The Conference Tree

Matt Alspaugh


Part 1
When you saw that my reading today was from Christian Scripture [John 2:14-16], I suspect that some of you may have had a reaction, annoyance, maybe even a bit of anger. "Oh, no, this guy is showing his true colors -- the honeymoon is over!" You who know a bit about Scripture may have even thought, "good God, he quoted from John, too -- this is not good".

I too, have a reaction to the use of the book of John. I've come to understand that each of the four Christian Gospels have their own slant, their own marketing spin if you will, that they were each likely written to address a particular concern as the early Christian movement was developing. So the writer of Mark, the earliest book written, and probably the most historically accurate, seeks to discredit Jesus' immediate followers, his disciples, as somewhat foolish. And the writer of Luke seeks to emphasize Jesus good works among the poor and oppressed. And the writer of Matthew seeks to increase the credibility of both Jesus and the emerging church by connecting them to ancient Hebrew prophecy. And in the book of John, the last one written, well, the writer of John was laying out this whole new Christian theology in which Jesus becomes part of God.

It turns out that our story today, of Jesus Cleansing the Temple, appears in all four Gospels. That's unusual. That means that this story must be very important to the emerging Christian faith, and it is! This story is the setup for Jesus being arrested, tried, and executed.

So why did I pick John today? It's pretty simple -- of the four versions, the story in John seemed tome to be the most dramatic.

In this story, Jesus has just come into town. He's now well-known, top of his game, and crowds follow him. He goes to the temple to be part of the holy days of Passover. He sees what is going on in the temple, and he gets angry.

Let's take a moment and look at what was going on in the temple, all this buying and selling of animals and money changing. This was part of the religious culture of the day. People would bring food or an animal to the temple for sacrifice, the priests would sacrifice the animals. They'd burn some as an offering to God, and the rest would be used to feed the priests and other staff. As this system developed, people wanted the convenience of not having to travel with their own animals to the temple, so a market developed, and you could buy animals and change your local currency into temple currency. It was a whole super-Walmart, just steps away from the temple.

But this is all part of the ordinary operation, and Jesus comes in and gets quite upset. Angry. Perhaps even outraged. He lashes out in violence, turning over the tables of the moneychangers, whipping and beating the sales staff to drive them out of the temple. He tells them: "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers."[1]    That sounds pretty righteous to me.

Most of us Unitarian Universalists like to think of Jesus as a great teacher rather than a god. That was one of the early conclusions of William Ellery Channing and early Unitarians -- they rejected the divinity of Jesus, but thought of him as an exemplary teacher. But if we are to learn from Jesus' life we must contend with the meaning of this violent outburst.

Part 2

We can become angry for any number of reasons. We can become angry when we want something we can't have, or because it is taken away. Sandy is quite naturally upset when her Dad shows up and takes away her TV time.[2]

The ancients in many religions were very much in touch with this sort of anger. In the Bhagavad Gita, written in India many centuries before Jesus time, we learn:

When you keep thinking about sense-objects,
Attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire,
The lust of possession which, when thwarted,
Burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgment
And robs you of the power to learn from past mistakes
Lost is the discriminative faculty,
And your life is utter waste.[3]

In other words, these ancient people had tapped into the realization that when we get attached to things or pleasant experiences, we want to hold on to them, to have more of them. Like TV. And we get angry when they are taken away. That anger clouds our judgment, and we make bad decisions, these can have consequences.

I offer this example not to try to argue that the eastern religions had anger all figured out earlier than the Jews of Jesus' time. Rather, I'm trying to make the point that they saw anger differently. They saw anger as a generally troubling emotion that had to be treated carefully.

Unfortunately, many western people who practice these eastern religions today believe they need to suppress their anger completely, to never experience it, and certainly to never show it. We also may have got this message as children: don't get mad, control your temper, supress your feelings. I'm not sure this is helpful.

In some circumstances, the pent up anger can burst out in rage: anger amped-up with even less judgment and less moral control. Or that anger stiffens over time into bitterness, and it slips out in unkind comments or even complete withdrawal and silence.

