First Parish of Watertown

“Walk in Beauty” by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - September 28, 2008

Opening Words from Ellen Sturgis Hooper

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?

Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.

Reading - from "Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan

Sermon - “Walk in Beauty” Mark W. Harris

My parents had little or no understanding of music or art, except to know what they liked. I don’t say that to be critical of them. No one ever taught them. It is just how it was. They didn’t know Bach from Beethoven from Brahms, and frankly neither do I. As a minister I have enjoyed learning something about music appreciation. My parents favored Lawrence Welk and Liberace, while I rocked on with the Beatles and Stones. The same was true of art appreciation in my house. My parents didn’t know Manet from Monet from Modigliani, and so our walls ended up being filled with what they liked, which was pictures of people, especially dead ancestors, but living ones, too. We had a few painted wooden eagles here and there to remind us that we lived in a Federal period house, but mostly what I remember is the portraits. There was this popular fad in the mid-twentieth century of taking photographs, and converting them to oil paintings, and so our living room was adorned with two large paintings of my parents. At some point my mother’s portrait which was reproduced from a photo taken sometime in her forties was replaced with another portrait based on a photo of her as a young nursing student when her hair was long, luxurious and black. Perhaps she wanted a representation of herself when she perceived that she was more beautiful. As I was growing up, other family matriarchs were added to the portrait gallery, and since I loved history and genealogy this was meaningful to me, too.

Last week when Andrea was waxing eloquently about England and their bizarre ways of drying clothes. I was reminded of what A. A. Gill, the author of The Angry Island, had said about art and England. He wrote that the English mistrust art because its meaning is not direct and clear. Art is emotional and can be voluptuous, and so the English prefer portraiture because all of it can be judged by one simple criteria - they want it to mean the same thing to everyone, like a chair, or steam engine or a picture of someone, which either looks like someone or doesn’t. So it is not really art, but instead requires only talents like craft and skill. It has been said the American artist John Singer Sargent had drawing skills like few people who have ever lived, but he lacked imagination, depth or meaning, and so his art consisted of well executed but empty portraits of rich people. So perhaps my parents, and many of us have inherited this English mistrust of art. We go for the simple and straight forward, and so many people marvel when they say the painting looks just like a photograph. The closest my parents got to art appreciation was when they discovered Andrew Wyeth. His stark portraits of people and houses was appealing to them because I think they saw as it as an extension of their love of portraiture and realism that would not fool them. They could understand its simplicity and direct imagery drawn from life experiences, and to them it was not emotional or abstract, even though Wyeth himself has used that latter word to describe his art.

The other portrait that filled our house was that classic picture of the Nordic looking Jesus with the long flowing, wavy hair outlining his serene, loving gaze. Our portrait was a desk model that had a little light that could shine on the image from above. As a boy, I suppose the idea was that this living room adornment would reinforce that Jesus loved me and all the children of the world, just as we sang in Sunday school, but I don’t think it was ever considered art like El Greco’s painting of “Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple” or Caravaggio’s “Supper at Emmaus,” or maybe it was. My own conversion to art appreciation occurred when I was assigned an elementary school project by the art teacher, who was this lanky, blond woman who would show up at my rural two room school house once or twice a week in this zippy little red MG. Her appearance for a variety of reasons was cause for celebration. While my skills at drawing was limited to stick figures, the opportunity to research, and assemble a booklet with photos of paintings I found in old magazines was exciting, as it combined many of the things I already loved, and in fact always have. I learned about artists and art history, but was also introduced to Vincent van Gogh.

Those paintings of his produced an emotional response in me, and this remains true today. When I look on the images I know I am moved. They shake my very soul. And so the corn fields seems to wave, and the sunflowers are bursting with life, but while the colors and thickness of paint are not the skillful reproduction of the perfect photographic image, there is something that sees through to the soul of the person like the poor, peasants in the Potato Eaters you can view here in Boston, or to the very heart of nature as in the famous Starry Night. This painting was the cause of our Harris family pilgrimage to New York a couple of years ago, as it had moved our youngest on sight, just as it had moved me so many years ago. There you see the dark night with the tree leaning skyward echoing the church steeple nearby, while all the stars vibrate in a night that is magically alive. To help children see and enjoy beauty in life and in art is to help them know what is holy.

As a young man van Gogh was a preacher whose calling did not work out so well, but he turned to painting pictures of those same peasants he ministered among. One of his biographers says, he described this as a kind of conversion experience: "Even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I had forsaken in my discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me." So his art became his religious expression of faith in God and the simple piety of the poor hardworking folks. This was a God who he said “was not dead or stuffed, but alive, urging us to love, with irresistible force. . . . Our purpose is self-reform by means of a handicraft and of intercourse with Nature -- our aim is walking with God." Van Gogh tried to capture what he saw of the infinite in the subjects of everyday life. "I prefer painting people’s eyes to cathedrals," he wrote, "for there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral, however solemn and imposing the latter may be -- a human soul, be it that of a poor beggar or of a street walker, is more interesting to me." When recounting the birth of a coal miner’s calf he described it as a sacred event, analogous to the birth of Christ, with the numinous quality of a beautiful painting. (1.) His Potato Eaters is a kind of communion of family dinner illuminated by the lamp of the table, which represents a “white light” that can shine in our lives. So for me as a young boy who had few skills at drawing or playing a musical instrument, there was still this inexpressible, sudden realization that I could feel this incredibly deep meaning that conveyed the beauty and wonder of life through works of art, and I would simply need to pursue something expressive that could transform me through observation, living, writing, decorating, gardening or cooking (which were my father’s creative outlets), or even adorning myself. There is the balanced discipline of learning a craft coupled with the flair of creativity. How could I express my creative spirit?

