First Parish of Watertown

Opening words - from Gary Snyder

The Zen Buddhist teacher told this story. One day the master asked his three fourteen year old students, "How old is the Buddha?" The first responded, "The Buddha was born 2,500 years ago in India." The second responded, "The Buddha is eternal." And the third responded, "The Buddha is fourteen." All in a sense were right. but the one who said "The Buddha is fourteen" hit the mark straight on. We are all Buddhas by nature, whatever our age, from the small child we dedicate today, to the eldest among us. You are what you are seeking. You are the Buddha. You are it. Why don¹t we know it? What would it take to know it? To awaken and to recognize who and what we are.

---

Sermon - "The Challenge of Pluralism"

In her book, A New Religious America , Diana Eck of Harvard tells us that understanding America¹s emerging religious landscape is the most important challenge facing us today. When most of us were youngsters this landscape was defined as Protestant, Catholic and Jew. We could say Judeo-Christian heritage, and it meant our whole religious universe. Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism were exotic expressions of faith that conjured up images of Arabian Nights, sacred cows and Saffron robed monks with shaved heads, but they were anywhere but here. Today there are 300 Buddhist temples in greater Los Angeles, and more American Muslims than there are Jews or Episcopalians, let alone Unitarian Universalists. What does this mean to us religious liberals who in some respects mirror a diverse religious landscape by espousing a pluralistic faith of our own?

On the one hand, you might think this is just what we need. America is playing into our hand. They need us to show the way. Perfect. We can finally fulfill Thomas Jefferson¹s dream that every person now living will one day become a Unitarian Universalist. It is true that we have long said be tolerant and understanding of others. In Transylvania more than 425 years ago, the Unitarians implemented the first edict of religious toleration in history. Here in America when a liberal theological perspective developed within the established Congregational churches, such as ours, those same liberals argued against sectarianism. They wanted to define Christianity as broadly as possible without restraints of dogmas or creeds. Theirs was an ethical faith based on how one behaved as a Christian, how much love you lived with your life, rather than specifics of doctrines, such as believing that Jesus was the Christ who had come to save those who believed in the one true faith.

Since the dawn of Christianity, people had been trying to define that one path to truth, and it has proved extremely difficult to do so. In an essay from 1851 called "Ecclesiastical Christendom," the great Unitarian leader Frederic Henry Hedge wrote, "No form of Christianity is absolutely and only true. Each successive one was right in its place, and good in its season; each put forward the face, and embodied the truth which the time required. . . Protestantism means movement. And when we say this we pronounce its justification . . . For what but movement is the destination of humanity in this moving world? Creation moves from everlasting to everlasting. This universe of things, whose sum no thought can grasp, is not a fixture, but a movement, and the quality of movement is the measure of vitality. The power who moves all things has not willed that any spirit should stand still, and the Church, the communion of saints, must move or die." This also points to the fundamental message of Transcendentalism as reflected in Emerson¹s words in Nature that we must enjoy an original relationship with the universe. Religious must be revealed to us, and not simply be the history of theirs. Emerson and Thoreau were among the first people in the world to understand not only this desire for each generation to perceive the truths of religion anew, but also to see that God or the over-soul is not revealed through any one particular tradition. They took their belief in Unitarianism, or one God literally. The spirit that infused the world with love and justice was experienced differently in different cultures and traditions, but no one of those was superior to any other. When Emerson read the pages of the Bhagavad-Gita in his study, or Thoreau contemplated the wisdom of the Koran by the shores of Walden Pond, they realized this truth, and said the most important question must be, how does God or the spirit speak to me, or as Gary Snyder might reflect from our opening words, how do I find my Buddha?

Where is your Buddha? I think sometimes we misunderstand our Unitarian Universalist faith. We look at this rich tradition that rejected dogmas and creeds and longed for universal truths, and personally find it liberating to realize that religion does not need to be based on static truth or certain objects of devotion. Up until recently the ethos of the denomination was often based on the rejection of a Biblical childhood faith that for many of us felt like what Stephen Dunn recalled in the reading, the great book certain people use to make you feel bad. So we came in, rejected the past, and understood that all paths to the truth are equally valid. This, as we have said, was terribly tolerant and understanding, but not especially useful in seriously engaging with any new, positive faith based directions. While it was healing for many, it did not provide any meaningful new direction. It is an even less relevant course to pursue today as more people enter our ranks who have no religious baggage to let go of. It is also not helpful for those raised in the faith.

