Rev. Marti Keller and the UUCA Women’s Writers Group

Call To Worship – Laurie Renfro

As we spend time with each other and the great American classic by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, let us appreciate we are living in a time that welcomes all races to this place of worship.

And may we begin by greeting one another.

A Reflection on Harper Lee

By Rev. Marti Keller

August 15, 2010

In his introduction to Mockingbird, a portrait of  novelist Harper Lee, Charles J. Shields noted that her one and only published manuscript—To Kill a Mockingbird—was ranked in a Book of the Month Club survey conducted in 1991 as  second only to the Bible in “making a difference in people’s lives.” He writes that in the years following its publication—50 years ago this July—this book has drawn nearly a million readers annually. Over 30 million total copies sold, translated into 40 languages.

This novel, which won for its author a Pulitzer-Prize was instantly successful, becoming early on a classic of modern American literature and adapted into an Oscar-winning film in l962.

Despite her novel’s huge impact, Harper Lee’s writing life was brief and her off-page life intensely private, having only occasionally commented on the book itself, refusing any personal interviews since l964. She is not expected to make an appearance even in this year of multiple celebrations of the anniversary of her novel—with readings led off by Steven Colbert and other luminaries, and even a proposed Congressional resolution commemorating its publication—quashed at the last moment by a filibuster.

According to her biographer, Harper Lee has never appeared comfortable in the limelight. In fact, he writes that not only does she not solicit attention, she actively discourages it. In this era, he observes, of relentless and often prurient self- exposure by approval-hungry personalities, Lee prefers silence and self-respect.

She is not, however, a contemporary Emily Dickenson, a recluse. From accounts given him by friends and relations, she currently lives a normal life filled with community activities, many of them related to her church. She spends time in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama and some time in New York City, where she first moved as a young woman, working a clerical job with an airline, to be among writers, even lunching a few years back with Oprah Winfrey, who was unsuccessful in convincing her to come out of celebrity hiding.

She was born in l926 in the small Deep South town of around 750 residents, which had not changed much since the days of the Civil War when a Confederate soldier passing through was heard to say it was the most boring place in the world.

When the railroad arrived, things changed some—brick structures replacing sagging old wood buildings, new schools built—including the Alabama Girls Industrial School—  where dressmaking, laundering, and home nursing would not hold Harper’s attention.

There was a Home Café and the Simmons Hotel where families could eat a midday meal on Sunday, served boarding house style for 55 cents—chicken, mashed potatoes, okra, corn, gravy and cornbread and pie.

And in the center of the square and described as dominating everything by its size was the Monroe County courthouse, where Harper could watch her father perform the functions of a title lawyer.

This was Harper Lee’s small town Alabama childhood world—with a black housekeeper and a father who was by all accounts a proponent of racial segregation, where downtown was all white, where blacks couldn’t use the library or sit down and have a coke or ice cream. Where women and blacks could not serve on juries.

When you entered the sanctuary this morning, you may have been handed a sepia toned copy of a flier circulated at the time of what was a nationally known case—the so-called Scottsboro Boys Trials in l931-37. Nine black men were indicted for the alleged rape of two white girls on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis, and newspaper had a field day, boosting their circulation with headlines such as ‘ All Negroes Positively Identified by Girls and One White Boy Who Was Held Prisoner with Pistols and Knives  While Nine Black Fiends Committed Revolting Crimes.” The first jury found all of the defendants guilty. These events, most of which would have happened when Lee was about the same age as Scout, the young girl in To Kill a Mockingbird: the theme of racial injustice, the fear of miscegenation, the courage of two attorneys in that case in defending those wrongfully charged and all but one eventually released— had a deep impact on the 10 year old who would write a book called by some courageous and timeless in its exploration of racism, by others as a bloodless sugar coated myth of Alabama history.

But it seems more likely that the direct inspiration for the rape accusation and trial in her book came from much closer to home, that stately Monroe County courthouse which in l933 was the scene of the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. For whom the pressures of the trial and his initial death sentence by electrocution proved too much, landing him not in prison but in a Hospital for the Insane, where he remained for the rest of his brief life.

Out of this came To Kill a Mockingbird, and out of To Kill a Mockingbird this morning’s reflections, from some who lived parallel lives in parallel times and some who read it much later on – Euro women and African American women,  women writers with differing experiences and perspectives.

In doing so they have chosen to use language in places that was shocking then and still shocking now, but it was a careful and deliberate choice.

Their truths will move you.

COMMENTS ON TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD—FIFTY YEARS LATER

Bee Nahmias

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee shortly after it was published in 1960.  It was fortuitous timing to read about customs of the Southeast of the United States in the 1930s, since my husband and I, both fresh-baked physicians, had just put in two years in Atlanta. For us, coming from Washington, DC and New York, this move had been culture shock.  We loved the friendliness of the South, but had to adjust to other things. The Black/White relations seemed outrageous.

Grady Hospital was built in the shape of an H: there was a white wing and a black wing with a connecting corridor.  There were “white” drinking fountains and “colored” ones. We often got looks of suspicion on the road because our car had New York tags. Once I hosted a barbeque in the back of our apartment building and invited all the staff members of the Pulmonary Function Lab, including a young black female technician.  The next day a neighbor pulled me aside and said, “You know, we just don’t do that here.”

To Kill a Mockingbird widened my perception.  It confirmed what I had noticed already with my new Southern friends.  I could see that family was of the utmost importance; you were molded by your origins, either proud or resigned.  Blacks and Whites didn’t mingle socially. I also noticed that food preferences were limited and leaned toward fried and overcooked items. For my husband and me it was actually a second cultural learning experience. Both of us had immigrated to the States as teenagers and already had mastered a previous major cultural adjustment. One experience we cherished in Atlanta at that time was our membership in UUCA.

After our two years in Atlanta, from 1958 to 1960, we went on to Boston to finish our medical training.  When we heard of Atlanta’s miraculously smooth integration, we decided to come back because the opportunities for fast advancement were huge.

Re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird fifty years later has been illuminating. I found my old, tattered copy on the bookshelf and noted the paragraphs I’d marked in pencil before. This time, also, I marked portions that struck me now and they weren’t always the same. I took the book along on a visit to my daughter and her family in Shreveport, Louisiana.  And much to my surprise I found out that my grandson, Alex, had just finished studying the book in his freshman English class.  What a coincidence!  He educated me on the numerous study guides and quotes with comments that I could google.  But I didn’t do that until I finished choosing my own quotes and making my own analysis.

So what did I notice when I re-read the book?  I still admire the analogy between the innocence of a mockingbird and the innocence of Tom Robinson who is falsely accused of raping a white woman and will ultimately get the death sentence.

However, as a birder, I am appalled by the section of the book on which the title is based.  The children are told, “shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” No, no no—it’s NOT okay!  It’s amazing to see this being said by Atticus, the justice-loving defense lawyer, and by Miss Maudie.

I did admire again how Harper Lee managed to puncture the bubble of Southern snobbishness about family: Scout is speaking to her brother, “Well, Jem, I don’t know—Atticus told me one time that most of the Old Family stuff’s foolishness because everybody’s family’s just as old as everybody else’s.”

But then there’s this.  Atticus is saying, “…Miss Maudie can’t serve on a jury because she’s a woman…“ He goes on to say, “I doubt if we’d ever get a complete case tried—the ladies’d be interrupting to ask questions.”

Oh, oh, oh—there are so many concepts here that grate on me like fingernails on a blackboard.  First of all, of course, that women couldn’t serve on juries.  Scout, the alert and smart little girl, picks up on that right away. But Atticus spouts the usual lame excuses for sexism and tries to make a joke of it.  Little Scout is drawn in and laughs too.  And finally, Atticus says, “Our forefathers were wise.” What about our foreMOTHERS?

Now I understand that in 1960, when the book was published, the concepts of gender and racial injustice were just beginning to sweep the country.  I also understand that Harper Lee was describing perfectly the ideas of the 1930s.

But this is what really upsets me: My grandson told me that in his high school discussions nobody noticed or discussed the killing of the birds or the sexual discrimination.  And in my google research I note that these sections of the book are also slighted. We still have a way to go, it seems.

Today’s society has improved. Shooting bluejays is illegal.  Women have made great strides in equality. Racial and family status prejudice has much diminished.

Scout had it right when she said to Jem, “Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

I WILL BE READING THIS EXCERPT FROM TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

“Atticus,” I said one evening, “what exactly is a nigger-lover?”

Atticus’ face was grave. “Has somebody been calling you that?”

“No sir, Mrs. Dubose calls you that. She warms up every afternoon calling you that.  “Francis called me that last Christmas, that’s where I first heard it.”

“Is that the reason you jumped on him?” asked Atticus.

“Yes sir…”

“Then why are you asking me what it means?”

I tried to explain to Atticus that it wasn’t so much what Francis said that had infuriated me as the way he had said it. “It was like he’d said snot-nose or somethin’.”

“Scout,” said Atticus, “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don’t mean anything – like snot-nose. It’s hard to explain – ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.”

“You aren’t really a nigger-lover, then are you?”

“I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody….I’m hard put, sometimes–baby, it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you. So don’t let Mrs. Dubose get you down. She has enough troubles of her own.”

EMBRACING MEDITATION FOR AUGUST 15th

Led by Lisa Macy

This is a loving kindness meditation.  Close your eyes and let your attention

rest at your heart.  Just for the next few minutes drop any judgment,

criticism and analysis of yourself and just appreciate yourself.  Exactly as

you are this moment.  In this moment, there is nothing to change, nothing to

make different - just love you as you this moment.

Now expand that feeling in your heart.  Include people whose skin is a

different color than yours.  Include people whose hair is a different color

or texture than yours.  Include people whose holidays and culture are

different from yours.  Include people whose religions are different from

yours.  Even if they wouldn't include you in their circle, you go ahead and

include them in your heart.

Let them rest, with you, in your heart.

SEGREGATION IN THE DEEP SOUTH

Marceline Haver

I was born in 1928 in Florida. As a youngster, some things were easy to understand; some were confusing. Some people were dark; others light. The white people called the people with the dark skin; “darkies,” “colored,” or the “n” word. I didn’t know those words were bad, but I learned. One day when I came home, I told my father that my brother was playing with James, the “nigger,” I added. My father laid down his newspaper to counsel me. “Sister, they don’t want to be called “nigger” they want to be called “negro.”

I remember my father being angry when the Ku Klux Klan tied a poor white sharecropper to the Olustee Creek Bridge, beat him and left him there. They believed the sharecropper had stolen hams from smoke houses. Someone untied him and him and his whole family quickly moved away. Soon after that incident, the Deputy Sheriff and some other Ku Klux Klansmen knocked on a black man’s door in the middle of the night, demanding entrance. The black man got his gun, shot through the door and killed the Deputy Sheriff. The Klansmen fled and so did the black family.  It was a confusing and violent time.

My Uncle John was a Baptist preacher who had a man named Neilous, a black man, working for him sometimes. Instead of forcing him to eat lunch on the back doorsteps alone, Uncle John welcomed him to eat at the dining table with his family. He, Aunt Pearl and their daughter, Golde actually spent the night with Neilous one night during a terrible storm, fearing they wouldn’t make it home in their horse-drawn buggy. I hate to think what might have happened if the Klan found out about that.

Everything was segregated. Black people had to sit in the back of the Greyhound buses and drink water from fountains labeled “colored.”  The schools, churches and theatres were segregated. Black people entered a side door to the theatre and sat in the balcony – or rather half of the balcony. The other half, for white folks, was where my brother, sister and I sat as we listened to the blacks enjoying the movie, just like us. But, we were on the other side of a tall wall.