I think it is better that we pay attention when we're angry. Just pay attention. The anger is probably trying to tell us something.
Harriett Lerner, in her book The Dance of Anger, tells us:

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to. Our anger may be a message that we are being hurt, that our rights are being violated, that our needs or wants are not being adequately met, or simply that something is not right.[4]

For example, anger may be signaling a deeper emotion of fear. I think of the people going on at the various town-hall meetings this summer on healthcare reform and at the tea-party rallies earlier this month. Those people seemed angry, even enraged, far beyond what seemed reasonable. I wonder whether some of that rage was coming up from fear. Fear that everything was changing, that they were now the 'out crowd' and stood to lose everything. Their world was being threatened, and they responded with white-hot emotion.

For many of us, especially here in this community, our anger also comes up when we see others being hurt, or when we see others rights being violated, or others in need. This is righteous anger, and it is also worth listening to.

Perhaps this is what Jesus faced, as he saw people being cheated by the animal salespeople. See, if people brought their own animals, or bought them at a discount animal supplier on the edge of town, the priests would inevitably say that the animals were no good for sacrifice. You had to buy your animals from the right guys. It was a corrupt system. And Jesus reacted with righteous anger.

Part 3

So let's go back to Jesus at the temple. What emotion was he experiencing when he became violent? Was he responding in the heat of emotion, in anger or even rage? Or was he executing a well-thought-out act of civil disobedience?

It's hard to know. I will mention that two of the gospel books describe Jesus around this same time cursing a fig tree for not having fruit, and causing it to become barren. However that gets explained, it sounds to me like the behavior of an angry or even enraged man.

But whether or not Jesus was having a meltdown, it's clear he was responding to injustice and unfairness to others. We like to think that sort of righteous anger is somehow more acceptable than anger we feel because we ourselves were mistreated. The question is how we respond to this harm to others.

The deeper question is this. Suppose you see injustice, unfairness to others, and you get angry. You are able to control your anger, you see it as a signal that somethings not right. But you see that your only viable response is to take physical action, to intervene, even to respond with violence, or to get attention with harsh words. Are hateful words or physical violence ever OK? This is the question of Pacifism.

I think of the web of relationships that we are part of. It's part of a larger web, that interconnected web of which we are all a part. This web of relationships gets built up, slowly, over time. I visualize this web as a spider- web and we are like spiders tending to this web, strengthening it and keeping it in good repair. OK, I know spiders are solitary insects but bear with me. Put yourselves in this big imaginary spider-web of relationships with me and everyone here. Sometimes minor disasters happen to our web, a leaf falls on it, and we work to repair it. Occasionally, major disasters happen -- a tree branch or an animal crashes through the web and we have little choice but to cut away and destroy great parts of it if we are to save any of it. We do this, with sadness, knowing that the task of rebuilding will be a long and difficult one.

In the same way, we are wise when we avoid reacting to anger by becoming abusive or violent. We are aware that there are rare situations when harsh words or physical action may be required. We may have to defend ourselves from harm or protect another, and we may realize that there is no other way to respond but with harsh words or action.

I hope when we are confronted with this, we are disappointed, because we were unable to think of a more clever, creative solution to our problem than violence. And because we realize that the task of repair of relationships, even with our enemies, will be that much harder.

I like to think that Jesus, in the temple, was acting from a place of sadness, rather than anger. He was
righteous, he wanted to make things right, but could think of other option than to make a whip and drive the people and animals out.

Now you know the rest of the story. Right after this outburst, the priests arrange to have Jesus arrested and executed. Jesus was likely just one of many passionate, religious fanatics that took on the system in that day and came out on the bottom side because of it. He is killed, his followers scatter, and are filled with fear. They gradually reorganize and go on to create the religion about Jesus that is Christianity. And from Christianity emerged Unitarianism Universalism.

I'm glad that Sandy, in our story this morning, was able to find a way to accept and see past her anger with her Dad, and remember that even when she was annoyed with him, she still loved him. I know that many of us carry annoyance, even anger over our own past experiences with Christianity, or with present-day encounters with certain forms of Christianity. And that anger is an important signal, worth paying attention to. But I also hope that we can accept that anger and see past it, as we realize that we have a rich UU Christian past, and there are many Christians UUs in our midst. This past and these people give our movement depth and diversity, and for this we should all be grateful.

Notes
1 Mark 11:17 RSV
2 Searle White, "The Conference Tree", Stories for All Ages
3 Eknath Easwaran, The Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, p. 68.
4 Harriet Goldhor Lerner, The Dance of Anger, p. 1.

Why Do We Meet?

Matt Alspaugh

When I worked as a hospital chaplain, I'd often encounter people who as soon as I'd introduce myself as the chaplain, would say, "Oh, I'm spiritual but not religious".

