First Parish of Watertown

“Much Too Much” A sermon by Mark W. Harris

February 25, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown, MA

Opening Words - from C. P. Cavafy

To certain people there comes a day
When they must say the great Yes or
the great No
They who have the Yes ready within
them
Reveal themselves at once, and saying
it they cross over
To the path of honor and their own
conviction.

Sermon - “Much Too Much”

In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Rosalind says, “Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? Come, sister, you shall be the priest and marry us. Give me your hand, Orlando.” As a child I never knew the origin of that phrase about desiring too much of a good thing. I thought it was the everyday sage advice of my mother. Whenever I began to scoop out that second dish of chocolate ice cream, or assembled a giant sandwich, which she always called a Dagwood with cheese and lettuce and tomatoes, and several kinds of meat and pickles and onions and hot peppers making it wider than my mouth could ever stretch, she would look at me and say “ you are having too much of a good thing.” This of course translated into too much of a good thing is bad. Too much of this food or that will make you fat or give you heart disease, so don’t eat it. My mother had years of practice cajoling my father who like to indulge in all kinds of enjoyable things. He indulged his desires for food and drink, just as many people we know indulge their desires for clothes or books, electronic devices or games; the consumption of everything in sight that they want, including sex. Unfortunately my mother’s goal of stemming my father’s desires for consuming too much of a good thing often fell on deaf ears.
Moderating our desires is difficult. But to answer Rosalind’s question, we can say
that all humans seem to have desires for what they experience as too much of a good thing, and many of us are in a constant battle to stem those desires. Today’s sermon begins a new series on The Seven Virtues, not to be confused with the more well known seven deadly sins. The theological or spiritual virtues may be more obvious to you; they are faith, hope and love. But these are joined by the four cardinal virtues; prudence, courage, justice and temperance, the last being our topic for today. Frances Willard once said: “Temperance is moderation in the things that are good and total abstinence from the things that are foul.”.
This general definition that does not fit our own stereotype. What do you think of when you hear the word temperance? (alcohol or drinking). That’s right. Our minds may go back to the Roaring 20’s when abstinence from alcohol ruled the land because prohibition had been enacted into law. We associate temperance with the moralistic, fundamentalists like Aimee Semple MacPherson who said that drinking in any amount leads to immoral behavior, with the likelihood of addiction, followed by job loss and the ruin of the family. While many of us know that there is much truth in how various addictions from alcohol to drugs to gambling destroy lives and families, we also know that legislating morality has never worked. Yet alcohol was seen as a foul thing, and so abstinence was called for. The response was the creation of bathtub gin and hidden clubs called speakeasies. It was the era of Babe Ruth, who personified the voracious appetites and indulgences of a culture reacting to such total restriction. Liberals today might argue that each person must develop the self-discipline to decide for themselves whether to drink or not. We must make good choices about all that we consume, and be moderate in all things. But this is not an accurate view of the temperance movement in our history.
One of the most famous stories of a Unitarian minister being forced from his pulpit centered around alcohol. During the 19th century many Unitarian and Universalists reformers backed the temperance movement, which joined hand in hand with other reform efforts like women’s rights and abolition. They did so because they could see that the consumption of alcohol led to the disastrous results I cited before. Just as slaves were bound by chains of oppression and women by sexist laws and assumptions, many families and people were held captive by demon rum, and reformers saw a correlation between the drinking and poverty and prison . There was also some class prejudice related to this movement, as the newly arriving Catholic immigrants, especially those from Ireland, carried the stereotype of drunkards.
One of the prominent preachers of temperance was John Pierpont, who went far beyond suggesting to his Boston parishioners that they were indulging too much, he actually said that alcohol was a killing force in the society. Pierpont was no Puritan killjoy. His son James later wrote Jingle Bells, so we can assume his father took him on fun-filled sleigh rides. They just didn’t take warming beverages along. Appearing before a temperance convention in Boston, the elder Pierpont advocated for the passage of a law to stop liquor trafficking by imploring the crowd to see that allowing his fellow humans to drink alcohol from a cup was like letting them drink death. They might as well use a pistol or a cord he said, or be given a bowl of hemlock as imbibe a glass of spirits. (p. 316, Tyler). In 1838 Pierpont began to help draft petitions and to speak out for this law that would have prohibited liquors sales except for the very largest quantities. It was about this same time that parishioners began to complain of his failures as a pastor, even though he had been there 20 years. Four of his opponents were distillers, and eight more dealt in West Indian trade, meaning sugar and rum, and there was one glassmaker, too. There were even barrels of rum stored in the church basement. Furthermore voting power was determined by the number of pews that were owned, and so these opponents began to buy up the vacant pews. The handwriting was on the wall, even as Pierpont preached that gain is not godliness, his parishioners felt the threat against their means of livelihood. It took until 1845, and after they withheld his salary, Pierpont resigned. The morality of temperance was secondary to the morality of money in this battle. Here was a blatant example of the use of money to buy power.
One of the issues for modern day liberals is that the idea of temperance in this context carries with it the notion of telling someone else to give up something entirely. We see temperance as being about restricting someone else’s freedom. Don’t do that, are words that seem entirely too moralistic to many of us. Perhaps the idea of acceptance of others knows no limits for some UUs, and therefore they become supportive of issues such as polyamory, which teaches that it is possible to love two people or more at the same time, and therefore they may eschew fidelity in marriage. If Unitarian Universalism is about moral freedom for all, then we simply advocate different strokes for different folks and leave it go at that. Is there then no issue for which a liberal would teach temperance in a completely restrictive way? Most alcoholics would say that they must not drink. Wouldn’t we agree with that, especially with the knowledge that such behavior might more likely lead to renewed abuse. Is this not also true of other addictions as well? A totally restrictive temperance may be the right thing in certain circumstances for any of us who simply cannot control certain behaviors. I happen to believe that the human species is best conditioned to love one person at a time. While a liberal like me is not likely to attack the morality of another, it does not mean we have to affirm another’s advocacy of certain behaviors. I have my right to say that I don’t believe that healthy relationships are achieved by loving more than one person at a time. I believe in temperance in relationships.
This past week my family went down to New York City for a few days. Part of our trip itinerary was seeing the Statue of Liberty. I had been to the statue many years ago, but security around the monument has changed drastically since September 11. For a number of year no one could go inside the statue at all, but in the past two years people could climb to the top of the pedestal, but not go in the statue itself. We were subjected to two security checks on our visit. The first was even more stringent than what happens when you fly. They even searched my son Dana with an electronic wand. This was for the privilege of riding the Ferry to Liberty Island, and then once you are there, there is a second security check, similar to the first of electronic devices, air puffs, belt removals and the like, in order to go inside the statue. Being in New York, and seeing Ground Zero for the first time reminded me of the need for such security, but it also made me cognizant of the kind of contradictions we frequently experience in our culture that are almost schizophrenic in nature. The moderation of temperance gets lost as we sometimes swing from extreme to extreme with no middle to hold us steady.