A few years ago I recall Andrea¹s sister-in-law sent her children to Vacation Bible School. It was similar to the experience Stephen Dunn had with his kids. They wanted the children to go have fun for a week, and get them out of the house, but they came home singing and dancing about Jesus. While Jesus was a nice man who lived a long time ago, he was no one you should get so excited about that you should perform his story. What to do? Too often we have failed to either tell the stories, or else make them so literal and wordy, as in Dunn¹s example of evolution that the kids long for anything with a little passion. The reading does remind us of the power of stories to engage with heart and mind. How do we begin to engage with religious stories again? I think there are three steps for Unitarian Universalists to respond to the challenge of pluralism.
The first step is illustrated in a Zen story called the Empty Cup. One day the Zen master Nan-in had a visit from a foreign scholar of Eastern religions who came to inquire about Zen. But the scholar did not listen to the master at all. He simply went on talking and talking about all his knowledge of eastern religion. He was the expert. After a time of talking, Nan-in suggested they have tea. He poured the tea into the visitors cup until it was full, but then he kept right on pouring. The tea cascaded over the sides of the cup onto the saucer. Soon the saucer was full, and it spilled over onto the table washed down on the man¹s pants, ouch, and onto the floor. The visitor screamed, "hey, didn¹t you see that the cup was full? You can¹t get any more in!." Nan-in finally stopped pouring and said, "Just so. And like this cup you are filled with your own ideas. How can you expect me to give you Zen unless you offer me an empty cup?" The scholar had all of the knowledge, but none of the experience. He had to empty himself of his hubris that he knew it all, and couldn¹t be taught a thing.
The second step has to do with the religious smorgasbord, the pluralism we find in the world and especially what we espouse as our denominational approach to religion. Unitarian Universalists advocate that we should all sit at the religious banquet table and place all the tasty dishes before us, saying they are equally valid ways to find nourishment. The problem with the scholar in the story is that he had learned everything there was to know about eastern religions from the books, but he had never experienced them. He needed to empty himself of all his knowledge and taste. Learning about the foods makes us knowledgeable in history and traditions, but we never find a revelation for us, as Emerson suggested we need, we only know about theirs.

This also relates back to engaging with the stories. Perhaps at Easter it is difficult to engage with the story of Jesus because some of us have theological baggage with the Christian tradition, but what happens when we see the mythic story lived out for our day and time by a nobody Unitarian Universalist minister who sacrificed his life because he believed in racial justice and was in Selma, Alabama with Martin Luther King. The James Reeb story I retold at Easter is ours just as the one we will tell in three weeks on Flower Communion Sunday about Norbert Capek, the Czech minister who longed for a ritual to speak of our connection with one another, but not one that conjured up hurtful images of his Christian past. Later he was martyred by the Nazis. So we empty ourselves of all the knowledge and sureness we have about truth or the rejection of others¹ truths, and begin to engage the stories.

In the novel The Death of Vishnu, Mr. Jalal feels he is superior to those people who have what he calls faith. He wonders if his intellect has made him close minded to religious experience. He decides to switch off his intellect and invite religion to come and seek him out. "So far," the author Manil Suri, writes, "his interest in religion had always been clinical - never possessing the spirit." But he decides it is going to be an experiment, just to see if there is anything there. He is not actually going to empty himself as the Zen master suggested in the story. So he goes to the wilderness to wander in a park, and then sits and closes his eyes. Suddenly a light surges onto his face, and then a flash, and then his mind raced to the books he had read about the Buddha. Did a light flash before him when he reached enlightenment? What did it mean? Then the light returned, followed by a laugh, and his eyes flickered open to see a gang of school children who had gathered around him. One of them flashed the mirror for the final time, and then they kicked dirt on him and ran away. You would think he might have concluded that the world had become too overpopulated to recreate the conditions for Buddha¹s renunciation of the world. But even though he had been tricked, there was something more - he remembered the exhilaration, the mindlessness, feeling weightless as a balloon as he closed his eyes. His quest was true and real, not an experiment. His skepticism lessened. He now had a longing to feel a blaze of energy through every cell and fiber of his being.

We let go of all that knowledge, all that skepticism, and in a sense engage with the stories of those lives around us. Mr Jalal goes to be with the dying Vishnu. We experience religion; we do not simply learn about it. This brings us to the third step of the path of the challenge of religious pluralism. Some choose to sit and meditate. Some go on pilgrimages. Some want deeper emotional connections. But there is so much to choose from. Remember we are still at this banquet table where there are so many dishes. There is the Indian biryani, and the Passover horseradish, and the middle eastern cous cous. There are not alien to us anymore as they were in 1950. When we returned from England last June we simply longed to have good food again. Even though I am partly English by heritage there was something about those greasy chips, that lard filled pork pie, and the ever present use of black currant in every juice and jam they create. When we sit at the banquet table we like different things. Some foods appeal to us for color and presentation. Some appeal to us for vegetables or meat. Some are spicy and some are bland. We have preferences. Some are better for us.

This is a religious lesson that Unitarian Universalists need to speak to in the challenge of pluralism. While all religions are theoretically equal searches for truth or God, we cannot as individual people equally embrace all. We need to learn in our own individual searches to say what our truth is. One of the liberal dilemmas is we often say that everyone has a right to strong convictions, but then we deny that same right to ourselves. As Harvard professor Bill Hutchison says, we must be pluralists who also believe in something, who have strong convictions. Often when we try to explain Unitarian Universalism to newcomers it comes across as we believe in everything all at once, and it is all equally valid. I have to be honest with you and tell you that while Catholicism may have a certain hold over millions of believers around the world, I personally have found my tolerance for espousing its validity, even for others, waning. My convictions test my tolerance. We are each drawn to religious truths that speak to us. I suspect each one of us is here because we want the freedom to discover religious truths. We want the search, the religious quest more than the defined answers. As part of that search, it is behooves us to empty ourselves of some of our religious skepticism, and begin to experience faith as a living vital entity, and not an intellectual exercise.