I learned that when people say they are not religious, what most of them really mean is, they don't go to church, they do not belong to a congregation, and they may even completely reject organized religion.  They may also reject specific creeds and beliefs, but believe it or not, religion isn't always about what you believe.  In fact, research shows that most people who go to church will actually adjust their beliefs to be in alignment with those of the church they belong to.  So to me, when a person says they are "not religious" it basically means they have no church community.

Understanding what they mean by being spiritual, that's a bit harder.  My patients' stories were quite varied, but I came to understand that by being spiritual they meant that they devote attention to the big questions in life. You know these questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose in this life? How should we treat one another? What is the nature of that realm which we cannot know by our senses, of God, for instance? And what happens after this life of ours is over?

Depending on their approach to things, these spiritual people might consider these questions rationally, or emotionally. For example, they might contemplate the unknown with a sense of awe or humility, or foster a deep internal compassion for others.

In my time at the hospital I came to respect some of these "spiritual but not religious" people, those who forged deep spiritual wisdom, often hard fought, alone, in the hospital bed, at night.  Often the certainty of death can bring a person to a very clear place of focus. I encountered a handful of people who seemed to possess an amazing and profound spiritual nature. I recall one woman in particular who was dying of cancer. It wasn't so much what she said, it was her appearance, which, though gaunt, had a kind of radiance, a calmness and contentment that gave me pause.  She had moved far beyond the religion of her youth. She told me that she was at peace, and that her main concern was how her family was dealing with her illness and imminent death.

But getting to that degree of spiritual depth is hard to do, and it is very hard to do alone. Most who go down the path of individual spiritual development don't get very far.  Perhaps an extreme example is from sociologist Robert Bellah's book Habits of the Heart:

"Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as "Sheilaism." ... "I believe in God," Sheila says. "I am not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice." Sheila's faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining what she calls "my own Sheilaism," she said: "It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other."(1)

Robert Bellah suggests that Sheila is not alone in her willingness to endorse very few specific points. Sheilism, taken to its logical conclusion would allow hundreds of millions of individual faiths. There'd be Mattism, and Joshism (PICK OUT FOLKS) and Edism, and Dianetics (oh), and Marcellenism. One faith for each of us, that we each hold privately and separately from others.

Even if we don't take it to that extreme, there are many in the professional ministry who rail against the idea of being "spiritual but not religious." For some this is threatening to their career -- after all if people don't need church, who needs ministers? 

If there is this category of  "spiritual but not religious", then there must also be an antipodal category of "religious but not spiritual" and I met several of these at the hospital too.  When such a person learned I was a chaplain, they would immediately tell me that they went to church every week as if I were doing some kind of ecclesiastical bed-check.  When I would inquire, in my gentlest way, about how they were doing emotionally or spiritually, they'd shift quickly to safer topics, like the weather, or how the Vikings were doing.

Why might people be "religious but not spiritual"? Some people are religious out of a sense of loyalty. They come to a church or stay with a denomination because that's what their parents or even their grandparents did.  Or having joined a church, perhaps as a result of a marriage, they stay through thick and thin. They may put their own spiritual explorations on the shelf, sometimes at a very early age, in order to fit, to feel a part of that particular community.

Marcellene's musical selection today recalled the story of Ruth, from the Hebrew Bible.  Ruth is a young widow, without much hope. She scrapes by with her widowed sister and widowed mother-in-law, depending on gleaning and handouts.  Her mother-in-law Naomi, a transplant, an alien, plans to return to Israel, her own country. Ruth tells her mother-in-law,

"Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. (2)

Ruth is often held up as a model of complete acceptance in Christian communities. She is the specimen example of such unquestioning loyalty.
So, where do we as UUs fall in this continuum between Ruth's kind of loyalty versus Sheila's kind of individual exploration? The answer is, all over the map.  There are plenty of "spiritual but not religious" people who identify as UU out there. I understand that for every UU that is a member of a congregation, there are some two or three other people who identify as UU, but are not connected with any church. 

I have also encountered UUs who are quite comfortable being "religious but not spiritual", that is being part of a congregation but avoiding any kind of spiritual exploration.  True, they may be part of the congregation for very valid reasons.  In our tradition, there are some folks who get focused on social justice programming, and that's good. We've long been at the vanguard of work for social change, work to create a better society, from early anti-slavery work and public education work to recent GLBT rights work.

