First Parish of Watertown

“My Bad or Yours?” Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - June 1, 2008

Call to Worship - Philippians 4: 8

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Reading - “In Front of Your Nose” by George Orwell” (1946)

Many people ... are capable of holding [two] totally contradictory ideas in their heads at a single moment. This . . . habit of mind . . . is extremely widespread, and perhaps always has been. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to Androcles and the Lion, cites as [an] example the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, which starts off by establishing the descent of Joseph, father of Jesus, from Abraham. In the first verse, Jesus is described as ‘the son of David, the son of Abraham’, and the genealogy is then followed up through fifteen verses: then, in the next verse but one, it is explained that as a matter of fact Jesus was not descended from Abraham, since he was not the son of Joseph. This, says Shaw, presents no difficulty to a religious believer. . . Medically, I believe, this manner [of] thinking is called schizophrenia: at any rate, it is the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices flourish. Let me take a . . . sample. . . of plain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people who in another part of their mind are aware to those facts.

(Among the examples he lists is this one:) Hong Kong. For years before the war everyone with knowledge of Far Eastern conditions knew that our position in Hong Kong was untenable and that we should lose it as soon as a major war started. This knowledge, however, was intolerable, and government after government continued to cling to Hong Kong instead of giving it back to the Chinese. Fresh troops were even pushed into it, with the certainty that they would be uselessly taken prisoner, a few weeks before the Japanese attack began. The war came, and Hong Kong promptly fell — as everyone had known all along that it would do. . .

There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meals while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Sermon - “My Bad or Yours?” Mark W. Harris

There is a story about the Turkish teacher Nasrudin that begins with a scheduled visit by a philosopher who was going to debate an issue with him. But when the philosopher came to his house, he did not find Nasrudin at home. He had forgotten the plan and was off playing board games and telling stories in his teahouse. The philosopher waited some time, and then grew quite angry. Finally he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote, “Stupid Oaf,” across Nasrudin’s door, and stomped away. Soon thereafter Nasrudin came home, saw the writing, and ran off to the philosopher’s house. When the door opened, Nasrudin blurted out his apology. “I completely forgot our appointment. I apologize for not being home. Of course I remembered the appointment as soon as I saw that you had left your name on the door.” What names do you leave on doors? Why is it so hard for us to admit our human fallibility? Why we do we go to the ends of the earth to affirm our beliefs even when there is positive proof that we are in error?

If you were brought up in a Christian tradition, as I was, then you learned many stories where Jesus told his listeners to reflect upon how often they are in error. When the crowd is about to stone the woman taken in adultery, Jesus says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Why is it so easy to see someone else’s error, and not our own? Again recall Jesus saying, “How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you don't see the log in your own eye?” Yet it is one thing to mouth these ancient stories, and then actually struggle with how hard it is for each of us to admit that we are wrong, or that a belief we hold to be true is false, or that we don’t even see the biases we have. It is because we are hard-wired for self-justification. We not only want to be right, we assure ourselves that we are right in countless ways and instances. Otherwise the toll on us emotionally would be enormous. So instead of being contrite, we go on the attack telling the aggrieved party why they are wrong and how they actually induced the mistake. Think how hard it is to go to someone and say, “I made a mistake.”

The genesis of this sermon as you can deduce from the title is the phrase “my bad.” This is the current lingo for admitting a mistake. My son Dana says it all the time, and apparently picked it up at school. If he spills the milk, or leaves his portable game system at a baseball field, he will blurt out “my bad”, meaning my mistake. A little more sincere regret, like I am terribly sorry, might be better, but at least this is something. It minimally acknowledges some sense of owning up to a mistake. As you saw in the newsletter, my most vivid example of this new word usage occurred at a local pizzeria. I went in to the shop and ordered a slice of pizza and a side salad. A couple of minutes later the clerk asked me if I wanted to pay, and since he had my lunch all bagged, and I had selected a drink, and even though it seemed quick, I concluded that the slice must have been in the bag. I walked back to my office in the rain only to discover that the bag contained only a salad with no pizza in sight. I was thinking, “stupid oaf.” So I trudged back to the shop, and he immediately recognized me. I was pleased that he acknowledged his own mistake by saying,”My bad.” He give me the slice and I was on my way. We made it a pleasant ending to a small retail mistake. But what if I was driving for miles and discovered the error much later? Or what if he was the kind of clerk who felt I was rushing him, or that he was too busy, and it was management’s fault for not hiring more help. What if he was determined to blame his mistake on someone else because he didn’t want to look bad, or besmirch his own sense of his worth as an outstanding employee.

This problem is discussed in a recent book that was recommended in the New York Times for all the presidential candidates as highly appropriate summer reading. It is called Mistakes Were Made(But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. The authors Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson say it all comes down to “cognitive dissonance.” Basically this means that it is difficult for a person to hold two very distinct cognitions, that is ideas, beliefs, or values. If we are trying to manage this we become emotionally uncomfortable, and our very natural response is to find a way to gain some relief from these inconsistent beliefs through a plan of self-justification, so that our world view can be accommodated and placed in balance. A common way for me to do this for many years was with smoking. On the one hand I said “smoking is a terrible thing, and its killing me”, and yet I also said, “I smoke a pack and a half a day.” And so I needed to find a way to justify my smoking or else feel immense guilt. So I reduced my anguish by saying it relieved stress and anxiety; I enjoyed it; It helped me be social; It kept my weight down, and so forth. Of course there is also the plan for quitting eventually, which I employed with some regularity. I used to say to Andrea, “I’ll quit when we have kids.” and she would give me the retort back, “And what do you call Joel?,” my now 28 year old son, who was then 14, but did not have his three younger siblings yet. I got caught in my own trap of self-justification!

Each one of us makes mistakes, but it is difficult for us to learn from them. Tavris and Aronson tells us that because we think of ourselves as smart, moral and right, it becomes darn near impossible for us to admit that we do things that are dumb, immoral or wrong. We see the circumstances or the other as the oaf, but not ourselves. When the milk spills the child will say the milk spilled. It just happened. It is not that I was careless or moved too fast, but it might be called the parents’ fault because we trusted them to pour it and they say, “you knew it was too heavy for me.” The examples are endless. And these are only the trivial and every day occurrences of self-justification. What about the very genesis of the phrase “mistakes were made” which was said in the context of international diplomatic decisions, when millions of lives were at stake. When it was suggested that Henry Kissinger was guilty of war crimes in Vietnam, he simply said “mistakes were made”, thus exonerating himself from the onus of personal responsibility, and placing the decision making in a kind of inevitable slide into oblivion that the administration was a victim of. What if we ever had a politician who could admit personal responsibility in decision making? We wouldn’t know what to do. But this example also shows us how we avoid taking responsibility for actions that turn out to be wrong or harmful. The authors depict George Bush as the poster boy for this refusal to recognize his own mistakes while clinging to a belief that has been widely discredited.

It is hard to believe that we might be wrong, and so we find ways to accommodate even devout beliefs. Years ago when I was researching my hometown of New Salem, I came across a religious sect known as the Millerites. Led by William Miller, they came to believe that the end of the world was coming in 1844. Using the Bible for prognosticating, they decided what the chosen day would be in October. Many of the followers sold their earthly goods, and on the appointed day outfitted themselves in white robes, seemingly appropriate attire for living aloft in the clouds. They proceeded to climb up the local hills, raised their arms heavenward and waited for God to lift them airborne into heaven. And waited. And waited. They were clearly wrong. Do you suppose they admitted the error of their ways? No way. When a date the following year failed to materialize, they simply put the date of the Second Coming into the context of being imminent. They didn't know exactly when, but they had to always be on alert. Within twenty years they evolved into what we know today as the Seventh Day Adventists. And they are still waiting! Tavris and Aronson talk about a group in their book, who also predicted a date for the end of the world. When this date failed to occur, the group congratulated themselves on being so faithful. They decided that God had bestowed a miracle upon them, and therefore rewarded them and saved the world because of their steadfast belief. We are quick to affirm evidence that supports our view, and slow to believe evidence to the contrary. So if we believe terrorist acts are going to occur, but there is little evidence for them, we simply assert that the terrorists are being ever more clever in their ability to hide their nefarious activities from us.

We find ways to be comfortable with or to justify our beliefs. Let me say though that we need to do this or else we would go completely crazy with self-judging. Take the idea of being green, for instance. A person may be an avid recycler like me on the one hand, but also leave every light on in the house, also like me. I am trying to retrain myself to be more conscious of this, but you can drive yourself and others insane with being right about this with no sense of proportion. A little humility or humor are sometimes needed. Things can and do go wrong, and we can make terrible decisions. The pressure to have more income to add to our meager salaries may lead us to be duped by a sales scheme, and we end up losing out when the check we cashed turns out to be fake. How could I be so stupid we ask? None of us is perfect, and each is vulnerable to seeking self-justifcation for what we do. Ball players take steroids because it gives them what they believe is an extra edge physically, or allow them to return from injuries. Yet look at the difference between those like Jason Giambi of the Yankees who admitted his wrongdoing, and former Red Sox star Roger Clemens who attacks his former trainer for character defamation, lies repeatedly, and tries to unduly influence politicians all to save face. The public would surely have more sympathy if he were to admit his wrong doing and take responsibility for his actions, and yet he makes matters worse by refusing to admit his mistakes. I would say his genetic urge to self-justify has completely lost its monitor of control.

