The Veil Becomes Thin - A Day of the Dead Service

Matt Alspaugh

Part I
Reading: from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. [1]

Aren't you just amazed by the fall colors this year? I was driving over to Cleveland this week and was enraptured by the trees. Such color: that bright orange, crimson, even magenta and occasional purple. Those almost fluorescent yellows, and that bright chartreuse as some trees begin to change late. I wondered whether other drivers were as attentive, or inattentive, as I was, whether we'd all just drive off the road following this visual ecstasy, cars lined up in the ditches, struck dumb in amazement.

The colors of fall leaves are not like the colors of flowers, in nature. Flowers are colored by design, by the force of natural selection that drives them to advertise what they have to bees and insect and some birds. But tree color, that's just a by- product of the colors of certain leaf chemicals, the yellow carotenoids and the red anthocyanins. In a way they are an unexpected gift of nature to us. Or perhaps a gift of the divine. This is grace, an unexpected gift.

It's worth noting that this gift of color comes as a byproduct of senescence, the process of controlled death of the leaves. In the process of dying, the green chlorophyll degrades, and these other colors are gradually revealed to us. The stunning colors remind us that the leaves will soon be gone, that after this burst of glory the trees will be bare, and the world begins to become quiet, preparing for the time of cold and dark.

Many cultures have celebrated this time of year with a mixture of gratitude for the gifts of the harvest and a recognition of the dying time to come. Here in the US we celebrate Halloween, which is an adaptation of the Gaelic festival of Samheim. In that Pagan tradition, this is the time when the veil between heaven and earth was at its thinnest, and contact with the dead, in ghostly form or otherwise, was more likely.

One of the things the Catholic church was very successful at doing was merging other religious beliefs into an expanded Catholic religion. This is why Christmas happens near the winter solstice, and why Halloween is celebrated as All Saints Day. As Barbara Kingsolver suggested in the reading, The Catholic Church simply dropped a holiday about saints on top of an existing Gaelic holiday. On the other hand, the Catholic missionaries encountering the Aztec ritual of of the Dead were able to shift the date for that ritual to All Saints Day, but they failed to get the Aztecs to abandon their theology or holiday practices in favor of going to Mass.

As both Ellen and Barbara Kingsolver noted, the various Hispanic celebrations around death are often joyful and celebratory. They are not focused on horror or morbidity, as our Halloween tradition is. There is no sense that the dead will return to harm us, rather that this is a time for reconnection with the dead.

A few years ago, a new Latino minister, Reverend Peter Morales, brought a celebration to the church I attended. This was Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, and it is what we will celebrate here today. Our version will be a bit more modest than the way many celebrate: we won't travel to grave sites with blankets, we don't have bread babies, or nibble on candy skulls, or imbibe plenty of local alcoholic brew. But we will take time to acknowledge and remember our dead, those we loved who are no longer with us.

But first I feel I must address the topic of misappropriation. This is the term we use to denote the improper borrowing, maybe even stealing of traditions or music or art from other cultures. Misappropriation has been a particular concern of Unitarian Universalists, since we tend to draw from so many sources to create our own traditions. We want to do this borrowing and combining and creation with respect, even if we lack specific permission from those from whom we borrow. I hope and trust that we can see that this ritual and other parts of the Day of the Dead tradition are gifts to us, gifts that we share with each other today with the utmost honor and respect.

Within this gift there is a message, offered freely, as in grace. It invites us to ask-- how do we see our relationship with those who have left us, those who have gone beyond? Some of us may have a very real, tangible sense of connection with our dead. We may have dreams, we may have had visions or presence or conversations with our departed. For others, this is all much more metaphorical. We may have conversations with the deceased, but they are of a more hypothetical nature: you know, what would my mother say about that! Or we may just learn to live with the normal emotions of grief, the ones that continue on and never completely fade. Emptiness. Loss.

What we in this culture seem to be re-learning, after having almost forgotten it, is that it is important to celebrate grief, to make time for grief. Memorial services, funerals, internments are all important for everyone, including children. Also important is the periodic return to such celebration, as in this Day of the Dead. As we return again to our memories, we may find feelings that are more complex than just a generic sense of sorrow. We want to remember those we have lost in all their complexity, in good and bad, in what they left us and what they took away. We want to remember them as real, living people who were important to us, that we loved and who loved us, and we can still find a real and deep connection with them.

So it is that we have this celebration of the dead here today. On this, our common table or altar, you are invited to place photos or mementos or other objects of those who you remember today. If you did not bring an object with you and you would like to take part in the ritual, the ushers have flowers, and you are invited to place a flower on the table as a token of remembrance. My experience is that this is most powerful when done in silence. I invite you forward as you wish to add your tangible reminders to the larger memory of this place.

Part II
Reading: "The White Museum" [2]

One of the first things I learned as a hospital chaplain is that the conversation with the family of a deceased person about organ donation is a delicate one. Even people who are normally rational and who hold liberal views about such things are sometimes tripped up in the chaos following death, even an expected death. People often make decisions using a worldview resurrected from their childhood. So it was that when my mother died, her request that her body be donated to science was somehow ignored. Instead of having some first-year medical student wander through the museum of her brain, she came back to us in a brown plastic box.