We also have folks who enjoy intellectual stimulation and exploration of a wide variety of topics, and that's good too.

But I believe that many people who come here do are hoping for something more. They seek to understand and live out those deep spiritual questions, to sort out answers that have meaning for them. In short, I like to think that most of us are here because we are spiritual as well as religious beings.

If we hope that by coming together as a religious community we can more intentionally explore these deep, spiritual questions, what qualities and characteristics should our community have?  What aspects of community most encourage our spiritual growth?

First it must be a place that embraces and encourages change. Galen Guengerich, a UU minister in New York City, suggests that to be in religious community is to be in a place of "constant beginning". I interpret this as the awareness that we all are beginners, or have been, and we are constantly changing as we flow through this community.
 
We come in for the very first time, as beginners, unsure of everything, not even knowing where to sit, not wanting to stand out.  Later on we gingerly agree to help out in some small way, to make coffee, to help with greeting, and as beginners we want to know the procedure, is it written down somewhere? Eventually perhaps we find ourselves in front of the congregation helping out with a worship service, or serving some leadership function, and we are once again beginners. We are all beginners, or should be. If we stop beginning, if we stop changing, if we get stuck doing the same things as if by rote, our passion dissipates and our creativity disappears, and not only are we unhappy but we deprive someone else of a beginning. In the same way, our spiritual development involves a series of beginnings, incremental changes, transformation, as we probe the deep questions with both mind and heart.

A second aspect that encourages spiritual growth is that our religious community must be a safe place. It is important that we work together to create the environment where we are wanted, including "all the edges and angles and hidden parts" (3) -- especially those parts that are hidden even from our own selves.

Safety becomes particularly important when we begin to share our deepest and most intimate spiritual doubts and yearnings, when we want to offer up the greenest, most tender shoots of emerging understanding.  These conversations cannot take place in the format of a graduate seminar, full of critical crosstalk and judgmental commentary. They require a much more gentle space.

Note well that this is a "safe place -- we make together" (4), it is not made safe by some outside power.  When we make this place safe together, we cannot behave any way we like or say anything we want. In particular someone can't come in and say to others, "You won't do."  We need to balance honesty and speaking our own truth with a need to show love and respect for each other.

Finally, religious community will inevitably involve disagreement. Conflict over priorities, discomfort over whether to allow a person to try something new, discord over change: these are all part of vital and active religious life. The question is how the religious community handles disagreement and conflict.  Are the issues raised up and talked about as they occur? Is the discourse open and respectful? Does the debate leave room for creativity? Congregations that are healthy accept that disagreement is part of life. They are resilient; they deal with disagreements and move on.

It's still very early in my time here. In these early days, I have a sense that the people of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Youngstown do well in these aspects.  I see people stepping up to new beginnings, I see people working to keep the community safe, and I see good handling of conflict. I'm optimistic that as we continue to develop these characteristics of religious community, the church can become even more vibrant and nurturing.

A healthy religious community learns to balance these three aspects I've talked about.  New beginnings make this a place to try things out, a place where we can make creative ideas come to life. This requires courage! Knowing we are in a safe place helps, but ultimately we each need the will to step out, do things that may feel uncomfortable. And the community -- that is all of us -- needs to support each other in that stepping out. We may even make mistakes, but we know that this ultimately results in learning and growth for all of us.

The root of the word "religious" is "to bind together".  We are a religious community bound together not by creed or common belief but by the desire to create a space, a container for our shared spiritual growth.  We wish to encounter the great questions, the questions of meaning, to engage them with gratitude and humility. In the process, we may encounter spiritual practices or beliefs that are new and uncomfortable. What would it be like to create a prayer practice, or meditate, or journal?  What would it be like to explore a different theological take on some old idea?  They may not be a fit for us, but in community, we move together, allowing others their individual explorations.

When I was a member of the Colorado Mountain Club, I learned the low impact ways of moving over untracked, wilderness terrain.  When you have a group in such a situation, you don't hike in a single file mindlessly following the back of the person in front of you.  To do so leaves a track, however slight, so is not conducive to the goal of "leave no trace".  Instead we fanned out, and walked in a loose pack. We each chose our own path, yet we were still together as a group, and could consult and plan with greater combined wisdom and greater enjoyment.  I like to use this as a metaphor for how we move forward together as a community. Since we all have the same ultimate destination in life, to me it makes sense to travel together, but loosely, each finding our own way without losing sight of each other.