I see this swinging pendulum of behavior in many aspects of our lives. We tell our children to be true to themselves and follow the bliss of their own individual natures and inclinations. Yet while we exalt the individual we are all captured in by the conforming dance of consumerism so that those same children who strive to be individuals are asking for the right pants, the right games, and eventually the right car or the right house to go with the right every other product. Which is it, consumer conformity or individual path? We tend to promote excess either way. Even in our social program for the reform of the world we advocate for feminism, as we believe in the equal rights and opportunities for women, but do we? Does freedom for women mean jobs or does it mean face lifts, and implants and other means to beautify the body? Then I come back to that security vs. freedom of trying to see the Statue of Liberty. Do we want to be able to do what we want, or do we want to be protected? Do we want to left alone so that we have total privacy, or do we somehow become collectively obsessed with trivia, so that we know every last detail of the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Is it privacy we want, or are we all thirsting for that moment of fame of recognition for which we would all sacrifice our privacy?
I sometimes see us as living in a kind of binge and purge culture. We can’t simply live in moderate circumstances. The perfect example of this is those fundamentalistic TV preachers, like the stereotype of Elmer Gantry. There is this kind of extreme morality that advocates the binding of the soul and the body that goes along with it in extreme restriction. Don’t do anything that is bad for you. But there is this natural human inclination to indulge our appetites or desires for the new, the tasty, the provocative, the powerful or the beautiful. It is like hanging that apple before Adam and Eve. Eventually you are going to taste it. This is why I believe that parents who severely restrict their kids from watching TV or eating ice cream are inviting an extreme reaction. They are helping develop the TV and ice cream addicts of tomorrows. Extremism of any kind is going to lead the human species to want to break free of this restrictiveness; this temperance. Then with the preachers we see it time and again. The preacher who rails against homosexuality is having a gay affair. The preacher, like Gantry, who rails against infidelity is a philanderer. So I think UUs are right to be concerned about following any total kind of temperance because it leads to extremism. Our problem is that we often cannot seem to come up with any kind of restriction at all, which is why thinking about temperance might actually be good for us.
Any religion can harbor the tendency to go to its extreme. With liberal religion that extreme is a tendency to say that we tolerate all religious and moral positions. But what happens when you tolerate them all is the possibility that you can advocate for none. In religion we could become what Oscar Wilde describes about temperance: “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” What I know of excess is that while it may seem like fun for the moment, it usually means we have no discipline for controlling it. If it is alcohol we drink until we are wasted. If it is gambling we spend it all. We cannot enjoy a little bit of something because there is no monitor of the good or the enjoyable, we simply want to let it burn out, like Jack London said of life, until it extinguishes itself. The danger with our faith is that we will get lazy about our religious searching, and not take any religious disciplines or serious scholarly undertakings with any kind of controlled studiousness or continued practice. Our tendency is to go with the trend or what is new, and then we find we lack the discipline to really know something well or to stick with it. For some, the extreme of rejecting of our childhood faith, results in an ecstasy of freedom, and we may lose interest in building up any faith tradition. With respect to temperance I think a good approach for us would be to move from the extreme of laissez-faire religion and deeply subject ourselves to a an experience of one holy book, one faith, or one practice such as prayer or meditation.
The current issue of the New Yorker has a cartoon of a woman who is speaking to a man, whom we might presume is her husband. She announces to him: “I am going to give up Google for Lent.” While this is amusing, it also speaks a truth about the addictiveness of anything that we get drawn into in a protracted way. Most of us know it is very easy to google a subject of interest, and find eight gazillion references to it. What next? Where does one stop in trying to find the answer you are seeking. Finally, you have gone to so many links you tend to forget what you were looking for in the first place. And that leads to something else, and so on. Finally, hours have gone by, and the kids have torn each other from limb to limb, and I have forgotten what I was looking for. Like anything, google can be googled to extreme. It is a good thing, and like any good thing that we enjoy or gain knowledge from, we can be seduced into over using it to fill up time. And when it is used to extreme you lose yourself or you lose track of your children. Like our UU faith, the web can leave us wandering endlessly, and in that search we may forget what meaning we wanted to glean from this religion. Like anything, a little discipline means we will not get lazy, we will search in moderate amounts, and we will focus on that which is important.
This past Wednesday we entered Lent. As we wandered around New York, I was struck by how many people had the cross of ashes marked on their foreheads to remind them that this was Ash Wednesday, and they needed to reflect on the meaning of their lives, or what they might give up or sacrifice for Lent. I did not grow up in a tradition that celebrated Lent in any way, but the mark that day kept reminding me of that phrase that was used for the title of the Civil Rights history film that was done a few years ago, keep your Eyes on the Prize. Focus. Have discipline. Temperance reminds us of the need to focus on what is before us, and discipline ourselves not to be sucked into the extremes of our lives and our culture. We live in a world where it seems everybody can have everything, or at least we act that way. Nobody saves for anything, or waits for anything, they just go out and get it. Everybody like to have the trappings of a good life, and so we don’t moderate our desires very much.
Many of you know that I was a regular smoker some years ago, a pack and a half a day. I was able to give up more than a decade ago, thanks to the presence of a new family, and the hope that I would live to see them grow up. It was hard to give up smoking, and it took some discipline and some concentration. I had to keep telling myself this is bad for you, and bad for your family, and bad for the society. You don’t want one. You don’t need one. One thing that struck me in retrospect was how much time was wasted in smoking. Not just the money, but the time, just doing nothing. There was nothing productive or intellectual, and even the social was fading , too. Andrea said not too long ago that drinking can be like that too. It is a waste of time. Think of how much time you waste. This is why we need temperance as a virtue. If you drink too much or too often, all you are doing is wasting time, wasting life. Drinking too much is also physically debilitating so perhaps temperance is more crucial here, but there is a common thread about temperance. Too much Google. Too much of anything. Too much freedom destroys us. Anything in excess is addiction, even exercise, if you want to do it all the time. Levi even told me you could die from drinking too much water. Not much chance of that happening with me.
In all things we need discipline We need focus. It may mean abstinence, but more likely moderation. I have a son who does not like reading. But unless he reads, he will not learn. He will never achieve what he could achieve. He must develop the discipline of reading. Without temperance, one child might read too much, and not have any social life, not develop his/her body in any way. Without temperance, one child might not read at all, and never find knowledge or convictions or the basic ability to function in life. Everyone one of us needs temperance to balance our lives. We are all contemplating temperance all the time. How much more exercise, or more diet, or more organization would balance my life. Temperance asks me how I am utilizing my time that once went to smoking. Is there a balance of time with loved ones, with eating right, with exercising, with reflecting or meditating. When my life is more in balance I will have embraced the virtue of temperance. It is finding balance and moderation in all things, not wasting so much time surfing an empty net looking to fill up space, but casting your line in all directions with love and the fulfillment of the body with nourishment, the mind with stimulation and the heart with devotion.