That religious experience may be going down to the river more, and meditating on what is eternal or other such times of quiet and solitude, or even reflection with others about life, any of which can help each one of us discover our Buddha. Unitarian Universalism does not say all faith experiences are right for you, but it does say that you are free to experiment and discover together that faith which is right for you. You do not have to be everything, but it is uplifting to discover that something - that Jesus or Buddha spirit, or that humanist story that empowers you to work for justice and peace in the world. Pluralism is not about finding everything in you, but it is about finding the true you, and the faith that helps that unfold.

Pluralism has always been a great challenge for our culture even right from our earliest days. For some reason in the past few months I have become fascinated by the Lewis and Clark expedition. We saw an Omni Max film, an exhibit at Harvard, and the news about the bear claw necklace they discovered that was a gift from one of the native American tribes was exciting. Now I am reading Stephen Ambrose¹s old bestseller Undaunted Courage. I think it also represents a dream of peaceful pluralism that I learned as a child - the white American explorers, and the Shoshone squaw Sacagawea learning from one another without becoming one another. On May 22, 1804, 200 years ago yesterday, Lewis and Clark embarked from St. Louis on an arduous journey. Along the way they found cross cultural understanding with Hidatsas, Mandans, Sioux and others. They were often ignorant in their approach to find way ways to relate to these tribes. Yet somehow their gifts of diplomacy and exchange resulted in a peaceful expedition. They provide lessons to us across the divide of history. Sometimes Unitarian Universalism seems like the old melting pot theory of assimilation when we try to be everything to everybody, and invite people in as long as they become like us. We have a long standing commitment to religious freedom, and as a result of that we do embrace religious diversity. But it must be more than inattention to these traditions with a blase expression of, "they are all good." We must engage more with the religions of our neighbors. We must engage more with religious experience ourselves. We also must each use our freedom to find our truths, not just to express our freedom. In the coming years we have an opportunity to understand a new religious world. In the old assimilationist world, somebody was in control and the others were absorbed. This is why devout Muslims fear us liberals. They think we want to dilute everything so deep convictions are lost. Lewis and Clark may have learned from the natives and vice versa, but the natives never got to fulfill their destiny. That is the challenge of today. How can each tradition fulfill its destiny, find its Buddhahood, and share control? We must learn the art of stopping, and emptying our overfull tea cups. We must learn the art of experiencing, of not only filling our heads, but our eyes and hearts and souls with religious experience. We must learn the art of speaking truth, so that we don¹t espouse the melting pot theory of religion, but facilitate the meeting place of religions, so that we do not trivialize the truths that others find, even as we as Unitarian Universalists seek the common oneness of faith and universality of justice. Diane Eck suggests that we must seek harmony in diversity rather than unity. She says our dream for society, and perhaps for our church as well should be like the symphony orchestra, each playing our own instrument, but creating beautiful music together in a harmonious whole - the symphony of religions.

---

Closing Words - from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. We are conscious of a universal soul within or behind our individual lives, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, is not mine or thine, but we are its; we are its property and people.

Opening Words - W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
..., and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!

...but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

---

Reading - A Cartoon Elite, by Nicholas Lemann

POPULISTS used to hate the rich, but now they hate the elite. This shift
has made possible the migration of populism from the Democratic to the
Republican Party. The conservative notion of the elite has some internal
variations -- Dan Quayle's "cultural elite" isn't quite the same as Newt
Gingrich's "corrupt elite." But at its core the notion is descended from two
books published in the late 1950s by left-wing politicians on the other side
of the Atlantic Ocean: Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy and
Milovan Djilas's The New Class.

From Young came the idea that not long after a society institutes mass
educational sorting based on the results of IQ tests, a distinct high-IQ
ruling class will begin to emerge. Because of the tendency of people in this
class to marry fellow students at highly selective universities and pass on
their IQ-rich genes to their offspring, over time the meritocratic upper
class will more and more resemble a hereditary aristocracy. If this class
absorbs the left-wing views that prevail in the universities, then once it
is in power, it will resemble the arrogant Communist bureaucracy that was
the subject of Djilas's book. The emotional charge of conservative attacks
on organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the
National Endowment for the Arts, and on more-amorphous institutions like the
news media, Hollywood, and the Washington establishment, comes from the idea
that they are made up of superior-feeling, isolated New Class members who
want to force their cultural mores on ordinary folks whom they despise.
Populism usually arises from a general discontent that precedes the
identification of a specific villain. People feel that things are out of
control, socially and economically. Men without higher education,
especially, have dramatically lost ground over the past two decades. The
idea that this is the fault of the meritocratic elite is an easy sell.
The pampered meritocrat has become the contemporary equivalent of the
Organization Man of the 1950s -- a symbol of the age for purposes of
middlebrow hand-wringing. A typical description of the type comes from an
article by Michael Lind in Harper's Magazine.