In 1956 when I was 28 years old, my husband, Bob, and I moved from Virginia to Americus, Georgia. Bob preached full-time in a fundamentalist church. Three days after we moved to Americus, a motorcade of Ku Klux Klansmen drove by an integrated cooperative community farm called Koinonia shooting guns at whomever they could. Merchants in Americus boycotted the people of Koinonia, refusing to sell to them, because they wanted de-segregation.

Bob and I had four children ages 5,4,2 and six months. I loved them but felt I wanted to do something more.  I went to the Thalean Elementary School and inquired about teaching private piano lessons one day a week. The principal supported that and then persuaded me to teach music to the entire school once a week. The school did without a janitor for that one day to pay me ten dollars. I rode the school bus to the school. Thalean had a modern school building with new books. Not like the school the black children attended, which was a crudely built, unpainted building. They learned with old, worn books white children had used.

The leader of the Ku Klux Klan actually sent his daughter to take piano lessons with me. There was tension in the school because some of the Koinonian children attended Thalean Elementary and their parents were afraid to attend the meetings or to get involved at the school because there was so much Klan activity amongst some of the parents

In spite of all this, I planned a musical for the entire school. The lead in my play, The Old Woman in the Shoe was a Koinonia girl who played her part well. Surprisingly, the Koinonia parents came to the musical! The second year, I presented, Pinocchio with costumes and lights, courtesy of both parents and teachers. That year the auditorium was overflowing with parents from both sides. It was a grand success!

That second year our oldest son entered the first grade and Bob was elected president of the PTA. The Koinonian parents were no longer afraid to attend the PTA meetings and things started to slowly change.

Segregation was everywhere in the South. When Bob later returned to teaching school he was assigned to Southwest High School in Atlanta.  We bought a house in the then, all-white community, Cascade Heights, in 1960. About three years later, in nearby Peyton Forest a house was sold to a black doctor.  The white residents panicked! Everyone wanted to sell. They even made signs offering Coca Colas or ice cream to lure buyers to look at their house! Folks in Cascade Heights were afraid blacks would move into their all-white community. The Mayor at the time, Ivan Allen, placed a barricade across Peyton Road to hinder access to Cascade Heights to contain the spread of blacks!

The blacks in Atlanta didn’t mind fighting injustice. There was an uproar amongst them and a judge ordered the mayor to have the barricade removed. And, he did. He even regretted his actions and went on to become one of the first Southern White leaders to sign the Open Housing Act. Slowly, hearts were opening.

Many of our black neighbors were more educated than many of the whites that were moving out. When our new neighbors, Charles and Delores moved in next door, we went over with a pitcher of lemonade to welcome them and their daughter, Chandra. Charles was working in advertising for the Butler Street YMCA and Delores was a professor at a black university in Atlanta. We became fast friends.

Some things were changing. Some were not. Some fundamentalist preachers quoted the bible to justify segregation. I heard one mother say, “God made the birds different colors and didn’t mean for them to mix.”

I was still teaching private piano lessons and my class gradually changed from all white to integrated. I entered my pupils in the National Piano Playing Auditions each year and they all did well.

The churches were still segregated. My church at the time, Cascade Heights Church of Christ, planned a revival and told the congregation to invite all their neighbors.  Each member of the church was assigned a row to fill.  Ours was the second row. We invited Charles and Delores. Delores declined; Charles agreed to attend.

When Bob and I walked down the aisle with our five children and our handsome black neighbor, there was a buzz. I overheard someone whispering, “Bob and Marci might be ready for this, but, we are not.”

To Kill a Mockingbird

Kim Green

“Besides nothing’s really scary except in books,” Scout said.

I read to Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the 8^th grade.  And, I was scared. So scared that I blocked it out, as if I had been hit in the head. I fell unconscious. Obviously, I had read To Kill a Mockingbird, but not until I held it in my hands this time did I realize that its contents were shamefully unfamiliar.

This book happened to me when I was worlds away from the Deep South.  I was in New York City’s, Upper East Side at an exclusive girls prep school. I was one of two black girls in the 8^th grade and one of five in the building. The building was filled with 395 other girls; blondes, brunettes and two red heads. I blame my literary amnesia on my fragile blackness, which had been torn and twisted like a fraying rope, for the eight years I had already been struggling in this foreign white world.

It’s all coming back to me now: that sinking feeling of being under the pressure of looks and stares burning through me as my classmates were directed to read from the text; a text peppered with the dreaded “N word” throughout. The “N” word that I could not bring myself to utter, even in private. I hated this book; I felt betrayed by my teacher.

“Nothing’s really scary except in books.” That line reaches out to me now and shakes me into realizing the power of stories; true or imagined.  In revisiting To Kill a Mockingbird, I mourn for the young me feeling the drama of being Black amongst whiteness as it crawled up my spine. I was a child being confronted with the universal irritation of skin; it’s color.

Unlike Scout, I never sought relief by seeking counsel from my father. Like her, I, too was a motherless daughter.  I avoided the topic at home because I didn’t want to hit my father with the same assault weapon that had knocked me out. Those weeks of reading in school felt like years as we wrung all of the pulp out of the pages. My class read and re-read. We analyzed and discussed. We underlined, highlighted and made notes in the margins. We wrote essays, we answered questions, we even had quizzes. I’m sure we did… because that’s what we always did at my school. But it’s as if, I wasn’t even there.

I never brought the discussion home because I didn’t want my father to be faced with the task of wallowing in the messy truths of our skin’s hue. I didn’t want to hear all of the ugly stuff that we were sure we had escaped. After all, we were in New York City, up North, free from the “nigger”days.  I watched my father live as torn and tormented as Harper Lee’s characters; full of love and hate in the same breaths. Although, my father acted satisfied with our seeming inclusion in the mainstream, he lived until he died, distrustful of “them.” He always warned that “they” would hurt me someday when their parents would whisper in their ears, that I was not quite their equal.  My father was comfortable with saying, “Kim, that’s just how the world works.”

I still wince at To Kill a Mockingbird. It makes me sad to think that by simply having my heart beat inside this brown suit that houses my heart, I am historically deplored by those of a lighter shade.  I read To Kill a Mockingbird depressed by life’s absurdities all over again. I am awed by the courage of Harper Lee to put these difficult thoughts into words and put these mangled ideas down on paper.  She masterfully held the mirror to our faces.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an ugly but beautiful book. Like Lee’s, Boo Radley, racism still lurks around, scaring us and making us look at the bedlam we’ve created. Like Boo, racism peeks from the strangest places and when everyone has had their fill, it skulks back into the darkness, where it belongs.

After 50 years, it intrigues me that the world is actually celebrating this book. This book has been called life-changing by some, and forgettable by others.  I won’t identify which group feels which way…I leave that to you…

As I stand on the sidelines of the To Kill a Mockingbird parade, I wonder how I can feel love for this cruel book, and I do. I guess the colorless side of me, the writer side of me, sees the grace in every word and feels the weight of being human.

I have awakened from my slumber now and have come to understand that this book touches me underneath the skin; pushing and prodding me down the winding road of being a writer.  This book moves me to give people that look like me a voice and stories of our own making.

I often wonder why we are a culture that loves to remember and celebrate the unkind. Southerners still romanticize the confederacy, without thinking how it makes their Black neighbors feel. We live in a peculiar world where hate groups still exist and new ones are forming everyday. We seem to love to linger on the days when we weren’t our best selves. It strangles me to understand how we’ve gotten so tangled.

Like Maycomb County’s Sheriff Tate, I, too, wrangle and fidget with the truth, hoping for peace. He said, “There’s a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it’s dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.”

I say, if only we would.

In West Virginia, where I was born in the 1930s, I lived next door to the church where my father was the pastor.  The church had a tiny hewn out of rock deep, dark hole beneath the Sunday School Room floor where run-a-way slaves were hidden during the Civil War.  And I remember as a small child playing a game called “help the run-a-way slaves outfox the bounty hunters.”  It was like Hide and Go Seek, but more complex. I also remember studying the “Civil War” in the 5^th grade in West Virginia, and “The War Between The States” in middle Mississippi, the following year—hardly recognizable as the same war.  This proved to be my first big “aha” in life, as I learned that one couldn’t take everything written in text books as absolute—or even accurate.

Now please join hands as you are able and willing for the Benediction

In the weeks to come, may we all be motivated to seek the truth of people and not just believe what we are told about them. Remember what you heard today from Harper Lee and the UUCA women writers. Remember the anguish, injustice and hate caused by prejudice to its victims and its onlookers.

And now we have this moment–this moment in which we are physically connected: hand to hand—one to another.

So no matter what the coming days bring, may the remembrances of this shared hour remind us that we are all alike.  As members of a liberal faith, let us go forth by demanding of ourselves and others, the peace of justice.

Amen and . . .  Awoman.

Benediction 120 words

Rev. Marti  Keller

August 8, 2010

At the end of May, I flew off to Trumansburg New York via Syracuse on a narrow aisled 50 seater plane, landing in a  Spartan airport with just a sports bar,  a pizza stand and a candy, gum and mass paperback  bookstore. I got off that small, bumpy plane, entered that mini terminal and went down the one escalator to the baggage claim, suddenly panicking that I had landed in the wrong place—perhaps I should have flown to Rochester or Schenectady, and that Lisa, my second college roommate in Stern Hall, UC Berkeley, would not be there to greet me.

And even if I was in the right city, I would not be able to find her, let alone recognize her, having only seen a tiny Facebook portrait of her recently.

After all we had not been with each other in the flesh since shortly after I turned 21.

Lisa started school a couple of quarters late, straight from Southern California, Newport Beach it turns out, though at the time we roomed together all I knew ( or remember that I knew) was that her dad was a physics professor at the university in Irvine, and that shortly after she moved in she started spending a lot of time away from that retro all women’s dorm with the mandatory dress code and  sign out sheet curfew with her grown-up, off campus boyfriend.

She would flee regularly down to the flats, away from the walnut and brown sugar coffee cake Sunday breakfasts and the confinement of our shared quarters  to a peeling bungalow a few miles away on a street smelling of bay water( and probably some illegal substances).

My world then seemed smaller—and larger. Besides classes, the up and down hill trek to Eschleman  Hall, the sixth floor Daily Californian headquarters, where there were manual typewriters and rimmed copy desks, seniors smoking cigarettes, editing half sheets of cheap beige paper, me, as a newbie, an underling, assigned to put together the calendar with colloquium and underground foreign film screenings.

In an article I wrote for the alumni magazine ten years after I graduated—“When We Were Young and Gassed,” I recalled that there had been an almost unbroken series of dramatic clashes since I started as a cub reporter on that nationally known paper: the December l966 student strike, following an attempt to move Navy ROTC out of the student union, anti-draft rallies, sit-ins, mill-ins, and a Third World Liberation Front strike.

At one point there was an anonymous piece printed in the arts section suggesting that in view of the current situation on campus, the following proposal is offered—that future riots be scheduled ahead of time and they be held in the Greek Theatre, where no windows will be broken and there’s plenty of fresh air to disperse the gas, and seats for those who wish to watch.

Those reporters I interviewed for the retrospective piece collectively remembered about working on the paper in those years was that there were days that the editorial offices were so dirty, so charged, so filled with noxious fumes and fatigue that normal life, or what we imagined was normal life, seemed just a happy dream.

Lisa, who was then and is now a gifted artist and a nurturer of children and other living things, recalls that when we met she felt unformed, and that when she found me, perched on the edge of my narrow single bed, almost folded in on myself at a moment of rare respite from the activities and stresses of my life at that time, that she thought that my life seemed passionate and real. I thought from the moment we met that her life was passionate and real.

From this first meeting came a relationship that has been, after the few months we roomed together and the times we got together while we still lived in the same quarter of the universe as she liked to describe it, almost entirely created and maintained through letters and occasional calls.