Closing Words - “My Symphony” by William Henry Channing

To live content with small means,
to seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion;
to be worthy, not respectable and wealthy, not rich;
to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly;
to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages with open heart,
to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never;
in a word to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common;
this is to be my symphony.

“Grazing on French Fries” Mark W. Harris

- Chocolate for Love - Chocolate for Joy - Chocolate for All -
(with Chocolate Communion)

February 11, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown

Opening Words - from Anne Sexton - “Welcome Morning”

There is joy
in all.
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared. I’ve heard,
dies young.

Sermon
My oldest son Joel is in the restaurant business in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He runs a couple of burrito joints called Dos Amigos. Although they are not high end restaurants, what he produces is very good, and made from scratch; fresh ingredients and quite tasty. As far as we know, we have no Mexican ancestors, and I often joke that his love for burritos comes from those packages of frozen ones that Andrea and I kept buying when he was in high school. Every day after school there was a burrito fest, when he would pop these rolled bean and cheese delights of 500% fat into the microwave, and then smother them with salsa. No long ago, I was visiting with Joel. We were eating out and during dinner we had a conversation about why he went into the restaurant business. It turns out that one of the inspirations was that I loved to go out to eat, and he enjoyed sharing that experience, and in turn, wanted to provide his own delicious food for a waiting public. Food for people who are hungry. Food for people who enjoy the conviviality of being with others; of being with those they love. Food for the simple joy of living, for the gladness of being alive.
The multi fold meaning of food in our lives is hard to capture in one sermon. Andrea will sometimes remark, how much time we spend either preparing food, eating food, or thinking about food. What’s for supper, mom? all the generations have asked. Here is our most basic work. Food is at once the thing we need to survive and be nourished. It is the element that is the center to all of our family gatherings - holidays, weddings and funerals - feasts to celebrate, and manna from heaven to rescue us in times of despair, a magic pill in the form of ice cream, chocolate, or potato chips, to make us feel better. Every religious tradition has sacred meals with Christianity having the most memorable for many of us with Jesus using the elements of the meals he shared with the disciples as the symbols for himself in anticipation of his death, that they might share in his very being, and remember him and the life he lived forever. They would become one with him by eating this meal. Jesus loved to eat and drink, and was called a wine-bibber by his enemies, but it was the occasions where people drew near, shared fellowship, and made connections with one another, and established those enduring bonds.
Food is love, and that is partly what Valentine’s Day reminds us of with its gifts of chocolate. In love poems, such as that passion expressed in the Song of Songs, the love is described as “better than wine, and his fruit was sweet to my taste . . . “sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am sick with love.” There is something special about chocolate, and the desire many of us develop around it. It was first used in the Americas, and the Aztecs gave it its name, as a gift from their white bearded God of wisdom and knowledge. It was served as a drink to members of the court . In fact, Montezuma’s court drank 2000 pitchers of chocolate every day. I had the experience of drinking liquid chocolate most intensely when my family visited Cadbury World near Birmingham, England in 2003. This part factory tour/ part chocolate fest was highlighted by a ride on a cocoa bean car through the history of a growing addiction to chocolate. Yet it is more than just a taste sensation. Some theorize that chocolate reproduces bio-chemically the sense of well-being we enjoy when we are in love. There are foods that give us both comfort and calm, and so we naturally, not merely habitually, reach for the chocolate or the chips when we are under stress.
The real craving is for that sense of well-being. Whether it is erotic love or familial love, we all want that feeling of comfort and caring that food symbolizes for us in the context of sharing intimate moments with those we love. In my minds eye, I am picturing my father, and a dog eared cookbook with the name Fannie Farmer scrawled across the front. It is late afternoon on a cold, winter day. He has flipped to the recipe he must know by heart, and begun his measurements. The good Unitarian Ms. Farmer gave us all our precise measurements for spices and such, teaspoons and tablespoons, and plenty of sugar. His choice that day was brown sugar and cinnamon and pecans, a delicious confection all made to be rolled up in his famous cinnamon buns. It was a sweet dough he told me, a little different than his wonderful rolls or breads, the staff of life he made for our family so often. And as the winter sun quickly ran to hide, we warmed the inside of our kitchen with companionship and instruction - this is the way I roll, this is the way I cut. Love was never expressed with hugs or kisses or words. It came in our devotion to food. In the family we take care of the needs of those we love - what will fill you? what will make you feel better? This was how they showed their love - the dishes they prepared to bring the family together, to find solace, enjoy company, feel protected. Only last week, I made a beef stew, the family recipe Joel remembers best. He telephoned for it once. Then and now the generations are spanned. I see my father in the kitchen with the chrome encased formica table and the Farmer book binding pulling away from the text, making this dish or another to nourish and sustain us all.
If food is the focus of how we are nourished within the family, it is also the symbol of how we make our connections with the community. We sometimes says that First Parish is centered on food with elaborate social hours, and suppers that mark the most important events of the church year. Food becomes the symbolic center of how we build the strength of the community. With social hour, we may make more connections than with what happens in church. Church is the time to reflect and think about the meaning of life. It is preparation. Church is the grinding of the spices and the chopping of the vegetables, and perhaps the warming of the oven, in readiness for what is to come. Then we go forth to connect with each other and live in the world. Social hour is the pinnacle of cooking and eating. Here is where you make it happen. You speak to another or embrace a friend or find a common human frailty, need or interest. You must make the connections happen in your life, the life of your family and community, and the food is the human bond bringing us together in love and concern for each other.

(Eating chocolate heart)

Take this heart of chocolate, this symbol of our connections to those we love, and let it become part of you, just as those you care for in gladness, those you remember in grief are with you always, may we realize that we are never alone, never without someone who cares.

I love food, but perhaps that is obvious. Is it an obsession, or does it fill a psychological need, or is it for the pure love of taste, for conviviality, for the fulfillment of the joy of living? It is interesting how the English love the idea of cooking. Their television stations are filled with cooking shows, and the shops in the cities include specialty kitchen stores that offer fancy appliances and upscale cookware. But it somehow gets lost in translation. By repute and by reality the food is terrible. The French have two favorite sayings about English food, "In order to eat well in England, it is necessary to take breakfast three times a day" and: "English cuisine? If it's cold it's soup, if it's warm it's beer." I can tell you that this is no longer true. The beer now is as cold as you can get it here. Great strides have been made in refrigeration. And the soup? Well, it does not matter to me whether it is hot or cold because all the food is bland and tasteless from the white, spiceless sausage that ruin their bangers and mash to the limpest french fry in captivity. I offended the waitress one day in London when I ordered a piece of cake, and then asked how old it was. In this country fresh means daily, but in the UK fresh means, until sold. But, it also means less waste than is true here. Where is the balance to be found?
I love food, but have always struggled with my weight. Food can be a comfort, and a solace for us. Food may unite us as families and churches, but it can also drive us apart, and it can be a source of pain or discomfort. Traditionally, not eating was a sign of grief. We withhold food from ourselves because we feel like we could die from our pain. This is the story of Hannah from the Bible who refuses to eat because she cannot have children. Eventually she becomes the mother of the prophet Samuel. Just as our memories may be flooded by family thanksgivings or a parent who taught us how to cook, so there may be memories of gorging, where the joy of eating became the obsession of having it all. While some of us may remember being forced to eat our vegetables cooked to death in good English style, we also may recall having certain foods withheld. We may be told we cannot have any. Some families may feel only adults are worthy of lobster and kids can have hot dogs, and others may feel that sugar is out of bounds. We forget about all things in moderation, and go to the extreme of withholding all those things that might bring some kind of enjoyment.
A few years ago Daniel Sack, a professor at Vanderbilt wrote a book called Whitebread Protestants. It reminds me especially of the communion service of my youth in a conservative Congregational church. The late nineteenth century brought two major reform to the Protestant churches - communion was now given in individual cups rather than from a common chalice. This was for sanitation purposes, as awareness of the spread of germs was comprehended. Second, the service no longer included wine, but instead grape juice, or even in some cases, water was used. Wine could produce intoxication, and it was associated with joblessness, shiftlessness, the destruction of the family, and to some extent with those Catholic hordes who had invaded America with their wanton ways. Alcohol led to immorality, and certainly could not be served in the church. This moral crusade helped to bring on prohibition. I grew up with grape juice, and was rather fascinated by my little glass which had its own little holder on the pew, perfect circles to fit little fingers in, too. The Whitebread were those loaves of Wonder bread cut into squares. What did they ever do with the crust?
Protestant communion practices, at least in my experience, seemed to take the joy out of what should have been a moment to connect us with others. Perhaps it was the dry bread which implied a kind of formality and rigidity to culture that I found lacked freedom and openness. We all know eating a meal together may become orderly, proper, and dignified like a military ritual. Sometimes dinners seemed like a duty to be performed. How de we balance some of that rigidity with joy? For me, an aspect of food and our love for it, is the sheer taste sensation, and the human need to enjoy ourselves, and to celebrate over food the basic truth that this creation, these families , these friends have given us life. Food is representative of that common life we all share.