The closer you come to the centers of American politics and society, the
more everyone begins to look the same. . . . the people who run big business
bear a remarkable resemblance to the people who run big labor, who in turn
might be mistaken for the people in charge of the media and the
universities. They are the same people. . . . most of the members of the
American elites went to one of a dozen Ivy League colleges or top state
universities. . . . They talk the same. They walk the same.

Christopher Lasch called it "the new aristocracy of brains," or "the
knowledge class" as he championed a provincial lower-middle-class culture in
which the highest good is community, not the fulfillment of ambition, and
identified with a "petty bourgeoisie" of "small proprietors, artisans,
tradesmen, and farmers," which he admired for "its moral realism, its
understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its
skepticism about progress." But he never patiently laid out a theory of who
the members of the elite are and where they came from.

It's easy, though, to extract a picture of them from the book. They have
a "growing insularity," they inhabit "an artificial world," they spend too
much time talking, exercising, and going to restaurants, they are
excessively mobile -- "at home only in transit, en route to a high-level
conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international
film festival, or to an undiscovered resort" -- and some partake of a
sob-sisterish brand of social-issue liberalism, a liberalism obsessed with
the rights of women and minorities, with gay rights and unlimited abortion
rights, with the allegedly epidemic spread of child abuse and sexual
harassment, with the need for regulations against offensive speech, and with
curricular reforms designed to end the cultural hegemony of "dead white
European males."

The implication is that American life can be understood as a grand
struggle between these people and the petit bourgeoisie: everything that
helps the former hurts the latter. For example, "feminism's appeal to the
professional and managerial class" is simply that it "provides the
indispensable basis of their prosperous, glamorous, gaudy, sometimes
indecently lavish way of life." Meanwhile, in the lower-middle class
feminism doesn't bring gaudiness, but it does mean that the children wind up
parked in front of the television set. The elite gets richer, and ordinary
people lose ground economically. The elite migrates, and ordinary people
remain in their deteriorating neighborhoods. The elite promotes
cosmopolitanism, and ordinary people feel their steady, traditional,
provincial civic life slipping away.

Hymn 295 Sing Out Praises for the Journey

---

Sermon

On the Arabian Sea, along sundrenched shores, there are piles of wrecked
shipping vessels which have been carried in on tides, or blown in by fierce
winds, or dragged to rest. What were once the hulls of ships are cut into
salvage metal by workers shipped to the site -- often in the same worn out,
ill-maintained boats they end up processing -- from their native India. It
is a booming industry, recycling this steel. But Greenpeace has been trying
to shut it down. To hear some describe their efforts, a bunch of elitist
liberals are interfering in things they know nothing of, wrong-headedly
thinking they are helping these poor workers while actually depriving them
of their livelihood. What is not mentioned is the housing, which consists
of sand and sky and filth; the violence; or the toxicity of the materials
these people work with, and coincedentally release into the sea and the sky.
The shipping industry itself is a globalized form of free enterprise, and
the salvage operations are just a small arm of it, but profitability is what
drives it all. The steel is worth reclaiming if the Indians do it, and even
die doing it, but it such would not be the case if the heap of metal were in
a country with any health or safety regulations, let alone a set minimum
wage.

At the auction last time around, Susan Flint bought a sermon by me, and
told me right then and there she wanted it to be about elitism. About a
week later, I bought a new bedspread, and I was amused to read that it was
"Elite Brand", made in India. Textiles are a very big industry there, and I
have actually toured a shirt factory outside of Delhi and carpet workrooms
in Agra. These are not places for the elite to work, nor are the products
really meant for liberal elite, because the carpets are handmade, but by
children; and the shirts are mass produced in situations not all that
different from what the mill girls in Lowell might have seen in the
nineteenth century. So I was left wondering what the name Elite was meant
to convey, and found myself reciting the old self-mocking and yet prideful
rhyme: And so this is our old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,
where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God.
Greenpeace is elitist. A bedspread made in India is elite. Unitarian
Boston is elite. What does this mean? And why? Is it an illness to be
elite, or a does it reflect an achievement of some kind?

Well, it may in fact be both. In addition to being a catchphrase that
can mean almost whatever you need it to mean, the "culturally elite" may be
contemporary America¹s genuine expression of identity crisis. So, skipping
over the specifics of definition, as seems to be common practice among the
theorists, we can focus on the elite as a group which threatens us. Except,
it turns out, it is us.