As a parent I notice this especially in child rearing, and find it a crucial aspect of character building. Here is what I experience when I may reprimand a child for an action, such as hitting another with a stick. First, there is an extended explanation of why it happened. We hear all the details that explain why something occurred, but never a simple acknowledgment that what was done was wrong. This is unfortunate, because we may never hear that the act perpetrated by the child was wrong regardless of what led up to it. What ever happened to walking away? Second, there is a justification for the action. The explanation is often portrayed in a manner so that the wrong action seems inevitable, such as the other person was taunting me or making fun of me, or the other hit me first, or that everybody was cheating, and so it somehow makes my acting in this way more acceptable. It is what happens when we see everybody turning right on a no turn on right sign, or everybody speeding, and we say everybody is doing it. Third, and finally, the child, after explaining the gory details, and justifying their actions may finally have to turn and tell the parent why they are wrong. You are not fair to me, or you give them more or favor them. We may tell our parent that they didn’t tell us in enough detail not to do something, or we didn’t know the consequences, and it is really their fault for not doing a better job of informing us. This happens for adults at work, too. We may cloak our own errors or inadequacies in blaming the employer. We say they didn’t give me enough hours or the proper training to do the job.

We all have this innate need to be right, and then this urge to finds ways to affirm that need. Sometimes we need someone else to help us see how we could be happier if we understood how we are working overtime to convince ourselves that this erroneous belief is good even as it is making us feel very unhappy and unappreciated. My Methodist colleague here in town showed me the way. What do we feel if we go through a painful, prolonged process of making a group work? I worked for years to ensure that the Watertown clergy group met, convincing myself that philosophically it was good to have an active clergy group where all the different faiths come together. While good in theory, the truth was that the group did little for the community which did not emanate from my energy, and I was on a different wavelength than most of the group, and thus spent a fair amount of time compromising my integrity. But because I put so much energy into the group, I distorted my perception of it in a positive way, so as to find good things about it, while ignoring the negative. While it is good to accentuate the positive, one also needs a slap in the face of reality sometimes, too. When the Methodist minister moved to town, he attended a couple of meetings of the group, and then he flatly stated, “this is a boring, worthless group.” Why do you bother? The answer was obvious. It was self-justification. I wanted to feel good about this group, even though it was moribund. In a sense I was happier with the group than I should have been because I put so much effort into it. It distorted my sense of reality because I so much wanted it to be a success. This can happen in relationships and jobs, too. When we look in front of our noses we may find that our need to be right about something is wrong, plus it is wasting a lot of our time and energy.

What this all means is that we should get a grip on reality. I should have seen that what I was doing was not making me happy. Sure there was a bit of doing my job, or doing my duty, but what are the limits of that when it comes down to affirming something that is useless or wrong, or wasting my time. This points to the larger truths about life that George Orwell discusses in “In Front of Your Nose.” We all believe things that we know to be untrue, and even when proven wrong, we still try to justify ourselves. From little clergy groups to big bad wars, this is a human predilection that is dangerous to our good spiritual health. Orwell tells us that there is much in modern democratic societies that end up being lies and distortions of truth, and we go along with them. “To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle.” Orwell often came back to the theme of the flight from truth. He always said that he had an uncanny ability to face unpleasant truths. The human mind, he thought is capable of holding two contradictory truths, and that it can adjust its memory, and turn and twist the truth so it can become a believable reality. So we might wish to ask ourselves, what do I justify in my mind to make me comfortable, and how often do I ignore what is in front of my nose? We all want to sleep at night. No one wants to be overcome with regrets. It is better to look at our lives, and recall the philosopher from our story, how do we leave our names on the door?

I thought my wife had a profound idea in her sermon last week. She was speaking about Abu Ghraib, and the woman who appeared in many of the photos. The woman said that one of the men in her photos looked like Jesus Christ. This thought, Andrea said, meant that calling them Christlike compounded the injuries we already inflicted, especially because they were being tortured in ways that offend their religious sensibilities. Further, by comparing prisoners to Jesus, we obliterate who they are, and end up using images to give meaning to the torturers rather than to those who suffer, and by doing so we help ourselves cope with what we are seeing. We justify it by reporting it from our cultural Christian perspective. This is also true of cognitive dissonance. It can be a flight from truth when we use our beliefs to uphold prejudices and hypocrisies, but also those little things that so much want to be true, but simply are not. Often we feel as though we need to mold the truth to maintain our sanity. But when does the molding destroy our integrity? When do we have to stand up and say, This is a mistake, and I made it. I was wrong, and I will try my hardest not to do it again. I dream that my children will learn to be adults who admit their mistakes. I long for a President who would admit his/her mistakes. I long for a responsible faith that teaches us to own up to our mistakes - for I know it will lead to more open and honest relationships, and more compassion and forgiveness of each other as well, once we take that responsibility. I want to write my name on the door with honesty and integrity, while struggling mightily to shave down, at least a little, that log that is there.

Closing Words - Lao Tzu (ca. 500 B.C.E.)
A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.

Magic. With Salt
May 25, 2008
The First Parish of Watertown
The Rev. Andrea Greenwood

Opening Words Lot’s Wife, Anna Akhmatova 1922

Lot, holy Lot, trailed God’s messenger,
an angel so vast and bright, it devoured the black hill,
but uneasiness shadowed his wife, whispered strong, filled her:
‘It’s not too late, there is time to look back, still
 
at the red towers of Sodom, the land where you were born,
at the square where you sang, the yard where you sat to spin,
the second story windows looking out from your cosy home,
the family bed, blessed when your children’s life entered in.

Her eyes were still turning when they were forever stitched shut
by a bolt of pain that seized her
and sent her legs like roots into the stony ground,
Her body flaked into tranparent salt.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no real significance
Yet in my heart she will never be lost
She who gave up her life to steal one glance


Story Orpheus and Eurydice

Be warned: this story is beautiful but tragic. It begins with Orpheus, the best musician that ever lived. One strum of his lyre, one note sung, and beasts would crawl to him, rocks would shift their moss to move to be closer, trees would tear their roots to be closer to him. He had more power than we regular people do, because he was the son of the Muse Calliope. But Orpheus was a mortal.

He lived his life simply and without a care until the day he met Eurydice. She was a Dryad; one of the nymphs that lived in the oak trees and helped to make the forest enchanted. They fell in love and it meant everything to them. They were so happy, simply caring for each other. But there were other men who also wanted Eurydice , and did not care how she felt. She ran from one in terror, without watching her step, and that is when a terrible thing happened. She stepped on a poisonous snake! The venom from its bite killed her at once and her spirit went to the Underworld. Orpheus was inconsolable. He cried and cried. His grief was bitter, but he did not let sadness slow him down. He decided to take action.

He descended from this world to the Underworld through a cave, and climbed down and down until he arrived to cross the River Styx. He passed through crowds of ghosts and presented himself before the throne of Hades and Persephone and he sang them a song about his sorrow. He promised that he was not spying on any secrets from the Underworld, and he knew that the three-headed dog with snaky hair that guards the entrance to the Underworld was stronger than him. He just begged the gods to let him have his wife back., saying that she had died sooner than she should have because of the snake.
 
“Eros has led me here,” Orpheus said, “Love is a god all powerful on the earth, and, from the stories I have heard, that is true here as well. I beg you who live in this silent place, unite again the thread of Eurydice’s life. It is our destiny to end here, sooner or later. One day Eurydice ill rightly be yours. But till then grant her to me, please! I beseech you. If you deny me, I cannot return alone; you shall triumph in the death of us both.”

Persphone's heart melted and a tear rolled down her cheek. Even Hades could not help weeping. They let Orpheus through to Eurydice, and she came from among the newly-arrived ghosts, limping with her wounded foot. Orpheus was permitted to take her away but he was warned very carefully: Eurydice would follow him into the light of the world and once she entered the sunlight she would be changed from a shade back to a woman. But if Orpheus doubted, if he looked back to see her, she would be lost to him forever. Under this condition they proceeded with Orpheus leading, and Eurydice following. They climbed through dark, steep passages in total silence, till they had nearly reached the outlet into the cheerful upper world, when Orpheus began to rejoice that his wife would be with him soon. He listened, thinking Eurydice would now begin to carry the sound of feet falling, and in a moment of forgetfulness, to assure himself that she was still following, cast a glance behind him, when instantly she became a shadow that was whisked away. Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air! Dying now a second time, she said a last “farewell,” - and was hurried away, so fast that the sound hardly reached his ears.

Orpheus was torn apart -- by grief, by wild animals crying at his mournful singing, by Zeus, angry that Orpheus had seen the mysteries of the underworld; by his own prophecy that he could not live without Eurydice, by what had happened. Orpheus was torn apart, and cast to the winds, and if you listen, you can hear him sing in them still.


