Monkey Mind

The American Republican party held its first national meeting on this day in 1856.

It began with a great intuition about human dignity. Not unlike that event I noticed yesterday from eight years earlier.

Interesting times, no doubt.

And neither dream seems to have quite lived up to their hopes.

But, while those other guys’ dream failed pretty much upon application, at least the Republican’s had Lincoln before the dream was sat upon…

The Communist Manifesto was first published on this day in 1848.

Thought you might like to know.

Also, if you aren’t familiar with the inside of that little book, this isn’t a half bad introduction to their thesis…

I was thirteen.

I was thrilled.

I still am…

ONE WORLD AT A TIME
A Meditation on Unitarian Universalism, Rational Religion & the Great Humanist Way

James Ishmael Ford

19 February 2012

First Unitarian Church
Providence, Rhode Island

Text

Darkness within darkness
The gateway to wisdom.

Tao Te Ching

Last Thursday evening Jan and a host of us from church drove over to Cranston to join the throng hoping to influence the School Committee’s decision whether to appeal the lower court ruling that the prayer banner on display at Cranston High School West be removed. As an admirer of young Jessica Alquist’s principled and constitutionally informed stand on behalf of minority views, I was glad for how it all turned out, if not quite so sanguine about what many people said or did during the hearing.

I was distressed at how both atheism and humanism were blamed for pretty much all the ills we experience today. Of course, the way the human brain sometimes works, it reminded me of a joke.

I’m sure you’ve heard it in one variation or another. The set up is simple as pie. A man is caught in a terrible automobile accident. It takes the jaws of life to extract him from the mangle. He’s on the stretcher, the EMTs look him over and one says to the other, “It doesn’t look good. Should I call a priest?” The other EMT notices a button with a flaming chalice on his jacket, and says, “No. He’s a Unitarian Universalist. Call a math teacher.”

Now, I think the spirit, the worthy point that hides within this joke is also expressed within something Henry David Thoreau once said. When asked his opinion about the afterlife, Henry replied, “One world at a time.” Call a math teacher. One world at a time. When people think of Unitarian Universalists they often think humanism. In light of the harsh things said about humanism at that meeting, perhaps it would be good to pause and think about it.

Today I want to talk about humanism, what it means, and what it has to do with us as a community of faith. And today seems particularly appropriate to do so. Not only is it in the wake of our local turmoil around civil liberties and blaming atheists and humanists for upsetting the cart, for all sorts of bad things, but as it happens, Nicolaus Copernicus happened to be born on this day in 1473. Quite literally a Renaissance man, he was a jurist, a mathematician and an astronomer. And frankly, when I think humanist, I think of someone rather like him.

Copernicus was also ordained within the Roman Catholic church, his exact rank isn’t completely clear, but almost certainly a priest; he was, after all, once nominated to be a bishop. He also caused the church a great deal of unease and for some who followed his work considerable discomfort as his relentless pursuit of truth led him to prove the previously universally accepted opinion the earth stood at the center of things was not so; replacing the earth with the sun, and then going one step further, establishing even our sun which we’re twirling about is not the center of things.

Now, it is probably worth noting he chose to wait until his deathbed to publish, and the consequences of his work would, as I said, fall on other shoulders. Think Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei. Humanism lived does upset carts. But, for our brief time together, what I really want to hold up is the possibility of finding the sacred within the natural realm. Which, best I can tell, is something that marked Copernicus’s life and work. And, which, I suggest, is what humanism is all about.

Back to that joke. Back to one world at a time. I hope you’ll allow me a strong statement about who we are. Yes, we have absolute freedom of conscience, and no one is forced to assent to any statement made anywhere by any one of us, including from this pulpit and by me. But, here’s a truth: any serious observer can see something as common among us, so common as to be descriptive. We are within our tradition, for the most part, humanists. And we have been since our foundations. Humanists.

This humanism works for atheists, agnostics and theists of many different flavors. At the School Committee meeting I understand Greg Epstein the Harvard humanist chaplain was there. I didn’t get to meet him, but I am quite interested in his work. I believe what he is offering at Harvard maps closely what we do, he just markets it to atheists and the closely aligned. We, at our best, are far less discriminating. And I think there are good reasons for our humanism to be so wildly, extravagantly, promiscuously so. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

In fact in recent decades there’s been a bit of confusion about our basic humanist stance within our community. I think this is so for a number of reasons. For one, because to many humanism has come to be associated with a hard and uncompromising atheism. Think of the New Atheists who take no prisoners and are relentlessly judgmental about anyone who uses religious language.