We Unitarian Universalists come out of a Protestant, and more specifically Congregational tradition, especially here in New England. That Puritan faith we evolve from was attempting to purify a church in England that had been Catholic up until the time when Henry VIII decided he wanted to get divorced, and create a new church with himself as the head. This week I was looking at a book called Stripping the Altars, which literally describes what the early Protestants in England hoped to do, but what the Puritans took even further. They were partly reacting against a church where no one could read, and so the Bible stories had been told in elaborate stain glass windows, and images of Jesus and other saints decorated the sanctuary in chapels and altars. The church had developed cults of saints, and venerated images and objects. The Puritans especially wanted to have a direct relationship with God, and so all of these images of the holy were rejected because the Bible told them that creating images of God was idolatrous. They did not pray to saints or expect that relics would provide special healing power, but rather wanted a direct experience of God, and thought they would feel that most powerfully by reading the word of God that they found in their Bibles. They rejected religious art because they didn’t need the holy represented for them, or to be told what it meant. They wanted to feel God directly in their lives through the impact of reading. So while it seems that Puritan meetinghouses are devoid of art because there are no statues, or stained glass, the emotional religious response is really two fold. You need to find God or the holy for yourself, and no priest is going to tell you what it is or what it looks like. You are the creative source of faith. And second, it needs to be directly experienced; it is not idealized in a cathedral or with stained glass, but in a simple dwelling that looks out on the world. This is what you have; each other or potato eaters in a humble home. The potter’s clay is yours to shape.

It could be that the English suspiciousness of art comes from this period when religious art was rejected. While it may simply seem like it is devoid of Jesus and Mary or any images because it is so stark or only word filled, there is also the possibility of a conversion like van Gogh had, so that the soul infuses all of life. The problem is that this kind of freedom is scary to many of us. We are afraid of the blinding light, and turn to alternatives to keep the spirit occupied. Perhaps the classic way of describing this is with the child who is given a pen or marker and told to draw. We have all seen the child who is uninhibited in use of color or line or expression, but we have probably also been the adult who wants to make sure that rules of reproducing exact, portrait like images are followed. How many of us say , “oh I can’t draw”, and therefore conclude that our ability to be artistic is thus non existent.

For many years a man named Tim Ashton was the UUA’s District Executive in this area. He knew me for a long time through work at the UUA, and then as minister in Milton, and finally here. Whenever Tim saw me after Andrea and I had started dating, he always made a comment on how sharp I was dressing, or how my clothes matched for the first time ever. He had known me as a drab, depressed and dumpy looking young minister, and now suddenly I was a fashionable, flashy and fit looking guy, well maybe not so flashy or fit, but at least I looked like I cared. The change occurred partly because I had a partner who knew what clothes went together, and made me aware that there were colors besides dark blue and green, but also because there was a change in me. I was in love. There was a change of heart. I had a direction and a devotion. I once preached a sermon here on Princess Diana, as a representation of beauty. By typical sexist standards, she was not a physical beauty, and yet her spirit, her vivaciousness, her obvious love of life made her beautiful, at least in the eye of this beholder.

One problem we all have is that the beauty that is our very being and the artistic expression of our soul’s beauty is not always easy to accomplish. In her novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison reflects upon the young black girl who learns that the idea of physical beauty in our culture is that you must have blue eyes, or you must be white. Morrison writes about our cultural ideal of beauty as one of “the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. (It) originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.” If the other girl was cute, then she was not. She lacked the thing that would have made her cute. Sometimes that inability to see our own beauty leads us to grasp at the shallow reflections of beauty that are found in the consumer culture. There is a classic scene in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where Daisy is with Gatsby and he begins to throw one shirt after another onto a bed - shirts of silk, and linen, in many colors and monogrammed in blue. Daisy bends her head into the shirts and begins to weep. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such- such beautiful shirts before.”

Some of us search for beauty in our appearance, and we try to alter our given beauty with an acquired beauty forged in the image of society and culture or we fear losing that natural or acquired beauty as we age, even as my mother symbolically did when she replaced one portrait with another. And some of us search for the artistic expression of that longing for beauty in our lives, and continually try to surrounded ourselves in the beauty of more and more acquisitions.
How do we draw that line between having the clothes that reflect the beauty we feel, and the clothes that may be beautiful but function as a shallow facade for an empty shell? The Puritans would have said the beauty of the old church was a facade of control and manipulation. It is obedience to false gods, and its art demands that you censor your feelings and passion in service to its authority. And while we may no longer be battling with the relics of the ancient church, we still have issues around manipulation. How can I live a beautiful life that breaks free of these manipulations to buy every day, or be a certain way?

I have been wanting this church to purchase matching chairs for a long time. I suppose we could go the old Yankee route and say use them up until they are all worn out, but in case you haven’t noticed, we have been losing about one purple chair a week to breakage. The old red chairs were useful for a long time, but they were purchased nearly 35 years ago. The purple ones are breaking and the folding ones are just plain old and ugly. I equate the way we look now with the way I use to look before I met Andrea. I was serviceable, but I look dumpy and unexciting. All matching chairs means not only that we match, but that we look sharp. We look welcoming. We look like we care. But beyond that it looks like we want to do something. We want to make a difference in the world. Our faith matters. If we are a church that just wants to exist to be serviceable and functioning, then we are a far way from striving for the creation of beauty in our ourselves and in our community. This is our sacred space. How is it going to reflect the beauty we want from life and religion? This is not Gatsby’s piles of facade, or altar pieces of coercion. This is the reflection that we are a vibrant people who are growing and building a strong congregation.