Letters that waxed and waned: letters handwritten on onion skin typing paper, yellow lined paper, handmade and drugstore note cards, cheap and then better quality computer paper, and most recently cyber space.

Given the distance, the geographic distance between us, this was the only way.

I graduated and stayed in the Bay Area for more than twenty years after we last saw each other.

She moved in with and then moved away with her slightly older, paving crew and construction working, brilliant guy, traveling in Europe, and then gravitating back East, nearer to his family, to upstate New York where they eventually built their own house on an unpaved rural road, where where she raised goats and made cheese, became a Montessori teacher, did her batiks.

I had children early and first, naming my daughter for her, writing a poem that became a recorded folk song, with a chorus that described the difference between my life and the life of her namesake, my life friend: Alisha, I want you to know you were named for the journey I did not make into dairy land in sandals, with farming books, a harp and a loom and a backpack full of dreams.

The letters we mailed to each other were filled with stories about our personal lives: musing about whether, post-graduation, we would be working in the same pancake house with our fancy degrees; how Lisa and John, who eventually became her husband, had to live with a 60 year old widow in a giant Victorian house, exchanging room and board for being maid and butler, housecleaner and handyman, confidants and surrogate children- eating spaghetti and butter with a side of macadamia nuts–  how I tried to fit in my journalism and my poetry with sick children, housekeeping, and city vegetable gardening. How glad we were both were to see the 1970’s decade end— how peculiar it was, how we were tumbling into the Eighties with more hope. How I decided to divorce, how she decided to have children. The years when the correspondence trickled on one side or the other, one year me apologizing, telling her “ there is no excuse for not having written, except a badly broken foot, a car arson, a move, a wedding. “Please write soon we would both sign off. Take care.

It wasn’t until 1991, 20 years after we probably last saw each other, that either one of us mentioned the extraordinary ( or what we thought were extraordinary) outside events that surrounded our young adult years, Lisa writing me that her daughter, who was in the eighth grade had watched a PBS series on the Sixties and found it compelling, reminding her of when we first met and what she viewed as my daring journalistic ventures on campus.

Only in the first decade of this new millennium did the name or names of presidents, liked and detested, appear on the pages of our letters of two women who are not indifferent to the goings on in the larger world.  The nature of our relationship, the texture of our friendship, has been more like mutual touchstones: always there, sources of nourishment and revival in times of drought and celebration in times of abundance and joy.

As Beth Kephart write in her wonderful memoir about these special relationships, friendships succor us, they fill in the blanks, they give us a purpose. Because, she reminds us, all friendships are finally mirrors, they provide proof that we do exist, that we are.  They give us a reason to laugh as well, to just laugh at life, flat out and keep going.

This came up for me just a week or so ago, when I flew again, this time to Phoenix, to participate in the Standing on the Side of Love actions in support of immigration  reform .

This time I was picked up at the airport by another longtime friend, Susan, who used to be married to my husband’s cousin. While sympathetic, deeply empathetic, to the cause which brought me in the middle of the summer to the heat of Arizona for a show of  support for those concerned about the human rights of undocumented immigrants and the injustice of racial profiling, she let me know that her first concern was for me: whether, as she always puts it, I was properly fed and “fluffed.”  Which for her means and meant making me scrambled eggs, grinding coffee, providing a water bottle and a cooling scarf for my neck for the march and demonstration in the hot desert sun. Transporting me and a fellow congregant from the actions downtown to the Phoenix UU congregation. Pouring me wine at the end of the day, insisting that I take a swim.That was the role she chose to play, as energy and health limitations prevented her from entering the fray.

In the midst of all this caretaking, was the most nourishing element— the constant talk, part-idle chatter, part soul sharing, the conversations that started 26 years ago and have continued, intermittently , ever since. Because, in general, as Beth Kephart notes, adult friendships are not the same among women as among men: women talk, the cliché says, while men revel in mutual doing.

Certainly this has seemed so for the men in my life, at least as I have observed them.

My first husband had a would be friend who died suddenly and young from a heart attack, leading me to write a poem, observing that “ they might have been friends in the way men befriend each other, across the lunch table, slipping a private tale or two between the manila folders of their attaché  cases, marking a column for personal accounting… not loosed tongued between clotheslines, but circling each other in an ancient ceremony of pride and territory… “

Friendships in bowling allies, on basketball courts, on hiking trails. Shared activities. According to  Geoffrey Greif, author of “Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships”, while women may enjoy getting together over lunch. men are usually comfortable meeting over a shared activity. When men meet, he says, they may not share anything personal at all.

He tells the joke that a man goes over to his friend’s house for a couple of hours and comes home and his wife asks him about his friend’s divorce, and the man says- ‘it never came up.’

We are told that friendships between men and women are different than same sex ones,  and no one like the other. We have circles of friends, from our religious communities, our neighborhoods, mothers and fathers of our children’s friends—some longer lived and more significant than others. As the reading from this morning reminds us, we adopt them, we celebrate them, and claim they are part of us and suddenly they are gone.

Because inevitably there are friends for a particular moment, a life stage—friends like Joann and Dee, the athletic, bright but not intellectual girls I would have felt so threatened by in high school and college, more comfortable on the tennis court, swimming, jogging and hiking—or in  wet weather, sewing and other handwork that always brought me to frustrated tears. Yet I gained  much  from them as young mothers and wives whose concerns at a time were so like mine and yet whose backgrounds, even inner lives were so different.

The health-saving benefits of friendship has been the subject of increased scientific scrutiny. In an article published last year in the New York Times by Tamara Parker-Pope, she reported that in the quest for better health, many people turn to doctors, self-help books or herbal supplements, overlooking “ a powerful weapon that might help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life—their friends.”

She cited a ten year study in Australia that found older people with a larger circle of friends were markedly less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large study a few years back showed an increase of more than 60 percent in the risk of obesity among people whose friends gained weight—and jumped 170 percent if a close  friend was significantly overweight.  In the same piece, the reporter cited a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer which found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends-.And it didn’t make any difference how close these friends lived or how much contact—the friendships themselves were protective.

While much of the research has focused on the friendships between women, some research has shown that men can benefit too—reducing the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease, lowering blood sugar and blood pressure levels, releasing mood elevating hormones.

Out of this data has come a plethora of practical, how to advice about how to find friends: getting busy, getting out : joining  fitness centers and dinner clubs, adult education or community volunteering; reaching out, extending invitations to dinner or a movie, phone calls, online messaging, support groups, neighborhood strolls. Getting a dog to walk.  Moving to co-housing communities where the chance of social isolation is hopefully less likely.

Making the connection between substance abuse prevention and recovery, and sounder mental health,  the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued a self-help guide on making and keeping friends,  including building skills that enhance friendships, qualities that make friendships richer and stronger, including being independent and self-sufficient, being positive, upbeat and warm, doing your share of both the talking and the listening, being non-judgmental, giving the other person plenty of “space.”

Why this growth industry for guides to true friendship in the 21^st century?  As Unitarian Universalist Association President The Reverend Peter Morales commented in his sermon delivered to the 2010 General Assembly in Minneapolis, the people to whom we must minister are the most disconnected people who have ever lived. What supreme irony, he said. We who have smart phones, we who have instant messaging, tweets, email, voicemail, and  zillions of friends on Facebook, are by objective measure, emotionally isolated—exchanging more messages than ever but, he told us, at the price of true intimacy and real community.

He talked about a major survey of interpersonal relationships published 25 years ago in the American Sociological Review, the leading journal of sociology, repeated five years ago in order to measure the changes  that had taken place in a generation.

Rev. Morales found the results stunning. One of the key questions asked participants how many people they knew with whom they felt they could confide personal information, a marker of a level of intimacy. Respondents could give an answer from zero to 10 or more.

In l985, the answer most frequently given was three—about 25 percent.

In 2004, the answer most frequently given was zero, that for around a quarter of the respondents, there was no one.

Another quarter answered only one, and that answer was almost always a life partner.

What that means, he emphasized, was that only half of all Americans have a close relationship outside their household.

In the short time since that repeat study in 2004 that internet communication vehicles like My Space and Facebook have been created and taken off, has this had any impact on these findings—are we more deeply, intimately connected as a result of the names , the “friends” we have added to our pages?

Essayist William Deresiewicz, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education last year about what he maintains is faux friendship says we live in a time when friendship has become all and  yet nothing  at all— so-called BFFs and parents who befriend their children ,and teachers, clergy and even bosses who, he maintains, seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends.

We are on a first name basis with everyone—and yet, he asks, in our brave new world, what is the nature of these friendships we claim?

Friendship in ancient times, he tells us, which was far from ordinary and universal, in fact rare, precious and hard won, described in some classic literature as more wondrous than romantic love. From this sort of preciousness, this special relationship has become, from his perspective,  universalized to the point where our friendship circles have “ expanded to engulf the whole of the social world,” giving us not actual connections, but a false sense of intimacy.

As we post to our average of 130 Facebook friends, with quite a few of us having many more than that, we are not asked to participate in real friendship as one blogger pointed out. We need not, she asserted, know anything about each other, let alone care about each other. We do not have the obligation or opportunity to tell and listen to each other’s stories, which takes probing and questioning, and the luxury of time: whether through 10 page missives, three hour conversations, a walk around a lake, or some other form of sustained contact. And the scale of friendship, given its requirements—time and little distraction, mutuality, nurturance—is necessarily bounded, as one writer said.

In a newspaper article titled “Are 5,001 Friends Too Many?”, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained ( read friends) is 150, which flies in the face of the practice of a Facebook friends roster growing like Kudzu, which may provide business and social networking activities, but fail to substitute for actual human contact on a manageable scale and the cultivation of real friendship.

Peter Morales in his keynote sermon was asking UU congregations to  look at how we promote genuine special relationships—friendships where people can go deep in a trusting context. Robert Hill in his classic guide to small group ministry in our religious communities suggested that besides being an effective way to grow our congregations in numbers, providing sustainable meaningful programs—these covenant groups are places to find others to talk with without barriers or reservations,  to be totally and openly ourselves.

Consider the possibilities here.

When I finally found my friend Lisa at the bottom of the escalator in the Syracuse airport, the exact right place I was supposed to meet her, the decades slipped away. We spent the next three days walking her country roads, now paved and named—looking for egrets—drinking cups of tea,   drinking in the joy of being in each other’s company, the sense of being made whole.

In the words of poet and spiritual teacher Andrew Harvey, coming to experience and celebrate the holiness of sacred friendship and to be grateful for the wisdom of your friends increases your faith in life and your capacity for skillful action.

And from the poet Rumi: Whatever fires the heart is a ray from my Friend.

How many of you know Hildegarde Grey?   She’s a long time member of our congregation.  She couldn’t be here this Sunday, so to make sure you know who I’m talking about, here’s her picture.

She looks a lot like me, doesn’t she?  By a show of hands, how many of you think this is Hildegarde Grey?  Not very many of you.  Well let me explain why you’re wrong.

Hildegarde is a former president of our congregation and a former chair of the Board of Trustees of the Mountain, our UU camp and conference center in Highlands, North Carolina—–which is where I got to know her.  I was serving on the Mountain board during the time Hildegarde was its chair.  And actually, I didn’t just get to know her at the Mountain, I got to be her, which is why I can, with a little creative leeway, claim this is a picture of Hildegarde Grey.

I got to be Hildegarde on another one of those occasions when she couldn’t be present.  She’s a very busy lady.  And on that particular occasion, she was busy being a grandmother.

How many of you think this is Hildegarde’s granddaughter?  Show of hands, please.