(Eating Chocolate as freedom to enjoy )

May we choose that chocolate which brings us the greatest joy. May we savor it, and let it melt in our mouths, just as life must be savored so that we might celebrate the good bounty of this earth and all it brings to our lives.

Food can provide the context of our relationships, as it brings us together with others. Food can be something we simply enjoy, but we know a source of joy can also be abused. Our appetites can be something we cannot control, and it leads to gluttony. Andrea’s grandmother lived to be 101, and had the discipline to always eat the right things. She could push herself away from the table and say, “Well, that’s done.” Preparing a meal was her job, and in many ways, she was happy when it was over. She could move on to headstands on the beach after dinner, because she was never one to linger, and she introduces us to the moral dimension of food with our own self-control. The old adage is that we do not live by bread alone. There must be deeper truths to food rituals than what keeps us alive, or even what makes us happy. Perhaps one of the most difficult choices we make with our lives is what to eat, and how is it going to affect us. There is an epidemic of obesity in our culture, and too much fast food, that slows us down and kills the blood. The choices we make about food are difficult ones, and we realize that while food brings us together, and brings us joy, it also presents us with a moral dimension.
Many of us heard about this moral dimension as our parents filled up our bowls with that beef stew and homemade bread. I was a stellar member of the clean plate club. I learned that if you take it, you eat it. Otherwise it is being wasteful. My parents were also those who invoked the litany about the starving children in India. For the first time, I realized there were children in the world who were hungry, while my belly was usually full. We learned that one of the imperatives of religious faith was to feed the poor. Every Sunday night there are people from this church who go to Panera bakery to collect their left over breads, and then deliver them on Tuesday to the local food pantry. It is not just the starving far away, it is also those who live next door who may not have enough. So we have Giving Boxes and Walks for Hunger that others might know that we care and want to be connected to them Gandhi once told us , “There are so many hungry people in the world , God can only appear to them in the form of bread.”
Feed the hungry is something every faith understands, but what about the moral aspect of food in our own lives. Most of us learned long ago, and still may retain the story that it was corn that saved the Pilgrims. This was corn that came from the Natives, who taught them how to plant. When I was growing up, I knew where the summer time corn I ate came from. It was from my father’s garden, and I had helped plant and harvest it, and then we ate it, anointed with butter and sprinkled with salt, a holy taste if ever there was. In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan asks not only, What should I eat?, but What am I eating? and finally, Where in the world did it come from? These are complicated questions these days. The Pilgrims leaned that no other plant could produce as much food in as fast a time as corn. Since those days, corn, as Pollan shows, has become an industrial commodity through the use of chemical fertilizers and corn fed animals that should have grass. The farms became factories. Commodity corn has turned cows into fossil fuel machines. Unfortunately even those who believe they are making the right moral choice in eating organic foods are not lessening the environmental impact because, especially due to transportation, they are still eating fossil fuel.
In the last generation many of us have tried to reform our diets. After I was educated into the ways of Diet for a Small Planet, I was a vegetarian in seminary for a time, and today, most of us eat less meat as a result of learning where it comes from and how it is prepared. We eat smaller pieces mixed in sauces rather than the large chucks of meat I consumed as a child. Andrea observes that some of those pieces still maintain the shape of an animal. Disguise it for me please, she says. For ourselves we know we must eat in a more responsible fashion- more fiber, more fruits and vegetables, less fat, but we don’t have to lose the joy. Eating in a more healthy fashion is not new. I once took a detour heading cross country, and went to Battle Creek , Michigan. Here I found the home of Kellogg’s corn flakes, and toured there much as I later sampled the delights of Cadbury chocolate. This time it was cereal, invented by a man who said what you eat affects not just your body, but also your morals. So we worry about what we eat, and how it affects us and the world. We want to be able to enjoy our meals. We want to be able to make connections over our meals. We may decide we will participate in the industrial food complex as little as we can. Michael Pollan reminds us that what we are eating is the body of the world. It is all connected, and we should remember that. And so may our last piece of chocolate be for all those in the world who go unfed, and for all of us who are fed by ways and means that we often fail to pay homage to - sun, rain, air, earth, bones, seeds. In making the tortillas, or in eating anything, may we remember that it all starts from scratch, like the fresh tomato salsa I taste in my son’s restaurant.

(Chocolate for all )
May we take this last piece of chocolate and share it with someone else that they will share with another, too. Because we must feed each other and the world, the nourishment that has gone before and the nourishment to come. May we eat with care and love for our bodies and for the earth.

“By what miracle” by Judith Morley

By what miracle
does this cracker
made from Kansas wheat,
this cheese ripened in French caves,
this fig, grown and dried in Ephesus,
turn into me?
My eyes,
My hands,
My cells, organs, juices, thoughts?

Am I not then Kansas wheat
and French cheese
and Symrna figs?
Figs, no doubt,
the ancient Prophets ate?



Closing Words by Edward E. Brown
Food is not matter
but the heart of matter,
the flesh and blood of
rock and water, earth and sun.

Food is not a commodity
which price can capture,
but exacting effort
carefully sustained,
the life work of countless
beings.

With this cooking I enter
into the heart of matter,
I enter the intimate activity
which makes dreams materialize.

Under the Dragon’s Spell
The First Parish of Watertown
February 4, 2007
The Rev. Andrea Greenwood

Opening Words: assembled quotes from Frank Lloyd Wright

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you"
.....(N)ature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.... I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain....buildings {with the} strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.... Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
"The truth is more important than the facts"... {Greatness....} is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as it is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart."