This past week Andrea and I received some church jokes via email . Among them was this: A Sunday School teacher began her lesson with a question, “Boys and Girls, what do we know about God? A hand shot up in the air. “He is an artist! said the kindergarten boy. Really? How do you know? the teacher asked. You know, Our father who does art in heaven . . .” After you snicker a little, I want you to reflect on doing art as an exercise in finding the holy in yourself. God does art in you. This past week after I finished teaching at Andover Newton, I picked up a little flyer about the chapel at school. On it was this poem from the second century church father Iraneus. I want you to not feel coerced by the language, but to listen: “It is not you who shape God; but God that shapes you. If then you are the work of God, await the hand of the artist who does all things in good time. Offer the Potter your heart, soft and pliable, and keep the form in which the Artist has fashioned you. Let your clay be moist, lest you become hard and lose the imprint of the Potter’s fingers.” What is given to you is good, and within that goodness, you must find the holy. I have never been much of a creative artist, but two summers ago at Ferry Beach, when I didn’t have to spend so much time teaching, Andrea and I worked with our boys and the art director to mold ocarinas, little flute like instruments. It was great fun, and they even made a noise when we finished. When our clay hardens, we may be working incessantly or doing our duty, and not take the time to mold something new that will make music in the world. We have lost touch with our emotional outlets. Sometimes I like to cook. Sometimes I like to write. But the beauty in us is that each of us can produce a lasting work of beauty - maybe it is your house or your garden, your apple pie or your ocarina. But we must be in touch with our hearts so that we can feel our passion.

It is not merely the skill of learning a craft, it the is freedom in your soul to discover a fresh way to look at something, a fresh way to create something, or even perhaps a fresh way to look. Frank Lloyd Wright was America’s greatest architect. Today in our reading you heard a fictionalized version of his relationship with Mamah Cheney. While they each may have lacked the commitment and dedication to stay with their original married partners, what they did do was remind us of the balance we need in our lives that when we become too rigid in living, the clay loses its moistness, and beauty and passion drift out of our lives. In the novel, Wright tells Mamah: “You’ve talked about your longing to find that thing - that gift - which makes your heart sing.” Most of us don’t have the luxury of living free in nature like Frank LLoyd Wright, but it does remind us to live with a passion for life. A fullness of living is what will help each of us feel and know what is holy. We do art with our lives. We seek beauty all around us - in the passions we express - in the beauty we exude, by the warmth of our love in the presence of each other. Life makes artists of us all, as we create new passion in our lives. Let us feel and express the beauty within urging us to live and love with irresistible force.

Closing Words - Navaho poem

In Beauty may you walk.
All day long may you walk.
Through the returning seasons may you walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may you walk.
With grasshoppers about your feet may you walk.
With dew about your feet may you walk.

With Beauty may you walk.
With Beauty before you, may you walk.
With Beauty behind you, may you walk.
With Beauty above you, may you walk.
With Beauty below you, may you walk.
With Beauty all around you, may you walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,
lively, may you walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,
living again, may you walk.
It is finished in Beauty.
It is finished in Beauty.

Notes:
 1. “From Preaching to Painting: Van Gogh’s Religious Zeal” by Kathleen Powers Erickson

"Cupboard Dry"

The First Parish of Watertown

September 21, 2008

The Rev. Andrea Greenwood


Opening Words

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Spoken Meditation (by Ellen Bass)

Pray to whoever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah, raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekinhah, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.

Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, Record Keeper
of time before, time now, time ahead, pray. Bow down
to terriers and shepherds and siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Pray to the bus driver who takes you to work,
pray on the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus
and for everyone riding buses all over the world.
If you haven't been on a bus in a long time,
climb the few steps, drop some silver, and pray.
Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latté and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.

If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
Pray to the angels and the ghost of your grandfather.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheel chair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer that as the earth revolves
we will do less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas, pray for peace.

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card. Gnaw your crust
of prayer, scoop your prayer water from the gutter.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.


Reading From The Angry Island A.A. Gill

Seen from one thousand feet above, England’s most striking feature is its greenness..... Towns and cities look like gray islands in a stained glass sea of green connected by a web of road and rail that elegantly picks its way round the contours of real rural England.

The green greening greenwood, greensleeves, greenbelt, green wellies, greengage, green cross, green room, green-house, green-fingered nature of England is its abiding legend, its central parable. England is at heart and hearth in its collective self-belief a country country. This green and pleasant land. The urban is the aberation, the bald patch in the verdant growth. England has no creation myth; there is no event or person from which the idea of nation germinates...... The closest England comes to having a do-it-all hero is Robin Hood, whose myth still speaks to much in the English.

Robin Hood in his Lincoln green is the evocation of an older, deeper silent keeper of England, Hern the Hunter --the Green Man....Shakespeare wrote about him.... He is the ghostly huntsman who protects certain forests with a pack of spectral hounds. His appearance is neither necessarily good nor evil, just often chaotic and contrary.

Green is the color of magic and spells, and the green man now is seen most commonly as a pub sign, but his face appears carved in the ornate masonry of medieval cathedrals. He’s half man and half tree, but it’s not clear if he is flesh becoming vegetable or vegetable becoming human. He is subtly both corruption and a rebirth, potency and death. He is the ancient English spirit, and it is his nature to be camouflaged, hidden in the dapple of the wood.

The green man is a spirit who inhabited the great forest.... ; the original old England of secret glades and darkness. Forest people have a more ambivalent and mysterious relationship with nature than pastoralists. The forest is gone now; the English cut it down and grew in its place a landscape of their own design... and few would recognize the green man in England’s life now. But you can see the life and the belief that first created and nurtured him all around you. He is the spirit of gardening......

Gardening is the great English cultural expression... and their great contribution to civilization. Gardens in England began with the Church; from monasteries. An enclosed garden led to English flowerbeds; a walled garden was a secret place of contemplation, tranquillity and delicate blossoms, a cage for a princess, a stage where ladies could be suprised, or where they could linger.... It is the perfect aesthetic for the Protestant English. ... They mistrust art unless it is wrapped in a layer of craft. They know how to appreciate the making; it is the hand, you see, not the head....