We’ll it’s not.  This is a picture of my granddaughter.  Beautiful, isn’t she?  She sure is.  Since Hildegarde and I can kind of shift identities, I thought I’d pass my granddaughter off for Hildegarde’s, just for a few minutes.  Just go with me here—-just imagine that this beautiful kid was being born on that day and consequently Hildegarde couldn’t be at the Mountain for a very special event.

It was the 20^th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Mountain.  An auspicious occasion, and one on which as chair, Hildegarde was expected to give a speech.  Since Hildegarde couldn’t be there, she asked me to read her speech for her.  I said sure.  Why not?  I knew Hildegarde to be well-spoken and I was certain it would be a good speech.  And if it wasn’t, it would be her fault and not mine.  After all, I wasn’t writing the speech, I was only delivering it.  So why should I worry?

Well I admit that I got rather busy.  I didn’t actually read her speech ahead of time.  I just trusted her ability to write a good speech and my ability to do a good job spontaneously interpreting it for an audience.  So the anniversary of the Mountain came, and there I was, a bearded black man, standing at the podium—–much like I am today——-looking at a room of about 200 people.

Standing there, I took in the busy professional camera crew and the scurrying professional photographer that the Mountain had hired just for this occasion.  Andy Warhol’s words about everyone getting 15 minutes of fame flashed through my mind.  I know that’s kind of grandiose, but I’m not on camera very often.  I’m not exactly a television personality.  So it seemed like maybe, maybe this was my 15 minutes of fame.  It suddenly became important to me to do a good job.  How could I know whether I would ever get any more such minutes of attention and notoriety.

So standing at the podium, I acknowledged and waited for the applause to die down.  Just to set the mood, let me have some applause.  Please.  Very good.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  So, I acknowledged and waited for the applause to die down.  And when it did, I folded my hands atop the podium and began to speak the words that Hildegarde had written with the kind of solenm dignity that was appropriate for this auspicious moment in the Mountain’s history, and appropriate for my personal 15 minutes of fame.

“Good morning,” I said looking directly into the camera, “ I am very pleased to be with you, and I’m  Hildegarde Grey.”

I got a somewhat different reaction from them.  It was mostly just stunned silence.  But you see, in a way—–in a way, I did become Hildegarde Grey.  And that’s why your vote was wrong.

Now this is Hildegarde’s real picture of course.  She looks much lovelier than I do.  But, my point is, identities are complex.  Indeed, identities can be messy.  Now I showed you a picture of my beautiful granddaughter.  In fairness, I must show you a picture of Hildegarde’s grandkids as well.

Great looking kids.  Almost as beautiful as mine.

Part of our collective identity as a faith movement is that we are democratic.  That is part of who we are.  And our democratic spirit highlights the messiness of our broader identity.  There was a democratic vote taken at the most recent General Assembly of our denomination.  At issue was whether we should hold our 2012 General Assembly in Phoenix, Arizona as it is currently scheduled, or whether we should join the many other liberal organizations—-both secular and religious—-that are boycotting Arizona over its recently passed anti-immigration legislation.  The vote didn’t go as I expected.  The vote was to go forward with our meeting in Arizona in 2012.

Now I’m not going to rehash the pros and cons of this decision, nor the creative ways in which we will turn General Assembly into a protest of the ugliness Arizona is attempting to write into law.  I only want to point out this morning, what this vote says about the complexity, the messiness of identity.  We are, to the best of my knowledge, the only major faith movement in the United States with an elected Hispanic American as its leader.  And we are, paradoxically, the only liberal faith movement on record as opposing anti-immigration legislation, that is also going to hold its major annual meeting in Arizona.  Whether this decision is right or wrong, whether you agree or disagree with it, you have to admit it points to the complexity, the messiness of identity.

So I’m going to ask you to take another vote.  Not on Arizona, but on this picture.  Now this very stately elderly woman, named Laura, belongs either to me, or to Hildegarde.  By a show of hands, how many of you think this is a picture of Hildegarde Grey’s Grandmother Laura?  How many of you think this is a picture of my Grandmother Laura?

Good, you’re learning.  This is my Grandmother Laura.  The woman who helped raise me and the woman who first taught me the importance of identity.  You see, my grandmother, despite all outward appearances, was fiercely, I would say even defiantly, proud—-of being a black woman.  Though she would have said “a Negro woman.”

My Grandmother Laura owed her existence to an act of violence.  The rape of her mother—–not an uncommon occurrence in the slave south, nor even in the years after manumission.  Even after the Civil War, a black woman’s rape garnered no investigation and risked no punishment.  Raping black women was a white, male privilege.  My Grandmother Laura, in her youth, a grey-eyed, fair-skinned woman, with straight, coal black hair, was a product of that privilege, and of that violence.

Her mother’s rapist, and her would-be father, seeing that my Grandmother Laura could easily pass for white, made up his mind to take her to raise within his own family.  And he would have done so had Laura’s mother not refused to give up her white-appearing child.  Though raised within a Negro family, my grandmother had many opportunities to enter the white community and pretend to be one of its own.  She never availed herself of those opportunities.  To her death at age 93, she was proudly, indeed fiercely, a black woman.  Though she would have said “Negro.”

Identities are complex, and they are messy.  My grandmother’s defiance of superficial appearance in order to claim an identity she found more essential, put me—–I believe—–on a determined path to know and understand my own heritage and identity.   That identity, however, got a shock.

A few years ago I discovered that I am not who I thought I was.  Now, I have long been aware of my personal contradictions.  I am a clinician who at least sometimes craves for days when I don’t have to see patients, a scientist who sometimes would rather be writing a sermon than a research paper, an aging political radical with an occasional twinge of conservatism, an atheist who keeps getting poked in the eye by God.  When it comes to identity, I am admittedly something of a mess.  But some things about my identity I thought I knew for sure.  Then I found out about my mutation.

The mutation is present in my mitochondrial DNA.  You may remember from high school biology, that mitochondria are like tiny power plants inside our cells.  They liberate chemical energy for use by the cell and are essential to our survival.  One of the most amazing things about mitochondria is that they have their own DNA and they undergo their own form of reproduction.  Mitochondria are, in fact, thought to have once been a completely different species of life—–a type of bacteria that invaded the cells of animals, found it a hospitable place to live, and decided to stay.  Mitochondria live within us in symbiosis.  We supply the mitochondria with a safe place to live, a consistent supply of the raw materials they need, and in return they give us the chemical energy that drives every single thing our bodies do.  It’s a pretty good deal for both them and for us.

But it’s also a little spooky to think of ourselves as a colony.  To think of ourselves as not just one species of life evolving on this planet, but as two distinct species of life engaged in a cooperative evolution—–a co-evolution.  Each of us does, as Walt Whitman proclaimed, contain multitudes, though perhaps in a different way than he meant.

Our DNA lies in the nucleus of our cells and we inherit half of our DNA from each parent through sexual reproduction.  Mitochondria, on the other hand, never learned about the birds and the bees.  They have their own DNA, and they have no need for sex.  To make more mitochondria, they simply make a copy of their DNA and divide.  And they’re done.  Not very romantic, but certainly efficient.

And as more proof that evolution is all about women, mitochondria dispense with any need for a man.  We get our mitochondria exclusively from our mothers.  Our mothers’ egg cells are the only sources of mitochondria.  We get none from our fathers.  So quite literally, each of us, as a human colony, as a fusion of two life forms, is the product of two types of reproduction—–one sexual that combines DNA from our mothers and our fathers, and one asexual that brings us DNA solely from the mitochondria of our mothers.  So it is from my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother, and all the mothers that came before, that I have inherited my genetic mutation.

And what is this mutation that has so upended my life and changed my perspective on who I am.  It is a mutation that I share with most of you in this sanctuary.  It is one of the mutations that defines most of you, and now apparently me, as white.  That’s right, courtesy of the science of human genetics, and despite all evidence to the contrary, I learned a few years ago that I’m Caucasian.  Who knew?  I even have a certificate proclaiming my new racial identity.

The first 150,000 years of human evolution took place in Africa.  But some 50,000 years ago, groups of early humans perhaps motivated by climate change, began traveling along the eastern coast of Africa.  Always hugging the coastline, they made their way from Africa into Europe and Asia.  And from Europe and Asia they made it into the Americas.  At each spot along the way, some people settled and remained, but others kept moving on, or their children moved on, until over the millennia every major land mass on the planet became populated by humans and our human mitochondria.  Those that stayed put, at each location along this journey, provide a genetic signature of that place in the world.  In attempting to trace a person’s ancestry, the geneticist matches DNA with the genetic signature of each of these stops along the human journey.

Since publication of Alex Haley’s book Roots, and the airing of the television series based on that book, tracing one’s family tree has been extraordinarily popular within the black American community.  Because of slavery, few of us, can do what Haley did.  The absence of any record of slave births, marriages, and deaths, the systematic dismantling of black families when spouses or children were sold away for profit, has left most black Americans with no paper trail to follow their roots back to mother Africa.  So many black Americans, including myself, have turned to genetic testing as a way to penetrate the veil of slavery in order to get a glimpse of what lay before.

I understood well the limitations of genetic testing for purposes of determining ancestry.  The technique provides palpable proof of one of the many ugly secrets of the slave era.  Black female slaves were raped by their white owners in numbers too large to imagine.  Numbers so large that 30 percent of the time a black person’s nuclear DNA—–the DNA that we inherit equally from fathers and mothers——-cannot be used to trace African ancestry.  A third of black Americans alive today have European ancestry evident in their DNA.  Consequently, for a third of black Americans, it is only the mitochondrial DNA—–the DNA that comes to us exclusively from our mothers, that reliably traces back to Africa.  I knew from my family’s history, and my grandmother’s portrait, that I was in this one-third.

My grandmother’s fierce pride in being a black woman, despite her outward appearance, is legendary in my family.  So while I was certain that because of my grandmother’s provenance, any attempt to trace my African ancestry was doomed to failure using my nuclear DNA—-that is, the DNA that includes what my family inherited from a rapist——I was equally sure that my mitochondrial DNA—–the DNA that comes to me exclusively from the women in my family—–would give me a glimpse of my African ancestry.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Even in my mitochondrial DNA, I am more akin to people in Europe than I am to anyone in Africa.  I contain multitudes, whether I wish to or not.

Perhaps anticipating my disappointment, the geneticist reassured me that my test results didn’t mean that I don’t have any African ancestry.  No, they don’t.  They just mean I don’t have enough to find the African forebears I was seeking.  They’ve kind of disappeared in those multitudes.

So what does it mean now that I’ve learned my ancestry isn’t exactly what I thought it was?  If you think about it, the ramifications are mind-boggling.  First of all, I’ve screwed up the national census.  39.9 million African Americans don’t live in the United States, it’s actually 39.8 and some odd hundred-thousand.  Sorry about that.  I didn’t mean to mark the wrong box.  I just didn’t know.

I’ve also apparently perjured myself on all those jury surveys I’ve filled out for Dekalb County.  Should I confess being white and turn myself in?  While ignorance is no excuse when breaking the law, I’ve never actually been selected for jury duty, so perhaps the judge will be lenient with me.

And what about white privilege?  Can any of you who have been Caucasian for longer than I have, tell me where I go, with my genetic certificate, to claim my white privilege?  Will my certificate get me a better deal on my next car purchase?  Will it motivate my realtor to show me houses in better neighborhoods?  Will it get me a better raise next year?  There has got to be some way for me to cash in on being Caucasian.

But more seriously, what this does mean is that there is more than I will ever know about even my mother’s side of the family.  One of the women on that side of my family was European.  I’ll never know who she was, or what circumstances drew her into my black family tree, during the time of slavery.  But she is now a part of me.  A part of her floats in every cell of my body.  She is part of the multitude.