"An idea is salvation by imagination"


Reading Speaking with The Dragon
by Marjorie Rebmann, minister, Unitarian Church of Montpelier, Vermont

I decided to put a new program on my computer. It’s called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It allows you to speak into a microphone mounted in a headset and your words appear on the screen. I could read prayers and appropriate words right into its fire-breathing nostrils as I burned with passionate inspiration. A modern miracle! I counted on Dragon to cut my work in half with every hiss, bellow and scaly belch from its program. I never suspected it would teach me a lesson in religious living.
In order for it to get to know my voice, I needed to read to it for one half hour. Dragon has some Buddhist leanings. To start it, you only have to say, “Wake up!” To stop it, you have to say, “Go to sleep.” To erase a word, you say, “Scratch that.” So I sat for an hour or so with a headset, reading, characteristically slurring my words…saying “Scratch that!” going back, saying them over again, getting a cup of tea. Dragon inhaled my voice and memorized my speech pattern. I decided to write a wedding, which was scheduled for the coming weekend.
The bride and groom had requested 1st Corinthians 13. Gingerly, I whispered into the headset, “Wake up.” Waking sleepy dragons is the stuff of fairy tales and myth. I had to say it much louder. “Wake up!”
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal,” I said. But apparently Dragon had not quite registered my speech pattern. On the screen before me, slowly appeared the words, “If I speak in the gongs of mortal sand and angels’ butts do not have love, I am a noisy going or a gang symbol.”
“And if I have,” I said, “prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.” Dragon wrote “miseries” instead of “mysteries” and “legend” instead of “knowledge and.” I pressed on. The phone rang as I was working and I hollered for someone to get it. I was interrupted again by someone in the house asking where something was. I continued with a few more interruptions and no little frustration at the words appearing on the screen.
I decided to read it all over from where I had fixed the thing about the “mortal sand and angels’ butts.”
I read from the screen: “Love is patient. Will someone get that damned phone? Love is kind. Why should I know where your new CD is? Who was your servant last year? Love is not envious, boastful or ‘arrogate crude.’” Not only were the words scrambled, but I had forgotten to put Dragon to sleep whenever I spoke to anyone in the house.
Every word I said was being recorded. Dragon went on crooning about love… “It does not insist on its own way…play that CD a little lower, please! I gotta get this wedding done! It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in mongering (meaning ‘wrongdoing’) but rejoices in the ‘truce!’”
I imagined reading all this at the wedding and I began to laugh. There should be a few more commands for a Dragon who indulges in spoonerisms and records everything you say. Commands like “Touché” perhaps, or “Uncle!”
Dragon pointed out the chasm between my love of scriptural poetry and its practical value. Corinthians is one of the sanctuaries of the soul to which we retreat when we want to be assured of how best to live in the world. Only we give the words their value. Only we can live them into being. This beast gave me the gift of hearing myself as others hear me.
Bless all the people and things in our lives which take us by the scruff of the neck and show us how we are seen and heard. Bless even a lab-grown, unseeing, fire-breathing crystal chip, which would lead us into the perfect geometry of the spirit.

Reading Shopping for the Dalai Lama, by Chris Wright Boston Phoenix September 20, 2003
When A Krispy Kreme franchise opened in Medford earlier this year, few people thought the town could top the pageantry of that event any time soon. So news that the Dalai Lama would be stopping by a Medford Buddhist temple last Friday generated quite a buzz in the town -- not all of it positive. Hank Pierce, a local clergyman, attended a town meeting a week before the visit, and found himself calming the nerves of a jittery populace, many of whom were haunted by visions of trampled flower beds and mangled bus schedules. Pierce, meanwhile, was harboring some serious misgivings of his own.
A minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford, Pierce, 37, had been chosen to greet the Tibetan holy man on behalf of the town’s clergy -- a task which involved presenting him with some sort of offering. “We were told you are not supposed to go to the Dalai Lama empty handed,” Pierce explained the day before the visit. He was speaking on his cell phone from Davis Square, where he was concluding a long, fruitless search for a suitable gift for the Buddha incarnate.
“I’m driving myself nuts,” he said. “What do you get the man who has nothing?”
It’s not like Pierce didn’t have ideas. For weeks, his friends had bombarded him with suggestions -- from socks to ties to wind chimes. None of them seemed quite right. One person proposed a pair of Birkenstocks. “I’m not gonna get the guy some stupid hippie shoes,” the reverend replied. “Besides, I don’t know what his shoe size is.” Another advised a Red Sox shirt with Dalai Lama on the back. “What number would I put on it?” Pierce asked. “A zero?”
For Pierce, the most important thing was that he get the Dalai Lama something tasteful. For this reason he rejected the suggestion of the makeover -- “Oh, yeah, Queer Eye for the Buddhist Guy.” Likewise, the t-shirt that read what would buddha do was a nonstarter. He thought about gifts that capture the flavor of Medford. But what? “There used to be Medford rum and Medford crackers, he lamented. “But the town’s not famous for anything anymore. Do I say “here’s a coupon for a nail salon? A cheesesteak sub? I think he’s a vegetarian.”
Pierce’s quest was further complicated by the fact that he didn’t want to be ostentatious. “You don’t want to be like, ‘I present you with this jewel encrusted clock,’” he said. “You don’t want to be too full of yourself. And you don’t want to spend too much money.” He paused for a moment. ‘There’s a watch I found outside my church. I could give it to him and say “Here, I found this” But then someone might come looking for it and I’d have to say ‘Oh, I gave that to the Dalai Lama.’” As he spoke, the shops were closing around him.
The next morning, Pierce had made his peace with the fact that he would have nothing to offer the Dalai Lama but a warm smile and a short speech. “If God had meant for me to give him something, he thought as he arrived at his rendezvous point, “I’d have something.” Then he saw a fried of his in the crowd. “Here, the friend said, holding out an orange knit cap. Seconds later, Pierce overheard a small boy saying, “It’s colder here than it is in India. The Dalai Lama’s going to get sick!”
When Pierce was eventually presented to his holiness, he handed him the woolly cap, explaining that it was a gift from the children of Medford, who were concerned for his health. There were a few excruciating moments before the Dalai Lama took the hat and put it on, and grinning broadly, turned towards a bank of photographers. “Look in the papers tomorrow,” Pierce said afterwards. “You’ll probably see the Dalai Lama wearing my hat.”