This in fact was a stance taken during much of the twentieth century by many our own identified humanists. Today, for many of us, a large majority I would say, such a bare, aggressive and frequently bitterly angry atheism, understandable as it might be considering how atheists are so frequently and unjustly treated, just isn’t what we’re about. Even, I hasten to add, as we cherish atheism and agnosticism as viable stances within our association. Particularly agnosticism, but again, I’m inclined to rush ahead of myself.

Another reason, I suggest, for the confusion arises out of our association with Hungarian speaking Unitarians. They’re a compelling faith community, touching many of our hearts as people who have suffered terribly for their faith in one God, and for that reason people also called Unitarian. We have a sense of but for the luck of the draw, there goes we. And, on balance I think our association has been good for both communities.

But, because of that shared name, which has brought us together, and because they’re a Reformation church, and therefore from the early-mid sixteenth century while English speaking Unitarianism is an Enlightenment phenomenon, and therefore dating from the mid-late seventeenth century, many of us assume that the one led to the other. Many people, thinking we come from them, have come to think their spiritual concerns are ours. This is, however, not so. It arises from a common enough error, a logical fallacy, known as Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, or Post Hoc for short.

Reformation Unitarianism, which arose and flourishes in Hungarian speaking countries was about the nature of God pretty much completely within a Christian context. These continue to be their concerns. But, they are not ours.

Enlightenment Unitarianism, which arose and flourishes in English speaking countries was about how we approach reality, most distinctively approaching religion with a critical eye. The term Unitarian itself, that “one God” part of our position was almost incidental for us. We did reject trinity as there was no conclusive evidence for it within the scriptures. It was not logical for a central doctrine to lack unambiguous support in the primary text.

The name was given us by those who didn’t like us and thought it the most insulting thing they could do. Until the blessed William Ellery Channing accepted the name on our behalf, and it is a nice name, we tended to call ourselves liberals and our faith stance was called rational religion. Throughout our real concern was how to live a holy life, a life of meaning and purpose in the world in which we found ourselves. And following that light, steadily over the years, we shifted from being a liberal Christian church, to becoming a liberal Church with Christians. Actually we’re a liberal church with Christians, Jews, Buddhists, pagans, atheists and theists and agnostics, along with many, many miscellaneous others.

The liberal thread that has joined the many different faces of English speaking Unitarianism, is called religious humanism, or rational religion, humanism for short. Of course humanism is another term that has different senses within different communities, so, let me give a brief definition for what we tend to mean. We do not mean humans are the center of things. By humanism we here tend to mean, whatever else might be true, our focus, our concern, our delight is found in this world as we actually encounter it.

Humanism is a path of humility. It follows the great dictum of not knowing, of not settling, of endless curiosity. Humanism is finding our way within a natural world, in which our natural ability to reason and its great flowering as scientific method are seen as things to be cherished and fostered. And we don’t stop there. Humanism is also about music and art and dance, it is all about embodiment.

That said the club is big. Atheist? Great. Christian? Wonderful. We’re all welcome. This is why we’ve been able to welcome pagans and Buddhists in significant numbers into our community over the past decades. The deal is we have a covenant of presence, to each other, and to this precious, hurting, world. Look at us in this spiritual community, as we actually are, shortcomings and accomplishments all taken together, and you can see what that means.

In this lovely old Meeting House today we count that wild kaleidoscopic range of views as natural. What runs a current, a great rushing tide through our hearts and makes us as one, within all our many spiritualties, is that profound this-worldliness. Just this. Just this. Examined and loved and lived. Lived. That’s why social justice is so important to us. It follows our humanist spirituality, our looking at who we are, really are, and that finding of how we are one family. Knowing this how can we help but act to be of some use in the healing of hurt?

Of course this approach to life can have its shadows, and does. Within our history we see how we can be hyper rational and miss the music of our lives. I’ve already noted how this narrowness marked many of us through much of the twentieth century. And sometimes we over react to our rationalism and can get pretty mushy. So, for instance, we provided a fair amount of the leadership for the spiritualist movement in the late nineteenth century. Not our most rational moment. But, also, whether some large part of us tilts one way or the other, somehow we always seem to correct. And moving a bit one way or another, over time the current that holds for us is a dynamic and spiritual humanism.

Over the past near three hundred years, of all the Western religions we seem the one most clearly identified with the rational and the naturalistic. Not the only ones. We owe an enormous debt to the rationalist and humanist current in Judaism. And there are similar rational currents within Christianity, lifted one could argue from classical Greek philosophy, but there, nonetheless. I think it a delightful sign of this that the American Episcopal church celebrates a feast for Copernicus. The telling difference is their feast is on the anniversary of his death, while our marking today is for his birth.

So, what might this all look like for us today? How shall we go forward?