Reading: Looking Back at Lot’s Wife Rebecca Goldstein

It was one of the stories from Genesis that most frightened me as a child: the story of Lot’s wife. She was told not to look, and she looked; and her punishment came swift and horrible. Frozen in the moment of her transgression. exposed to the eyes of all in her act of rebellion, she was transformed into a spectacle of salt, reduced to an element vaguely ridiculous, as if to turn back any notion of pity in us. And for what? She was told not to look, and she looked.

Why did she look? I asked the second grade Hebrew school teacher, who was telling the story.
It doesn’t mater why she looked, my teacher answered. God told her not to and she did. She thought she could get away with it, but of course she couldn’t. Nobody can get away with anything. God sees all.

That God sees all was a lesson my teacher was anxious to impress upon us at any opportunity, and it was a lesson that I as a child accepted without question. It was clear that God’s seeing all was a consequence of God’s being God. My teacher’s response therefore seemed irreproachable so far as its theology went. It was on the level of human psychology that I felt it falling short.

Specifically, I didn’t believe that Lot’s wife had thought she could get away with it. I wouldn’t have thought so, and I was a mere child, living in pallid, nonBiblical days. In vivid contrast was the picture of Lot’s wife: fleeing the accursed city, the shrieks of the damned in her ears, and in her nostrils the sickening stink as heaven’s fire and brimstone came raining down behind her. God had warned her that he would come, and he had come: in the version embellished by rabbinical tradition told to us by my teacher, his very Presence had descended, along with a host of 12,000 angels of destruction. It wasn’t the moment to think one could get away with very much of anything.

I wasn’t about to press the issue any farther with my teacher, but I was fairly certain that whatever it was that had made Lot’s wife look back in her flight was in the nature of an overwhelming compulsion ( a concept with which children tend to be well acquainted): the sort of irresistable urge that makes the whole question of whether or not one is going to get away with it pretty much beside the point.

What therefore seemed to me very much to the point was the question I put to my teacher: what forced Lot’s wife to look back, and -- even more to the point -- would I have felt driven to do exactly the same?

You begin to see why the story frightened me. Up to now in Genesis the villains had been recognizably villainous -- a brother who killed a brother, egomaniacs who brazenly questioned God’s authority and erected claims to their own imagined supremacy.

But looking where one is told not to look?

Had Lot’s wife, I wondered, looked back simply because she had been told not to, as I unfailingly sneaked a peek while standing between my mother and sisters in our pew in the synagogue during the recitation of the priestly blessing that was said on the holidays? I had been warned by mother to avert my eyes from the bimah, where the priests were chanting their spooky melody, lest I be blinded by the Presence descending upon their upraised hands. Beneath my lowered lids I could see my two sisters dutifully turned away, facing the back of the synagogue, as all the congregation was turned away.... Did Lot’s wife and I share the same perversity of nature that compelled us to take stupid risks for no very good reason at all? And was it for this that her punishment had come swift and horrible?

Or was it rather for the whisper of a doubt, soft but irrepressisble, that is perhaps always spoken in such actions as looking where one is told not to look? Were there moments in history during which God simply would not tolerate the existence of a skeptic?

The symbolic significance of the gesture of looking back was not lost on me. A child’s knowledge of nostalgia is one of the mysteries of childhood. Perhaps it wasn’t so much that there were moments of forbidden doubt as that there were places that merited no sense of attachment. Was it the regret and longing she had directed back to her home in Sodom that had drawn God’s wrath down on her?


Sermon: Magic, With Salt

Perhaps it is because I trained as a historian, but one of the first reactions I have to these transformative stories about the dangers of looking behind -- Orpheus and Eurydice; Lot and his wife -- is puzzlement. What is wrong with examining what is past? Why are the architects of these tales; the ancient Greeks or the Hebrew writers so determined to teach us to blindly obey; to look ahead the way horses do, with the patches on the sides of their heads ensuring that nothing in the periphery; nothing which is not directly in front of us commands our attention? It is true that there are times when the past can be dangerous. Dwelling on what has been can swallow us whole; ruin us for the lives that are ahead. But these stories do not dwell at all; there is one simple glance, and instant destruction.

And it is odd, too, that the way the stories play out we almost forget the context each is set in, which is complete devastation. EVERYONE is dead; yet these women are singled out as dying; with some human culpability. What does it mean to be described as dying when the setting is the underworld, or a city which has been set on fire by God, where the norm is to be dead? Even though the city burns all around, the death of Lot’s wife’s death stands out, because she could have lived. All she had to do was keep focused on the future. Same with Orpheus. His wife could have lived if he had just had enough faith to look ahead instead of checking behind. So, are these stories about a lost future -- Eurydice dying now a second time -- or about a longed for past?

Somehow, it makes me think of baseball games, when the coaches start yelling at the kids to just run; get to the base; don’t look to see where the ball went. Perhaps there is something in us that cannot quite get oriented without knowing where everything is; how that ball is going to come back at us. Sure, we could be safe if we just ran blindly ahead. We would have a better chance of winning. But some of us need to see things ourselves; feel compelled to look even when we would be better off not doing so. Maybe it has to do with differing ideas of what it means to be “better off.” What good does it do to get safely home if it isn’t your old familiar comfortable home; the place of love that orients you and lets you look out upon the world?

So I have been puzzling over this story of Lot’s wife. It is used as a punishment; as a deterrent for those who would question authority, and of course it goes on from using one woman as an example to condemning gay men and blaming this holocaust on them -- but I just can’t seem to read it that way. This story is part of a much larger one in the book of Genesis, in which Abraham brings his nephew Lot in search of a good land for their people, but sometimes in our Western, rational way, we see a roadmap, or principles to live by instead of a story arising from tugging on a dense, emotional knot in which family engagement and the good life are tied to each other in extricable ways. We tell a story and one part of the knot is untied, pulling us to confusing new places, where we are still connected, but are dislocated.

John Updike once said that a good story ends with an open door, and one of the gifts of Unitarian Universalism is that we can walk through that opening. Meaning is not circumscribed by tradition or doctrine for us. After the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, some parts of this story about Lot’s wife resurfaced -- the images of sinful cities bringing God’s wrath; the division of people into those who deserve to move into the future and those who do not; but also the fear that looking back might petrify us; the destructive nature of spectatorship. Lot’s wife seems to inspire both admiration, and a justification of punishment. Her glance backwards becomes the reason for her transformation. Looking at our losses might weaken us; looking at ourselves through a new lense might kill us. Being safe comes to mean being strong which comes to mean not changing or being changed.

But what if this is not a story of punishment? This unnamed woman who cares enough about where she has been and the lives she is responsible for is turned into salt, and that seems significant somehow -- salt is essential; and in a way, maybe this story is not about a woman who disobeyed a command, but is the story of what it means to be a parent who loses her children; who loses everything. Her daughters were left behind in this city that had been their home, and like Orpheus leaving Hades, she needed to look and see if they were following. They weren’t. She saw what became of them, and is transformed into a pillar -- not burned up into rubble like everyone and everything else, like all that she loved; but a pillar -- and that pillar is salt; a precious commodity that lets us float on the water; that gives food taste; that restores us. Perhaps it is not Lot’s wife who is being punished at all. Maybe this is a meditation on what attachment costs: that we can love our children so much that one glance at the grief of losing them pulls us backward; demands that we experience what they experience; to be one with them in every aspect of their suffering. As Rebecca Goldstein said in the reading, it is a compulsion. It is not about thinking you can get away with anything. And, in all seriousness, does it make any sense to view this story as showing only that God wants us to be righteous and follow his command to move forward; to never look back? Which parent would you rather have; the one who stopped and searched for you, or the one who has fled? Which God would you rather have: the one that wants to control our actions, or the one that tells stories to inspire a deeper compassion? Did God perform this magical transformation into salt because this woman’s desire to see her children was not forgivable, or because it was, in some sense, a beautiful need; one that summed up the purpose of life?

All too often, what we see is a product of what we believe, and not the other way around. We narrow our vision to fit what we know. The story of Lot is about a relative of Abraham who obeys God because that is how the chosen people survive. It is difficult to think beyond what we expect; to shift the frame of reference, and it is especially hard to do this because we think we are seeing clearly. I started thinking about this because I had a son who was obsessed with magic. He was possessed by a desire to perform magic tricks, yet was incapable of doing so because he believed in magic. How ironic: to be able to be a magician, you have to understand that it is all illusion; trickery; manipulation. You can’t believe in the wonder you are creating; but you produce spectacles that give hope to others, implying the possibility of real magic in the world. What my son wanted was to be a conduit for mystery and wonder; someone who could joyously show others the supernatural. But a magician has to understand that there is no supernatural in order to give the illusion that there is.

It is both fascinating and somewhat common-sensical to me that magic, like Unitarianism, is a product of the Reformation. This is because the Reformation inserted the use of reason into religion; began turning to nature for explanations of mysteries that had previously been ascribed to witches. Understanding how things happen creates a world which is relatively predictable, and that means we can use nature’s effects ourselves. Inevitably the idea of magic tricks as entertainment followed. Magicians know that we interpret what we see through what we have experienced, and so they can trick us in very simple ways; which are yet moving; which do connect us to some sense of mystery.