Sermon
I was eleven when I first learned the Canticle of the Sun, which is the text that was adapted to create the hymn we just sang. As with most things, I learned it in a book. It is possible that we had sung it in church, but that is not what I remember. The words of Saint Francis became meaningful to me because I was reading a story in which the kids discover a rock with some Latin words chiselled into it, and as they are helped to translate what the words say, and learn how they came to be there, they alternate reading of the lines, and interupt themselves, saying, “Yes, that’s true; the moon WOULD be a sister, and fire WOULD be a brother...” Somehow, in the fictional childrens’ thought process, the canticle came alive for me, and became something I thought about too. If celestial and natural objects were people, which would be brothers, and which would be sisters? Who are my brothers? And why? Written out, this has the unfortunate sound of a Barbara Walters interview, but this was the foundation of my religious life. Saint Francis was praising the Lord, but explicitly saying that his understanding of anything lord-like or holy came from the sun and moon and stars; from water and fire and nature. That was interesting to me; that we could begin associating direct experiences of mystery and wonder with a kind of traditional language. It was a perspective that unified my own life -- my ideas, my imagination, my passions --with a religious world that I previously had no access to. In so doing, it provided me a connection with centuries of humanity. Salvation by imagination, as Frank Lloyd Wright worded it.
I was the same age, and reading a different book by the same author, when I learned about Kwan Yin. The book was set in New York City during World War II, and was about the adventures of four children, whose mother had died so long ago that the story had no element of tragedy or loneliness. Their father -- who was always away, helping in Washington -- kept a statue of the goddess Kwan Yin on his desk. These parentless children were being given a message, in the form of this statue sitting where the father should be. What was being said? Kwan Yin, the most popular Chinese god, and the only Buddhist god who is loved rather than feared, is a fascinating figure, bridging many cultures; the natural and supernatural; and also gender. A female god is an incredibly rare thing in Confucianism and in Buddhism, but Kwan Yin used to be male. Who is my brother? Who is my sister? And where is God?
When the Buddha died in the fifth century before the Common Era, his disciples had a problem. Hindu culture had gods and goddesses who helped mortals in every possible life situation, and any job imaginable -- as well as many that are unimaginable. No matter who you were or what was happening, there was a deity right there to appeal to for help, if you were Hindu. But the Buddha had taught a different perspective -- one of self reliance. Be ye a lamp unto yourself, is the sentence associated with Buddha. Everything you need is already within you; and the life you are living is your life; do not worry about the next one, or your previous one. These lessons meant one thing when there was a teacher dispensing them, and quite another when it was just the message that was left. What was there to offer people who felt abandoned and longed for a god? How did we make sense of the things that happen? Where was the mythology? Without a leader, or any real offers of help, how would Buddhism grow?
Kwan Yin was part of the answer. She, and others like her -- past and future buddhas; buddhas from other universes -- came to life at this time. They could help teach for the Buddha; could embody qualities for the Buddha, but more than anything, they gave people something outside themselves. Some were based on real people; others were not. Kwan Yin, as the embodiment of compassion, seems to have evolved from a Indian man, who was so enlightened that he was offered a place in Nirvana. But this lord was so compassionate that he chose to help ease the suffering of humanity instead, and so remained on earth as a boddhisatva. He still exists in India today -- we know him incarnate as the Dalai Lama. Kwan Yin, the Chinese version of this same god, became a female in some ways as an antidote to the religion she upholds -- in a patriarchal and elitist culture, Buddhism was monastic and centered around the education of the monks. Kwan Yin gave form to compassion for those who fell outside of the monastery walls. She is regarded as the universal savior, working for male and female, monks and lay people, the masses, and the elite. She is available no matter what -- you don’t have to perform certain rituals, or meditate the right way, or eat special foods. Whatever your trouble is, you speak of it, she will hear your prayer. Her name, as the Dalai Lama’s, translates to “One Who Sees and Hears the Cries of the World.” Kwan Yin is immortal not so much because of her supernatural powers, but because of the way she lives in human hearts. She does, however, have a special connection with nature, and can transcend its forces by bonding with them rather than fighting them off. So in the book I was reading, Kwan Yin sat in for parents who were gone; taken by the forces of war and of disease. The children did not need to do anything in order to have the protection of the gods; she was just there, listening compassionately -- but always and also sending a message of self-reliance.
Self reliance is an interesting concept when applied to children. Actually, it is an interesting concept applied to adults, too, but that would be a different sermon. Kwan Yin gets it exactly right -- present, listening without intruding, helping in cosmic ways.... This is a goddess whose presence nurtures kids, because by speaking to her, we learn to think at a deeper level, and to work through our fears. When we are safe, and someone is listening, we are encouraged, in the most basic form of the word: Our courage to be ourselves is deepened, strengthened; and as we learn to reason things out by speaking, our faith is stengthened, too. What Kwan Yin models is a method of self reliance that depends completely upon connection; on adults who truly listen, and then watch as kids radiate life, realizing that someone believes they are worth paying attention to. And the best children’s stories do that, too: they reveal who an adult really is, and offer the kind of meaningful connection that lets children grow. The convictions or messages in a story are not tacked on at the end; or woven in so that we can then pull them out. A story simply is, and its meaning is created as we listen to characters grow, and then we grow with them, for the rest of our lives. As we mix in memories, meaning continues to be layered into the story. When we sing All Creatures of the Earth and Sky, I am remembering my years of Latin classes, translating the text, and the book in which I first discovered The Canticle of the Sun, and the children I have since read that book to.
Our culture, and our religion, can be very confused about what childhood means. Maggie Rebbman, who wrote the piece about her computer program I shared earlier; Maggie swears that one of the things the dragon typed onto her computer screen is “a little chip shall lead them.” I am not sure if I believe that; it seems a bit of poetic license; but I love it nonetheless. What do we mean when we say a child shall lead? Perhaps the Dragon, transforming the word into ‘chip’ provides some direction. Dragons and adventure clubs and strange Latin inscriptions on moss covered rocks are the stuff of fantasy and childhood; easy to reminisce about but representative of a time when we spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. These are not the subjects of adult life. But the crystal chip tells another story. The magic is true! Crystals really do have the ability to be transformed into machines that speak from these invisible filaments that bind us to one another over time and space are more real than seems fathomable. Like the spider’s web, it is natural, and completely amazing, and on a certain level, unbelievable. But faith, hope, and love abide; these three, Paul said. They abide, meaning that this is what lasts from childhood; and this is what we need to lead us -- not thinking and reasoning; but faith, hope, and love, which grow deep in our souls by testing out what we think and how we feel and what is possible. It is a world in which the values that connect, sustain, and enliven us come first. Occasionally my husband will tell me that my religion did not prepare me for the real world, and while I know what he means, it is not our job to accomodate our children to this world; our job is to give them faith enough in themselves and in life that they will help change the world. A child shall lead. A fire-breathing chip shall lead.
At Thanksgiving my brother spoke to me of his 12 year old daughter, and how her face was always in a book. He and his wife were hoping I might strike up a relationship with Dev, via e-mail. The word “intense” was used more than once, and the sense of their child as a somewhat alien being who reminded them of me came through. Devon just wants to read; she is devouring stories with a hunger that frightens her parents a little: they are concerned about school applications and ballet and violin and Devon is doing all that stuff and will be fine, but .. there is more to her, and to all of us, and she needs to find a way to keep herself; to understand herself, and really BE in her own life. Eleven and twelve are the age when we do begin to develop relationships with people you choose, rather than who you happen to fall in with. It is the age when responsibilities can begin to nudge out compassion; when the desire to protect one’s interests and plan for the future make one worry instead of simply be. It is when religion starts to really matter, as we try to integrate truth and facts. We ask where God is; if holiness is in nature, or in us; if there is something in the world that can heal our pain; make things right; end the suffering of people we love. I think of Kwan Yin, heading up the mountain path, staking her life on a contest, but taking time to help a person in need. She believes in magic, and in hard work and in right action even when it means she has less time to devote to the contest. It is no mistake that it is the Dragon God who transforms Kwan Yin’s story. Dragons both expose us, and protect us; which precisely defines how it feels to live compassionately. We are both more vulnerable to pain, to criticism, or loss -- and more connected to all that lives and breathes and grows and dies.
Maggie’s dragon, grown from a crystal -- representative of sorcery and magic -- grows a dragon that gives you back yourself in double consciousness: Not only does it record what you are saying on purpose; it also notes your reactions to everything around you. The Dragon is both innocence and experience; it is the old man giving visitors gifts intended for the Dragon God, and also sending Kwan Yin to check up on them. Although the transformations in this story are dramatic, and the results of conscious decisions, death is not necessarily that way. It can occur by simply not listening to others when they are suffering; not listening to ourselves when we are searching for a center; not helping when we really could. In the words of Hermann Hesse, “We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing less than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is overflowing everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it withour feet.” ”....(N)ature is the only body of God that we shall ever see....” said the Unitarian architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. “Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.” Wright was born into his faith; his grandparents had been Unitarians in Wales, where the flag is emblazoned with a large red dragon; and, interestingly enough, no sign of the Union Jack anywhere. Nevertheless, my mind does turn to England, and the tales of King Arthur. When Arthur was born, so the story goes, the constellations rearranged themselves in the sky, so that a dragon appeared overhead. The dragon recalled Arthur’s father, who had brought peace to England when he drove out the invading barbarians, and was named Pendragon by his fellow lords. The name translates literally to Dragon’s Head, but meant “high king”. But the high king was not all powerful in matters of love, and so he had asked for help from a certain magician in order to win the lady of his dreams. Merlin did help, but for a price: Uther would have to give up his first born son. And because of the alignment of the stars, Merlin knew the instant the child was born.
And so begins a story of magic and bravery and destiny; of the triumph of innocence and goodwill over cynicism and competetion. It is a child’s story, perhaps, but one which enriches our hearts and speaks a truth that informs identity. Under the spell of the dragon, we can all be saved by stories; stories that speak honestly of human pain and our longing to alleviate it. The stories cannot cure us; they do not end tragedy; but they save us nonetheless. Despite all we know about life; all we have witnessed, we can be innocent again, as we listen, while above us the dragon’s wings open like a cathedral, or a temple; and we are at home; forever young and alive and in the moment, under its spell.