My Dad finally decided what to do with her. We threw her off a cliff. Those were my words for it. It was probably illegal, but we didn't think about that at the time. We took her ashes to a state park in Texas, where a path overlooked the Brazos River, and in turns, spread her ashes over the edge of that path onto the slope below. We return to that site, more frequently in the beginning, less frequently now, twenty years later. When we go there, it is a time for remembering my mother's life. Perhaps for me, and my siblings, this remembering and grieving and letting go is as Carl Sandburg writes [3]:

Gather the stars if you wish it so.
Gather the songs and keep them.
Gather the faces of women
Gather for keeping years and years.

And then ...
Loosen your hands, let go and say good-by.
Let the stars and songs go.
Let the faces and years go.
Loosen your hands and say good-by.

This letting go is how my siblings and I did it. It wasn't a sad thing for us. We don't do it because others compelled us to do it, it just made sense for us. We loosened our hands, let go, and say good-by. This happened for us just as a natural course of things.

In some circumstances, though, some of us will find the sense of loss does not diminish, that the grief remains at some significant level. Sometimes those around us push us to 'get over it and get on with life'. Some of the old models of grief, such as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of grieving -- you know, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- suggest that one has move through steps with grieving to 'get it right'. I'm not sure this is helpful, for we all relate to loss in our own way. Some of us -- very appropriately -- grieve longer and more deeply than others. My experience in the hospital has led me to the point of view that any way we relate, whether in sorrow or with the kind of joy of remembrance that Latinos bring to Day of the Dead, is OK, providing it doe not become all- consuming.

Of course, as we think about others who have died, we must confront our own mortality. We must consider perhaps someday someone else, children, grandchildren, friends, may place our pictures, our own pictures, up on an altar like this one.

What happens after we die? This is one of life's persistent questions, one that we UUs often avoid. A minister friend told me it was one question that he thought not useful to explore. I differ on this, though I know with some certainty that I have no answers.

I think it is important for us to acknowledge that this question is a mystery, that there are many possible answers, and that we operate contingently, trying to make sense of these possibilities. For some of us, visions of the world of the dead are just a matter of curiosity. For some people, those visions inform their faith, and guide their choices and behavior in this world. Is someone watching over us, tracking our every move? How does this world relate to some world to come? For this world is just a temporary way-station, like a dirty bus terminal filled with strangers, a place to be endured while you wait for your bus to take you away.

But for a great many of us, there is a sense that there is no world other than this one, that this world is a place to cherished, and the people around us are to be cared for. After we die, we live on through the legacy of our actions, the things we did while we were alive in this world. How will we be remembered? What do we leave behind? Who did we love?

Rumi tells us, in a translation by Jonathan Star [4]:

The secrets of eternity are beyond us
And these puzzling words we cannot understand.
Our words and actions take place on this side of the veil.
O soul, When the veil is gone, we are gone.

This is the time of the year when the veil is thin, when we are invited to puzzle over the secrets of eternity. Those secrets will not be revealed to us on this side of the veil. To some degree we create our own understanding of such eternity, and we do so through the ones we love who have gone beyond the veil. We all enter and exit this world through the same gate. No matter how different each of us lives in this world, the exit is the same for all of us. Those who have preceded us in death can be our guides to what lies ahead for us. In their continued presence, in our memories of them, we can be joyful. We are not alone. In some sense, they are with us still.

Lifting up and remembering those who precede us, who have left this world, as we have done today, connects us deeply with one another. Let this table serve as a reminder, and let us revel in the profound joy of the connection, perhaps unspoken, that binds all of us who dwell together in this place and on this earth.

Notes
1 Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 2007, p. 289.
2 "The White Museum", George Bilgere, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ index.php?date=2009/03/23
3 Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel, 1920. - V. Mist Forms.
4 Jonathan Star, Rumi: In the Arms of the Beloved, 1997, p. 169.

Tolerance

Tim Raridon

What do we think of when we think of the word “tolerance”?

Tolerance. Many thoughts come to mind… Acceptance? Similar, but not quite the same thing. I may tolerate someone’s opinions and accept that person as a friend, and yet I might not accept the opinions they hold. Tolerance has many nuances of meaning and gives rise to thoughts of many important concepts.   
Tolerance. Putting up with. Cooperation. Forgiveness. The right to be wrong.

Broadmindedness. Open-mindedness. Religious freedom. Tolerance is certainly an important underpinning of religious freedom, as every good Unitarian who has had to put up with the rest of those other wrong religions for so long will certainly attest. Peaceful co-existence. Lenience. Patience. Diversity. 

Tolerance. Freedom. Democracy. Tea parties. Town halls. Live and let live. Agree to disagree. Freedom of the press. Freedom to assemble. Freedom of speech.

The word “tolerance” is derived from the Latin tolerare which means “to bear,” like bearing a burden. There are many diverse uses of uses of the word based on bearing burdens of all kinds, but I am primarily talking about tolerance as it relates to our reaction to those who believe differently than we do. And be aware, there is a “word thing” involved here. Semantic interpretations of what is meant and implied by “tolerance” abound. What do you think of when you think of “tolerance”? 
The great enlightenment thinker Voltair—known for his advocacy of religious and philosophical tolerance—said:  “What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature.”

This is the kind of interdependent, peaceful, cooperative notion that others of the enlightenment—like Thomas Jefferson—eventually developed into a central philosophical pillar that supports our religious and democratic freedoms. Tolerance. Perhaps Joshua Liebman explains the fundamental concept best: “Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.” Live and let live. Agree to disagree.