So is magic about skepticism? I often think of stories told about those of us raised in Unitarian Universalist church schools. where we looked for naturalist answers to Biblical stories of miracles. I don’t think people were intentionally training us to be skeptics, but when stories of mystery, danger, excitment and thrill such as the Israelites escaping from the Egyptians across the Red Sea got explained by sand bars, you can see why people might have thought we missed the point. Last year Adam Gopnik had a long article in the New Yorker, and in it he writes about magic as an intellectual experiment in empathy that spurs growth. It is not about tricks; about putting one over on anyone else. And even though the magician has a different position than the spectators, it is a relational activity. There is no effect without an audience, and the audience cannot be passive. Even when we have an idea of how a trick works, we don’t have a full explanation of why it works -- we are moved by this odd, invisible presence of the magician, who lets us experience some of the more profound aspects of life simply because he or she knows how our minds work. We are outreasoned, and it sets us thinking. We know that nothing truly supernatural happened, but we cannot figure out quite what did occur. It stimulates us to try to think in new ways, and we can begin to see how limited our thinking has been. What a magician shows us is how routinized we are; how we have let ourselves become dead to new possibilities; how stuck in experience we are.

Whether the story about Lot’s wife being transformed into a pillar of salt is proof of a God who has magical powers, or is proof that religion is somewhat quaint and vaguely ridiculous depends upon what you already believe to be true about God and religion. As a story instead of a proof text, it is far richer -- and not as easy to dismiss. We are in a predicament: this is a trick of transformation which we cannot fully process. Did God really do this? Or are we responsible? Does it tell us that it is destructive to witness things, or does it affirm that losing our children kills us? Does it mean we should obey commandments that tear at our soul, or that it is worth the price to follow out hearts? And there is the salt, which stays with us, in our tears; in our blood, in everything we feel and in any life we pass on. The memory of this loss is in us. Maybe Lot tells us that survival is possible, but perhaps not what we would choose. It is an open door inviting us in to a world where all is not known.

In anything relational, the end of the story is not the point. How can it be? In magic, the finish to a trick is not the point of a trick; in life, we don’t really want to know how it ends. The beauty is in the unfolding; in the possibilities; the growth. This makes it sound like growth inevitably follows from new experience, but it doesn’t. Anything new creates stress, and mostly we respond to that by shutting down, by narrowing our focus, by not looking back, and not looking too far ahead. This lets us survive. But research in psychology shows us that what creates greatness in people is a different response. If we can let things be complicated; if we can manage to take a wider view and expand our awareness, there is the possibility of being lifted; of feeling ourselves rising to the demands of a world we have yet to truly see; of changing in ways that force us to lose all that was familiar, but let us be present in new ways.

This spring, there have been quite a few articles about the meaning of the photographs which came out of Abu Ghraib; partially inspired by a documentary about them, and partially because the military cases against the soldiers who took the photos have concluded. What those photos mean now seems markedly different from what they conveyed when they were first printed. Although the pictures remain the same -- grinning American soldiers with their thumbs up in front of captive, victimized prisoners or even corpses -- we now know a lot more about the people, and what they thought they were doing. It makes the whole idea of looking back at things complicated. We think that witnessing something will make us compassionate. But it doesn’t; not necessarily. Sabrina Harman, who is the smiling private in many of these pictures, wrote about having trouble getting the images of the tortured prisoners out of her head. She described one man handcuffed backwards and naked to a window, with underwear puled over his head, and said “He looked like Jesus Christ.” We hear that description -- and I think Harman genuinely felt this, too -- as a way of conveying our horror at torture; as a way of protesting. But it is a description that works against our own intentions; a description that puts these images into a story we already know, with a meaning that is determined. It is not the story the pictures really tell. It is like Lot’s wife. She is a refugee, fleeing her burning city; her children lost in the rubble. Her home is gone and she is destroyed, but we are not compassionate. We are judgemental.

The prisoners who were tortured are Muslim. That is actually the reason they are being tortured, and tortured in ways to specifically offend their religious sensibilities. How can we call them Christ-like without compounding the injuries we have already inflicted? Somehow, by comparing these prisoners to Jesus on the cross, we put a story with a completely different context on these people, and in fact obliterate who they really are. We end up using the images to give meaning to the torturers rather than those who suffer, and we do it to help ourselves cope with what we are seeing. Comparing someone to Christ sounds like an empathic response, but it isn’t. It is a way of forcing something new into a familiar story; a story which exonerates us and makes it easier for us to move forward; easier to find a home in this land.

Later on in the essay I read from this morning, Rebecca Goldstein goes on to explore more of what she thought might be happening with Lot’s wife. ... “a meaner sort of motive behind her action suggested itself,” she writes. “one that would remove her to a safer distance from myself: a cold enchantment with the drama of death. The summer we had spent at the seashore I had seen for myself how the crowd had gathered around the boy who had been pulled unconscious from the ocean. and how the voice and face of this crowd had quickened with a strange excitement, as if it were almost glad for the event. Did Lot’s wife have such a strong taste for the theater provided by others’ tragedy that she could not keep herself from stealing a glimpse of the flaming spectacle? And was it for this that she had been turned, most appropriately, into the stuff of tragic spectacle?”

Voyeurism or skepticism, nostalgia or bravado: what moved her to look, and risk all? This question could be asked of those military staff in the photos, and probably of every single one of us who has suffered some assault on humanity so grave that we cannot quite think straight afterwards. We struggle to know which direction to look; to not resort to a script; to let this new pain in and change us. We do not want to transform suffering into something anything other than what it is, but it is hard to assimilate changes as devastating as the ones which incinerate our pasts; our ideals and the way we understand human nature. We need an imagination that is wider than our experiences; indeed, imagination can let us hold together things we experience as tearing us apart.

Alan Shapiro, a poet in North Carolina, wrote an essay called “My Tears See More than My Eyes”, a title he borrowed from his teen-aged son, who is the subject of the essay. The younger Shapiro is in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt, and this essay begins as a narrative; telling the story of visiting, of families scurrying in to the corners of the room attempting to find some way towards privacy in an environment which communicates a distrust of anyone being alone. The visitors grapple for a physical assimilation of the extremely intimate knowledge of reality that has been forced upon them: someone they love has gone where it is forbidden to go; they have seen the secrets of the underworld and cannot return to the living; not quite. Where do we go, in this room kept watch by those who demand obedience; whose eyes only meet to communicate rational demands, not shared pain? Shapiro looks back. The narrative ends and becomes a searching memory, asking how did we get here; how can we get back to the days before we knew this place of suffering; and if I figure out what road led us here, can we get our old life back? It is Orpheus, having the snake’s venom removed from Eurydice’s foot so that she can limp past the gates of hell, with death just a bad dream. But the backward look ends when Shapiro’s son keeps asking “So, Dad, can I come home now? Please, Dad; can you take me home?” This is not something they are allowed to decide. Control belongs to something outside the family. They live in a new place.

Shapiro is a poet, and so for him this moment is where imagination has to step in; where he needs to stop looking backward and begin to envision a new future. He can’t simply keep going; nor can he just look back; but he needs to do both; to begin spanning the distance between both realities: we will go on, and part of us has died. My son is not just my son anymore. Grief has taken us through a gate where all the other shadows live, and though I may manage to pull him back through to this side, we will not ever see things the same way. His tears have seen more than our eyes can. Home can never mean what it once did; it doesn’t mean being completely safe. Loss transforms us in ways we could never have imagined. All of life will be flaovored with it, and yet we are not weak. We are pillars, even if those who move blindly forward cannot see the truth.

Long, long ago I either heard or imagined someone to say that prayer was a connection between memory and hope, and ever since I have seen prayer as a place. It is the door we live in, pulling the past and the future into a frame for us. On one side of us are memories -- a lattice work of time, woven together and full of imperfections. On the other side there are these vague but solid hopes for the future; foggy shadows of people we do not want to lose; suffering we do not wish to endure planted alongside an obelisk of sure strength; an unwillingness to let ourselves be defeated. Above us, bridging the two sides, are our prayers; the sacred canopy under which we live; the sun bleached and tattered streamers of our hopes and dreams, testimony to what we have witnessed; what we have loved; what holds us up, what we will pass on. Our whole lives are prayers. But they are not prayers for anything; they just are living prayers; and the beauty is in the unfolding, and our ability to take an ever wider view. There is no aim; we are just witnesses to all the unfolding.

Closing Words: Memorial Day for the War Dead  by Yehuda Amichai

Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."

“Fasting and Feasting” - Mark W. Harris

May 4, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown

Call to Worship - from John Wolf

Fast from criticism, and feast on praise;
Fast from self-pity, and feast on joy;
Fast from ill temper, and feast on peace;
Fast from resentment, and feast on contentment;
Fast from jealousy, and feast on love;
Fast from pride, and feast on humility;
Fast from selfishness, and feast on service;
Fast from fear, and feast on faith.