A while back the comic book writer Alan Moore, creator of the Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as well as V is for Vendetta was interviewed for the New Humanist. Perhaps ironically, maybe simply fortuitously, he summarized what I think is our work today as spiritual humanists.

“My basic premise” said Moore. “Is that human beings are amphibious, in the etymological sense of ‘two lives’. We have one life in the solid material world that is most perfectly measured by science. Science is the most exquisite tool that we’ve developed for measuring that hard, physical, material world. Then there is the world of ideas, which is inside our head. I would say that both of these worlds are equally real – they’re just real in different ways.”

I believe our work today, as a community, is to bring the worlds of science and poetry and myth together, to join head and heart, to find the spirituality, the spirit, the breath of hope within our ordinary lives. We are called to live in this world and to dream dreams of possibility. The work we can do out of that knowing, well, really it is a not knowing, it is that endless curiosity, which arises in the human heart opened, is nothing less than sacred.

And, let me tell you a secret. The world needs this. It needs us.

Amen.

Kinda dumb. But I like it. Thank you, Linda…

Yesterday I went with Jan and a fair number of folk from First Unitarian to the Cranston School Committee meeting in a suburban Providence town, where they were going to decide whether to appeal a recent court ruling that the prayer banner at the Cranston High School West had to come down. As it was titled “School Prayer,” began with “Our Heavenly Father” and ended with “Amen,” from where I stood it looked a pretty open and shut case.

The sixteen year old who objected and on whose behalf the ACLU went to court and won had been subjected to various outrages since registering her complaint, including public shaming from local officials for rocking the social boat, one, for instance, calling her “a wicked little thing.”

Several of her family were members of our congregation.

Most of us from church were offended at how she’d been treated. As one of us said the subject was not a hill we’d probably have picked to fight on, ourselves, but bottom line, the kid was right. And she was in fact being persecuted for standing up for her rights as a minority citizen, she said she was an atheist, in a pubic venue who should not have to be subjected to the assumptions the majority were normative, or, more baldly, normal. With all that follows that. And, so, there we were.

The outcome was probably telegraphed by the attorney for the school who laid it out fairly clearly. If, he noted, this is a prayer case, well, that’s settled law. If, however, it turns on a display case, well, then they had a shot. He took it. The lower court didn’t buy it. He said the school district, already reeling from cost cutting, was going to be liable for a lot of money just for going that far. Precisely how much wasn’t clear, but the court had already assessed costs at a hundred, seventy five thousand dollars. He said probably it would be less. But, he thought, It might come to half a million dollars to go to the supreme court, should they decide to hear it, and should they lose.

There had been a lot of pot stirring going up to this meeting, including robocalls trying to whip up outrage at the secular take over of the schools.

I figure at the peak, maybe a thousand people showed up. Media counts ranged from six hundred to seven hundred.

Those who wanted appeal were well organized. In addition to the robocalls, they had little paper bibs brandishing the single word “appeal,” which well over half those present ended up wearing. Lots of people trying to organize them. A local crazy guy who appears at anything touching on social issues, was wandering around whispering and muttering. The chair warned him once that he needed to not disrupt or would be escorted out of the hall. Disruption was stopped pretty much before it began…

The previous meeting was by all accounts a circus. This was well run. Lots of cops with very obvious guns on their hips, standing around.

People were, by and large, civil.

There were some attempts at rousing the crowd, and I personally felt a small shiver of fear when some young men, mostly wearing the appeal bibs stood, pumping their fists in the air, and shouting USA, USA. It was pretty obvious their USA had no room for civil libertarians, and, it sure seemed to me, me…

Maybe my sense of anxiety at their aggression was just, me, but I swear, I felt I could see these young men in brown shirts.

Still, again, mostly it was civil enough.

There were attempts at generosity on the part of many.

Still, my discomfort was with what felt to me to be a strong current of feeling repeated over and over by speakers that the country was disintegrating, and the problem came from people who wanted to remove God from the public forum. The ACLU was singled out for particular venom by several speakers. For them the issues of prayer or display wasn’t the issue. It was prayer. It was how they felt under assault. It was their anger at how things were and how things seem to be going.

There were a lot of people who wanted things the way they used to be. And they said it. Over and over.

I thought about that used to be, and felt that shiver, again…

Well, when all was said and done the committee took its vote and five to two voted not to appeal.

Most said it was because of the cost.

Something nasty continues to simmer…

And, I feel some fear for the Republic…

As well as some hope…

Some hope…

I see Ward Cleaver, or at least the hand inside the puppet was born on this day in 1909.

As a kid I wished he was my dad.