The idea of tolerance is not always held in such high regard, however. Some believe that “tolerance” is symptomatic of a certain moral or philosophical arrogance held by those doing the tolerating. For example, Mahatma Gandhi—yes, that Mahatma Gandhi—said, “Tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one's own.” Gandhi’s sentiment is echoed by Father Domonique Pire, who similarly said, “Let us not speak of tolerance. This negative word implies grudging concessions by smug consciences. Rather, let us speak of mutual understanding and mutual respect.” I must say, these perspectives on the subject do give one pause and provide an opening to a deeper discussion of tolerance as a concept and the ways we resolve and deal with moral, religious and philosophical differences. Let’s dig into this a bit more and see what we find.



First, tolerance can be thought of as being the very essence of egalitarian thinking, and does not, from my perspective, imply a superiority or inferiority on either side of the equation between the “tolerator” and the “tolerated”. It seems, therefore, that I am in the rather dubious position where I must take issue with Mahatma Gandhi and Father Pire. Actually, it is merely a matter of semantics. 

There is not a hierarchy with righteous smug consciences on top and inferior lower minded consciences on the bottom at work here. Tolerance is horizontal, not vertical. It implies accepted differences, not overbearing disputes based on religious or political hierarchies and status. All men and women and children are created equal as far as this view of tolerance goes. Superiority and inferiority are not at issue. Equality of rights prevails in a free democracy and in a free church built on tolerance. Father Pire, sage and great wise teacher Gandhi, we are talking of mutual understanding and mutual respect when we speak of “tolerance”. We also understand your message of humility. In today’s reading, Thomas Jefferson, like Gandhi and Father Pire, reminds us to be humble in our tolerance, saying: “I know too well the weakness and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results.” Tolerance is intrinsically humble and egalitarian, because we know we are all individuals—we are all fallible human individuals. 
Some have equated tolerance with passivity and weakness. ”Tolerance is the virtue of a man with no convictions,” said GK Chesterton. William Somerset Maugham just as tersely said, “Tolerance is another word for indifference.” The thought here is that if you do not stand strongly in firm, righteous opposition to those with whom you disagree, you are somehow inadequate or do not care enough to fight for your beliefs. Maugham’s equating of tolerance with indifference is perhaps a bit strong, but there does seem to be a point here. We should guard ourselves against an aloof indifference. To this point, Margaret Chase Smith said, “We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.” We ignore those with destructive views at our own risk. Left unchecked, some elements can cause the corrosion of the whole fabric of society.

Tolerance is not necessarily indifference. In fact, it is often the opposite of indifference.

When we tolerate we not only recognize another‘s right to their opinion, but we also declare our right to our own opinion. My tolerance declares that I have made a stand, but that others may freely differ. Again, the idea is that you or I may strongly disagree with the ideologies or political views or religious views of others, but if I wish to have and exercise my freedoms, I must allow others their freedoms and beliefs. I really like the way Eleanor Holmes Norton put it: ”The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.” 
Tolerance is not an expression of indifference. It is an expression of my individuality and it is an invitation for further discussion and growth.  JFK said: “Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.” This is a great distinction. Tolerance, in this view, is an expression of opposition—opposition to the oppression of others for their beliefs. Jerome Nathanson’s perspective expands this idea further. He said, “The price of the democratic way of life is a growing appreciation of people's differences, not merely as tolerable, but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.”
Tolerance. This word evokes many thoughts and emotions, especially in this time of intense political and social discord. We are witnessing a very turbulent and contentious time for tolerance right now, a time in which we, all of us—as individuals, as a community, and as a country—are profoundly re-examining many of our fundamental—sometimes conflicting— concepts regarding, among other things, how our society should be organized and the role of government and leaders in solving a multitude of social and financial difficulties. Opinions are plentiful. The most basic aspects of civilized society and democracy are now being scrutinized

and vigorously fought over, and we are currently as challenged as any previous generations have ever been in attempting to resolve disputes peaceably. 

The way things have shaken out, sustaining a healthy inter-personal democratic tolerance for opposing views is now becoming increasingly difficult and pragmatically challenging. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, said: “We tend to idealize tolerance, then wonder why we find ourselves infested with losers and nut cases.” It is difficult to argue with this sentiment right now.  Many of the strong currents that flow through the real world apparently reflect little interest in peaceful coexistence and harmonious disagreement. The politics of zero tolerance regarding opposing views and policies is upon us. It is not the first time in history that strongly opposing views have threatened to undermine peaceful coexistence. But the present twenty-first-century-post-nine-eleven-technology-age-first-African-American-president circumstance is like no other we have ever known. What is going on?  
It can be said that tolerance is the foundation of freedom and of our nation. This is something I have pondered for quite some time. The idea of mutual tolerance is in many ways the bedrock of our Constitution and a major tenet of the founding of our nation. It is also in many ways a monumentally simple concept. Yet, whole civilizations have warred and crumbled for lack of understanding the power and necessity of tolerance. They failed to see the value in a peaceful co-existence of people with conflicting individual views and their ability to live successfully in a tolerant atmosphere of diverse cooperation which ultimately creates a more stabilized civilized society and a more constructive governmental discourse for all. 