Yes, we are the sob-sisterish, overly educated, immoral class of people
who are so busy championing the rights of minorities and gays and women that
we have made America weak, and God angry. This has been true since the days
of Henry Adams, who wrote of growing up Unitarian and seeking an education
in mid-19th century Boston: "the problem of life was as simple as it was
classic. Politics offered no difficulty, for there the moral law was a sure
guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for
Good, and three instruments were all she asked -- Suffrage, Common Schools,
and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and
man needed only correct knowledge of the facts to reach perfection....
Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian
clergy... who controlled society and Harvard College. Uniformly excellent
of character, both moral and intellectual, they proclaimed as their merit
that they insisted on no doctrine, but tried to teach the means of living a
virtuous, useful, unselfish life.... Boston had solved the universe."
Adams lays out the theory of the culturally elite about a hundred years
before the term became a common way to denigrate liberals. He ties together
power, social control, public education and universal suffrage in exactly
the way current theorists do, but according to recent writers the elite are
a post-World War II phenomonen related to society¹s increasingly
technological basis; a phenomenon which threatens our country¹s traditions
and stability. But either way -- 19th century or 21st -- the term refers to
us. Is it fair?

Well, yes and no. Unitarian Universalists are a somewhat elite bunch,
if what we mean by that is we have had many priveleges which have granted us
choices in life. We are not exempt from human struggle or pain, but,
statistically, we are composed of people who have had the advantage of good
medical care, clean homes, enough food, and education, early and long. But
that doesn¹t necessarily make us elitist. The theory of a powerful new
"knowledge class" which is the product of leftist American higher education
comes from a book primarily remembered for its racism, The Bell Curve.
Once upon a time, the book argues, intelligence was randomized throughout
society. Now, because our high tech economy demands a very smart work
force, the cognitively elite are in school together, where they form social
groups and breed, and enter the market so that we now have "an
unprecedented coalition of the smart and the rich."

This theory may feel true to those of us who are from working class
backgrounds; who have educated ourselves into the professional class. But
it is not an idea which holds up well under scrutiny. Intelligence and
class are not related, and often neither are intelligence and achievement,
either financially or otherwise. When we refer to "the professional class",
it ignores the fact that there are plenty of professions which are not
valued monetarily. A job which requires a long education does not equal
wealth. But references to the elite always include financial power.
Without inserting a lot of statistics, I can tell you that as incomes rise,
so does the proportion which is derived from long-term capital gains. What
this means is that the rich are not overly-educated liberals with great
salaries. They have either inherited it or are entrepeneurs on a grand
scale. And in fact, research shows that the more money a person makes, the
more likely that person is to vote Republican. The actual elite, people
with money, power and status, is made up of conservative businessmen and
their families, who may or may not also have had educational advantages. So
why are liberals called elite?

Despite Henry Adams¹ critique, the idea that America is run by a
sophisticated, brainy, culturally liberal group for whom education is the
route to success is quite new, according to Nicholas Lemann. I would agree.
Adams¹ point, after all, was not that having advantages was bad; it was that
believing that education would exempt us from suffering profound human pain.
Genuine education should be transformative, and he saw it as static. So
where did the idea of a liberal elite running the country come from, and
why? Lemann tracks the idea to the Clinton White House, which differed
from previous administrations in that both Clinton and Rodham really did
achieve their success through education and merit, rather than through
social connections, class privelege or any other advantage of the elite. Our
current president is related to fifteen former presidents, the late Princess
Diana, and has multigenerational friendships with royalty and rulers
throughout the world. Bill Clinton is related to his brother Roger, and
Hillary to her brother Hugh.

Having Clinton -- a very bright person with no signs of an elite
background -- as the president caused some reassessment of the power
structure in our country, and made the idea of a liberal meritocracy seem
plausible. But it is bad social science being done for political purposes,
and it has been remarkably effective. It works for the powerful rich, and
for traditionalists who long to preserve that intangible sense of how life
feels. Those of us who believe in human rights and environmental
preservation are attacked from both sides. It maintains the status quo by
using education, rather than money, as a way of measuring how much power we
have in society.

It is particularly ironic that education is seen as the breeding ground
for elitism. After all, who is our education president and author of the No
Child Left Behind bill? It is important that we take note of what is
happening under George Bush. We are witnessing a huge shift in the role of
public education, from a service which was an essential part of our
definition of what it means to be a civilized, democratic culture, to a
business; to an industry with a bottom line. Under the guise of fairness
and objective standards, we have instituted policies which are based in very
negative assumptions about human nature and what is trustworthy, and which
reveal a high level of anxiety about how to locate our positions in the
universe. When I was a child, we had neighbors whose children always got
exactly the same thing we got for Christmas, but doubled -- so if my sisters
and I got a record player to share, the kids up the street would EACH get
the same one. My mother¹s explanation was that a lot of people were
insecure, and so they copied what the perceived upper-class people did
rather than figuring out what they really wanted for themselves. She said
you had to believe you had succeeded before you could ever really critique
the system. So a conflict of those who measure worth with external
standards and those with an internal compass is not about being fair and
objective so much as it is about establishing the pecking order. We see
this every time MCAS scores are reported. The back to basics, traditional
believers in tests want to have not just high scores, but scores which are
higher than a sibling¹s, a neighbor¹s, or a rival community¹s. There is no
intrinsic value in the score, yet the score determines one¹s worth. For
people who hate relativism and want objective standards, these scores are
central to an awful lot of relationships. The tests are part of
distrustful system of rewards and punishments which says, on the one hand,
that everybody can achieve; however, we don¹t believe they will. So we
develop testing corporations with huge government contracts to see if the
schools deserve any financing. There is absolutely no evidence of any
belief that students or teachers want to do well or would do anything if
they did not have to, or that there is any intrinsic meaning in life or
education.