Closing Words from “Then There Were Five, Elizabeth Enright, who is the author of the various books I referred to, and the niece of Frank LLoyd Wright.

“Home again,” said Randy..... casually, as if she had said “It’s a nice day.”
“Home again” echoed Mark. But he felt as though it would be a long time before he was used to those words. Home.. well, that’s quite a word in itself if you’re not used to it, but to have it followed by again! ...
‘Home again,” repeated Mark. And he said it as solemnly and joyfully as if he had said the word “Amen;” and quickly followed it with the word “Hooray!”

“Firstus with Faustus” - A Look at Polish Unitarianism - Mark W. Harris

January 28, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown

Opening Words - “If There is No God” by Czeslaw Milosz

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper (and his sister’s keeper)
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother, (or sister)
By saying that there is no God.

Readings - from Treatise on Theology by Czeslaw Milosz
“I am Not” and “I Apologize”

Sermon

Unitarian Universalism is a religion that we joke about frequently. I often wonder what this means. On the one hand it is good to be able to laugh at ourselves. Life is too short to be overly serious all the time, and so when we talk about believing in one God at the most, or following the pathway to the discussion group about heaven rather than actually ascending to the place itself, we are really trying to provide an antidote to others dogmas and beliefs. Yet we also have somewhat of a history of ridiculing those who take theology seriously. Some might say it is downright ignorant for religious folk to literally believe in this irrational mumbo-jumbo. Why don’t they face up to the reality that there is no God? Perhaps the truth is that we struggle mightily with serious religious questions, and feel like Julian Barnes, who wrote in an essay in a recent issue of the New Yorker that he didn’t believe in God anymore, but he sure missed him. We would all like some coherent larger meaning for our lives, and so we joke about faith because we can neither accept dogmatic truths, nor abandon the search for truth itself. We want something to replace that which we know is not true, and thus feel caught on the boundary between faith and doubt.
We also frequently make fun of our historical origins. By some strange coincidence organized Unitarianism began in the mountainous region of eastern Europe called Transylvania. The standard joke is that Count Dracula must have been a Unitarian. What we miss in this bad history lesson, is that organized Unitarianism began even earlier in yet another obscure place called Poland. We don’t usually associate liberal religion with Poland. We may think of the Polish Pope, and the most conservative Catholic church of them all. In our worst moments it may be our prejudice towards the Poles. Before our politically correct times, it was common to have entire books of Polish jokes, all of which seemed to make fun of a people’s intelligence, or lack thereof. Most of us learned “Dumb Polack.” I even had friends in high school of Polish descent, who would speak of themselves in those terms when they got an answer wrong in class or did something foolish.
When I was growing up I learned that Poland was frequently a conquered territory. It was here that the Germans practiced their blitzkrieg in 1939. Polish Jews were slaughtered in a greater percentage here than anywhere else during the war. This was where Auschwitz was located. There was also a terrible massacre in the Katyn Forest in 1943 of all the Polish army officers, thousands of them, and the Germans and the Russians kept arguing over who was responsible. It turned out it was Stalin, but the Allies were reluctant to embarrass him. In sum, there was this kind of historical stereotype - always conquered, not very bright and can’t defend themselves. History lessons seemed to make fun of Poland and its people, but never for very good reasons.
Take all the stereotypes and throw them out the window! This was where Unitarianism was born. What made it possible for liberal religion to emerge in eastern Europe? Poland and Transylvania were border countries. Here western Latin Christianity met eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. Is it possible that being on the frontier forced faith based communities to deal with other viewpoints, and this created the possibility for Christianity to be more tolerant of a variety of perspectives or for a Christianity whose prophet was not exactly divine, but more like Mohammed? Sixteenth century Poland was an amazing place. The union of Poland and Lithuania made it the largest kingdom in all of Europe. Moreover it was a kingdom that was governed by a monarch who was elected by the nobility. For the times, there was a tremendous amount of participation in government. But perhaps most critical was that it was a multi-lingual (at least six) and multicultural land from Swedes in the north to Tartars in the south - Lutherans to Sunni Muslims, plus the largest Jewish community in all of Europe. There is little research on this, but because of the book Andrea and I need to write on UU traditions, I have been ruminating on why our liberal faith appeared where and when it did.
While Poland had Catholic monarchs, its aristocracy was a well educated, politically powerful elite who were attracted by Protestant reform, but they also needed the cultural and religious milieu where dissent was possible. While the more Western European countries that we typically associate with enlightened reason remained relatively homogenous. Poland overflowed with the potential for engagement of people who were very different from each other. To engage in dialogue means you not only talk about tolerance, but that you actually need to be more understanding of other viewpoints. What is a common ground for these radical differences? At the least you allow them to exist peacefully. Perhaps because of this life on the boundaries where many faiths coexisted, including Islam, Judaism and an Eastern Orthodox Church with a history of being less rigid about the Trinity, you have a more tolerant atmosphere which may have resulted in Unitarianism. Religious toleration was established in Poland by the Confederation of Warsaw in 1573. It said as part of a new coronation oath, “I will preserve and maintain peace and quiet among those that differ with regard to religion, and will not in any way . . . suffer anyone to be influenced or oppressed by reason of his religion.” (Hewitt, 49) By contrast, Unitarianism was illegal in Britain until 1813.
The first Unitarian theological opinions to be voiced in Poland occurred when the non-Lutheran Protestants met in synod in 1556. These views were presented by Peter Gonesius, who had been influenced by an Italian humanist named Matteo Gribaldi. There were four significant things about Gonesius. When he got up to speak, he had a wooden sword strapped to his side. Then when he spoke, he shocked the assembled body by denying Jesus’ divinity, and by declaring that infant baptism was a sham. He and his radical followers were able to remain within the Reformed church for nearly ten years, but eventually a schism occurred and the anti-Trinitarians were rejected by the majority and forced to form their own synod, the Minor Reformed Church, or what today we would call the Unitarian Church. This was the genesis of the fourth crucial element of Gonesius’ faith; how do our separate faith communities live in the world? In the next few minutes I would like to consider how those four elements were established as the basis for a faith that endures with those essential principles in tact some 450 years later.
A few years prior to the rise of Luther, a group of Catholics were trying to reform the church. This disparate group, of whom some remained within the Catholic fold, and others fled to more tolerant places in Europe when the sword of the inquisition fell, were known collectively as Humanists. This is not to be confused with a 20th century rejection of God, but rather as a brand of humanism that called for a revival of interest in Classical literature and learning in general. They said that ideas and learning should be available to everyone. They said that the Bible was not full of dogmas that should be enforced by authority figures, but rather that it was a guide for living which each and every one of us should study. They lobbied for new, improved editions of the Bible, and when some of the earliest versions they translated did not include verses that were used to uphold the Trinity, scholars like Erasmus, published them that way, and were accused of heresy. They thought that people should be able to publish what they want and discuss what they want without fear of reprisal. They said use your mind, and your own reason to discern truth, rather than accept it as truth because the church says its truth.