The truth is it is difficult to imagine democratic freedoms existing without tolerance. Perhaps this is the very core of what inspired me to talk about it today. Without some level of political tolerance and cooperation, we are left only with increased rancor and discord. As discord and enmity grow, division and confusion create vicious entrenched foes out of our leaders and our people. True democracy is undermined by anger, intolerant hatred and growing movement toward self righteous dissent and an increasing tendency for violence. As fear grows, the already powerful become more powerful and centralized, feeding on the inability of our democratic government act effectively. There is no quarter. Tolerance is not tolerated. Government freezes due to lack of cooperation and fear grows. And the downward spiral seems to continue endlessly. Tolerance dies. If tolerance dies, so does democracy. We feel like a motherless child. Democracy itself becomes a motherless child…a long way from home. 
The tolerance that supports and nourishes our free democracy is severely under attack. We should pay heed to Rene Dubos, who said: “Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.” I believe this is very true. If it is, then we are currently at great risk. But there is more to this. 

The deep irony of tolerance is that it has limits. We do not, for example, tolerate murder. We did not tolerate Hitler. We did not tolerate King George in the 1770s. We humans have throughout history drawn certain lines in the sand and said we will not tolerate this or that based on our own collective beliefs. This is clear, and we need to recognize that such limits exist and are even quite necessary. Again, we strive to be tolerant, but we are not altogether indifferent. 

The question before us is: Do we still value tolerance as a pillar of our society and our democracy? To what degree of dissent must one or the other of our opposing political groups go before tolerance is no longer possible? Has one side or the other—or both—already passed that critical point? What action of intolerance is either side now willing to undertake in order to preserve a society that has been founded on principles of tolerance? Do we put our society at risk as a result of our stubborn belief in a cooperative democracy based on mutual understanding and mutual respect? Does our stubborn belief in tolerance prevent us from taking action to uphold our convictions and beliefs?   

These are difficult questions that I merely wish to raise here and which I will not now attempt to comprehensibly answer. However, I will add this. I genuinely believe that we all must be diligent and support the shaking pillars of our tenuous democracy by supporting the ideal of mutual tolerance and constructive discourse. Tolerance of many beliefs is a central part of the Unitarian tradition. I am drawn to close my thoughts on this matter by inviting you to ponder the beauty and simplicity of the Yin Yang symbol, and how well it represents the conflict and harmony of opposing forces. White spinning into black. Darkness spinning into light. Each containing an element of the other. Each surging forward. Each relenting. Both stay strong. The whole stays strong. And harmony is created.  

Quotes:
Eleanor
Holmes Norton:

The only way to make sure people you
agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree
with. 

Jerome Nathanson:

The price of the democratic way of life
is a growing appreciation of people's differences, not merely as tolerable,
but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.

Margaret Chase Smith:

We should not permit tolerance to degenerate
into indifference.

Mark Twain:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry,
and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these
accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot
be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's
lifetime. 

Ralph W. Sockman:

The test of courage comes when we are
in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

There is so much good in the worst of
us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it behooves all of us not
to talk about the rest of us. 

Rene Dubos:

Human diversity makes tolerance more
than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.

Celebrations of Life, 1981

Voltaire:

What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence
of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally
each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature.

ARISTOTLE:

It is the mark of an educated mind to
be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

GK CHESTERTON:

Tolerance is the virtue of
the man without convictions. 

RUMI:

“Out
beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will
meet you there.” 
 

William Somerset Maugham:

Tolerance is another word
for indifference.  

Mahatma Gandhi:

Tolerance implies a gratuitous
assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one's own. 

Patrick Nielsen Hayden:
 

We tend to idealize tolerance,
then wonder why we find ourselves infested with losers and nut cases. 

JFK:

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment
to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution
of others.  

Joshua Liebman:

Tolerance is the positive and cordial
effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without
necessarily sharing or accepting them.  

Wilbert E. Scheer

Tolerance is the oil which takes the
friction out of life. 

Father
Dominique Pire:

Let us not speak of tolerance. This negative
word implies grudging concessions by smug consciences. Rather, let us
speak of mutual understanding and mutual respect.

Heinrich Heine:

Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow
the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more
strength than you possess.






 

We All Belong

Matt Alspaugh

Some time ago, I asked my Dad how it was that my family had become Methodists, since I knew that he had been raised in that tradition. I expected him to tell me something about the theology of the Methodists, or John Wesley or the warm, emotional side of that faith, but he didn't. He said that when his parents needed to choose a church, the Methodist Church in their small town was a little bit closer to their home than the Baptist church. That was it! But for an accident of location, I could have been raised a Southern Baptist!  Hard to imagine...

Now, today, most people put a little more thought into picking their church. Because they can drive farther,  churches have gotten larger, just as supermarkets and high-schools have gotten larger. So when people church-shop, many of them evaluate churches as consumers would, comparing features:  how good is the praise band, how silver-tongued is the preacher, do they serve cappucino or even breakfast, does the church-school have a playground with the latest equipment. Often, belief, theology, tradition and history do not even enter into the picture, or if they do, they are only a small checkbox on a large checklist.

We don't have a praise band or a playground and we don't regularly serve breakfast, (though our coffee hour snacks are fairly spectacular, in my opinion) And as for silver tongued preachers, certainly this tongue is made of flesh, so I hope you are here for different reasons. I hope you came here because you are, or were, looking for something different. I think most of you came, and stayed here because you want to belong.