And even more seriously, I have been reminded of the intellectual bankruptcy of race as a biological concept.  It has no meaning, it has no biological significance.  Culturally I will always be proudly, even fiercely African American.  Racially, I don’t know what I will call myself.  Perhaps I’ll start leaving that question blank when I fill out those census or jury survey forms.  I am African American.  But I am a mosaic.  I contain multitudes.

And so do you.  Even more importantly, so does our country. Sarah Palin may not like it.  The Tea Party may not like it.  But it’s true.  We are a mosaic.  We can declare English the official language and Christianity the sole religion of the land, but we will still be a mosaic.  We can stop eating tacos and felafel.  We can stop listening to Raggae and dancing to Salsa, but we will still be a mosaic.  We can close our borders and criminalize people who come here for the same reason most of our forebears did—–simply seeking a better chance in life.  But we will still be a mosaic.

Unitarian Universalists went to Arizona this past week, and we will go to Arizona in 2012 and do what we did in 1912 and 1812, and all the times before in the messy history of our country.  We will be neither confused, blinded, nor deterred by differences in race, sex, sexuality, nation of origin, or belief.  We will stand on the side of faith, of love, and of welcome.  Sarah Palin will not like it.  The Tea Party will not like it.  But we will be a mosaic.  Even in Arizona.  Amen.

Anybody else ready to take the red pill?  (After screening of the “red pill” scene from The Matrix.)

You probably know the rest of the story.  Keanu Reeve’s Neo swallows the red pill and follows Lawrence Fishburn’s Morpheus down the rabbit hole to discover that the world around us is not real but part of the Matrix, a computer simulation created by artificially intelligent robots in order to enslave humanity so that we can be used like so many 9volt batteries.  Only a few brave souls hidden away in the refuge city of Zion, who have experienced the truth for themselves, struggle inside and outside the Matrix to free humanity from the unreality they’ve been deceived into thinking is everyday life, a struggle that involves gratuitous amounts of firearms and lots of slow motion action shots.

The vision of the Matrix trilogy is a profoundly gnostic vision of the world.  The gnostics were an ancient religious movement that sought, above all else, true knowledge about the state of the world and their place in it.  Named after the Greek word “gnosis,” meaning knowledge or insight, the gnostics believed they had learned a secret that would set humanity free.

And it was a secret people wanted to learn.  We’ve known about the Gnostics for centuries through the words of Christian writers who produced treatises to condemn them as heretics, and we can be sure that these “Church Fathers,” as they were called, wouldn’t have taken the time to denounce them if people weren’t taking the time to be Gnostics.  In the centuries leading up to Christianity’s establishment as the official religion of the Roman Empire, gnosticism was increasingly viewed as a threat and treated accordingly by the Christian powers-that-be.

But these early Christian writers gave us a picture of gnosticism as they saw it, and it was a view that was often biased and unfair, written with an eye toward keeping the faithful faithful and the unfaithful a safe distance away.  It wasn’t until the accidental discovery in 1945 of several ancient manuscripts in an earthenware jar buried in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi that we heard the gnostics speak in their own voice for the first time since they had been condemned as heretics and run out of the Church.  What did the Gnostics believe, in their own words?

It was a case of extremely good luck that we got to read these manuscripts at all.  Several brothers were digging for fertilizer in the Egyptian desert when they uncovered a tall, unbroken jar.  Afraid that breaking the jar might set free hostile spirits, they were hesitant to break it open at first.  But, fueled by a hope for gold within, they broke open the jar to discover thirteen papyrus books hidden inside.  They brought the books home and laid them next to the stove, and their mother started to use them as kindling for the fire.

The brothers soon caught wind that a man from a competing tribe who had murdered their father was nearby, and they left to restore their father’s honor with a revenge killing.  Fearing the police would discover the ancient books (and take them) if they came to search the house for evidence, they gave them to their priest for safe keeping.  When a friend of the priest saw them and said he thought they might be valuable, what became known as the Nag Hammadi library made its way to the black market.  Egyptian officials managed to get a hold of all but one volume, which eventually made it way to eminent psychologist Carl Jung, to whom it was given as a birthday present.

When it was discovered that some of the pages were missing from the codex given to Carl Jung, one religion professor made his way to Egypt to try and find the missing pages.  What he found astonished him.  The first line he read was this: “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which his twin brother, Judas Thomas, wrote down.”  He had found the opening words to the Gospel of Thomas, a heretical collection of short sayings by Jesus, some of which mirror the words of the four official gospels, but others of which are entirely unique.  A piece of Thomas’s gospel had been discovered some sixty years earlier, but now, for the first time in 1600 years, we had the entire thing, and many more heretical books besides.  The Gnostics had reentered history for the first time in centuries.  We no longer had to rely on the reports of “heresy hunters.”  Now we could listen to them in their own words.

And what words they are!  It’s, at times, a bewildering array of poetry, mythology, and philosophy.  There are the words spoken by the goddess of wisdom that we heard this morning, lists of divine emanations and the words of power needed to surpass each of them, retellings of the Garden of Eden myth where the serpent is the hero, and self-named “secret gospels” containing wisdom that Jesus didn’t share with most of his disciples.  The Nag Hammadi library is a treasure house of world literature to rival any religion’s scriptures.

But what do these Gnostic scriptures teach?  We’ve already gotten a hint of what the gnostics were about in our clip from The Matrix.  Central to the gnostic vision of the world is the belief that the world we live in day to day is, as Morpheus put it, “a wool pulled over our eyes.”  If you have ever felt that the world as we experience is somehow not good enough, somehow not real enough, you’re not far from the basic gnostic impulse.

Traditional monotheisms like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam teach three things about God that don’t always play nicely with each other.  Those three things are that (1) God is all-powerful, (2) God is all-knowing, and (3) God is all-good.  The reality of suffering in the world makes these three things hard to hold together.  How can a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good let people suffer hardships and evil they don’t deserve—or, we can ask, let them suffer at all?  Wouldn’t a good God save people from undeserved suffering? The traditional answer is that it’s our fault, that we do deserve it because we’ve used our free will to rebel against God’s goodness in false pride.

The Gnostics would have none of it.  It’s not humanity’s fault at all, they said, it’s God’s fault.  As they looked around the world they found themselves in, they saw a universe that was a cosmic mistake created by a fake God who was either stupid or evil, or both.  The true God, they said, would never have created this world.

They called this false God by many names—the Gnostics were never ones to insist on uniform theology—but the most common was “the Demiurge,” from a common Greek word that could mean “craftsman,” “blacksmith,” or even “public works laborer.”  People have also translated it “the Maker” and “the Artificer.”  Philip Pullman calls him “the Authority” in his wonderful science fiction trilogy for children, His Dark Materials. (Adults can read it too.) I like to call him “the Forger” because it pulls on the meaning of someone who makes something but also of someone who deceives, and the Demiurge does both.

By calling him “the Forger,” they wanted to make it clear that he was not a true Creator who made the world out of nothing by his own power.  No, the Forger’s work was derivative, relying on the work of the true Creator, a God beyond God, whether the Forger knew it or not, and by most accounts he’s not even aware of the true Creator God.  The Forger did the best he could (perhaps) but the world he forged together is obviously, the Gnostics would tell us, not first rate work.

So how did we come to live in this imperfect world?  How is it that the Forger even got to create a universe? The Gnostics’ mythology (and stick with me here) begins with the true God, the God beyond God, a God that they called “the Fullness.”  The Fullness is a divine limitlessness from which all things come and to which all things return.  It’s not a God who thinks or feels so much as a God who is pure potentiality, containing the seeds of everything within it.

From the divine Fullness, a series of divine emanations come forth, with names like Grace, Silence, Power, and Love.  Eventually, the story of divine emanations gets to the birth of Sophia, the goddess of wisdom whom we heard from in our reading this morning.  In a tragic cosmic error, Sophia leaves her home in the Fullness and finds herself in exile, trapped in chaos and darkness, causing the creation of the material reality, which starts off as nothing but an unformed mess.

Sophia then goes on to create in desperation the Forger, so that she’ll have some help ruling this unruly material reality.  But because she’s separated from the Fullness when she does this, the Forger is a defective creation.  The Forger has no knowledge of the original divine Fullness, and in some tellings isn’t even aware of the existence of his mother Sophia, so that when he sets about to order material reality, he does it in a way that exacerbates chaos and darkness.  He creates a world that isn’t good.

It is into this imperfect, dark, chaotic world that we come, but we are not all darkness and chaos.  Buried, deep within each of us, is a hidden spark, a lost piece of that original divine Fullness, trapped in materiality.  We have inside us the seeds of the divine, whether we’re aware of it or not.

And the Forger is determined to keep us unaware of that fact.  The world he built is gamed against our discovering our true, divine nature, our original goodness.  Morpheus calls it the Matrix.  Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick called it “Black Iron Prison.”  It’s a world filled with distractions, disease, violence, and oppression, and governed by the lust for power and for fleeting pleasures.   It’s a world of winners and losers, a world where those who have a lot get even more and where those who have little end up with even less.  It’s a world where success is measured by how much you can get others to comply with your wishes, where you can reward those who help you and hurt those who don’t.  It’s a world that rewards you for acting just like the Forger, ordering your Empire before you and remaining ignorant of your true origin in the Fullness, a place where there is always enough to go around, where life leads to more life, where domination not only isn’t present but where domination just doesn’t make sense.

If you’re a fan of our Unitarian Universalist forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson, you’ll recognize some similarity to his Transcendentalism.  Like Emerson, the Gnostics believed there is a divine spark within each of us waiting to be awakened.  And like Emerson, the Gnostics preferred a purple, convoluted writing style.  (UU blasphemy, I know.)  Unlike Emerson, the Gnostics emphasized that the powers-that-be were conspirators with the Forger to keep us in line (though they saw the powers-that-be not so much as “flesh and blood” than as “principalities and powers of the air,” as Saint Paul would have put it).  And unlike Emerson, they had a deep pessimism about our ability to awaken the divine spark within without some sort of outside help.

It is this need for a mediator who can reconnect us to the divine Fullness that leads us to the final character in Gnostic mythology.  I say “character,” but I should say “characters,” because different Gnostic groups saw this messenger of light as different people.  For Jewish Gnostics, he was Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son.  For the Mandaeans, the only Gnostic group that’s survived from the ancient world, with some 60,000 living in Iraq and Iran today, it was John the Baptist.  For the Manichaeans, it was their prophet Mani and other prophets of other religions who preceded him.

For Christian Gnostics, it was Jesus.  This is a very different story about Jesus than the story told by traditional Christianity.  For Christian Gnostics, Jesus didn’t come to die for our sins.  Sin, for the Gnostics, isn’t humanity’s main problem.  The main problem is ignorance of our true, divine nature, a problem caused our being trapped in a world built with anything but full human flourishing in mind.  It is for this reason that Jesus left the Fullness to enter material reality, the Matrix, not to satisfy an angry God’s desire to punish us, forever, for being less than perfect.

We can see why Christian Gnostics might not get along with what we now know as traditional, orthodox Christians, even if they both shared a deep admiration for Jesus.  The Gnostics did fairly well in the first few centuries following Jesus, when Christianity was a theologically diverse minority religion with no shared creed, though they were probably always outnumbered by orthodox Christians.  One popular Gnostic teacher almost won the election to become Bishop of Rome, a position that would over several centuries evolve into what we now know as the Pope.  It’s surely one of the great “what if’s” of religious history—what if a Gnostic had become bishop of the city that was the seat of imperial power?  Would there even be such a thing as an agreed upon, orthodox version of Christianity?