On one hand, we believe in mass testing in order to ensure that the
schools are doing their jobs; on the other hand, higher education breeds an
insular and out of touch bunch of liberals. We can further add to this
irony by noting that there is evidence that the whole notion of a ruling
class of brainy people who don¹t understand regular folks is actually the
product of mass testing. As soon as tests to measure intelligence and
aptitude were developed and then put into place as screens into certain
schools and fields, we obviously developed a requirement that certain
professions would be dominated by people who did well on those tests. So,
although Herrnstein and Murray argue in The Bell Curve that our
technological culture demands that very smart people rule the social
structure, the only real reason that people from a narrow range of cognitive
ability can become lawyers, say, is because you have to pass the LSAT to get
in. Drawing up wills and deeds does not require giftedness. Educators have
known ever since the tests were developed that testing did not really
measure what individuals could do. But, anticipating the business model of
the 21st century, perhaps, James Conant, president of Harvard University in
the middle of the last century said of a colleague advocating educational
admissions tests: although "his conclusions could not be justified from his
data, yet he insisted that the conclusions were good propaganda for the
educational world and he has continued to preach them. . . . Certain
desirable social results may be obtained even though the methods of
obtaining them are wrong."

It is worth noting here that the only question is about the science and
methodology, not on what constitutes a desirable social result. Elitism
has appeal both nostaligically and instinctively, but it is by definition
conservative, in the sense of minimizing change; of keeping things the same,
with a social order that rewards economic achievement and suppresses
intellectual creativity by standardizing everything. Liberalism involves
change-- not as its purpose, but as the result of a consistent application
of abiding principles. Having had the benefits of health care, education,
and homes created by people who love each other and are supported in that
love, we try to keep extending these opportunities through all the world.
We want everyone to have what we have been given, or what we have been
allowed to work for, and we want people to know they are inherently worthy
of time, care, and attention. We believe in love. We believe in the golden
rule. We also believe in truth objectively arrived at, and in our human
capacity to grapple with such truths, and be changed by new information.
When the status quo is challenged; when we feel "our steady, provincial,
traditional, civic life slipping away," the resulting anxiety drives us to
look for someone to blame; some group more powerful than we are; some group
which is gaining while we are losing. It is very telling that if you do an
internet search on the term "cultural elite", you will be refered to
approximately 27,000 white supremacist websites. It was simultaneously
refreshing and terrifying to read homophobic, racist, antifeminist ideas
being expressed openly, rather than in the coded form running through our
public discourse. But Henry Adams comments were with me as I scrolled
through: In the fifty years since the Brown decision struck down
segregation by race, there have been additional court decisions to end
segregation by abilities. We have consistently -- if slowly -- worked
towards universalizing the opportunities offered by civic institutions and
social structures. What we would have expected to have accomplished with
those decisions was a deep enrichment of all that defines our culture:
freedom, reason, tolerance, progress. But the words on my computer screen
and the pictures in my newspaper reveal us to be just as divided and
hatefilled and disinterested in the humanity of those around us as was Bull
Connor and Louise Day Hicks; as Mitt Romney and those who murdered Matthew
Shepherd; as the prison guards in Abu Ghraib, and the Al Queda operatives
who beheaded an unemployed 26 year old walking out of Iraq. This is why we
who are called the liberal elite are confused, and a bit hurt: we know we
are comfortably alive, and want to be spurred into action which changes this
world. We want to help. But we also know we are pained beyond words by
these events, and in need of comfort ourselves. We are called names and
told we have power that we simply do not have, despite our schooling and
our standard of living.

The true elite are those who believe that money and power afford them
the abiliity to not care, as if humanity were somehow a luxury in this
world. There is an energy and excitement in success and achievement; a
survivor¹s affirmation of the self that can be infectious, like Frank
Sinatra singing "New York, New York." But there is a price to valuing
wealth and status above all else. It can be seen along the Arabian sea,
where the immigrant laborers scramble on heaps of metal, washed in toxic
waste. We believe those on the top of either heap are equally worthy, and
have connections between them that run much deeper than profits. We believe
that in the end, apologetics and judgement are both irrelevant. Rich or
poor, conservative or radical, intellectual or practical, we all owe this
world our love. We must engage; see; experience; grow; suffer; change.
That is the real work of all humanity; to bring more love to life.