Let me quote Reverend Ravi Janamanci, a Unitarian Universalist minister who spoke at General Assembly this year. I think Jim Rogers commented on Ravi's talk in the last newsletter.  Ravi describes his experience as an immigrant from India, and his sense of not belonging.

In the US, I felt like a visitor from outer space. ... In the anonymity of Chicago, I wanted to belong--as a natural part of the human landscape, not an aberration to be tolerated. I wanted to be comfortable in the presence of others and know they were comfortable in mine. I did not want to be caught ... in the fault lines between worlds, cultures, and faiths.[1] 

Ravi wanted to be a part of the community. Ravi went on to describe what happened -- a minister who invited him to church. Let me continue this long quote because I love his language:

The late Reverend Frank Robertson, ... invited me to his church. Frank gave me the incredible gift of seeing myself as more than just the sum of my identities. He showed me what Unitarian Universalism was all about: a faith open and welcoming to people regardless of ethnicity, theology, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or political affiliation; a faith where theological crossbreeds, cultural mutts, religious hybrids like you and me can struggle and connect....  A faith where being a mutt or a mongrel is not an awful place of last resort but an intentional first choice. Instead of promising a heaven of sameness, Frank invited me into a community of individuals working at creating a heaven on earth.

Ravi notes that belonging in this faith is a struggle. He says:

Many of us struggle to belong in this faith–as people of color and from minority cultures, as differently-abled people, as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning people, as Christian theists, pagans, atheists, secular humanists, Hindus, Buddhists, or as Republicans.

Yet, we stay. We keep showing up. Why? – because we know we are not alone. Somehow, we know that we belong here and that the struggle to belong is an integral part of belonging.

Ravi's message is this: we belong because we must. We meet others here, engaged in similar struggle, and in them we glimpse a higher sense of purpose that we wish to be a part of.  We discern that this community is connected to something big, and we want to be a part of this discovery and creation of meaning, to share in what is being constructed here.

Whether or not we are members, and have actually completed the ritual of signing the membership book, we are here, we belong, because we must.  We come here, because at least to some degree, we can let go of some of the pretenses imposed in the other communities where we live and work.  Here, we can just be ourselves and not our identities, imperfect but working to be better persons in a better world.

 We also come, I hope, in part because we feel cared for here. Friends in this church community want to learn about our struggles and our suffering as well as our successes.  Even if the community can do little to heal the hurts, it can hold us in care, and help ease those burdens.

Every bit as important as being cared for -- is caring. We come to this community because is offers us an opportunity to care, to help out, to be of use. We care not only for others in the community, we care for the community itself. Once these basic needs are met, we can expand our caring reach to those outside the walls of this community. The church is interconnected to other communities through care, through the work we do in the larger world.

For most of us, caring is a natural and a joyful response.  We are glad to be of use, whether it is visiting friends who are ill, or helping out here in the nursery on Sunday morning, or organizing the Farmer's Market. Our hearts grow warm as we do these things, and that joyous warmth brings us closer to others and deeper into this community.

I consider this church community to be a microcosm of the larger communities in the world. The challenge of this church, or any community, is to provide a safe place for people to be of use, to follow their calls.  This may mean helping them to find and do things they may not otherwise get a chance to do. One of the challenges of this church is to push us to explore areas that may be uncomfortable or scary of difficult. 

We're beginning to explore a new form of Shared Ministry in the Sunday Services group. I'm inviting individuals who are in that group to work with me on particular sermon topics. Diana Shaheen worked with me on this one, and I asked her to find readings and poetry and to bring her own thoughts to a conversation about the topic of Belonging to Community. I think Diana also might agree that this is stepping out of her comfort zone, and doing something new and different. I look forward to others on the Sunday Services team trying this approach with me. It's an example of caring by being of use.

A final way to care, to help out, is through our financial contributions. We are entering the weeks of the pledge drive, the time when we make financial commitments for the next year. 

Giving money to an organization is both very simple and complex. It seems simple because it can reduce the measure of our care to a simple numerical calculation. How much do I value this church community? Two percent of my income? Three percent? Five or ten percent? That's the simple part.

And giving money is complex because money and finance is so imbued with so much meaning in our culture. Salaries are secret in most companies. We're all focused on getting a 'good deal' in our purchases and transactions. Many live in anxiety as the worth of our retirement accounts ebb and flow as they ride the jitters of the stock market. So even thinking about making a monetary gift to the church through a pledge can bring up complex emotions. We hope the next few weeks will provide an opportunity for each of us to explore this complexity.

It would be nice to consider a variety of different types of community beyond this church, but time does not permit that. So let us consider just one more, one at the opposite size extreme from this church.  Let us consider the ecosystem, that interconnected web of life to which we all belong and which we cannot choose to leave. Like it or not, we're all part of the community of nature.

The reading by Stephen Belbin we heard earlier was excerpted from a longer paper "Totality and Belonging: Toward Eco-Concept Synthesis."[2]   This reading as well as the paper offer rich ideas about our place in the ecological community. I hope I can offer a brief exploration of these ideas.