Reading - Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert


Sermon - “Fasting and Feasting” - Mark W. Harris

My colleague Christine Robinson recently reminded me of a Winnie-the-Pooh story in a sermon of hers. You may recall the tale. It seems Pooh went to visit his friend Rabbit, and managed to squeeze his round frame into the front door. Once he could see inside, he pilfered the honey rabbit had stored there, and more than ate his fill. In fact, he made a pig of himself. The result was that his already ample rotundity grew. As he tried to exit from the hole, he could only squeeze halfway through, and then he became stuck there. Christopher Robin was called to handle this emergency. The gang pulled and pushed on poor Pooh only to discover that he was indeed stuck there. Christopher Robin declares that it will take a week’s worth of fasting to cure this problem. Pooh is very upset by all this, but Christopher Robin assures him that he will read to him to help pass the time. In his anxiety, Pooh cries a bit and then says, “Would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?”

If you read my newsletter column, you know that I am feeling a bit like the wedged bear who has been gulping honey all winter. It is almost always true that I gain weight over the winter months, and then shed those pounds in the more active spring and summer months when I can swim and kayak and climb mountains. This was true during our recent week in Maine. We climbed a mountain, went on another hike where we flew kites, did some kayaking and bowling, raked and cleaned and generally prepared our cottage for warmer days to come. Yet this spring things have gotten more extreme than usual. The weight is effecting my breathing, and my bending. This is not a sermon on the whys and wherefores of overindulging my already big appetite. I do not plan on psychoanalyzing myself about lack of will or revealing why I eat to compensate for stress. I just know I am concerned about my physical condition and want to do something about it. Pooh’s solution, albeit forced, was fasting. Why not me?

Yet this sudden interest in fasting is not merely personal with a goal of a trimmer me. It is also about feeling some frustration as to how to respond to a world where mayhem and killing and war seem commonplace even if I reject the use of violence, and the environment problems seem endless and potentially catastrophic even if I change all my light bulbs, and walk more often, something to help with both the weight and the environment. Of course, they are connected concerns, as our insatiable appetite for gasoline literally fuels our violent presence in Iraq. My earliest experience with fasting, as I noted in my column was when I used to attend meetings of the Yorkshire Unitarian clergy in Sheffield, England once a month. We would gather in an ancient meeting hall, pay 5 pounds for lunch and then sit down to a repast of a glass of water. The money was pooled each month and sent off to support OXFAM.

Over they years I have known other colleagues who fasted in response to social concerns, as a way to raise funds, but also as a way to not indulge our appetites in whatever it is we are consuming, but rather to discipline ourselves for a day once a week or once a month, or even for a period of time within a given year (such as Lent for Christians or Ramadan for Muslims) to reflect upon our lives and our place in the world. What intrigues me about fasting is that while Unitarian Universalists are often known for wanting to be active in making the world a better place, and our lives may even include civil actions such as letter writing or demonstrating. Fasting not only includes the possibility of collecting money for some worthy group in lieu of what we would otherwise be paying out, but it also means that we each stop and deeply reflect for whatever time period it is. We decide as a personal act of purification, and as a public action of freedom from our usual levels of consumption to fast. I will perform this religious act. I will not eat, but will reflect upon my longing for a healthier me. I will not shop, but will reflect on what I really need for consumable goods. I will not drive, for the sake of the environment, for my body. I will not watch television, for my mind, for the sake of kindling deeper relationships with others. I will not ______ the possibilities are endless. The spiritual discipline of fasting asks each of us to reflect upon what aspect of our lives feels like an endless treadmill, and the fasting means we take a break from the treadmill. In that reflective fast, we may have new insights as to how we might live our lives in ways that are more compassionate towards one another, and toward the world we inhabit.

At first this might seem antithetical to Unitarian Universalist traditions. Historically, we have not usually paid much attention to spiritual disciplines where we deprive the body of something it desires, or the person from making free choices of what they want or need. We are not like the medieval flagellants, a group who beat themselves with whips so that they would more deeply reflect on their sins. This is because we trust that individuals can make good, responsible choices. Yet I believe an action like fasting can bring greater reflection and action, and can have larger implications, especially if we are not alone in our fasting regimen. In fact, fasting played an important role in the development of faith in America, and was not just something for celibate Catholics or exotic Hindus to undertake. It is not about giving up food for so long that you cannot see straight, and expect to have some kind of otherworldly trance. There is a long history of using fasting as a protest against injustice, from those who go on hunger strikes in prison to show that they are being treated unjustly to larger movements like that of Gandhi to prove the validity of their political position, and force the hand of oppressive governments. I think it is a good thing to do in solidarity with others, because it is hard to drive a low mileage car when the culture affirms the giant SUVS, and it is hard to pay extra money for energy efficient and low water usage appliances when everyone else seems to buy the cheapest choice. These are not easy choices in such a conspicuously consumptive society. But we simply cannot go on living as we do. We are all stuck in the hole, and honey is not good for us. I even see my eating as symbolic of consumption out of control.

When the towns were first being settled in Massachusetts Bay, fast days were observed right from the start. While there were occasional weekday sermons in England, here they were given a special and legal status. The problem is they became a source of conflict between the controlling factions in the stand offs between church and state. While fast days were first called to celebrate events such as the building of a new church, and God’s blessing was invoked, as time went on, fast days were most usually declared when life’s events turned sour with terrible storms, wars, or outbreaks of disease. Leading clergy such as Increase Mather would ask, “What evils have provoked the Lord to bring his judgment upon us?” The decline of faith was seen as a cause of human disasters. So clergy would implore the people to renew their pledges to walk in the ways of the Lord, but they needed a legislative act from the Great and General Court to do so.

The legislature, as politicians are wont to do, wondered how much of the blame they should take for essentially affirming that there might be some culpability on their part, especially if the issue was war or famine. So when Increase's famous son Cotton requested a fast day proclamation in 1690, they rejected his draft, since acknowledging it might make them look bad. Cotton then decided he would carry out a private fast instead, and had his church renew its covenant. Religious leaders always felt as though their pleas for repentance and reform should be part of a larger scheme, even if it was only their own congregation. They saw signs of unfaithfulness all over the world, and said so in fast day sermons. This was effective in 1674 when Increase Mather’s sermon said the day of trouble is near. History helped him out, when King Philip’s War broke out, and chaos ensued. The politicians began to panic and turned to fasting and then reforming in order to save themselves, I mean the Commonwealth. They proclaimed how humbled they were that they had not heard the Word of God enough. Soon enough the legislature voted stricter laws, including fewer tavern hours. But they had to weigh when they should call a fast day and what evils they should list. Then when war took a good turn, the court said we don’t need to fast any more. God seems to approve of us now. In fact, when things improved, and the clergy asked for a fast again, they said no, this should be a day of thanksgiving. Once again, the clergy would say, They won’t listen, but we will do a private fast. God’s word was brought to bear on all aspects of life.

Perhaps this sounds archaic to us, and perhaps theologically it is, but the religious motivation behind it should not be seen that way. When times got tough they asked what could they do to restore their special relationship with God. To them things had gone awry. They thought in terms of themes of personal salvation and corporate conditions. What do these events mean in terms of our personal and collective well being? In my case, I can feel more severe effects from weight gain than I ever have before. So I am asking myself in terms of my personal well being, and before you, that I want to change this situation. My fasting, which might also be better diet and more exercise, is a symbolic action of repentance. Like the Puritans, I am saying this needs to change. But I also undertake it with the hope that it will bring my deliverance. I will become healthier and more whole, and effect change for something that has been an issue for me since childhood. We could look at corporate conditions, too, like why are so many children in America overweight, but perhaps a more common response might center on the foods we eat, or the consumptive habits we have in general. Our life is going to suffer if we don’t balance the needs of the community. Fasting from food consumption may reflect, as one of my students said, that Sam’s Club is rationing rice, and its high price in the world means that some will starve, and thus fasting helps us realize fundamentally that our breadbasket mentality must change, for food is no longer limitless, and we are not entitled to more than a fair share in the context of the world community.

You may be saying that you do eat right and you try hard to exercise, and you even give
up the things you love indulging in. You may say, you are no fan of fasting. I am not the most likely candidate for this either. I love chips and ice cream. I have to force myself to exercise. And, yes, I have a Charlie card, but often find the bus inconvenient. Who wants to wait on Mt. Auburn Street in the middle of a storm, when you can stay warm and dry in the comfort of your own private car? I will fly a jet to General Assembly, but I don’t go as often as I used to. Don’t we try hard enough already? We used cloth diapers for years before all the diaper services seemed to go out of business, and then the resulting guilt from using all those paper diapers nearly consumed us. We recycle and walk. We turn down the heat. Do I have to do more? Can’t I just say I am trying to be good enough, while I try to convince others to be more like me? Sure we want others to feel the urgency of our afflictions - the tragedy of war, the fear of global catastrophe. But it must be more than fear or guilt.