---

Closing Words - WH Auden Letter to Lord Byron

There is one other author in my pack:
For some time I debated which to write to.
Which would least likely send my letter back?
But I decided that I would give a fright to Jane Austen if I wrote when I
had no right to,....

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me uncomfortable to see an English spinster of the middle class
describe the amorous effects of brass, and reveal so frankly and with such
sobriety the economic basis of society.

Opening Words - from Joy Harjo - "Eagle Poem"

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed, because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

---

Sermon

Last Sunday was an amazing day for me. I am grateful for all that you did to celebrate my twenty-five years in the ministry. Among the events was a story about my life that Roberta told to the children. In that context she said that I was the youngest of four, but then she asked who was my mother's favorite. The whole church school seemed to respond, Mark. That was a predictable answer, but it is also an accurate answer. I was the last to be born into my family, my Mom's baby with the big dimples and her jet black hair. It often felt like I could do no wrong in her eyes. This was also slightly embarrassing last week to recall this, as my oldest brother was present. There were the usual expectations for the oldest with him, and his relationship with my mother was not always smooth. Yet it still felt like one of those old Smothers brothers shows, where Tom invariably said to Dick, "Mom always liked you best."

My Mom was easy to be with, especially for me. She was quiet and introverted, and ready to respond to my every need it seemed. Trained as a nurse, I knew if I was ill or uncomfortable in any way, she would do whatever she could to care for my every need. This was so unlike my father who was extroverted and opinionated, and also had a lifelong addiction to alcohol. For a child who was quiet and introverted as well, my mother was a gentle respite from the frequent loud, boisterous, activity in our household. I felt safe, cared for, and nurtured. Those were wonderful gifts my Mother gave me. I thought of those qualities the other day when I picked up my boys at school. Two little girls, recent immigrants from Russia, were playing in the playground. For some reason their mother left the playground, and they realized she was no longer there. Frightened they somehow connected with an adult, even though they didn't speak much English, and she brought them over to Dana's teacher who I was speaking with. She scoured the area and found the mother, who then proceeded to scream at the girls for leaving the playground, even though she had initiated the problem by leaving herself, making them feel deserted. Of course the mother became frightened , too, because she thought the girls were missing. Both girls burst into tears, sobbing as the mother berated them. Here they were deserted and frightened, and had actually done the right thing by seeking out an adult, only to find themselves reprimanded and verbally assaulted by their own mother. I said to another parent, "Hug them first, tell them its ok, and that everybody is safe, and then tell them not to leave the playground if she has to be called away." Surely their trusting sense of being watched and cared for took a blow that day.

I thought of my mother because I am like her when it comes to watching my kids. I have always had high anxiety about losing them. In that rural place where I grew up, where as Roberta also said last week, I had no friends, my mother was constantly yelling into the woods to make sure I was near by when I played my Civil War games. I too, try to keep a watchful eye on my sons, although much of that energy now focuses on our baby, who is five. This is more than your average parent's protective eye, I am aware of extra anxiety and protectiveness that seems to be in those genes I inherited from my mother. In the novel Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Now we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny. It brings onto our faces the same wrinkles and age spots our parents had. It makes us sniff in idiosyncratic, recognizable family ways. Genes embedded so deep they control our eye muscles, so that two sisters have the same way of blinking, and boy twins dribble in unison. I feel myself sometimes, in anxious moods, playing with the cartilage of my nose exactly as my brother does. Our throats and throat boxes, formed from the same instructions, press air out in similar tones and decibels. And this can be extrapolated back in time, so that when I speak, my Mother speaks , too. She's writing these words now. "

Mother's Day reminds us now not only of the nurture and care we received from our Mothers and Fathers, but what of their genetic material has surfaced in us. Looking at physical and mental illnesses we ask when in the past this gene appeared, to give us, or me, this particular trait or affliction. A couple of years ago I remember giving a sermon after I had made the startling discovery of looking in the mirror and seeing my father. Age has brought this awareness; I now can see that the brother who was here last Sunday resembles me. We liberals who once believed most things could be explained and resolved by nurture now must admit that much of our constitution is hard wired. My mother appears whenever I do the cooking and find myself measuring every precise teaspoon. She is there when my historical dictionary of fact upon fact recalls her detailed memory for oil company customers and where they lived or how much they owed. If anyone named a person in town, she could always say who they were married to, and where their parents lived. As a child, no wonder I could name every Civil War general and battle, every dinosaur's name. No wonder I liked spending time with her. I was her in so many ways. She not only took me places, and bought me stuff, more recently it was her who was writing the entries in the dictionary - births, marriages and deaths. She was the one spontaneously twisting my hair, as I once did for hours. Was it because I saw her do it so many times, or was it something deeper?