Belkin tells us that among all those forms of life, we alone have the sense of belonging. As sentient beings, we understand our place in nature in a way that other creatures and inanimate objects cannot. We have awareness, and since we are aware of belonging to this community, that awareness brings choice. We can choose how we will interact with the community of life.

One choice for us is the traditional Judeo-Christian view: we shall have power and dominion over the creatures of the earth, use them, bend them to our wishes. We see the natural world is corrupt, imperfect, even evil, to be tamed.

Another choice is to  merge completely with the natural world as it is. We could return to a state of nature, and we could live off the land in the most Romantic sense. In this approach we see nature as perfect, and are in awe.

Belbin tries to find a middle way between a humanity that is separate from nature and which dominates over it, and a humanity that is completely embedded in nature. We can belong, in a different way, to the natural world. We have to recognize that nature is neither perfect nor corrupt.  We have to confront the bad as well as the good. We have to discern, we have to act responsibly.

Moreoever, we have to be leaders. In the words of writer Margaret Wheatley, "I define a leader as anyone who's willing to help, anyone who sees an issue in their community, their family, their organisation, and is willing to just step forward and do something about it."[3] I would note that this definition of leadership applies both to our role in the world, and in this church as a microcosm of the world. So in either setting, in any setting, when our awareness leads us to care and to help, we become leaders in the community.

Now there was one part of the reading that I struggled and tussled with. Belkin imagines our current world, our interconnected ecosystem, what he calls the totality, as a bridge that we must cross over to some perfect and unchanging reality beyond.

He warns that we cannot stop on the bridge -- either by worshipping Nature or power -- we have to cross.  At the same time, we cannot just fly across, bypassing the bridge, and (his words) "claiming instead a self righteous inheritance of a glorious future invisible."  In other words we must not ignore or despoil this world in hopes of some future rapture or resurrection to some heavenly home in the afterlife.

So we have to cross. What does it mean to cross over the bridge to some perfect and unchanging reality beyond? Perhaps this might refer to an ecologically sustainable reality, in which our very downsized ecological footprints tread lightly on this earth. To achieve true sustainability would require that we operate at a level of physical neutrality: zero population growth, a flat GDP, elimination of all extractive and polluting aspects of production.

 It may also be that this perfect and unchanging reality is related to some worldwide spiritual enlightenment. Perhaps the emergence of the Omega Point or the technological singularity. I personally don't know what that would look like. I don't have that kind of theological imagination. I may be agnostic on this potential for enlightenment, but don't let my beliefs or unbeliefs limit yours.

But whatever Belkin means, there may be a germ of truth in this idea that we must cross the bridge. If we think of our church community as a microcosm of the larger world, then I do agree that part of our task is not to come to this community and just stay in place, doing the same things over and over, but to cross the bridge. To find personal spiritual transformation and to live lives of wholeness.

The community becomes both an end and a means. We both cross over the bridge and we live on it.  We do our part in this church community, sharing the joys and the burdens of our ministry. We become leaders because we care. And at the same time, we continue to do our own work of self development and transformation. We do both these together: both crossing over and living on the bridge.

In all of our communities there are bridges. We live on them, we belong, we do the work, and we cross over, finding change and growth in whatever way it is presented to us.

As to the whole world, the totality, the concept of simultaneously living on and crossing over the bridge is hard to grasp. I continue to struggle with that image. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the vision of where we are going and what we must do. It is fleeting, hard to put into words. Better to reach for the words of others, like Albert Einstein:

Human beings are part of a whole called the "Universe", a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. The delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons near us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.[4]

Each one of us is a member of several communities: interlocking communities of family, church, city, nation, and the whole of humanity.   We are asked to widen our circle of compassion beyond the boundaries of each of these communities, blending and overlapping into the larger community that is this world. We are called to care, and to care is to lead. This is how we get to the other side of the bridge, to a more perfect reality. It is up to each of us to do this, in our own way, and it is within our abilities to do so. It is a lifelong task. Let us rise to that task. May it be so.

Notes:
1 Ravi Janamanci, "Faith in the Borderland", Sermon at GA 2009,www.uua.org/documents/ janamanchiabhi/090628_faith_borderland.pdf
2 Science in Africa on-Line Magazine, http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2001/december/ecocon.htm
3 Margaret Wheatley, speaking on Future Tense, ABC Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2009/2611237.htm
4 From Irene von Lippe Biesterfield with jessica van Tijn, "Science, Soul, and the Spirit of Nature", (quoted in Parabola Fall 2007, p. 52)

The Answers Are Not in the Back of the Book

4 Oct. 2009  --  Martin Berger

      Our Alternative Services Committee originally intended to offer us this day a commentary on Things We Learned in School That Aren’t True, to be linked with Columbus Day, an observance that comes up in about a week.  The service was to feature the bright young historian who now teaches Latin American history at YSU.  She will no doubt address this audience in the future, and she will do so splendidly, but as things have worked out, this Sunday you’ll be addressed by me instead.

      I cannot speak with authority about Columbus.  I grew up on the outskirts of a city named after that individual, but apart from that I have no professional expertise in the Age of Exploration, the Age of European Conquest and Exploitation, or whatever we should call it.  I have touched upon the topic in survey classes, and I have some opinions, but my work as a historian has focused on Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries.  