Gnostics and orthodox Christians co-existed in the same churches for three or four centuries, though the Gnostics believed they knew the true, secret meaning of Jesus’ teachings, a snooty sort of one-ups-manship that couldn’t have done much to win friends and influence orthodox Christians.  We can see it just in the titles of the Gnostic scriptures we’ve rediscovered, with a typical name being something like the “Secret Book” or the “Secret Gospel” of fill in the blank with your favorite disciple.  They also practiced rituals in addition to baptism and communion, rituals designed to awaken gnosis, that insight into our true nature, and these rituals were kept secret from the general public, even from their non-Gnostic fellow Christians.

Gnosticism started to decline as orthodox bishops solidified their control over the Church and Roman Emperors started to favor the creed-based form of Christianity they helped create for their own purposes.  The non-Christian Manicheans, who practiced a more dualistic form of Gnosticism that made the Forger the evil equal of the true God, flourished for a few centuries, stretching from the Roman Empire to China, and becoming one of the most widespread religions in history.  And the Mandaeans, another non-Christian Gnostic group, did well for a while in their own right too in the Middle East.  The Gnostics would pop up briefly again during the Middle Ages in southeast Europe and then again in southern France, where they were wiped out over several decades by a ruthless Pope-initiated Crusade.  After that wave of extreme persecution, they disappeared from history until those brothers dug up that jar in the desert at the end of World War II.

It’s easy to dismiss Gnosticism as so much idle speculation, but it’s important, and kind, to remember that their mythology was based on their own spiritual experiences.  They experienced alienation from the world of suffering around them, so they blamed that world on a character they created, the Forger, a useful shorthand to sum up what’s wrong with the world.  When they experienced a flash of insight that there was something deep within them with inherent worth and dignity, no matter the suffering around them, they named this wisdom the goddess Sophia.  And when they realized that there was a world of spiritual experience waiting for them beyond that first key insight, they depicting them as divine emanations they would meet on their heavenly flight to meet the one true God beyond all other gods.  Gnosticism isn’t about “believing” in the Forger or Sophia or any of the other characters.  It’s a spiritual path for aspiring mystics, one that chooses a mythological story to set up sign posts for the journey.

But we can be critical of Gnosticism too.  Any religious movement that plays the “smarter than” card and flaunts secret wisdom isn’t going to go mainstream.  There is a difference between being a smart religion and being a smartypants religion.  Smartypants religions don’t last very long.  If our collective religious life, in our one thousand congregational cultures across the continent, depends on knowing more than everyone else, and on trading insider references to upper middle class and predominantly white cultural markers, like National Public Radio and Whole Foods, if we rely on these things to cement together our common life in conversations in Coffee Hour and covenant groups, fellowship groups and RE classes—we will never become a truly multi-cultural (or multi-class) religious movement.  If someone has to listen to Prairie Home Companion to be a part of the conversation, we’ll have a problem.  Our mission and message will remain a well kept secret, like the Gnostics, and we’ll remain a small movement, like the Gnostics, and plug along until one day political winds radically change and we’re persecuted out of existence.  It’s happened countless times to small religious movements throughout history, and we’re not immune.  Unitarian martyrs have died for their faith before, and it could happen again.

But we can also draw courage from the Gnostics. Their theological creativity, their courage to rewrite well known myths and to invent new ones, stands as a shining example in humanity’s religious history.  To make the serpent the hero of the Garden of Eden for trying to bring us wisdom and to blame cosmic injustices on God—these are not the actions of theological cowards.

What can we expect of the Gnostics moving forward?  We can expect Gnosticism to keep showing up in films and novels, and in the spirituality section of the bookstore.  But if Gnosticism is to move forward and become popular again, it will need to transform itself into a “good earth Gnosticism,” one that doesn’t “blame” our beautiful universe on the Forger but celebrates Creation as part of the divine Fullness.  If we need a figure like the Forger to blame our suffering on, let him stand as a symbol of the oppressive societal structures that we have created, in our own ignorance.  Our current environmental predicament demands theologies that embrace the natural world, not ones that write the natural world off as a tragic cosmic error.

And let us embrace the Gnostics’ appreciation for theological diversity.  While they generally told the same mythological story, Gnostic teachers each told it in a different way, with different names for the gods and different plot points, and we have no evidence that they tried to silence each other for their differences.  We can laud Jewish and Christian Gnostics for their practical religious pluralism, for trying to stay within their larger religious communities even when it was obvious to them that their spiritual experiences were profoundly different.  Though I hope we won’t, like the Gnostics, try to keep our wisdom a secret.

The struggle for justice takes courage, strength and compassion. This work has never been more necessary, (or more difficult) than that undertaken by our partners in Haiti since an earthquake struck that nation on Jan. 12 of this year.

During this sermon, we heard about the unique work of UUSC’s partners to respond to the triple disaster of an already devastated Haiti, a terrible earthquake, and a botched international response. And we heard how our efforts on behalf of this work are critical.

Nichole Cirillo is manager of UUSC’s Campaigns for justice and advocacy. As such, she determines ways for our members to become involved in social justice and human rights advocacy on the global level.

Howard Zinn  was a world-renowned historian, author, playwright, and social activist best known for A People’s History of the United States. His many highly acclaimed books include his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, published by our own Beacon Press, and Three Strikes.

He was not, let me repeat, he was not ( or as far as I could research he was not), a congregationally attached, pledge-making, dues-paying Unitarian Universalist. He was however, as I just noted, one of our published authors, whose “personal history of our times” has been called an inspiring autobiography in the tradition of Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, the story of more than 30 years of fighting for social change and an argument for hope.

He was not a UU, but he spoke often in our pulpits, and I heard him speak a few years back at our of our annual General Assemblies, to a packed hall, delivering his insistent message, in his words, that what he had learned in his long life, from his experience as a bombardier in the Second World War, from his seven years teaching at Spelman College here in Atlanta, living in the black community and participating in the southern movement for racial justice, from his involvement with Daniel and Philip Berrigan and Daniel Ellsberg in protesting the war in Vietnam, was that “ small acts of resistance to authority, if persisted in may lead to large social  movements, that those in power who confidently say never to the possibility of change may live to be embarrassed by these words, that the most important thing he learned was the meaning, the true meaning, of democracy.

Howard Zinn was not, as far as we know, a Unitarian Universalist, but when he died early this year at age 87, the celebration of his life was held at our own Arlington Street Church in Boston, a place where he had spoken several times. My colleague Kim Crawford Harvie welcomed about 250 invited guests, the crowd full of scholars, writers, editors, actors, poets, activists, and neighbors—friends all, saying how fitting it was to hold his memorial service there, since this congregation had been in the forefront of progressive issues for decades, including the first legal same sex marriage in the country.

Marian Wright Edelman, longtime head of the Children’s Defense Fund , told how she was a student of Howard Zinn’s at Spelman and what an influence he had on her there. He taught me I could do anything, she recalled, and that there were more important things to do than getting a man at Morehouse. At Spelman, she said, he made her teachers and administrators uncomfortable because he challenged the status quo. He was passionate about justice and the ability to make a difference. He believed in us and that we were powerful.

He taught the young, the poor, and the weak to be free. What a lot of candles he lit!

Zinn arrived at this historic black college  in 1956 was not a particularly deliberate choice—close to finishing his doctorate work in history at Columbia University, he was contacted by its placement bureau for an interview with the president of Spelman, who was visiting New York.  Spelman,  Zinn recalled, was virtually unknown at the time outside the black community. He was offered the chairmanship of its history and social sciences department and $4,000 a year. He summoned up his courage: I have a wife and two kids, he said, Could you make it $4500?

So he came to what he described as a different world, a universe apart from the sidewalks of New York, a city thick with foliage, fragrant with honeysuckle, with air that was sweeter and heavier, where people were blacker and whiter, where when he told potential landlords he was teaching at Spelman, apartments were no longer available.

Where what for him and his family was an inconvenience was, as he wrote in his memoir, for blacks a daily and never ending humiliation. He had been in his first and new teaching position for six months when in January of 1957, he and his students had what he called a small encounter with the Georgia state legislature. They decided to visit one of its sessions and instead of sitting in the “colored” section of the gallery, ignored the signs and sat in the main section. Panic broke out and the Speaker of the House, in Zinn’s words, seemed to have an apoplectic fit. Only when they moved back into the colored section, Zinn included, were they then warmly welcomed as the visiting delegation from Spelman College.

One of Zinn’s favorite poems by Marge Piercy was read the day of the celebration of his life in our Arlington Street congregation: The Low Road

It starts one at a time,
It starts when you care to act, it starts when you do
It starts again after they said no,
It starts when you say We
And know who you mean, and each day you mean one more.

Second Part of the sermon – by Frank Casper

If, as Robert Bellah theorized, there is such a thing as an American civil religion, replete with its own doctrines and holidays, then it can be safely declared that the 4^th of July is very likely to be its high holy day. We call this Independence Day, but it memorializes and celebrates something much deeper and, as Howard Zinn so thoroughly shows us, exceedingly more tenuous then our independence from Britain. What in truth we solemnly remember and renew this day is the theology of human rights, first articulated in what some say is the most powerful sentence ever written in the English language. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. In that celebrated sentence, Thomas Jefferson established human rights to be at the very heart of what it means to be human. He then went on to say that it is for this reason that governments are established among us, to protect and advance human rights, and by that, protect human dignity.

Now, that’s pretty important stuff, ultimate stuff, utterly revolutionary then, and ever since. This, I believe, is what Howard Zinn urgently seeks to remind us of in his book “A Peoples History of the United States”. But Mr. Zinn is not your average historian. His method is a bit strange, but compelling.  He tells the story from an odd but, when you think about it, altogether obvious perspective. “I prefer”, he writes in “A People’s History”, to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Indians, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves,…of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills,… of the New Deal as seen by Blacks in Harlem,…and so on”.  These are “the people” according to Zinn. And the results are unlike anything any of us likely encountered in high school, or college, for that matter.

We learn, for example, just in the first chapter, that we have managed to establish a holiday celebrating a mass murderer called Christopher Columbus. We learn, that right from the start, that most celebrated line of Thomas Jefferson’s, despite it’s universal language, excluded most of the human beings living in what was then being declared as “The United States of America”.  It did not include Indians, African Americans, or women. We learn, as Mr. Zinn makes perfectly clear in his essay on the subject, that the Bill of Rights some 15 years later met with fierce opposition, was debated for three years, and was adopted with what can only be described as deep reluctance. And still excluded most of the people in the country. We learn, in page after page of “A Peoples History”, that the driving forces in our nations founding and development had more to do with power, greed, fear, and racism than the lofty ideals established in the Declaration of Independence. Because this is true, we also learn that all subsequent progress toward a wider, more inclusive meaning of “the people” has been a long, arduous, and bloody struggle that is not yet and likely never will be over. Zinn shows us that the challenges to our legacy of human rights do not come just from foreign powers, such as the former Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or the aims of contemporary Islamic extremists. The challenges he so well documents are domestic, primarily on the part of our own government, both liberal and conservative.

He reminds us that no sooner had the ink dried on the Bill of Rights then Congress, during an undeclared naval war with France, passed the Sedition Act of 1798. This act empowered the President to expel any alien he judged dangerous and to arrest all subjects of warring foreign nations as enemies. The Sedition Act also made it unlawful to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing…against” the US government, Congress, or the President with the intent “to bring them …into contempt or disrepute.” Thomas Jefferson bitterly denounced it as a violation of the First Amendment, and the eventual backlash to the Act resulted in his election as President and the control of Congress for Republicans, who were the progressives of the time, the Federalists being the conservatives.

The Civil War provided the next great test of faith in our own ideals, and it failed when, with strong public support,  President Lincoln took various measures that infringed on civil liberties in the name of national security, the most egregious of which was the suspension of habeas corpus. This caused the arrest and indefinite military detention of 20 to 30 thousand persons without charges who were merely suspected of being disloyal, dangerous, or disaffected.