Pooh says he really cannot be sustained in this period of fasting unless he hears a good book. A good part of the reason for our action on environmental issues is that we overindulged. And now we respond somewhat grudgingly. I have to do this. It does not seem like a good book to us. Yet it is. Fasting means we learn to enjoy the things that really sustain us. If we are watching all that TV, or eating all that food, or driving around all the time, it may mean we are neglecting those we love, or guarding ourselves against dealing with some issue, or not taking care of our bodies so that they feel and act more responsively to how our head would like them to move or be. But I want to undertake a regular day of fasting as a sign pointing toward my body feeling better. I want to undertake a regular day of fasting as a sign that I don’t need or want to spend my energy on what I need to have rather than focusing on what I need to do emotionally to build better relationships, or build a better world. If I eat less it means I acknowledge I am no longer focusing on filling my stress with food, but rather will fill it with talk about it with those I love, or walking it off, and globally will acknowledge that others deserve this food I consume, because they have as much right to the resources of this planet as I do. And perhaps I will donate my savings on food to some global effort. At the least I may lose some weight, decrease my carbon footprint a little, and listen to my boys a little more, and discover the deeper truths that sustain you and me in our relationships and in community.

So what am I going to do? Well, on the third Wednesday of the month, I plan on having water for lunch, breakfast and dinner. I will see how that goes. I plan on saving a little money, and then donating it somewhere, with this first month going to our charitable offering, and the second month going to Eliza Petrow’s AIDS program in China, as mentioned in our newsletter. I invite others to join me, in fasting from food, or TV or driving or whatever it is you want to give up; once a week or once a month. I have cards over there on the side table, and perhaps we can check in with each other. I am seeing this somewhat like the reading on prayer from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I resonate with her nickname “Groceries,” for in my stint in a lifetime of eating in my own little Italy, I have learned how to eat well. She learns she needs a diversion to keep her from her appetites and learn how to pray, and so her diversion must be pure love. I am not so sure that fasting will lead me to divine love, but it sure is a diversion from my other diversions, like eating. I think a diversion like fasting will gets us away from whatever unhealthy honey-like diversions we have, and will answer our own version of that prayer of Richard's from Texas. “Please, please, please open my heart.” Now the practical person might say that if I change my eating habits, I will not have my heart literally opened liked Richard. I might say if I take on this practice of fasting that my heart will turn to issues of love and relationship and away from consumption diversions. It will be the good sustaining book, like Pooh needed to get out of his being stuck in a hole with tightness. Many religions have fast days. Some fast to focus on spiritual matters, and others to purify the body. Some fast to control our desires, and others fast to feel solidarity with the poor. Some churches have a fast offering on a designated Sunday each month. Perhaps you could give your fast to our monthly charitable collection. Like the Puritans, the hope for fasting is that it will bring some spiritual gain. Weight loss, perhaps, but also a healthier body. Less waste, perhaps, but also a healthier world. I am sure in a real Pooh story he would have tried to wiggle around and make the hole bigger, but we have done enough of that already. Now is the time in our lives, and in the life of the world to shrink, to fast from all our feasting. Maybe, we will taste a little divine love.

Closing Words - from Rumi

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side, Die.
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

“Writing the Minns Lectures” by Mark W. Harris

April 27, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown


Opening Words from Robert French Leavens


Holy and beautiful the custom which brings us together,
In the presence of the most high:
To face our ideals,
To remember our loved ones in absence,
Ti give thanks, to make confession,
To offer forgiveness,
to be enlightened, and to be strengthened.

Through this quiet hour breathes
The worship of ages,
The cathedral music of history.

Three unseen guest attend,
Faith , hope and love:
Let all our hearts prepare them place.

Sermon

Many years ago in the far off city of Krakow, Poland, there lived a man named Isaac, son of Jacob. He was a poor man whose family seldom had enough to eat. He also lived at a time when dreams still held great power for people. One night he dreamed of the distant city of Prague. In his dream he saw a certain bridge over the Vltava River, and under the bridge a treasure was buried. The dream was so lifelike, he could not forget it, and this was especially so because the dream continued to recur every night for two weeks. Finally, to purge this insane image from his mind, he resolved to walk all the way to Prague to see for himself.

After several days of walking, he finally arrived in the city. Everything looked just as it did in his dream, and he soon found the exact bridge, and went underneath it to search for the treasure. Suddenly a soldier grabbed him by the the scruff of his neck, and led him away to prison for questioning. Under intense pressure form the authorities, he soon told them exactly what he was doing under the bridge - looking for a treasure he had imagined in a dream. All the soldiers quickly broke into laughter, “You stupid idiot,” they said, “Don’t you know that you can’t trust what you see in dreams.” Then, the one who had captured Isaac said, “Why, for the last two weeks I myself have dreamt that far away in the city of Krakow, in the house of one Jew, Isaac, son of Jacob, there is a treasure buried under the stove in his kitchen. But wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous thing in the world for me to go all the way there to look for it? Think how many Isaac, sons of Jacob, there are in a large city. One could waste a lifetime looking for a treasure that doesn’t exist.” Still laughing, the soldier gave Isaac a kick and sent him on his way. Then Isaac, son of Jacob, walked back to Krakow, to his own home, where he moved the stove in the kitchen, found the treasure buried underneath, and lived to a ripe old age as a rich man.

In the wake of the celebration of Passover, it seems appropriate to share a story from the Hasidic masters of eastern Europe. The story’s meaning is so simple. Our treasure is at home all the time, but we must go on a long and difficult journey in order to discover it. Home is Krakow, but he goes to Prague to discover the truth. We must risk ourselves to an uncertain future, to find the treasure that lies within. I want to think of this story in the context of writing the Minns Lectures. I hope none of you were fainting with suspicion that I was going to offer another sermon on Polish Unitarianism as soon as the word Krakow crossed my lips. Today I want to tell you a little about the journey I have taken to write the Minns Lectures. It has been long and arduous, and not without pain.

First, the facts. This week I will begin a series of five lectures that have been given more or less annually since 1944. I made application to become the lecturer, and they have honored me by choosing me for this paid historical gig. During the last few months I have given every spare minute of my life to the lectures. Susan Minns, one of the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts, among other notable accomplishments, established them in her brother's name. He was a descendant of the first minister of First Church, Boston, and a member of Kings Chapel, and therefore the lectures are administered by a committee from both those congregations. You get a sense that they were Brahmins through and through. That makes me a little nervous since the lectures address issues of class, and there has long been a stereotype linking Unitarianism with wealth, cultural elitism and Harvard College. Well, guess what? It is an accurate stereotype, at least for Bostonians in 1850, which is not to say it is true for Universalists, or for UUs today. Yet there is this sense that as a religious institution we only appeal to a narrow segment of the population, which today we might define as a liberal, economically comfortable, well educated elite, who know what is right for America, if only the masses would listen to us. Oops, that’s part of the stereotype, too. Self-righteousness, and yes, you’ve heard it before, children who don’t behave.

Unfortunately, you are not going to get too many answers today. You’ll have to come hear the lectures. And they are very historical, maybe even more so than that infamous Polish sermon. So if history is not your thing, then you can stay home and watch the Sox, and see the lectures later when they are released in the theaters. Ok, so maybe I am exaggerating their importance. While this won’t be an overly historical sermon, it will argue that history is important not just to me or this church, but to you as well. In fact, confronting and shaping and affirming your own history is a vitally important spiritual discipline.

This all started for me a long time ago, more than thirty years. At that time I was in graduate school in New Hampshire working on a thesis about my home town of New Salem. In the process of studying my home town (Think New Salem and Krakow), I began a journey. I discovered two faiths, Unitarianism and Universalism, that both affirmed the use of reason in the interpretation of the Bible, a loving God who embraced all and a basic understanding of human nature that was good. Juxtapose this with a literal understanding of the Bible stories, a judging God who filled me with unending guilt, and sinful nature that really could not do anything right or worthy in God’s eyes until Jesus saved me, and you have captured my reasons for leaving my childhood faith. It was an instant conversion. I became a born again UU. This study of my home brought me a new faith, and it also gave me a calling. I soon came to believe that living this faith and sharing it with others was what I was meant to do with my life, and so it has been ever since.

But that is not the whole story about the genesis of the lectures. I also have money and class issues. For example, having a venture capitalist as our student minister a few years ago was not the easiest task for me. These money issues were part of my journey to UU ministry. The thesis I spoke of was about the decline and failure of rural Unitarianism. The central reason why rural Unitarianism failed was that its rational, intellectual faith could not speak to plain, rural folk who needed someone to listen their needs, and not tell them what their needs were. Then when I served my first church in Palmer, Massachusetts, the then minister in Hartford, an important minister with a long Unitarian pedigree told me that my church was only there for historical reasons, and there was no way we would have a church in Palmer, a poor New England mill town in economic decline, today. It did not fit that green leafy, rich suburb filled with smart people stereotype. I think Andrea encountered some of this when she came to Watertown. Colleagues said, You mean there is a Unitarian church there? No, can’t be. A urban, industrial , immigrant community, with few WASP types simply could not sustain a UU church. That stereotype almost became a living truth, and if it were not for some brave souls, a few of whom are still among us, who said UUism can grow and thrive in Watertown, it would have happened. We are all witnesses to that revival today. In fact our annual meeting is a celebration that you do not need to be a certain kind of person to be a Unitarian Universalist except one that is open minded and understanding and willing to risk all dogmatisms in a search for truth.