      So I am going to approach the general topic of what we know, or what we think we know, from different directions than those that Columbus and his three moldy vessels followed in 1492.  (Those vessels, incidentally, were cheap and expendable, quite unlike the costly state-of-the art contraptions that we have more recently thrown into space.)
      Of course we know things that are wrong–some from school, some from the vast pool of information and misinformation that’s called Urban Legend or Everybody Knows.  There are still a lot of people who believe that eating carrots will enable them to see in the dark.  That belief comes from a World War II cover story circulated by the British in order to prevent the Germans from figuring out the British use of radar to find and intercept German night bombers.  (The Germans had their own radar program and weren’t fooled about what the British were doing, but the cover story lives on, even though Bugs Bunny didn’t work the night shift.) 

      People have been persuaded that draining large quantities of blood from patients almost always improves their medical condition; that the course of future events may be determined by careful examination of the innards of assorted sacrificed creatures; that yelling at a television set influences the flight of a football; and that stock and housing prices could never go down.

      It’s hard to tell which weird assertions, in our weird world, are true and which are false.  We can’t just go by the sincerity and general credibility of the person who makes an assertion.  We had a  President whose gullibility led an aide to say “It’s not what he doesn’t know that’s the problem, it’s what he knows that isn’t true.”  But even he was sometimes right; it was morning in America, once every day.

      Of all our many sources of error, I am going to focus on one that I find especially pernicious.  It is also a relatively easy target.  It is dogmatic assertion, as backed by authority and cast as faith.
      My examples are mostly drawn not from the academic learning that I’ve made a living explaining to students, but from personal observations.  This is in keeping with the ways that this church is accustomed to search for truth; we draw on many sources of inspiration, not only from a single authoritative group of texts, and we tend to distrust authority of all varieties.  We routinely respond to statements of opinion by asking for evidence.  This pulpit suggests authority, as it stands a bit above pew-level, but that’s the result of church-building tradition and the practical wish to make the weekly spiel easier to hear.  We are generally civilized enough to listen without interrupting, but we don’t confuse the voices of our ministers, or our Alternative Service speakers, with the voice of God.

      Not everyone feels this way about authority.

      For some years now I have tried to encourage the same spirit of questioning by asking students to repeat after me the familiar schoolyard challenge: Oh yeah?  Says who?  It’s a little like a Responsive Reading.  With UUs it’s not necessary to do the chant.  We already respond to the bumper sticker that says “Question Authority” by thinking “Who says I have to do that?”  This insubordinate spirit is a large part of what keeps me in this organization (we haven’t the time right now to discuss whether we should call it an organization), despite my annoyance when members or guests (or perhaps poltergeists–how to disprove that possibility?) put trash in the recycling and vice versa.
      We all have our own stories as to how we came to our present intellectual stances.  Probably we forget a lot of our own formative experiences, but one that I recall vividly occurred in 9th-Grade World History.  Our textbook began with the human race and its ancestors.  That textbook wasn’t creationist, but it reflected what was then known, so the textbook’s version of the human family tree included the celebrated hoax known as Piltdown Man.  Now, by the mid-1950s, the new technology of radiocarbon dating had demonstrated that the coffee-stained bits of human and simian bone that had been presented as our ancestor were nowhere near old enough to qualify. Piltdown’s fake ID had been busted, and a fellow student had read about the bust in Scientific American.  Our teacher insisted that she would continue to teach Piltdown Man because he was in the textbook.  She was entirely uninterested in what was or was not true; the book was her authority.  To question the book’s authority was to challenge her authority.  She would hold to her line as rigidly as any drone in Stalinist East Germany, ritually invoking the wisdom of MELS (that’s Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, the first two of whom were themselves pretty antiauthoritarian).
      Miss Derivan would not recant, but she did back off to the extent of ignoring Piltdown Man.  She had demonstrated, at least to some of us, an important principle: do not trust people in authority, particularly stupid people in authority.

      So far as I know, no educational theorist has recognized the usefulness of exposing the young to arbitrary, irrational, dogmatic authority.  There must be opportunities for educators (in publications, grants, etc.), for following up this point.  But such experiences of being subjected to inane dogmatism, which must be universal, don’t make everyone skeptical.  Many people want to be told what to do, and what to believe.

      What a great many normal people seem to want (“normal people” as opposed, perhaps, to “Unitarian-Universalists”) is faith, which can be defined as “insistence on believing something, whether or not there is any reasonable evidence for it.”  It can be a desperate thing, this search for faith.  A very clever person, Madame de Staël, wrote “I do not know exactly what we must believe, but I believe that we must believe!  The 18th Century did nothing but deny.  The human spirit lives by its beliefs. Acquire faith through Christianity, or through German philosophy, or merely through enthusiasm, but believe in something.”  She was understandably rattled by the French Revolution, but many people can share her distress, and her craving for something to hang onto.

      We humans seem to be predisposed to find significant patterns in what we experience.  We generalize, and we attempt to come up with explanations.  Noticing patterns is a good thing; apparently-unrelated data may indeed indicate the presence of a people-eating predator, or the imminence of a drought.  We also see less vital, less significant patterns, such as faces and animals in clouds, and so on.  Most issues of Skeptical Inquirer report new instances of holy apparitions on moldy tacos and so on.  (This congregation is less disposed than most to that sort of thing; when we had a persistent problem with paint flaking off the sanctuary ceiling, before we installed the vent fan, I couldn’t sell anyone on claiming that the bad paint was an apparition of Joseph Priestley and charging admission.)  We have ways of evaluating apparent patterns and the explanations that people suggest.  There’s not time today to expand on the scientific method, etc., but I contend that a major problem arises when our attempts to explain phenomena harden into dogma, or faith.