The garden came as a revelation to the English; it literally sprang from the Bible. To toil in the garden is neither art nor truly craft; it isn’t farming; it is in a category all its own.... It is the seed of Eden; the time of innocence and purity. The English garden is a profound and silent parable. You make without creating; you toil without payment... it is pure, a divine blessing, a psalm of nature.

... But there is in the English garden a particular shade of melancholy. a remembrance of something lost... It revisits the perfect place where sin was born.

English gardens transform England from a secret forest to a new Eden.

Sermon

“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst..” I didn’t write that. Ralph Waldo Emerson did, a hundred eighty years ago, in the middle of a summer like the one we just had; where spring is skipped over and we go straight to heat in June. It was in the 90s early on that year, and humid, and he probably meant what he said: breathing felt like a luxury. I found myself wondering what he would have said if he was the chief officer in charge of laundry. Sure, we can pontificate about breathing, turn it into a spiritual discipline, even, but when you have to climb into a bed with damp sheets, a slightly more traditional kind of discipline shows its appeal.

This summer, it rained every day. I know this because each time I hung out the clothes to dry, a thunderstorm would come up and soak everything; making the clothes far wetter than they had been when I removed them from my energy efficient water saving washer. I might be exaggerating about the rain coming every day; but on the days it didn’t rain, the sky itself was sweating. My clothes truly were drier in the machine, which twists the clothes so that they have less water in them, than they were outside. The washer is made with the assumption that we will use a dryer, and so it aims to minimize how long the dryer needs to run. Dryers, in case you didn’t know, are a contemporary evil. They are the single largest energy drain in almost every household.

So I have been forgoing my dryer, and hanging out clothes. I like this work. I have always been fond of necessary tasks that force me to be outside. I have trouble enjoying anything if it doesn’t accomplish something. Line-drying also reminds me of my childhood. Who wouldn’t smile at the image of playing hide and seek between the strung sheets; the clean smell and that fabulous snapping sound like flags in the wind? And I love when all sorts of colored t-shirts are pinned up, like tickets on a prayer wheel; like the ribbons on a maypole.

But this summer I started having other memories; less beautiful and spiritual ones, like rushing to get the almost-dry clothes in before they were completely drenched, and creating a bigger mess than the previous starting point. Dirty laundry is bad enough; WET laundry that you have already cleaned once is worse. Sometimes my mother would either kid herself, or lose track of what dry feels like, and so we might open the top drawer to that nasty scent of wet socks. The worst was sliding in to bed and feeling clammy all over, like you were joining a ghost of fog; wearing a wet shroud. I also remembered England.

We went to northern England on an exchange nine years ago. The house had no dryer. It had a garden, as they would say, so small that there was no permanent clothesline; just a hole in the ground in which to insert the pole which was kept leaning up against the back of the house. We had to make a transatlantic call for help finding this hole, which seems crazy in a yard that was 70 square feet, but it is true. And once we found it, we never took the clothesline down for the rest of the summer. Our garden was a permanent laundry room. Every day, before we left for whatever historic site was on the docket, I would wait for the wash to finish so I could hang it out to dry, and every day the laundry remained wet. Sometimes it might have dried, and then got wet again, but I wasn’t home to get it in off the line when the steady drizzle became more like a shower. It rains a lot in England, you know.

We had children who were not yet toilet trained. We had an infant who could grab spoons, but not find his mouth. We went on trips every day, no matter what the weather. The local bakery sold gingerbread men with a potent blue frosting. which always landed face down in the lap of my toddler. We had a lot of laundry. But not necessarily a lot of clothes. But this is how the local people lived, and so we did too. I definitely came to understand why nylon is a more popular fabric there. We got used to be slightly dirty, slightly damp, or both. I often think this experience ended up setting the tone for our appearance permanently: one does conclude, after a while, “why bother?”

Four years later, we went to England again. This time we did have a dryer. The house had a much bigger garden, and so we had a clothesline, too; and I did use it, but we had an odd problem. It turns out that the area behind the clothesline was a favorite spot for homeless women to sleep, and they considered bedding hung to dry on the line a gift from the universe. When I mentioned this problem to the church administrator, I got a lecture on how there are no homeless people in England; there are just what are called “rough sleepers”; people who choose to bed down in the out of doors. I can usually tell when I am in over my head, and this was one of those times. This was not a problem I had the tools to solve. All I could think of was a conversation about window screens during our previous English sojourn, and our host’s explanation that the English do not need screens because they do not have insects. Having made no headway then, despite being able to provide very concrete evidence, I admitted defeat and decided to just use the dryer instead.

Just as we had done five years earlier, we waited to leave for our daily adventure until after the wash was done. Then I would pop it in the dryer and head off for a train ride to the British Museum, or the Natural History Musuem, or the National Gallery. And when we got home, no matter how many hours later it was, the dryer would still be running. At first I thought the dryers just took longer there -- the washers do, so perhaps three or four hours is normal here, I thought. Then one day we were gone for about twelve hours, and the dryer was STILL running. I began taking the fear of dryer fires more seriously. In fact, they began to seem inevitable. And the anxiety I felt over the near constant running of the appliance was unnerving. It seemed high time for me to learn the intricacies of this machine, so I studied every setting and switch, trying to figure out how I could get the dryer to run for a reasonable amount of time. I had assumed a kind of heierachy to the settings -- short to long, light to heavy; or the reverse. But a deeper examination led to complete confusion. What on earth did “Cupboard dry” mean? Dry enough to put in a closed space, I thought. But no -- on that setting, clothes were damp. There was a setting called “Mangle dry/ flannel.” I was proud of myself for knowing that “flannel” meant towels and face cloths, so surely that setting was comparable to our heavy one. But again, no. Jeans were sopping wet; just warmer. I could not figure out any logic to the order the settings were in. Cupboard dry seemed to be the standard from which things varied -- there was a setting called extra cupboard dry, but I could not figure out why the machine kept going forever, seemingly without drying past a certain stage. I started to feel stupid. I started to think that the manufacturers of British dryers were stupid. And that the British public was wrong to put up with this; or perhaps they just didn’t know what dry meant -- centuries of rain on their garden laundry lines had them convinced that damp was the way to be. And I was increasingly annoyed with the pervasive attitude among the Brits that Americans were wasteful hogs who were responsible for global warming. For crying out loud, this little country was full of dryers that would not stop!