What happened is that many of these humanists were Italians, and needless to say, the authority figure in Rome did not want them questioning things like the validity of the Trinity and the efficacy of Baptism. There is something radical about those hot blooded Italians. Look at our student minister! Many of these humanists were forced to flee Italy, and they found their way to such outposts as Transylvania and Poland, known as the heretic’s asylum. One would guess that they felt a little like Poland’s own native son, Czeslaw Milosz, who writes in “I Apologize,” “the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the mystery of Original Sin, the mystery of the Redemption are well armored against reason. In fact, they were to them, as we might echo, too, a complete mystery. But these humanists, like Milosz wanted a “middle place between abstraction and childishness where you can talk seriously about serious things.” And I think that is sometimes why we have used humor to talk about faith. We don’t know quite how to grasp the enormity of the questions because we have only learned childish or abstract ways to address them.
One of those Italians who had to run away was a lawyer, (see there is synchronicity here with Mark), and his name was Faustus Socinus. I have called him Firstus because he became the true leader of the Polish Reformers, and eventually gave them his name as the identifying mark of Unitarians, henceforth known as Socinians. Socinus said that the idea of Jesus as God is “repugnant to sound reason.” He believed that Jesus was totally human, but that God shared his divine power with him, making him an adopted deity who could be worshipped. Many of Socinus’ views were embodied in the Racovian Catechism. Published in 1605, the Catechism has been called the “most influential document in Unitarian history.” In question and answer format it is the confession of faith for the anti-Trinitarians in Poland, but its worldwide influence came after it was published in fifteen editions in five languages, including one in England dedicated to James I, who promptly had it burned.
In many ways those who independently interpreted the Bible using their own reason were following the logical outcome of Luther’s call for the priesthood of all believers. The radical, democratic impulse inherent in this idea had political ramifications that were much too radical for Luther. This had to do with issues of authority around the sacrament of baptism. Remembering that Jesus had been baptized as an adult, a group who came to be known as Anabaptists believed that only adults could make a faith choice, and that baptizing babies for the purposes of inducting them into the faith was wrong. Socinus went even further and said that even adult baptism did not need to be a prerequisite for membership in the church. Increasingly the seat of authority in religion passed from the church to the individual. Milosz echoes this when he says, “I am not, and I do not want to be, a possessor of the truth.” Those who smugly sit with their serenity of faith, he calls merely self-satisfied. Faith’s challenge should meet us where we are in our lives “amidst the crooked fences of a little town,” and not amongst gilded statues. Faith became a matter of individual reason and choice in the day to day lives we live here and now.
In our own time Czeslaw Milosz left Poland when he found the Communist Party destroyed the independence of the intelligentsia, and his work was censored. He and the Pope began corresponding over Milosz's treatise on theology and its justifications of evil. He wrote, "One of the things the pope said to me was, 'In your poetry, you take two steps forward and one step back.' I replied, 'Holy father, how in this century can I do otherwise?'" There have been centuries of violence, one on top of another, and yet in the founding moment of our liberal religious history, the man who first publicly uttered words of Unitarianism was wearing a wooden sword. This was the symbol for pacifism, that he would not take up a weapon and draw blood from another. War was never a solution for settling disputes. Violence was never a way to reach understanding. The sword was the standard dress for the nobility in that age, and so to substitute a wooden one sent a dramatic message. Following the example of the Hutterites, these early liberals believed they were living out the true Christian nonviolent path of meeting revenge with forgiveness, and hatred with love.
Yet their faith in Jesus’ simple message made them wonder if they could live these principles in the world, or would they, like the Hutterites, need to retreat from the world. Should they hold property in common? Could they serve the state in any way, or did they need to create a separate, purified community apart from the state. Feeling persecuted for their heretical views, many members of the Unitarian Polish Brethren, migrated to a new community called Rakow, which was created in 1569. Following the example of Plato’s Republic, they seriously pondered whether they needed to create this separate utopia, just as their descendants the Transcendentalists, would ask the same question here in New England. Can we live a just life in this fallen world? Even here with our church community, I often hear people ask whether we should have a caring community that offers sanctuary from the world, or do we engage with the world and transform it with our faith. Do we withdraw or not? Like More’s Utopia, which literally translates as “no place,” the Polish Brethren concluded that they could not withdraw, but rather must be engaged with the world. They asked themselves over and over again, what are the ethical demands of faith? They concluded that because they were in the world, they must work to reform the world empowered by faith. With this mission they gave us the foundation of our church. A open, caring community, that abides by freedom of inquiry, living by peaceful, cooperative means, in dialogue with others to bring about a world of justice and understanding.
There is an Hasidic tale called, “Only a Visitor.” Once some tourists from the United States were visiting Poland, They had heard about the famous Polish rabbi Hafez Hayyim, and managed to receive an invitation to visit him in his home. When the tourists arrived, they were surprised to see that the rabbi’s home was only one single room filled with books. His only furniture was a table and a bench. “Rabbi, where is your furniture?” they asked. “Where is yours?” replied the rabbi. “But we are only visitors here,” answered the tourists. “So am I, “ said the rabbi. So am I. Living on the periphery between one civilization and another meant that in 17th century Poland our ancestors could not live with the clinging baggage of conventional religion. Being a religious visitor means that you understand that we must keep searching for truth, and cannot live by convention alone. When you are free of all the furniture and baggage, it means can live a faith with the fullest integrity. Only the doubters remain faithful. What this sermon did not tell you was how Unitarianism was eventually outlawed from Poland, so that by 1660 Unitarians were either forced to convert or go into exile. Sometimes we forget the cost of freedom. Those in power did not think of everyone as visitors who needed to share the land and share their truths with others equally rather than make the weak conform or else. When will we free ourselves to have a simple faith and a simple life, to be free to pursue simple truths that we might together create a community grounded in peace and harmony? Let us be visitors on earth together, living that simple, loving faith of personal integrity and communal salvation that was born so long ago, and still is our charge to fulfill.

Closing words - from Rilke

I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.