Seeing clips today I admit I’m not so sure…

Still, of such stuff television, I mean dreams, is made…

I was late driving into church, so it was a rare time for me to hear my local NPR’s broadcast of its BBC news program. They were discussing poverty in America. The story led with some of those sound bites that we’ve heard this year from conservatives mocking what we call poverty in this country, pointing out how the majority of our poor have televisions and refrigerators. The talking heads also opined that most of America’s poor never go without missing a meal.

The attitude these commentators revealed, and what appears to be a talking point campaign these comments represented; suggesting the poor are a figment of someone’s imagination, certainly nothing worth worry about, well, except maybe to ask them to pay some taxes was harshly skewered by Jon Stewart on his Daily Show. That clip is floating around the web & I recommend watching it sometime. Personally I find this view shocking for the brazenness of those who want to minimize or deny our domestic problems. It was heartbreaking for its callousness toward those who are most hurt within our country.

But this NPR story only started there.

They went from those comments to an interview with some children at a school in Nevada. They were homeless, an increasing part of our American population. Several of the children spoke of going to bed without eating. They struggled for words to describe their experience. “My tummy growled.” My eyes began to water. And another said, saying how hard it was to sleep. “I waited until the next morning when I could go to school and eat.” I choked.

Another child waited. And then spoke very softly. It was hard to understand. The interviewer had to ask for sure what the child said. It was, “We ate a rat.”

I pulled over and wept.

Just anecdotes. Limited statistical significance.

Not long ago someone commented on one of my blog postings that I always am using my comments on my primary spiritual discipline koans, to tell people to support gay marriage or get involved with ecological concerns or some other social issue. Also recently someone else stated flatly they found me a socialist, and they meant this as a bad thing. I should add not long before, but close enough, following a different posting suggesting the dear folk in the Occupy movement might profitably be a bit more focused on specific issues, for instance electing people, I was characterized by someone as an apologist for a broken system.

I seem to annoy lots of people.

I’d like to be clear on how I see this. After being a person, and a family person, and a spiritual practitioner, I consider myself primarily a spiritual director, and after that a pastor. I advocate a practice of paying attention, of not turning away, from what is going on inside us and what is going on around us. Doing this we, I assure folk, will discover a perspective, a place to stand that is healthy, marked by wisdom. It is a seeing of how profoundly we are connected. One metaphor I like to use is that we’re one family. Actually our connections are even deeper. But, family, that’s a good enough. Plenty good enough. from that place I suggest we’ll know what to do. And, that we should do something.

No kid should have to eat a rat.

Not in our family.

And, who, our spiritual path lead us to see, can be excluded from the family?

One family.

I in fact don’t have a lot of judgements about what precisely any one of us should be doing. You like legislation. Good. You think a picket might help. Good. You want to help out at our food pantry. Good.

But.

Know who you are. And how we fit together.

And then.

For goodness’ sake, for the sake of the family,

Do something.

Of course, as with any day in history, so many things crowd up together. On this day in 1556 Thomas Cranmer is declared a heretic, on this day in 1779 James Cook is killed in Hawaii (by people who had a good idea of why it isn’t a good idea to encourage European visitors), on this day in 1835 the Mormons form their first Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, on this day in 1912 Arizona is admitted into the Union (which some to this day consider a mistake), on this day in 1918 the recently formed Soviet Union adopts the Gregorian calendar, etc. etc.

Babur, Moghul emperor of India, Frederick Douglass, the amazing, Jack Benny frequent night visitor to my childhood home, Jimmy Hoffa of whom the less said the better, James Pike, notorious and therefore interesting Episcopal bishop, Carl Bernsein who helped a president bring down his presidency, and Jenn Nardone, our congregation’s membership coordinator, all share this day as their birthday.

This holiday is a weird one, almost as much a creation of the greeting card cartel as anything else, but still offering a moment to recall love.

Love that strange god. Love silly, foolish, insane, lovely, delightful, the bane of our lives, the purpose of our lives.

Not a bad thing to pause and notice.

Love.

Actually, a good thing.

I think.

I feel.

Love.

A very good thing.

The most dangerous thing in the world.

Love.

What makes it all worth while…

I do believe…

And so, with all the ambiguity of the heart, of course,

How can I help but wish

a blessed Valentine’s Day to all…

Two people I really admire were born on this day. Abe Lincoln meant that the Republic into which I was born, and where I live, and probably will die, is at its best about something more than free commerce. And Chuck, Chuck, what can I say? You point the way for all of us… Love the various pictures going around. Although if I were Darwin, I think I might be a bit jealous that he gets toast (with various religious ironies) while Lincoln is hip to the max. But then they say he was gay, so maybe, of course…