It turns out that I was ahead of the curve in identifying a real problem. In England over the past twenty years, dryers have made inroads: An appliance that was rare a generation ago is fairly common now -- and even in the past seven years there have been changes. People I knew who had dryers before stored theirs outside under plastic tarps, because there was both no room in the kitchen and no way of venting. But technological advances have made it quite common to own a dryer with a condensor, requiring no venting, so it can be kept inside. It turns out that is the kind of machine we had in London. And because they are not vented, the damp, hot air remains in the machine. Clothes do not dry all the way, and the machines run forever. And as a result of this new luxury, the carbon footprint of British households has expanded dramatically, and the BBC now has a website urging people to return to the traditional ways.

In general, I think most of us do long to return to our traditional ways. But we don’t mean we want to assess the weather and our schedules and spend an extra few hours on the task at hand. We mean we want that feeling of peace and of having done the right thing; we want that sensory experience of fresh air and wind with a visual component; that connection to generations of our ancestors living harmoniously with the elements. It is a kind of pastoral idealism in which nature helps us, consoles us, and in which it is our birthright to feel good. And so day after day of rain, or the presence of people who sleep under the stars and could use some sheets, become not only what they are -- natural facts, or social inequities which present challenges to us -- they also become a threat to our belief systems about how the universe is put together and to our perceptions of human nature. In England, or in this refulgent summer, I grew anxious and defensive not because I could not get what I needed. We were able to get our clothes dry. It was just that I couldn’t get them dry without confronting the cost.

Perhaps this is as it should be. We all need reminders that individual choices are an illusion; we are part of an integrated whole, and what we do effects not only one another, but the planet. This is a theological issue, and it is one that fascinates me -- not least because of the way it becomes politicized. Somewhere along the line it became the norm to expect to be able to live effortlesly; to be able to have food and clean clothing and amusements of so many kinds at will; without time or trouble; without paying attention. When we complain about laundry or dinner, we are not talking about hauling water or setting it to boil so we can scrub; we are not talking about plucking chickens or weeding our vegetable patches while the dough rises. We mean we resent the fifteen minutes it takes to fold the clothes, or to cook the food we bought after it was shipped across the globe. In the reading this morning, A.A. Gill called the English garden the “perfect place where sin was born.” It is a lovely line in its evocation of Eden, but the stronger part of the message is not about traditional theology. It is the domestication of evil; about the part of the wilderness that we trap by trying so hard to tame it. It is a paradox: a description of beauty in one sense; of charity and nurturing what is given. but it is also an description of sin; of futility; of working endlessly but gaining no sustenance.

So how are we to be saved? I want to achieve it through works -- by forgoing a dryer; by using canvas bags; by recycling; by not buying everything under the sun; by turning off all the lights my family keeps turning on. I want to live in harmony with the natural world. But nature is not the encryption of divinity. This is hard for those of us who grew up wearing Earth shoes and stalking the wild asparagus; those who find the buds bursting and grass growing evocative of God. But the truth is, nature is not going to give me clean dry clothes. It is going to make me work overtime, and then rain all over everything. One could look at the American suburban dream house as a refuge against this fact, just like the tamed garden. Home move theaters, internet access, wine cellars, in-home gyms and basement freezers make it so we never need leave -- but you do have to ask what this says about our perception of the world outside our walls. When we criticize these types of homes and lifestyles, it is usually about consumerism, or greed. But those are actually side effects of the real problem, which is the containment. Life cannot be ordered so perfectly; cannot be packaged so beautifully. But going back to the garden -- walking as much as possible, eating locally, air drying -- these things do not save us. The garden is a subtle testament to the fact that the wilderness is scary and unpredictable and must be tamed; the gated communities reveal our fear of engagement; of ever needing anyone.

I have to confess I am having a hard time not adopting the talking style of John McCain. What we need, my friends... My friends, I would like to tell you that it is all going to be okay, but my friends, there are more battles to be fought.... I did purposefully choose a domestic topic, the laundry, and tie it to a story of man’s fall from grace. Women have been blamed for things for a long time now, and the current political scene is fanning the flames. It was twenty years ago this month that the Harvard Business Review printed an article which gave us the concept of “the mommy track”, and if this election process has given us anything, it is proof that we have a long way to go. The one female candidate left taps into our mythologies of small town America; the pastoral dream of a perfect place where we grow our food and watch our children and keep everyone safe. This narrative conveys meaning -- even though none of it is true. We are not a country where people live in small towns; we primarily live in suburban sprawl. We do not grow our own food; we actively promote agribusiness and warehouse shopping. We do not watch our kids; we program them. But this image of who we are and what it means speaks powerfully to many Americans, because it offers salvation: it looks backwards to cultural tradition and myth; it keeps America contained. We can get out, but we do not have to let anything that will change us in. It is an image that keeps the wilderness at bay without acknowledging that we are using paradoxical definitions of nature: outside of America, nature and human nature are evil, a threat, and need to be tamed or beaten into submission. But here, humanity is made in God’s image, and nature serves us. It is our playground, an endless resource.