Why do we meet? I hope it is that we are religious as well as spiritual people. We walk together on our spiritual journeys, a loose and joyful and courageous, loving band, all exploring, all sharing, and in the end we will have known much more and lived more richly than if we had merely walked alone.

(1) Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 1985, p. 221.
(2) Ruth 1:16, NRSV, with edits
(3) A Safe Place, poem by Gilbert Rees
(4) ibid.

Homily - As Tranquil Streams Meet and Merge

September 13, 2009 -- Matt Alspaugh

Water. It seems so simple. How very ordinary. Familiar, everyday. And yet, special, mysterious, life-giving, with an energy of its own.

The mystics understood water. In the Taoist tradition, water is often symbolic for a way of being in the world, soft and giving, yet able to wear away stone. Water seeks the lowest level, but fills every gap. Water easily joins with other water, so that small streams can become great rivers.

Our story of the swimmer is based on a parable by Chung Tsu, a Taoist teacher living about the fourth century before the Common Era. Chung Tsu often included Confucius in his stories, even though Confucianism was a competing or at least complementary tradition. Perhaps he did this to gain credibility, like Plato does in writing of Socrates, or the gospel writers have Jesus do in quoting Hebrew Scriptures.

But back to the Tao. In the story, the swimmer at the waterfall shows how we might move through all the turmoil and turbulence of life. Like the swimmer, we neither resist what would overwhelm us nor do we just passively 'go with the flow'. Instead, if we are wise, we use the energy of the turbulence of life, diving down, popping back up, to create a rich and full life. To do this we have to be aware of the virtual water that is life around us, to discern its currents and eddies, and merge with the flow or move through as we can. We become expert swimmers in the sea of life.  In conflicts, we seek out a third way, rather than choosing sides.  In creative work, we may have long periods of just being, trying to wait patiently as the creative muses flow through us, letting our talents emerge.

Today is our Ingathering and Water Service, which we do annually, at the beginning of the church year. Now many religions have practices that must not change, ancient rites and rituals whose origins are lost in the mists of history, or whose sources are fabricated apologies providing explanations that support the existing power structures. We are a bit more flexible. Our Unitarian and Universalist rituals are often relatively recent in origin. Our chalice lighting ritual is a few decades old; the springtime Flower Communion originated in Europe right before World War II. Today's ingathering service includes the Water Ritual, which was the creation of two women in 1980. There is a story behind this Ritual.

In 1960 the Unitarian and the Universalist denominations merged. The merger of these two different but religiously liberal movements had been contemplated for nearly a century.  The song we sang earlier, 'As Tranquil Streams Meet and Merge' was written about the possibility of this merger, in the hopes that we would merge these two movements into something bigger and stronger. 

When the U and the U merged into the UU, one of the things the group had to do, and it was quite controversial, was write out a statement of purpose. This became our Principles and Purposes.  (HOLD UP FRAMED COPY OF OLD ONE) Now this early one was unsatisfactory in many ways, and in particular, it had extraneous masculine language; the text was sprinkled with words like 'brotherhood' or 'mankind.'

In 1977, a lay leader named Lucille Longview got a resolution passed at the General Assembly of our UU denomination that asked the denomination and the churches to avoid sexist language.
This was called the "Women in Religion Resolution", and from it, emerged a rewrite of the Principles and Purposes.  This rewrite, you should know, was long and contentious, as difficult theological questions had to be addressed. Somehow, the movement found a middle way, and the result was the Principles and Purposes we read today. These were passed by the 1984 General Assembly and amended in 1985.

During this process of agitating for a rewrite of the Principles, some three hundred women, and some men, met at what was called the Women in Religion conference in Michigan in 1980.  The woman who started this whole process, Lucille Longview, along with Carolyn McDade (a songwriter -- author of our closing hymn today) decided to create a ritual for this event, which they called the Water Ritual. Persons were asked to bring water from home and to ritually combine it. They were invited to briefly share a few words on the meaning of the water, and to take some back home if they wished. According to the creators, this ritual reminded participants that they were connected by a universal symbol, water, and that through water, they were connected to the totality of life.

The Water Ritual helped this group to go forward to join with others to create and obtain passage of new Principles and Purposes. The Water Ritual helped bind them together in a time of ingathering, before the real work began.

So the Water Ritual that we celebrate today is a continuation of this practice, an ingathering as we come together, connect or reconnect with others, reforming this community after the relative quiet of the summer.