In 1917, during WW1, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which made it a crime during times of war to make false statements with the intent to interfere with the success of US military forces or recruiting. The act was the predicate for confiscating antiwar films and raiding the offices of antiwar organizations.  Zinn notes that it was the great liberal Oliver Wendell Holmes himself wrote the opinions affirming the constitutionality of this law. If that wasn’t bad enough, it was also during this time that the Senate considered a bill that would have made the entire United States a military zone within which anyone who published any material that might endanger the success of US military operations could be tried as a spy by a military tribunal and put to death. But President Wilson was unwilling to go that far, so we got the Espionage Act of 1917 instead.

The Act was extended in 1919 by the Sedition Act, so as to make it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about” the US form of government, Constitution, flag, or its military forces..” It was under this act, and with the approval of the press and the public, that Emma Goldman had been deported to Russia in 1919, after serving two years in prison for criticizing the US government during wartime. America largely supported the prosecution, imprisonment, and exile of pacifists, anarchists, socialists, and other dissidents like Eugene Debs, who was convicted after delivering a speech about socialism and telling his audience that they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.” In all, over two thousand people were prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

We would of course be remiss if we failed to mention what some consider the most egregious of such unfortunate occasions, the mass internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. The justification for this was the unfounded allegation that Japanese Americans were facilitating attacks on American ships in the Pacific. But the real agenda was racism, the desire of their neighbors to halt the influx of people of Japanese ancestry and to appropriate their property. And not too long thereafter, Zinn tells us, “It was the Congress of the United States, Democrats as well as Republicans, that set up the House Un-American Activities Committee, and voted contempt citations against people who refused to bow down to that Committee. It was the Supreme Court that affirmed the convictions of the Hollywood Ten for invoking the First Amendment. It was Republicans and Democrats, it was all three branches of government, all of them swearing to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and all of them violating that oath.”

And so it’s been since, most recently with the Clinton Administrations Antiterrorism Act of 1996, which created a special court to use secret evidence to deport foreigners labeled as “terrorists.” And now, in the stunned aftermath of 9/11, our country is in a deeper crises than it has been in decades, and with Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, which expand even farther the surveillance powers of the government, and giving the executive branch the power to deny constitutional rights to those labeled as “enemy combatant” on the basis of secret and unaccountable evidence. Again, Zinn writes, “It is a truism of our political culture: if you are at war for freedom and democracy, you can’t have freedom and democracy. So, exactly when free speech is most needed, that is, when it is a matter of  life and death for the young people about to be sent to the battlefield – exactly at such a moment the government declares it can be suspended.”

What can one say? It’s a damned pitiful record. But I want to draw your attention to some recent events that suggest motives other than the unfortunate American tendency to panic in the face of national crises and to trade liberties for security. I am referring here to the decisions by conservative legislators in the state of Texas regarding textbook content and school curriculum.

This year, after a long and emotionally charged debate, the Texas Board of Education, dominated by a group of conservatives, voted in a host of changes to the state curriculum that has wide-ranging implications for students across the country. Taken together, the clear intent of these changes is to undermine or eliminate references to the Enlightenment and leading Enlightenment thinkers, in favor of biblical and Christian influences on the formation of the American form of government. The most blatant example of this is the elimination of Thomas Jefferson, to be substituted by the theologian John Calvin. John Calvin is the originator Calvinism, the very theology that Unitarian Universalism was born opposing. Additionally, teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. And in a related move, textbooks will not describe the United States as a democracy, but as a “constitutional republic”. What does that mean, you might wonder. Suffice it to say for now that in the conservative circles that make this insistence, democracy is regarded as some form of tyrannical mob rule. You can hear distinct echoes of this in the rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, that we are drifting toward or already have become some kind of dictatorship. But this is the subject of a whole other sermon.

To me, it is one thing to occasionally trump the Bill of Rights for reasons of national security, as blatantly fraudulent as that has been. But it is quite another thing to be ideologically or religiously opposed to the Bill of Rights as such, which is what this action by the state of Texas suggests. This is something that Jim Kelley and I were hyposensitized to during our years with Citizens for the Middle Ground. There is a whole cottage industry of conservative publications advancing scholarship that seeks to rescind not only all civil rights legislation, but to discredit the whole history and development of democracy as we have come to know it. While we must be constantly vigilant toward our unfortunate tendency to barter away our freedoms for an illusory security, I urgently believe we should also be vigilant toward those who would trade our liberties for their faith.

And while we’re on the subject, the Texas legislators added something else to this law we should be aware of. They beat back numerous attempts to add textbook references to important Hispanics throughout history, and deleted a requirement that sociology students “be able explain how institutional racism is evident in American society.” This policy echoes recent legislative events in Arizona.

After making national headlines for a new law on illegal immigrants, the Arizona Legislature passed a bill, signed by the governor, that bans ethnic studies programs. According to Suzie Khimm in an article published by Mother Jones, Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction and a Republican candidate for attorney general, wrote the law specifically to target the Mexican-American studies program, taught from grade school through high school. This program, ironically, was created in the late 90’s in response to a lawsuit alleging segregation and racial inequity across the school system. But Khimm quotes Horn as saying that the program teaches a form of “ethnic chauvinsim”, encouraging Hispanics to resent whites. Horn adds that such learning could encourage students to revolt against the US government, effectively legitimizing fears of a Mexican re-conquest of American territory. This is why part of this new law makes it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the American government. In my view this is a transparently insidious appeal to a fear that runs rampant throughout the racist right-wing, the specter of white Western culture being overrun by a horde of brown people.

But the real target of this pernicious legislation can be heard in the response of the students. Students and others who defend the program argue that their classes teach students history from a multicultural perspective, and help them analyze public services to find evidence of discrimination. This is the kind of critique of American culture and politics one finds in Zinn’s books. These are “the people” according to Zinn, and silencing these voices is the real agenda behind the efforts in both Texas and Arizona.

It’s clear, isn’t it, that you don’t have to spend a great deal of time with Howard Zinn before you realize that our government falls far short of the ideals we solemnly observe this day?  In fact, Mr. Zinn concludes that if it had been up to the institutions of our government, the Bill of Rights would have been left for dead. But I have to say that, despite the long litany of evidence for it, I think this conclusion of Zinn’s may perhaps be a bit too strident. I read an essay some time ago by Wendy Kaminer. She’s a lawyer and prolific author on civil liberties, and member of the board of the ACLU from the early 90′s to June of last year.  She looks unflinchingly at the same sorry record, but says that despite these setbacks, things have gotten gradually better in terms of civil liberties. Members of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and all women have gained unprecedented legal rights since mid-century; and, on balance, you are probably better off being arrested today than in 1960, before the Supreme Court extended the Bill of Rights to criminal suspects in state courts. Indeed, according to Kaminer, the main reason that the US has been able to re-establish and advance a culture of rights in the aftermath of crises is largely because our court system has been able to drive this commitment back to center stage time and again.

I don’t mean to suggest here that this is something we can rely upon. No fair reading of our history can yield that confidence. But it is enough to suggest, contrary to Mr. Zinn, that our institutions do occasionally work on behalf of the ideals so long ago established as the guiding principles of our body politic. But when considering the question of how, against what seem to be impossible odds, we have come as progressively as far as we have toward those ideals, Mr. Zinn has his own answer.

“Ordinary people did it,” he writes, “by doing extraordinary things”. I quote:

“The editors and speakers who, in spite of the Sedition Act of 1798, continued to criticize the government. The black and white abolitionists who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, defied the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, who insisted that black people were human beings, not property, and who broke into courtrooms and police stations to rescue them, to prevent their return to slavery.

Women, who were arrested again and again as they spoke out for their right to control their own bodies, or the right to vote. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchists, radicals, who filled the jails in California and Idaho and Montana until they were finally allowed to speak to working people. Socialists and pacifists and anarchists like Helen Keller and Rose Pastor Stokes, and Kate O’Hare and Emma Goldman, who defied the government and denounced war in 1917 and 1918. The artists and writers and labor organizers and Communists- Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, who challenged the congressional committees of the 1950s, challenged the FBI, at the risk of their freedom and their careers.

In the 1960s, the students of Kent State and Jackson State and hundreds of other campuses, the draft resisters and deserters, the priests and nuns and lay people, all the marchers and demonstrators and trespassers who demanded that the killing in Vietnam stop, the GIs in the Mekong Delta who refused to go out on patrol, the B52 pilots who refused to fly in the Christmas bombing of 1972, the Vietnam veterans who gathered in Washington and threw their Purple Hearts and other medals over a fence in protest against the war.”

And so on. It was and always will be ordinary people responding to extraordinary circumstances, people like you, people like me, we, “the people”.

Crooked Path to Enlightenment

Rev. Anthony David

June 13, 2010

Late in Siddhartha Gautama’s ministry, when India was on fire with his liberating message, people would come to him asking NOT who are you? NOT what’s your name, your origin, your ancestry? But asking this: WHAT are you? In other words: To what order of being do you belong? What species do you represent? Are you an angel? Are you a God? To which the historical founder of Buddhism would answer, every time, very simply, I am awake. That’s what it means to be a Buddha: to be enlightened. To be awake.

But things did not start out that way. The path towards awakening is a crooked one, zigging and zagging crazily. There’s Buddha potential in everyone, but the story of how any individual person taps into it is always unique, and always incorporates adversity of some kind. This is as much true for the founder of Buddhism as for ourselves, as Unitarian Universalists.

One legend has it that at Siddhartha’s birth, his father, a King, summoned seers to divine his son’s future. All the seers agreed that this was no ordinary child and that, in fact, there were two remarkable possibilities before him, though only one could come true: either he would become military conqueror and ruler of all India, or he would become a spiritual leader and world redeemer. That’s what the seers said. At which point the King resolved that he would do everything within his might to ensure that his Prince stayed the heck away from spirituality. In contemporary terms, we might say that he wanted his son to go for the business major over the major in philosophy…. So the King surrounded his Prince with every luxury imaginable. Three palaces and 40,000 dancing girls (this is a legend, after all.) Strict orders to servants that no ugliness was ever to intrude upon Siddhartha’s courtly pleasures. Nothing to suggest that life might be more complex than it appears, and that it inflicts hurts which everything a King has—material wealth and power—are helpless to ease.

The man who awoke started life fast asleep. There’s not a straight shot to destiny in this hero story. For twenty-odd years, Prince Siddhartha would live in a bubble of his father the King’s making. But then, one day, he went out into the countryside, riding. It had been a longtime habit of his, riding, though the King would insist that he’d stay on the regular paths, from which he’d have servants clear away anything offensive. Any ugliness swept away. Except for this one day. One day, along the path, the Prince encountered an old man. Decrepit, broken-toothed, gray-haired, leaning on a staff and trembling. The Prince had never seen anything like it before.

Perhaps the psychological truth in the legend is this: that there is a King in all of us who has his own ideas about what success means for our lives and jealously tries to keep us in that bubble, wants to make us his Prince, keep us convinced we’re gonna live forever. But the bubble always bursts. There’s always that time when it dawns on you: people are not immortal. Time flies. That moment when you look at a home you lived in for years for the last time, just before you leave, never to return—when you realize that life is but a series of such moments. The bubble bursts.

The King was furious when he found out. Of course. The ego is always furious when it’s out of control and best-laid plans start to unravel. So he doubled-up the guard along the paths Siddhartha rode. Tripled them up. Anything to prevent spiritual yearning from coming alive in him—anything to prevent him from hungering for more than a life of material wealth and power. His father the King decreed it.