I think this is where we liberals can grow, religiously. We tend to downplay the wilderness; the place of suffering where tribes were sent to wander endlessly. We focus on the failed governmental response to natural disasters, or the human factors which contributed, and skip over the fact that nature is brutal and uncaring, and relies on cycles of creation and destruction. It is a walled off view of nature as sanctuary; and we have to confess it is not the whole truth. We end up subtly participating in this pastoral view of America, and it leaves us at a loss when we need to engage with real issues of violence in the world. It is not enough to say that nature is good and people are good. We do not really want to tie our worth as human beings to whether or not we hang out our clothes or commute by bicycle. It is all more complicated than that. Even in my closed English garden, the rough sleepers found their way in. What of me must find its way out?

For a time in England, I valued accomplishing the task at hand -- laundry -- more than saving the planet or helping the homeless who were right in front of me. And I got kind of mad at being put in the position of choosing. Maybe this can help me understand some of what is happening as we look for a new leader. The divisions among us in this country are huge, and I think the anger masks tremendous pain, because we are all falling, and we don’t know where it will end, or how we will get back up. Salvation is a difficult concept for many of us. I really never understood it: saved from what? Suddenly, yesterday, I realized that the word is a medical term -- it means healing, as in “salve”; a soothing ointment that protects a body from infection when the skin is broken open. Salvation doesn’t have to mean that one place is damned and another place is perfect; it can mean that as we move between places, we can be cared for, treated; the open places can be soothed until new skin grows; new connections are made. Human life begins when Adam and Eve leave the enclosed garden. The perfection is broken, but they are delivered into real life; a life in which relating to eachother is the only hope. Talking about what saved them is talking about how to stay alive in a world which is scary and painful and in which the very things that liberate us force us to leave the feeling of safety behind, and to learn new ways of taking care as we are all falling in a universe that keeps growing. Maybe we are saved as we learn how to suffer; to admit that we are afraid and do not want to be cast out, but that we must go.

What does it mean to be falling? Surely it is not always bad. I think of my children who love rollercoasters. Isn’t that falling, and rising, and falling again? You can’t have fallen if you were not above something; if you are down, there is nowhere to go but up. It is a word that brings together our highest aspirations and the ground; that mountaintops where the secrets of the universe are revealed, and the dirt where snakes are denied the possibility of ever getting high enough to fall at all. There is some pleasure, then, in falling -- in the dizzy rolling upended experience. Maybe it doesn’t teach us anything, but it acclimates us to what life feels like. It can be terrifying; and it is deadly; but it is not ONLY that. Life gives us tasks that do make us wish to retreat, to live safely in a place we know. But it also gives us astonishing joy.

Two weeks ago I was doing a wedding. It was going to rain, but the big storms held off. It seemed like we would be okay. It was humid. Everyone except the bride was there. The groom and I paced around, assessed things. Groomsmen began undressing; toweling their foreheads. Then the bride was there. We took our places. And waited. The drizzle turned heavy. A cell phone call created a buzz, but no one came to the front to tell me what was happening. Thunder boomed. The organist started recycling music. Guests who needed to use the toilet had to walk across the chancel. Finally, an announcement: The bride’s mother was ten minutes away. Then another announcement: the bride’s mother was lost. It was now pouring, and an hour late, and I could see the therapy bills mounting for the bride talking about her mother. Finally, she showed up, and the wedding started, but it did not feel good. I was soaked through with sweat, everyone in the chapel was anxious, and it just was not good. But after all the introductory talk about why we were there, love, etc. etc., the groom started crying, and all of the bad feeling in the chapel evaporated. No one would have said that this is what they were waiting for, but it was. Those tears saved us, reminding us as they did of love; of being so moved by
what life was offering him that all the anxiety just flew away and finally, we were all there together, in the moment, and it was beautiful. And it would not have happened if the mother of the bride had been on time. So, there was grace; but before that there was something more like falling; of seeing just how complicated this new relationship might be, and it gave way to love that felt real.

And that, my friends, is worth everything.


Closing Words

Deep peace of the running wave to you; Deep peace of the flowing air to you;
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you; Deep peace, deep peace.

Deep peace of the morning dew to you; Deep peace of the wandering wind to you;
Deep peace of the sleeping stones to you; Deep peace, deep peace.

Pure green of the emerald grass to you; Pure red of the whirling flame to you;
Pure white of the silver moon to you; Pure peace, pure peace....

“Beliefs that Bond” - Mark W. Harris

September 14, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown

Call to Worship - “Theodicy” by Czeslaw Milosz

No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.
Desire will not save the morality of God.
If he created beings to choose between good and evil,
and they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,
Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,
Which would find its explanation only by assuming
The existence of an archetypal Paradise
And a pre-human downfall so grave
That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.

In the world of good and evil that we inherit we must ask what will we choose this day? In our Unitarian Universalist tradition we aspire to live our lives in service to beauty, truth and right.

Reading - from March by Geraldine Brooks

Sermon - “Beliefs that Bond” - Mark W. Harris

Over the summer I began reading the longest book I have ever read. Now bear in my mind that I try to set a limit for myself of 250 pages, as I am not a very fast reader. Part of the reason for this is that I am a historian, a facts kind of guy, so I generally read nonfiction. I like to absorb what I am reading. Unfortunately the summer is only two months long, and here we are mid-September, and I have only read 650 pages, and have a couple hundred to go. I’ll get there before winter. The book is a fairly new history of the antebellum United States called What Hath God Wrought.” I suppose that title could be interpreted in a number of ways, but it is taken from a quotation by Samuel F. B. Morse who upon inventing the telegraph expressed this divinely established inquisitiveness. The author of this book, Daniel Walker Howe, places much of his interpretation of the transformation of 19th century America upon a communication and transportation revolution - think of that telegraph along with canals, trains, newspapers, magazines, advertising and mass culture. We often look at the past in the context of the present, and perhaps some might see that we are in the midst of another communications revolution that has truly transformed our society.