So the water for us is a reminder of interconnection.  Tony Hoagland reminds us of this interconnection, water being part of other water, river to ocean, rain to dew, cloud to puddle, a complex and beautiful and energetic web of interconnection in space and time.  And something does turn and stir within us, we are part of other water, for, after all, our bodies are almost two-thirds water, and our blood is as salty as some ancient sea.

Our animal selves know this. We yearn for the interconnection with water, we take delight in still waters and flowing streams, in waves crashing on some sandy shore, we love the smell of summer rain, and the sparkle of the sun on new snow.  Our Water Ritual symbolizes our longing for interconnection not only with each other, with people, but with the water in its various forms, and with all of the natural world, all of creation. We are reminded of our interconnection with the web of existence. Like water, we seek our place in the nature of things.

Labor in an Era of Unemployment

September 6, 2009 -- Melissa Smith

I occupy the “feature presentation” spot in today’s order of service not because I am an expert on the subject, but because I came up with a title at a meeting of the Sunday services committee. I thought it an appropriately ironic response to the day before the Labor Day holiday, but none of the experts was free on the Sunday when our new minister, Matt Alspaugh, was scheduled to be out of the pulpit.  Matt’s opening service last week on “Making Changes” took, as he put it, a “left turn” into the issue of health care, so I want to take a leaf out of Matt’s book and ask a similar series of questions on the theme of the day: (Please raise your hand if your answer is affirmative to the following questions)

• Have you or someone close to you lost your job in the current economic downturn?
• Are you personally acquainted with a person who is unemployed and hasn’t been able to find a job?
• Have you yourself experienced unemployment at some time in the past?

Having turned the political into the personal, I begin by admitting that I HAVE been unemployed, and I DID have the experience of living three months on unemployment insurance 24 years ago. I suppose it is the first in my list of ironies that, a year later, I fell into a position in Youngstown, Ohio, where the local unemployment rate ay that time was, as I recall. 14.5%. My new position lead to the most secure form of employment available here – a tenured, full professor at Youngstown State University. What I actually DO has changed vastly over the last 23 years in my position. I now occupy the other end of the national dilemma – non-retirement for fear of losing health benefits. The link between health care and employment was the subject this Thursday which many of you probably attended, of Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who was a guest of YSU’s from “Center of Working Class Studies.” The intent of my remarks this morning, my reflection on personal and professional experience is to further our commitment as U-U’s, as a community, to transcend the current ubiquitous political dialogue and find our individual and collective means to affirm the principles, which we repeated as a responsive reading at the opening of this service. I fear that these reflections will remain without much conclusion, but I invite you to work towards a satisfactory resolution during coffee hour.

We live in a society where the question “Who are you?” or “What do you do?”  is first and foremost answered by the identification of one’s status in the workforce – at least such is Robert Fulghum’s central theme in the reading that Diana Burkhart found for this service and read just now. Whether or not we are “employed outside the home” (a euphemism introduced by the Women’s movement to eradicate the assumption that “work” is defined as having a job and the elements of social recognition attached to it), the issues of personal identity are central to our faith. Indeed, our first principle is affirmation of “the worth and dignity of every person.” As has been recently pointed out by some pundit I heard on NPR, the importance of one’s form of gainful employment is so critical that personhood, at least in terms of access to health care, has come to be defined by the existence of an insurance policy that is most likely to be supplied by one’s employer. Any “public option” smacks of socialism. So many forms labor are apparently not sufficient qualification for personhood in the health care system.

My grandfather, whose Socialist credentials dated back to 1910 when he served as President of the Intercollegiate Socialists Society of Columbia University, was fond of repeating “Brains never created a cent of economic wealth.” -- despite the fact that his gentlemanly existence, and subsequently mine, surrounded us almost exclusively by members of intellectual professions. I grew up with the belief that the timing of our Labor Day in the USA, the first Monday in September, had something to do with official fears associated with May 1st as the “Workers’ Day” in most of Europe. Our resident Labor historian Diane Barnes (current vice-resident of this church) clarified for me that, while Labor Day was indeed put in place as a means of appeasing workers in the face of labor union activism, it was not originally schedule in counterpoint to the Socialist holiday:

“Actually, even more cynically it was a ploy to get political support from workers. In the late 1880s through early 1890 there were a series of very big national strikes in various industries, but especially on the railroads. Workers in New York "took" a holiday in Sept.1892, parading and marching around the city. Grover Cleveland, who as President was particularly harsh in crushing strikes, saw this as an opportunity to look like a friend of the working class. In 1894 there was a huge strike at the Pullman factory in Chicago, and Cleveland sent the US Army to crush the strike. Almost as soon as he did this, he pushed a bill through Congress that officially declared the first Monday of September "Labor Day." He still lost the 1894 election!