A few weeks ago I traveled out to Orange, Massachusetts area , where I grew up. I was asked to conduct a funeral for my Aunt Pearl, my father's oldest sister, who had died at the age of 100. Of ten children in my father's family, only the youngest now remains. We laughed that a Harris had reached 100 when most would have said it was impossible. Was it the genes or was it the behavioral choices we had made? Then we examined the photographs. There you are, they said to me, as we looked at a photo of my grandfather. All families have looked at photos and noted the resemblance, but now we know it runs so much deeper. My son Joel does indeed sound like me. He has my vocal chords. And Dana has that dimple. Adopted children must wonder what of this person who I have become is my parent's nurture and what is my nature, and from whence does it come? Of course many of those small and large traits we see in ourselves are lost in the merging of nature and nurture. Sharon Olds tells us in her poem that she learned to love the small things about her father, because she could not love the big things. Those things that are often so much of us and them, we learn to love. We bind ourselves to the world she says, by finding things to love. With all we receive from nature and nurture we still have the power of choice. Find those things to love. Name those things we love, and bestow their power and affection on all who follow.
My mother was not an affectionate person. I once told my parents that one thing I would try to do differently with my son Joel would be to show my love for him in more outwardly affectionate ways. I grew up in a time when it was commonly assumed that a mother would be a housewife, and not work outside the home. Last fall, Caitlin Flanagan in an article in the Atlantic called, "Housewife Confidential," which was a tribute to Erma Bombeck, talked about her own mother, and the significance of her life. Flanagan writes, "To me, she never seemed diminished or unimportant because of those endless domestic errands; on the contrary, the work she did was wholly connected to the life we were living." This was true of my mother; she took care of us, and everything connected to the family, and moreover was the backbone of the family business, managing all the financial operations. In her quiet unassuming way, she managed to hold everything together - physically, emotionally, materially. She made it possible for us to live.

Perhaps this sense of being in control is largely lost on us. Flanagan writes that "housewives then didn't trot after their children the way I trot after mine. Their children trotted after them." She says that earlier mothers had a clear and compelling awareness of human vulnerability and a sense of having somehow been charged with the care of others. I can easily say, she always took care of me. Flanagan says motherhood in modern times has changed us. First it has introduced in our lives an almost unbearably powerful form of love. This is the primal connection each of us has felt, if not as parents, then as children. Through birth or adoption, nature or nurture, we are connected in care and devotion, in expectation and fulfillment of one generation to another. But modern life has also changed motherhood with a ceaseless grinding anxiety, one that often propels us to absurd activities. Then she cites the example of the mother who was on a business trip and tried to Fed ex some breast milk home. She says there is a helpless sense of repeated failures, both large and small. This is an acknowledgement that this is so difficult. The tremendous power of love and the overwhelming task of caring for others, and how you attempt to accomplish that at all working inside and outside the home. This is why we trot after our children these days. We want them to feel that love and care, and so we chase them with it. We say please feel it, know its presence.

Despite being my mother's favored child, and knowing I was appreciated and adored by her, I have often lived my life feeling unappreciated. I am not sure why I often fail to trust that others care about me. Is it in the genes, or is it something I learned through experience. Why do any one of us feel that no one appreciates what we do. While you the First Parish congregation are not my mother, you certainly gave me a massive dose of appreciation last Sunday. Sometimes we find it hard to accept that we are loved or cared for by others. If I am always waiting for someone to thank me or acknowledge what I have done, I will be stuck in a tit-for-tat response to others, and not engaged in true acts of love. How do we get beyond the need for appreciation? I suspect Mother's Day was developed to appreciate someone who was not receiving much appreciation in the normal course of events. It's often true that mom's don't get the appreciation they deserve. We tend to devalue or trivialize the hardest work in the world, falsely convincing ourselves that the other things we do are more important.

I was struck when Caitlin Flanagan said , the work she did was wholly connected to the life we were living. I am not sure how often I expressed my appreciation to my mother. Sure I got her cards and gifts for Mother's Day and her birthday, and even told her I loved her, but I am not sure I ever fully appreciated what Flanagan is saying. She was responsible for my life in so many ways. She was connected to all of it. Perhaps this is why modern living is so hard for moms and other parents. We feel incredible anxiety if we are not connected to all of it. What's love got to do with it? I have sometimes foolishly said my mother never showed her love in words or actions of affection, but her love was all that love is or ever will be. She took care of my life. She was my life. Susan Griffin says in the reading that her mother was the center of the earth. She was the ear of the universe. Her job was and our job continues to be the care of others. Why do we think spending time with children is unimportant when there is nothing more important. Mothers feel anxiety today because they know this. You are charged with nurturing life. The level of care you demonstrate, your presence focused on others means everything.

In Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "I haven't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It's always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses who can tell you something about the Etruscans." Our being here together lets us time travel - back to the bodies of our mothers, the bodies of our fathers, and further back, to the beginning. Where we realize what we celebrate today is what is most important - Mother's Day asks exactly what the Masai warriors ask each other in greeting as they come from their families, and how are the children? May we time travel back to embrace the small or great things in our lives that we can choose to say taught us how to care for one another, and then choose in the few days we have to do the caring work that wholly connects us to the life we are living.

---

Closing Words - from The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.