Yet even more symbolic for me has been the discussion of the presidency of Andrew Jackson. It has both given me hope that we can survive such a violent, racist, self serving, power hungry Presidency, but it has also made me despair that things have not changed much, and the people get, as we say, what they deserve. I suppose in my own self-serving way I have pondered the life of John Quincy Adams, the Unitarian, who was the good, moral, earnest President who was defeated by Jackson. Here was a man with a vision for America who had a firm understanding of issues, and yet he lost to a cult of personality around a president who destroyed the national bank, viciously relocated Native Americans and extended slavery. Jackson campaigned against Washington DC, as a man of the people, but he really had nothing to offer and what he desired was the accumulation of his own personal power. As is true today, they practiced the politics of pettiness, and so personal attacks and meaningless accusations take up the focus of the rhetoric and the publicity, and we ignore the fact that it would be nice if somebody did have a vision or knew what they were doing. Perhaps I had better not say anymore, or I might be accused of violating the separation of church and state.

I suppose the wider issue is how we protect ourselves and our values, and envision a more just, peaceful and compassionate future in a time in history when national candidates ignore the human role in global warming and want to simply drill some more, or give themselves the prerogative to attack whomever they wish because they believe God’s will is their own, and woe to other nations who behave as we do. Perhaps it comes down to the eternal question of theodicy that Czeslaw Milosz ruminates about in the opening words - how do we reconcile the existence of evil or suffering in the world with a belief in an all powerful or all loving God, or at the least, a wonderful creation where we are blessed with countless opportunities for fulfillment. Of course we know there are undeserved tortures and tragedies, and it may even seem sometimes that a diabolic power is behind it all. No, I don’t mean Karl Rove. How do we respond to such human destructiveness?

One of my other hopes this summer, in addition to reading my big book, was to attend three special exhibits at area museums. I managed to attend all three, making it to the final one last Thursday, just days before it closed. This exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum was called “Wedded Bliss.” In pictures, dress, artifacts, decorations and more it told the story of how weddings have been and still are celebrated all over the world. The exhibit was rife with symbolic items that were meant to preserve and protect the relationship, and ensure its fulfillment in a long, loving relationship, the successful birth of children and economic stability. I was especially intrigued by different kinds of protective clothing. In recent decades we have often interpreted the wearing of bridal veils the same way we have described head coverings for Muslim women, the hajib, as oppressive and backward. While it may reflect sexist assumptions about bridal exclusiveness and chastity, this type of clothing was also worn symbolically as a protection against evil spirits or influences. In fact in one video we saw of a wedding from Morocco, it was the man who had his head covered to protect him from evil, while he stayed in a protective tent for three days before the wedding. One amazing bridal coat from Pakistan was decorated with tiny pieces of mirror in order that the evil spirits would be reflected back upon the perpetrators. So head coverings in wedding clothing are much more than the preservation of sexual repression by the male of the female, they are symbolically protective of harmful things that the couple may encounter. They reflect a hope that this couple may stay safe from all the slings and arrows of an often unkind world.

This summer I also had a chance to see a wonderful movie called “Arranged.” In fact, I liked it so much I want to show it here for an Adult Youth Popcorn theology session, which we will do after the first of the year. Arranged tells the story of two young women who are growing up in America in very traditional religious families; one an orthodox Jew, and the other Muslim. The two women, Rochel and Nasiria, befriend one another while dealing with family members who are try to arrange marriages for them. They both have horrible experiences with their initial proposed arrangements. Nasiria is set up with an older man, who is a friend of her fathers whom she has never met before, and Rochel’s various arranged dates are with in serial order the most awkward or self-centered or disgusting group of young men you have ever seen. The problem is that both women wish to affirm their strong religious faith, and moral and ethical commitments to family and tradition, and yet they wish to live in the modern world, where Jews and Muslims can become friends, and they can make choices about who they marry. I thought it was a good movie for liberals to see, since it sometimes seems that we too often interpret strong statements of faith as something to be rejected as old fashioned, or repressive.

We see the consequences of this kind of overt rejection of tradition in the film, when Rochel goes to a party at her cousins apartment where alcohol is flowing, pot is being inhaled, and the dancing is a invitation for young people to hook up. Rochel does not like the scene, but she also has a conversation with the cousin who speaks about what she has lost in the rejection of her orthodox faith. She says simply, “I miss the family.” Many of us know from experience that it is sometimes difficult to reconcile modern values with traditional faith stances, and that is why we chose Unitarian Universalism. But these young women want to try. The message for us as religious liberals is not simply that we should respect those who value religious tradition, but that in fact when you make a commitment to Unitarian Universalism you join a faith tradition that while not orthodox in its theology, is in fact orthodox in its centuries long commitment to justice, equality and freedom, and that we may indeed be called upon to risk everything to preserve those deeply felt religious values. We sometimes falsely believe that becoming or being Unitarian Universalist does not mean anything - no beliefs, do what you want, a who cares kind of religion. But in fact it demands everything, not in terms of believing, but in learning about the world, in living in community with others, and in loving others. It asks us to truly live our faith.