      Faith is demanding.  Maintaining it can be as hard as independent thinking.  Finding ways to banish all the ideas or circumstances that don’t fit the program creates strain, and that strain is often expressed in louder and more vehement proclamations, and in more extreme actions.  Perhaps at some deeply-repressed level the inconsistencies remain in the faithful person’s mind, and drive the faithful toward more intense fanaticism.  Faith that admits of no doubt, that allows for no new information and no adjustments, seems to me to be rooted in panic.  There’s nothing between ironclad belief and chaos.  
      “We think with our blood,” was a Nazi slogan, which meant “we don’t think, we follow with all our hearts the intuitive wisdom of our leader.”  “Führer befehl, wir folgen.”  One way to convince onself that faith is pure and doubt is banished is to commit extreme actions.  If I blow myself up for my faith, I demonstrate to everyone that I really mean business, and any shreds of doubt are dispersed along with all the other shreds.  If I burn people because of disagreements over the finer points of theology, I show the intensity of my commitment.  Faith can inspire people to be even nastier than they would be as imperfect, merely-human individuals.

      If my World History teacher had known anything beyond the textbook, she might have done what a real teacher would do.  She could have used Piltdown’s blowup as a “teachable moment” (an ed-biz cliché, but a useful one), to riff on the evolution of knowledge.  Instead she demonstrated the assurance of the ignorant–often wrong but never in doubt.

      It used to be common practice, in introductory history classes, to assign controversy readers.  Students would be required to read scholarly arguments on a topic, presenting opposing views on a topic.  Many students actually did the reading.  Real authoritative opinions would clash head-on, and students who knew nothing of the topic were required to assess the arguments of learned scholars.  It was not uncommon for wretched freshmen to beg their cruel instructors and graduate assistants to tell them, please: which is right?  
      It is painful for people to make judgments when their whole previous educational experience has been restricted to memorizing and regurgitating.  If they are persuaded to question authority, they may adopt new certainties, sometimes at least as silly than the orthodoxies that they have rejected.  Debunking can be followed not by reasoned skepticism, but by rebunking.  If the flagwaving indoctrinations of long-ago textbooks are replaced by newer politically-correct orthodoxies, not much has been gained, even if we sympathize with some of the goals of the corrective rants.  Even the phrase “critical thinking” becomes maddening when ritually repeated.

      A tougher set of problems is suggested by our second reading, the one from Ron Suskind’s account of his interview with an arrogant political aide who claimed that he and his colleagues could create reality, going beyond the annoying cliché “it is what it is” all the way to “it is what we say it is.”  The question of what is truth has engaged the attention of lots of interesting ancient Greeks, Pontius Pilate, and the more recent Postmodernist school.  We’ll have to figure out epistemology on some other occasion.  For now, I’d like to assume that some approaches to evidence work better than others, on the whole, and stick with how we should deal with uncertainty.

      This sermon began with my encounter, some fifty years ago, with Piltdown Man and my World History teacher.  Let us now consider another personal experience, this one from just twenty-some years back.  I think of it as the Parable of the Opel.

      After our VW Squareback ignited while I was I was underneath it (practical note: don’t assume that when fuel  is pooling all around you, you’re safe in the absence of sparks or flame; the heat from an incandescent bulb will light gasoline just fine), we bought a 1973 Opel 1900 sedan.  As a conscientious car-owner, I read the owner’s manual and set forth to do the right thing and change the radiator coolant.
      The manual included a photograph of the radiator and the simple valve that would allow the old stale coolant to be drained out.  I looked at the radiator and could not find the drain-valve.  I felt all around the radiator’s lower regions and could not find the drain valve.  Finally I drove to Wick Avenue for aid.  

      Opel, a significant German carmaker headquartered in Rüsselsheim, was at that time a General Motors subsidiary, as it remained till quite recently.  In the US, Opel was a “captive import,” and a sideshow of Buick, so it was Buick Youngstown that I made my pilgrimage.  I was directed to the sole mechanic who worked on the foreign cars.

      I posed my question about the invisible drain-valve, and the mechanic–a smallish man, surly but wise–delivered a truly illuminating revelation.  “They ain’t none,” he said.  “You just take off that bottom hose and let it run all over the [bleepin’] place.”
      I had been perplexed by the authoritative text, the owner’s manual, which had lied.  No doubt, sometime after the manual was produced, someone figured out that a Deutschmark or so could be saved by omitting the valve.  I ought to have generalized from what I already knew about history–that official, establishment wisdom ought not to be trusted too far, that common sense and available evidence ought to be considered.  

      It’s good to read the manual.  It may well be right.  But it’s better to treat the words of official wisdom as probabilaties, at most, and to check things out.  The Hellenistic physician Galen advised the aspiring doctor to “learn thoroughly all that has been said by the most illustrious of the Ancients”; and then to “test and prove it, observe what part is in agreement, and what is in disagreement with obvious facts,” the better to “choose this and turn away from that.”
      This policy is more challenging than faith, or following authority.  But if we aspire to reasonable action, it is all we’ve got.