My personal money issues partly came from being raised in those places where Unitarianism failed. These are rural villages and mill towns where the stereotype tells us that only hicks come from there, not educated and well-to-do UUs. You do not belong. Ever since, I looked at the content of my thesis and thought the Brahmins didn’t seem to understand. Ever since my former colleague looked at my church and said, you don’t belong among us, you are not one of us, I have longed to write these Minns lectures to say to the stereotype, that I do not have to have a certain pedigree, or education or profession to be a Unitarian Universalist. I don’t need six generations or a Ph.D., or a white collar job, which is not to say those are not fine things. Personally, it has been partly about money because my father did well financially despite being on welfare as a child during the depression, after his father’s business failed, and poverty arrived in an alcoholic stupor. So I enjoyed the benefits of money growing up, but our family values were pure working class, and now I am the educated idiot my father both wanted and feared. My education assigns me to a certain class today, but I have often felt confused, who do I belong with? And those UUs who have promoted a stereotype that we must fit a certain type in a certain kind of town have done us no favors. I first thought UUs were those people who had it made, and never had to struggle with anything. I have learned that rich and poor, educated and not so educated have religious needs that we can respond to. What is wrong with everyone feeling welcome?

That is the essential question, who do I belong with? I have thought about this a lot this year. My first sermon of the year was called “Almost an Atheist.” In that sermon I mentioned how Andrea said to me, “Oh, you still believe.” Believe in God that is. I have thought about that in the context of thinking that none of us really stray very far from our childhood faiths if we are going to have a powerful, life sustaining religious core. At first you might say that is ridiculous. Most of us UUs with a few exceptions are come outers from other religious faiths. I rejected fundamentalism, and another rejected Catholicism. We certainly don’t believe in those old ways. That is true, but we do need to integrate it into our life experience. We need it on our journey or else we only reject Krakow to come to Prague, and don’t know how to get back to Krakow, which is where our home and treasure lie.

Just the other day on the way home Dana was asking about what kind of baby he was. How much crying did he do and so forth. Children always want to learn what they were like when they were younger because it helps them get a perspective on who they have become. In the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, one psychologist writes: “Observing, recording and preserving the memory of both large and small events of life is one of the most satisfying ways to bring order to consciousness. In a sense every individual is a historian of his or her personal existence.” We have all learned that memories of childhood and the patterns we developed determine the kind of adults we grow up to be. Many of us spend time in therapy dealing with these experiences as children of alcoholics or victims of abuse. We try to see how this experience has shaped us, and how we can reconcile ourselves to it. Sometimes psychology has focused on the negative, and especially religiously speaking, we need a more positive turn on our childhood. What kind of moral values or community compassion for others or love for others or peace for the world did we learn about that we still build upon?

If adults become private historians of our own lives, it is also true of older age. Erik Erikson believes that the last stage of the human life cycle involves the task of achieving “integrity.” That is, we bring together what we have accomplished and failed to accomplish into a meaningful story, that we claim as our own. Before my father died, he gathered his three sons for a last trip to Cooperstown , New York to see a painting of his old professional baseball team on exhibit. He wanted to integrate children with what he loved and handed on, that it, among other things, might be a bond between every one. We want to feel forgiveness for mistakes, loving connections that gave meaningful times together, and feelings of pride for what we have accomplished as a family or a community. As Carlyle wrote, “History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”

Many of us try to make sense of our history in our religious communities. Some of us think we join a UU community to purge ourselves of the theological dogmas we endured in our journeys. There is an undiscriminating rejection of the past. In the reading Conrad Wright says that this attitude of rejection is actually quite conventionally traditional, and it has a long history of its own. Furthermore this complete rejection of the past is “a form of bondage to it.” In a way it is like the undiscriminating acceptance of the orthodox faith that liberals sometimes like to make fun of with an intellectual superiority. The renewal of life depends upon the fulfillment of the past rather than the repudiation of it. What this means is that we look at what meaning we have derived from that past. Perhaps Catholicism gave you a good ethical grounding or thirst for social justice, or perhaps Fundamentalism showed me the importance of texts or story or even community, or even that an idea of God was useful to help me think about what grounded the universe in meaning, even if their concept of God was one I rejected. For I took a journey of rejection, but I also kept on journeying to come back to what meaning was gleaned from that experience as I grew and changed. And perhaps that is what Andrea has been saying to me all year.

What is central to our journeys is that we have the courage to go to the far off city, to find the way to our treasure at home. To leave home, is simply to reject the past, and never find the treasure. As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. To simply stay home is to stagnate, and never look to find the hidden treasure. This journey of mine has helped me discover that I can return to my home and find meaning there, even as it is transformed. I have also encountered those who never left UUism who did not finish their journey either. They stagnated by believing the stereotypes that only one kind of person belongs here, or that we know what is right. I believe that at heart Unitarian Universalism longs to be a faith that is not an exclusive club, but a wide open door that wants to experience and learn from all kinds of people, rich and poor. I often feel like we do a good job of that here in Watertown. It is a lesson we could teach UUs elsewhere. It is not easy. God knows I have issues, but I don’t want to ever feel like there is anyone, including myself who does not belong. I strive to change and grow and take the risk of a journey that will bring me home to a treasure. The social organism and the person that does not change will atrophy and die. Victor Frankl once wrote, “We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man or woman but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Each of us must make that continuing journey that is our life, may we always remember our past, but also live it forward into the treasure that is our future choosing to fulfill our childhood faith because it took us on a journey that brought us to Unitarian Universalism and home now to a bigger heart and a wider soul. That is our heart’s longing as a people and as a community, to give ourselves a usable past. And that is why I wrote these lectures. I looked ay my shadows, and the shadows of my adopted denomination and have used that journey to call myself to my best self, and that the understanding and love and friendship we can share among all people of all classes can bring power to our feelings of powerlessness, compassion in our times of despair, and community when we feel truly isolated.

Closing Words - from Theodore Parker
Be ours a religion which, like sunshine,
goes everywhere;
its temple, all space;
its shrine , the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living.

“The Cost of War” - Mark W. Harris

Justice Sunday 2008 - Five Years Since the Start of the Iraq War - 4,000 US Deaths -
40th Anniversary of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

First Parish of Watertown April 6, 2008

Call to Worship - from Deng Ming Dao

Only when peace lives within each of us, will it live outside of us. We must be the wombs for a new harmony. When it is small, peace is fragile. Like a baby, it need nurturing attention. We must protect peace from violence and perversion if it is to grow. We must be strong to do this. But force, even in the name of honor, is always tragic. Instead, we must use the strength of wisdom and conscience. Only that power can nurture peace in this difficult time.

Story for All Ages - Li’l Dan the Drummer Boy by Romare Bearden

Reading - The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Sermon - “The Cost of War” - Mark W. Harris

What is good about war? It seems like such an illogical question. What could possibly be good about the killing of people, destruction of property, and desecration of the earth? Yet I remember the question from my eighth grade teacher as clear as day. She wanted to hear both the positive and negative attributes of war coming from the droll mouths of her sleepy, pubescent youngsters. It was 1965 and Vietnam was only a minor military action with the build up and the anguish soon to follow. I am not sure what prompted the discussion question. Were we reading the Red Badge of Courage, some Hemingway, or All Quiet on the Western Front? I recall the teacher going to the blackboard. The obvious pluses were things like freedom and liberation. As a student of the Civil War, I believed it was fought to free the slaves and preserve the union. So I spoke up to list a good thing about war. The Revolutionary War of course had brought us self-government, freedom from imperialistic control. As an eighth grade class we surely believed in what Studs Terkl later called The Good War fought by those whom Tom Brokaw deemed The Greatest Generation. We all knew about World War II, where the Holocaust was stopped, where a madman who was trying to take over the world was prevented from doing so. As the decades passed, nations learned to stand up for their own sovereignty and human rights, so that more people might live in peace. You sometimes must go to war, to stop war. That was a good thing , too. Defensive war is often listed first when we define a just war. The list grew. There were things like coming of age and initiation rites for young men. There was courage and bravery, skill and camaraderie. There was common cause to unite a people. Someone even suggested population control. It joined the positive list, too. This was before Vietnam tore us apart. This was before 1968 when the My Lai massacre went down in March, and then April 4, forty years ago Friday, Dr. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis.

My son Levi is almost as old as I was when that teacher asked us that question, what is good about war?. Sometimes we live under the illusion that our children are immune from such subjects. Then the other day on the car ride out to their schools, he and Dana began a barrage of questions. Was Hitler worse than Saddam Hussein? What happened to Saddam? Why did they do that? I struggled to try to articulate simple answers to complex questions. The horrible nature of war, and the costs it exacts from us are almost always rational responses for upper middle class white Americans like us because we do not experience the deaths or the wounded first hand. It is usually not our cousins and brothers. Our children play at violent video games, blithely shooting down virtual opponents, and none of it is very real. Modern warfare, as we know, is often like a video game with targets who are not up close and personal. In warfare this changed, Drew Faust tells us, with the Civil War. Before then a soldier’s skill often mattered, and if you were fighting hand to hand you might have a chance of success in battle. Then mass conflict, and modern weapons made killing and death much more random. It also became hard to justify all of this killing in the context of a good God who intended such carnage, and offered eternal life as a reward. Individual deaths became framed more as sacrifices for the good of a nation, so that future generations might profit from the young people who were creating a new and better world.

