soft, rosy light with feathered edges like some fabulously romantic close-up in one of D.W. Griffith’s silent film adventures. The soft focus lense gets cranked down and the camera moves in to capture - not an 18 year old Lillian Gish floating on the edge of a chunk of ice - but Erving and Miriam Polster in the kitchen of their little cottage on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, somewhere over near Case Western Reserve where Miriam was a doctoral candidate in psychology. (Erv was a practicing Gestalt Therapist, already much in demand.)

Their backyard was a fenced-in garden that led directly to the kitchen door. In my soft rosy memory glow I see that garden and the bungalow connected to it. Inside in the kitchen are a Formica and aluminum table and chairs along one wall, and on the other the sink and such - little more than a galley, I suppose, but it felt huge in their presence. The glow, I think, came from within them and it spread out to encompass all around them. It felt like home there, you know; the home, that in my case at least, had never actually existed.

You would have thought they had just built a nice fire burning in the fireplace intended to welcome you (especially you) into the library. But there was no fireplace and we were in a derelict, trashy neighborhood on the outskirts of civilization, where only students could willingly choose to live. If there was a real life glow in Cleveland, it was toxic.

I was 26 and Erv leaned over to me and remarked that Ira Progoff had accepted his invitation to come do a workshop on Dream Interpretation and would I be interested in coming.

Well, was I interested in coming!? Progoff did not then have quite the fame that he later acquired. He was just beginning, as were we all. But his hand was the hand that had actually touched the hand of Carl Gustav Jung. And in the hierarchy of great men that peopled my young mind there was no god greater than C. G. Jung. So I went. I was scared out of my wits, but I went.

I walked in, alone, into this barren room with nothing but a circle of metal chairs set-up in one corner. Somehow, I think, I had imagined a large lecture hall where I would be able to secret myself in the shadow of a back seat. But this was one of those bare lightbulb experiences where they are playing Good Cop Bad Cop only there is no Good Cop and you are the one under interrogation.

Progoff began by presenting a dream and, then, elaborating upon some of it elements using Jung’s amplification methods. So far so good, I was starting to relax. Then, suddenly, he stops lecturing and begins asking us questions. “Who,” he says, “do you think - of the several persons in the dream - was the dreamer?”

It was a silent room. It was a very silent room. It was silent room full of silent therapists. Not even Erv was speaking. And into this silent silence I hear myself pipe up, and I’m suggesting that the dreamer is the young woman who has undergone a transformation as part of the dream story. (I can’t remember what I said yesterday on the telephone, but I can recite to you now what I squeaked out in that barren room 37 years ago.)

Well, to cut directly to the chase, I was wrong. But I still somehow had enough ego left to drag myself off to supper after the workshop with Erv and Progoff and a couple of other men whom I did not know. The memory picture of us is framed, of course, by the cigar smoke that so often seems to surround these early life stories of mine.

A year later I was praying (though I didn’t know it) for the appearance of another light to show me the way home in the Dark Night of Overwhelming Human Experience.

But the warm light from Erv and Miriam did still fill my heart like candles of love and concern glowing in our midst and spreading out in the incredible life stories we share.