Every year I share with groups of students my knowledge of Unitarian Universalist history. We begin with early advocates of Unitarianism in Europe who implored monarchs and nobles, priests and peasants to respect and honor all holders of religious traditions who lived within their homelands, each of whom had their own understanding of God and faith, to live together in harmony. Then they sometimes died in prison or at the stake for their advocacy of freedom of belief. We are proud of this heritage of people who fought for freedom and tolerance. Our faith has endured at great cost. From Transylvanian bishop Francis David, our founder who died in prison in a cold, castle fortress, to Michael Servetus who died at the stake, to Norbert Capek who sacrificed his life in a Nazi concentration camp, to James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo who died at the hands of racists in Mississippi, one clubbed with a bat, another whose car was run off the road, the costs of advocating freedom have been great.

On Monday, I will be speaking with a friend and colleague of Andrea’s and mine named Gordon Gibson. Gordon served a church in the South during the civil rights era, a dangerous time for any advocate of equality, but especially for one who was trying to integrate his church in a segregated land. He is retired now, and chose to make Knoxville, Tennessee his home. In late July this past summer, on a beautiful Sunday morning he was attending church there at the Tennessee Valley UU Church. Some 200 other people were there in church, including a large number of young people putting on a performance of “Annie.” A man suddenly appeared while the children lined the front of the sanctuary. Out of his guitar case he pulled a sawed off shotgun, and began firing. Two people were killed, and seven others gravely injured. The incident might have resulted in more causalities, and the injured might have included children, except that a giant of a man, physically and spiritually, the usher for the day, Greg McKendry offered up his body to protect the children, throwing himself directly into harm’s way; echoing the scriptural passages - “except that a man lay down his life for his friends. Greater love has no man than this.” Others soon smothered the shooter, and prevented him from getting off more shots. Afterwards our friend Gordon spoke of the intense courage he experienced that Sunday; the courage of the usher to sacrifice his life; the courage of the others to tackle the shooter; the courage of the entire congregation. When violence erupted they did not panic. They protected the innocent. They stopped the violence as best they could. They held one another.

Soon after I heard about this horrible and tragic event in Knoxville, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be in a room where a person is shooting randomly at others, trying to kill and wound as many as possible. After the attack, the police learned that he was motivated by a purported hatred of liberalism, and by extension homosexuality. He had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country. One columnist called the attack an act of terrorism. The minister of the TVUU Church said the man tried to divide us by hatred into liberal and conservative, gay and straight, and certainly an act such as this can make us fearful of being UU. Your fellow UUs were violently assaulted simply for being Unitarian Universalist. The minister there said rather than bringing about separateness and anger this act reminded everyone of the preciousness of children, the sacredness of life, and the value of true friendship and family and neighbors. Instead of shattering a church community, it inspired them to protect their house of faith and its people even more, and preserve it for future generations as a beloved community where people truly listen to each other, care for one other and support one another.

Acts like this can make us run away. National and local politics can make us run away in alienation and fear and frustration and hopelessness. Or we can remember the courage and fortitude of our forebears, and our living members today, and vow to not let our principles be compromised, not let our voices be silenced, and not let our love be held back. We would open our arms to each other, and heal this broken world of ours, and we would begin with ourselves and each other. In our reading today you heard from the fictionalized father of the March girls, first made famous as the absentee parent in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Here in Geraldine Brooks novel March is an army chaplain. In the reading he is saying how he feels incapable of celebrating his homecoming because he thinks of all those who will never live to make it home. He is literally paralyzing himself into a man incapable of greater action or self-acceptance because he is wallowing in his perceived inability to be the most courageous hero of all who should have saved everybody. He hears that he is not God, and thus not capable of determining every outcome in a world where events and people can confound us at every turn. Living in community is frustrating and harrowing. People violate our personal and community boundaries all the time with their own self-serving needs and desires, and we can end up completely frustrated that we cannot fix everything, and thus feel like a total failure. Or we can do as Mrs. March suggests? He could accept or understand that he did do a great deal to save lives. Others must do their part, too. To believe in something and then try your best, to act as decisively as you can, that is what counts. She says the reprehensible thing would have been not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your being felt was wrong. That would have been the personal tragedy; the great sin. March followed with all his heart what he sincerely believed.

I recall feeling a little like this after traveling to Washington during the Vietnam War for a demonstration. I was there for the big rally after the Cambodian invasion, but I left on a Sunday to go back to college. The next day I heard that many of the demonstrators had been arrested, and were being held in makeshift chain link fences. I felt guilty that I had not done enough, and was not arrested with the others. But perhaps I also should have reminded myself that I was committed to helping to end this war. That I had gone to Washington, and that even perhaps finishing my education was a good choice to make. Like March heard from his wife, the important thing is that we defend our convictions with courage, and we not compromise our beliefs, or live a lie, or not speak up when equality or justice or peace is threatened. In that amazing book, To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus Finch feels this threat of not being true to his convictions when it is suggested that the truth be covered up. Atticus says, “Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him . . . if I connived at something like this, frankly, I couldn’t meet his eye, and the day I couldn’t do that I’ll know I’ve lost him. I don’t want to lose him and Scout, because they’re all I’ve got.” When our values are threatened, we , too, remember that the next generation is all we have.

For centuries our faith has called upon people to live their convictions with honesty and integrity, and to not be afraid of any authority - individual or state. Defending freedom and equality will in the end make us all one, all able to live together, and no man with a shotgun, no person holding political power can destroy our faith in the struggle for peace and justice. There is evil in the world.- people vent their personal despairs and fears and failures in horrible ways. So do groups and nations. We all need places we are loved. We all need places where we can feel safe to be who we are, to speak our truth. Like the veil of marriage , may this community be your veil of safety against evil and sadness and despair. May you find friends here, and arms that hold and words that uphold. Your beliefs matter. Your beliefs as Unitarian Universalist are strong arms of love against the hates of the world. May this be the place where you celebrate those beliefs. May this be the place where you vow to enact those beliefs in the world.


Closing Words - from Olympia Brown

Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals. Which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message. That you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives and loves.