There’s a force that wants us to stay asleep, in all of us. But the Spirit of Life won’t let us be. A disease like juvenile diabetes happens. Someone halfway across the world hacks into your gmail account and starts sending emails to every one you know, telling them that you are in London and all your money is stolen and you’ve been beat up and would you send money? Or this: the continuing tragedy in the gulf—the continuing oilspill—the spreading ecological catastrophe. Life won’t let us be.

In Siddhartha’s case, during his second outing he saw a body racked with disease.  During a third, he saw a corpse. And then came the fourth outing—perhaps the most surprising sight of all: there, by the roadside: a Hindu monk with shaven head, ochre robe, begging bowl, and peace. Peace in the midst of circumstances that, for all Siddhartha knew—given his experience up to that point—should make peace impossible. But the impoverished monk was happy. And Siddhartha, the Prince, despite his three palaces and 40,000 dancing girls, was not.

Buddhists call this the legend of the Four Passing Sights, and it is said that these sights so overwhelmed the sensitive Siddhartha that he resolved then and there to give up the right to his father’s throne—leave everything and everyone he knew—and strike out on the spiritual quest. Become a monk himself. Find peace.

Thus he entered the next phase of his life. Ever afterwards, Buddhists have called one of his main learnings of the time the doctrine of the Eightfold Path, which basically says that if you want to quest after enlightenment, then above all, you’ve got to be practical, you have to look for the middle way—the balance between extremes—in all you do. Not too much attachment to worldly things, but neither too much asceticism and self-mortification. With this understood, do eight things:

1. Know some basic spiritual truths like the Four Noble Truths—more about them in a moment.
2. Be serious about your desire to grow spiritually.
3. Avoid gossip and cruel speech, and be kind and truthful with your words.
4. Do not kill, steal, lie, drink alcohol, or abuse sex. Strive for right behavior.
5. Avoid jobs that pollute your soul—work at jobs that further the good life.
6. Discover your own rhythm and move steadily at your own pace. Right effort.
7. Develop your awareness and thinking skills.
8. Learn how to meditate, and practice it regularly.

That’s the Eightfold Path. Fairly easy to summarize, but Siddhartha almost died on the way to learning it. It’s a crooked way. Fact is, it was Siddhartha’s basic disposition never to do anything half-way. It wasn’t enough for him just to resemble the Hindu monk who had shocked him out of his ignorance. Wasn’t enough just to shave his head, put on the ochre robe, beg for all his meals, practice physical yoga postures, meditate regularly, fast periodically. Siddhartha had to outdo him. Be the best monk ever. For he was stubborn and strong-willed like no one else. That‘s who he was. To find peace, he was gonna break the sensitive organ of his body that so thoroughly linked him to pleasure and pain. He was gonna get beyond all that. Release the spirit trapped in the flesh. It got to the point that Siddhartha ate so little—only six grains of rice a day during one of his long fasts—that he looked like a concentration camp victim, until one day it just went too far. He lost consciousness, was sick near death. He would have died if it had not been for his companions, who nursed him back to health.

Trial and error was how Siddhartha learned the wisdom of the middle way. You can’t pursue spiritual truth without taking care of the body, without giving it what is natural and necessary. Of course, we say, but to get to the common sense implied in a phrase like “of course,” the future Buddha walked a crooked path. And so do we. We renounce our right to one kind of ego certainty, only to assert another kind of ego certainty. If we won’t be a Prince, we’ll be the best Monk. Zig, zag. So we learn.

And now we turn to the last part of today’s hero story. Young Siddhartha has just realized for himself the wisdom of the middle way; he has survived his mistakes so far! And now he continues on, still in search of enlightenment. One day he sits down under a Bo Tree near Gaya in Northern India, and he intensifies his meditation practice, vows that he will not be moved from his spot under the Bo Tree until he finds ultimate peace.

And he’s almost there, he’s about to come fully awake … and guess who appears at the last moment? Not his father the King. Not the monk he felt competitive towards. But the Evil One—a demon who will test Siddhartha to see if there’s any unhealthy ego left in him which can be inflamed. This is what the ancient Buddhist legends say, and as an intriguing side note, consider how we have the same kind of thing happening in legends about another spiritual teacher from a very different tradition, named Jesus of Nazareth. There’s something to this theme of last-minute temptation. Something that cuts across space and time and suggests a truth about the basic human condition. Just when you are closest to awakening, that’s the time of greatest danger. In other words, if ever there’s a time when you can’t see your shadow—when you think your perspective is perfectly clear, when you think others are idiots and you yourself have the truth, or are blameless—the devil’s got you. You’re in the hands of the Evil One.

Back to the story: He approaches Siddhartha meditating under the Bo Tree and thinks, I’ll distract him by inflaming his sexual desires—this young man of his father’s court, who used to enjoy the company of 40,000 dancing girls. So he assumes the form of Kama, God of Desire, and all of a sudden: beautiful women are everywhere, beckoning. But Siddhartha remains unmoved. He’s renounced his addiction to physical pleasure. He’s come a long way since his days at court.

So then the Evil One thinks, Well, here’s what I’ll do instead. I’ll distract him by making him afraid for his life—this man who was once so freaked out by old age, sickness, and death. So he assumes the form of Mara, the Lord of Death, and all of a sudden, Siddhartha is surrounded by hurricanes, tsunamis, showers of flaming rocks. But Siddhartha allows the fear to come and go without clinging to it. It just comes and goes. He’s renounced his addiction to physical permanence. He’s come a long way since the Four Passing Sights.

In final desperation, the Evil One does this: He challenges Siddhartha’s right to do what he’s doing. Says he’s got no right. And this opens up a huge can of worms, because it takes Siddhartha back to his own father the King and his disdain for spirituality, his disappointment in Siddartha who, after all, went for the philosophy major. Siddhartha has every right to nurture resentment towards this man who tried to keep him in the bubble, who sidetracked him from his destiny for more than 20 years! Yet Siddhartha has forgiven his Dad. He’s renounced his right to resentment. He stops clinging to it. Siddhartha touches the earth with his right fingertip, and the entire universe responds with a thousand, a hundred thousand roars: “It is your birthright,” “it is your birthright”—just as it is the birthright of everyone in this room to seek and find their own unique destiny.

That’s when it happens. There, under the Bo Tree, near Gaya in Northern India: The Great Awakening. The hero has overcome, the great prize is his. Nirvana. Siddhartha Gautama becomes a Buddha.

He sees. Exactly what he sees, he ends up summarizing in his very first sermon, which he called “Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth.” Summarizes it in the form of Four Noble Truths. Here’s the First: Life is Suffering. Suffering is basic to the human condition. Aging, sickness, death, enemies, resentment; new forms of suffering, emerging with new technologies, like identity theft; suffering that seems random and arbitrary, or suffering whose cause is unknown; suffering which is a matter of being tied to what one dislikes, or being separated from what one loves. So many forms of suffering. Life is suffering.

But what causes this? The Second Noble Truth gives an answer: Suffering is Caused by Self-centered Craving. I mean, isn’t it obvious that life is full of suffering? But if we truly knew this, then why do we get so upset about it? Why does it shake us to the core, every time? Something makes it so hard for us to accept the pains of life gracefully and courageously. The Buddha calls it tanha, habits of heart and mind which cause us to cling to personal expectations and “shoulds” about the way the world ought to be. We stew in the juices of our angers and resentments, and so we suffer.

So how do we stop it? This leads to the Third Noble Truth: To Stop Suffering, One Must Overcome Self-centered Craving through Nirvana. Some people think Buddhism is a real downer, yet with this Third Noble Truth, we have a true Gospel, we have genuine Good News. Suffering is not the end of the story. There is a cure, and the cure is the Nirvana experience, which is what Siddartha had under the Bo Tree. But it can only be had first-hand—and this leads us into some perplexity, for how can people understand nirvana if they’ve never experienced it personally, for themselves? Perhaps it is like what the boy from the reading experienced: a sense of self that can grow far bigger than any steel-grey knife thrown at it. Perhaps it is like the blowing apart of the walls of one’s limited sense of self, until all that is left is limitless, limitless compassion, limitless peace; and somehow you are still aware of your separate, individual self even as you feel its interconnectedness with everything else; and it is good, it is like a new Creation, very good, and in the face of this sweetness, why not let all the shoulds and expectations drop, why not let them go? The Evil One could come and throw everything at you, but there would be nothing to hit, there would be nothing in your soul that desire, or fear, or a sense of unworthiness could cling to. Perhaps this is what Nirvana is like. But again, words are one thing—and direct experience is something altogether different.

Which takes us to the Fourth Noble Truth: The Way to Nirvana is Through the Eightfold Path. And we have already been introduced to this. That eminently practical path to enlightenment.

That’s the Four Noble Truths. That’s the very first sermon that Siddhartha Gautama, now a Buddha, preached.

But at this point, what you need to know—and this is the last part of Siddhartha’s hero story we’re going to explore today—is that the sermon almost never got preached. There was a thin slice of time in-between Siddartha’s enlightenment and Siddartha preaching, and into that moment went the Evil One. Just as in every horror movie, when you think the coast is clear, but nope. Jason, or Freddie Kruger, or some other incarnation of horror—despite the fact that they’ve sustained the kind of battering that would take care of a hundred people—pops up. Horror happened to the newly-born Buddha.

Here’s the fact: upon experiencing Nirvana, the Buddha almost walked away, almost gave up his ministry before he even began. The Wheel of Truth stuck before it even got started.

What happened was this: The Evil One blindsided him with a fourth and last temptation, sucker-punched him with the very worst temptation of all, exactly because it appealed to one of the Buddha’s greatest strengths: his reason. Unitarian Universalists, if you have ears to hear, please hear this.

The Evil One said to Siddhartha, Good job with the whole enlightenment thing! Nirvana is yours. But of all people, surely you can appreciate how impossible it will be to put Nirvana into words. How can you do that? How can you teach what people can find only for themselves? How can you show what people can see only with their own eyes? So there you will be, going on and on about the secrets of spiritual enlightenment, and your audience won’t know what the heck you are talking about. Such isolation and misunderstanding you’ll experience. Worse, others will step to the fore, teachers pretending to know but only for the sake of duping others, making money, gaining power. Selling fake nirvana. Try to put the real deal into words, and look what might happen!

And with this, Siddhartha, the man who awoke, the man who became a Buddha, paused.

Can you relate? Ever had a moment in which you dream a great dream, and the hero path opens up before you, and your star blazes brilliantly above you, but then a voice of dry reason says: It’s impossible? Or, look what might happen?

And you can’t just dismiss the voice of reason here. Reason is essential. Reason keeps us safe. Reason keeps us connected to other people and to reality.

It is a crooked path to enlightenment.

Yet what I’m saying—what I believe is the ultimate message of this part of the Buddha’s story—is that we need more than reason to pursue the hero path. We need more than reason to dare what is great. If we stare too deeply into the complexities and possibilities of our future, we’ll be like the proverbial caterpillar who asks himself how he walks when he has so many feet going at the same time. Though he’d been doing just fine up to that point, upon realizing the complexity of it all, upon realizing that the life he inhabits is fundamentally a Mystery, that’s when he decides to control it, that’s when he insists on calling the shots, that’s when he puts ego square at the center. And that’s when it all comes apart. The simplest thing—walking—becomes impossible.

But it’s not impossible, when you have hope. When the Evil One blindsided the Buddha with his rational argument, the Buddha paused for a moment—but only for a moment—and then he said: “There will be some who understand.” “There will be some who understand.”

And you know the rest of the story: from the some who understood grew a world religion with billions of adherents today, which continues to transform lives. So many of us Unitarian Universalists, blessed by the riches of Buddhism.

But it was pure hope that took the historical founder over the top. Pure hope. May it put us over the top too.