MISTAKES WERE MADE A Meditation on the Ecological Catastrophe And What to Do About it, Even if it is Too Late James Ishmael Ford 10 April 2016 Pacific Unitarian Church Rancho Palos Verdes, California It wasn’t all that long ago that the right wing entertainer Rush Limbaugh declared with full on pontifical certainty that “global warming is a religion!” You should feel the exclamation point. It reminds me of that old story where the kid goes up to the pulpit... Read more

Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born on this day in 1928, making him eighty-eight. A prodigy he entered Harvard at fifteen, graduating with a degree in mathematics, and then a year later was awarded an MA. He worked at his doctorate for the next fifteen years, teaching at various schools and spending a tour as an enlisted man in the Army. Eventually he would give up on the doctorate. Other interests overtook him. And, of course, Lehrer would come to be... Read more

Symbols count. Don’t ever let anyone tell you they don’t. They are not the end of the deal, of course, but they can be enormously important. Case in point. The Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let celebrated contralto Marian Anderson perform in Constitution Hall because she was African American. The uproar that followed has echoed to this day. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in the DAR, and with the aid of her husband, was able to... Read more

Of course we don’t have a clue about when Gautama Siddhartha was born. We can only reasonably assume he was a real human being, and beyond that a few details marking his life. What we know of these things about his life are what we can glean from the suttas or sutras, texts written in Pali or Sanskrit some three, maybe four, possibly five hundred years after he died, and incidentally in languages he himself didn’t speak. So, everything about... Read more

William Ellery Channing was born on this day in 1780 in Newport, Rhode Island. He was the grandchild of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. As a child Channing attended with his family an extremely conservative congregation led by the Reverend Samuel Hopkins. Dr Hopkins was a strict Calvinist who preached the utter depravity of humanity and how nearly all of us were destined to damnation. A turning event occurred for the boy when after hearing a... Read more

It was on this day in 1895, following his disastrous, and frankly given the givens incomprehensible law suit for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, Oscar Wilde was arrested in his room at the Cadogan Hotel, and charged with “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons.” It would go from bad to worse. Later, John Betjeman would sing of those moments at room 118 in the hotel… Read more

Yes, it is true. I do not believe in a deity with some human like consciousness interfering in history. And, throughout my life I’ve stumbled into such serendipitous events that calling those moments evidence of a good god is totally understandable. At least if you’re not holding too tightly on to what is being proved. It turns out I’m not alone in having these experiences. And with that a small anecdote from noted Buddhist scholar, Richard Hayes. I first heard... Read more

Conventional wisdom is conflicted on the subject. The Mahatma himself, Mohandas Gandhi warned how “silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.” After all the assumption that silence means assent is so old as to be a Latin proverb. “Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit,” that is “He who is silent, when he ought to have spoken and was able to, is taken to agree.” While on the other hand we... Read more

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated at 6:01 in the evening, on this day in 1968. I understand that after the police and FBI arrived, during all the confusion, people running around, agents trying to get a handle on what had happened, one agent informed his superior on a walkie-talkie how he just heard Coretta Scott King say that Martin’s dream would never die. There was, I gather, a pause. Then the agent’s superior instructed him “Go... Read more

EATING TOGETHER A Sermon for a Unitarian Universalist Pledge Drive James Ishmael Ford 3 April 2016 Pacific Unitarian Church Rancho Palos Verdes, California If you’re visiting us today, congratulations, you’ve arrived on our annual budget drive kick off Sunday. Of course this also means you are here on a Sunday where there’s a little more elbowroom than usual. Feel free to spread out. I’m going to begin with a story meant to complement our retelling during the children’s time of... Read more