Back to my history: While my socialist grandfather pontificated over cocktails to his friends and acquaintances, I grew up at the height of the Cold War Era. My earliest memories of television are associated with the McCarthy hearings. I was born in the state of New Hampshire, whose motto is “live free or die.” We Americans define our freedom in terms of right to free speech, assembly, etc., and consider these freedoms the essence of democracy. I nevertheless grew up with a fascination for the land that was claimed to be the worker’s paradise (Russia) – although my own interests had more to do with the language, and more specifically,  the revolution in theatrical practice begun at the turn of the 20th centuryby director Konstantin Stanislavsky than the political revolution masterminded by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

When my educational path took me to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, and eventually led to my tenured position here at YSU, it was with a sense of romanticism that I came into contact with the grimaces of organized labor and the aftermath of its unsuccessful struggles with the steel industry.  I was fascinated by the appearance as a speaker at YSU in 1988, shortly after I had joined the YSU faculty, of Gus Hall, the long-time President of the American Communist Party, whom I had watched on Russian television in Moscow at the 25th Communist Party Congress in 1976 (I was studying in Moscow at the time). I had mistakenly assumed that Gus was a fiction of Communist Party Propaganda. At his YSU talk some 20 years later, poor Gus inveighed against the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), telling the Youngstown audience “I told Gorbachev that he was on the wrong path” Gus urged nationalization of industry in this country while these policies were being dismantled in the country whose language and culture were my field of study and teaching.

The Constitution of the USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union, guaranteed Soviet citizen a right to work. The flip side of this constitutional right, however, was the fact that being unemployed for more than three months was illegal. A central event I learned of from the dissidents and Russian immigrants who composed the Russian teachers I encountered in the US-- three waves of refugees from the USSR to the USA-- was the trial and exile of poet Joseph Brodsky (subsequently Nobel Laureate and Poet Laureate of the USA), whose chief crime was writing poetry without a license.

The Soviet Union considered itself the “most democratic nation on earth,” and this was not merely the stuff of propaganda. In that society, “freedom” was defined as “freedom from” want, and therefore a guarantee of basic PHYSICAL needs: found, shelter, work, and health care. The benefits which the state was able to provide may have served OUR AMERICAN propaganda, but many on the lower ends of the economic scale in this country might argue that the lack of access to health care, housing, food, renders freedom of speech virtually meaningless. “Freedom to”, however was more controlled: all forms of employment were to be in service to the state, and writers were first and foremost “ideological workers.”

Joseph Brodsky had left school to go work in a factory to support his parents, and began to write poetry without benefit of higher education. His writing never qualified as “literature of dissent,” but it was not comprehensible to the masses” – the requisite to being a published poet in the Soviet Union and gaining membership in the Writer’s Union, which in absence of a capitalist economy, was the source of all social and economic benefits a writer could gain. As an adult, even though Brodsky was extremely erudite by virtue of self-education and earned a reasonable salary as a free-lance translator, he was, by official definition, a “work-shirker.”

The transcript of Brodsky’s trial was one of the first manuscripts that circulated widely in “samizdat” (the underground “self-publications). Brodsky the poet was sentenced to seven years’ exile in a labor colony. He had the temerity to answer the judge’s question that the right to write poetry was not grant by any governmental authority, but by “God,”—not the best answer to give in the courtroom of an officially atheist state.

Now, some 20 years after Gorbachev’s glasnost opened his country for the publication of all manner of free speech, the return to autocracy under Putin-Medvedev is preferred by a large majority of the population who suffered from mass unemployment brought on by the perestroika or “restructuring” its government and industry. While we no longer consider ourselves a globe divided into two poles, we generally note, I believe, that  “The Great Society” that arose in our society in the post-War era to deal with the needs of the underprivileged is also reaching levels of crisis. So a critical aspect of making changes both globally and locally of that change is to allow freedom to redefine what constitutes our human identity. Where do we stand vis-à-vis the hierarchy of needs, and how do we negotiate “worth and dignity” of every person” in the interconnected web of existence of which we are all a part?