Today we ask, what are the costs of war? We have been told all along that the atrocities of the Iraq War have been necessary for some larger purpose of protecting freedom. We heard Saddam is developing weapons of mass destruction, and must be stopped. We know this to have been a manipulative lie. But there were others, too. This war must be fought as part of the war on terrorism. But there was never any terrorist connection to Iraq until the war was pursued. This is why one of the things we must dedicate ourselves to is educating each other about these twisted truths. We have military experts saying Iran is training Al Qaeda in Iraq. That is just not true. Iran is a Shi’ite country, who are training Shi’ite extremists, not Al Qaeda, who are Sunni extremists. We must be among those who are determined to know the truth, and commit ourselves to teaching that truth. The authorization of torture and the degrading treatments of prisoners has been excused as another aspect of fighting the war, and yet no rules of war or holding of captives were followed. As one solider said of Abu Ghraib, “They couldn’t say we broke the rules because there were no rules.” Costs pile up in terms of reputations and leadership in international relations, and in the morale and care of troops, and the response of much of the American public who block out the truth of how many civilians have died, how much has been destroyed, and how ill conceived and poorly managed this conflict has been.

Exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered a sermon called “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” at the Riverside Church in New York. In that address, he wrote, “ a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Billions continue to be spent on war, while veterans who have suffered horrible injuries in this conflict suffer from lack of services, and more comprehensively, precious resources are diverted from all people in this the second longest war in our history. A recent editorial in the Globe stated that the money spent on the war could have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years or provided health insurance to all American Children. What could a tab of $720 million per day give us in lunches, schools, teachers or housing?

How has the war made you feel? Many of us we have mentally calculated a cost in dead and wounded and refugees, and after a while we feel helpless. We avoid reading about it. We become numb to it. We just kind of forget about it and go on with our life. We feel like we have no voice. It is a hopeless tide of maybe another 100 years. So we each know we carry some pain and denial and anguish from this war fought in the name of our country. In her book on the Civil War, Drew Faust writes about how difficult it was to identify soldiers who were killed in battle. This was before the days of dogs tags, and so soldiers going into battle might write letters that they would place in their pockets, or pin who they were and where they were from on their shirts. They carried their very names so that they would not be lost forever. They wanted to be remembered and memorialized, not forgotten. They carried all the hopes and dreams of their lives into battle, only to be killed if one stray bullet hit them square, or if they lived, come home with death in their soul. I saw an article the other day that said we would take this war much more personally if there were a draft, and it threatened the very lives of those we love. Then we would take to the streets again, just as we did with Vietnam. Does it take something to touch us personally to activate our outrage over this war?

I am sure all the men of my generation remember the draft lottery. We recall the numbers we received, 93 for me, 18 for my brother who joined the National Guard. Would we get the call up to fight in this unjust war? We all carried our draft cards in our wallets, amid licenses and memberships and bank credit. Some said they would never submit to serving in this war, and they burned their cards in the chalices of Arlington Street Church, and our own Watertown minister hid the draft dodgers in the attic of the house I live in now, where Dana and Levi sleep. These two who asked about war and death. We carried our cards as someone who might go in the rank order of our numbers. The soldiers in Tim O’Briens work The Things They Carried carry all the things they need for living - Things that remind them of home - the picture of the one they loved and the house where they came from. The identity of who they are - the dog tags; The items they need daily for sustenance and personal maintenance, razors and iced beer and chocolate bars. And luck and faith and hope - a rabbit’s foot and a little smiling Buddha or a cross to ponder. To be able to see and hear - a flashlight and a radio. Physical, personal items, too, like memories and illnesses, or the acne scars, or the skinny legs that could run so fast, and help you get away. All that we carry makes up who we are. What has shaped us, who is important to us, what skills or virtues we have, what we own and what we use, what we think works well - From Dial soap to the worn black leather New Testament - let me be clean and truthful about what I know, and hope I get through. The burden is immense, because we carry our comrades, our past, our earth, and even the sky, as the rain falls.

My old draft card reminds me of how I once carried that war around with me. And my children’s questions remind of how they carry an idea about this war around in their minds and hearts. I think we recognize the pain we feel over this war, and that makes it personal. Making it personal means that we are public about the anguish this war causes. We acknowledge this cost, and realize that part of our ministry must be a public ministry against war. The UUA is now considering whether we will become a peace church, and there is an article in the current UU World about this discussion. I do not know how the discussion will end. I believe there are just wars, but one of the problems with wars in our lifetimes is that they have been used to perpetrate a preconceived policy, an industrial and military system, a thirst for oil, that feeds a war economy, for Presidential self-aggrandizement, and then declared divinely sanctioned. The president of my seminary Rebecca Parker writes that Mel Gibson’s film on the Passion of Christ reproduced an understanding of images of Jesus’ torture and execution, presenting violence as divinely sanctioned, necessary for salvation, and an occasion for gratitude and awe. This level of violence is cause to bear grief, to feel the loss of life, the loss of a mother for her child, any child in any nation. When the atomic bomb was developed. J Robert Oppenheimer realized the destructive power that he had helped unleash. He quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, where the god Krishna appears on the battlefield to the warrior Arjuna, that the explosive power of human might was like the Mighty One . .. “I am become death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” We feel so bad because that is what war does to our souls. So we feel grief for all the lost life.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham refuses to go to war for the sake of gaining land, power or natural resources, but he does go to war when his nephew Lot is captured. He gets him back, but only takes the spoils of war that replace what he has lost, and no more. He is not out for power or riches. War may be necessary it says, to fight for the survival of loved ones. We take care of and protect those we love, and all other ways to pursue war are cruel and unjust.
When children express fears about war it becomes personal. When I recall my fear about the draft years ago, it became personal. When we know someone who is touched by this war it becomes personal. We want to educate others to the truth. We want to be heard, and elect those who will listen to our pleas. We may want to take to the streets again, or at least enlist in antiwar campaigns before it is allowed to last for 100 years. There is a final task. A few minutes ago I asked you to think me how this war makes you feel. Now I want to ask you. What does the word peace signify to you? Here are some I thought of -heal - touch - love - place of rest - - cradle wounded spirits, home, loved ones, and finally, reclaim joy.

One thing we can do in ruminating on this war is feel outrage and grief and madness over how it has been fought, and how Iraq has been devastated, and the world made more dangerous. We may feel all of that. If we choose to feel it rather than deny it, then the strength and power we need to oppose war, to speak the truth, to reveal lies, seems overwhelming. We know that strength cannot emanate from anger or grief, because it will dissipate in sadness and emptiness, and we will feel forlorn and barren. Abraham wanted Lot back because he was life, he was joy to him. We don’t respond to waste with grief, or violence or anger alone. They can be destroyers, too. No, we must live our lives as Dr. King would have suggested we do. We meet violence with love. If I am dead in my heart, then I cannot exude any love or joy or spirit of life to you. The worst cost of war could be to our very souls, if we forget the joy of living. We want to see the colors of our spring flowers, armies of crocuses standing in their own ranks in all their vital beauty. We want to hear each others voices raised in song of connection and care. We want to taste the rich spices of sage , rosemary and thyme that invigorates the marvelous sustenance we can share. We want to touch the cooling waters of country streams that have rushed down from ancient mountain peaks to make our fingers tingle that we might reach out to embrace the world to greet one another. We want to smell the steamy hay that we have sweated all day to harvest, and laboriously loaded in the barn that the sheep or cattle might be fed, that the animals and the plants and the people might all find peace in the circle of life and friendship that would be their joy, if they would simply live and let be.

O gracious people of this community, let us stand against the despair of war, by reclaiming joy in our lives, that for all the anguish of the world, the pain our brothers and sisters at war have endured, and we bear witness to, might be ended that they could find happiness in each other’s company, and meaning in building up a community of justice and understanding and plenty. Abraham looked on Lot. Mary looked on Jesus, and we look on the face of parents and children, on our beloved ones, and realize the loss of loved ones, the children, the smiles, the human potential has always been the most horrible cost of war. In her convocation address at Starr King, Rebecca Parker suggested lighting a white candle for all the grief we feel in response to war, for white is traditionally the color of death. She also suggested lighting a red candle, as well, red that stands for life, the blood flowing through each of our veins that gives us life, that makes our arms reach out, our legs run, and our bodies embrace. Let us always remember that as a community, as people, we are here for life, and we oppose the destruction of life. War shatters life. Pain and grief may lead us to protest war calling for truth and justice, but that will leave our souls empty in the end, the worst cost of all. We find peace by being people of peace in our lives, not living with anger and bitterness, but by embracing life. Embracing everything which is infinite, which is natural, which is yes. We need to protest war by shouting we love life. As a community, we uphold life. We celebrate life. We are life in all its beauty and rhythms and joy and its possibility for renewal. Let us with one heart and voice call out for life.

Closing Words from Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.

The world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.