It was a history that told tales where names of the heroes and the names of the villains were almost in two columns. The good guys and the bad buys. Us vs. Them. Usually, in this history, “them” included anyone whose family was not White, of Anglo-Saxon heritage and believed in the Protestant version of Christianity.
Times were simpler then…
Not the historical times that were being reported on mind you. Those were not simpler times at all. They could be, to quote Thomas Hobbes from his seminal work fro 1651 The Leviathan: And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
But rather, history was simpler to report back then.
I had a dear friend who graduated from Dartmouth college in 1931 with a degree in American history. The American history he studied was most often the history of straight, white men, most of whom had died, and were universally seen as heroes.
Like many other academic disciplines, the Field of Study know as History has undergone some major changes in the last 80 years.
Learning history was simpler then, less nuanced.
You learned that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of whom it could be argued were Unitarian, were great men. They were part of the pantheon of Founding Fathers, to be revered.
And that was that. History understood.
Except obviously, that wasn’t that.
There were of course sub-groups in our culture, those who’s stories had been discounted, ignored, left to neglect because the learned men of the time didn’t consider them worth studying.
Happily, this has been changing. So now, as we study Jefferson, we learn about Sally Hemings, the slave woman who bore him six children. We begin to see that the same man who crafted words like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” himself had feet of clay. Like all of us, Jefferson was both a man of his own time, but also a man striving toward a future of greater equality for all.
I know that when one read these words 237 years later, it may be difficult to reconcile Jefferson’s words with his actions.
It would be easy to shout words like hypocrisy at a moment like this.
But that would be a bad idea.
We cannot judge people with the values that we hold today, when they lived in a context different than our own.
Think of the moral struggles of our own time. Think, for example, about current hot, political topics. Think about in 237 years what our progeny might say about us and our inability to, for example, guarantee a living wage for all people; or that we put up with such barbaric practices as the death penalty.
Many of us know the old rhyme: In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean, blue.” We know that Columbus was looking for a short cut to Sub-Continental India, and instead “discovered” the New World.
I’m not really up here to debate the historicity and accuracy of all those things.
One of the things that Columbus did, even though it probably never entered his mind, what Columbus did was leave us, these 521 years later, he left us a giant controversy.
As early as 1792, celebrations were held to commemorate Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. In New York City, a celebration was held, and in Baltimore, MD a monument was dedicated to Columbus. In 1892, a statue of Columbus was raised at Columbus Avenue in New York City. Further, at the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago that year, replicas of Columbus' three ships were displayed.
By 1886 Italian-Americans were promoting Columbus Day as a day of ethnic pride and in 1906, Colorado became the first state to recognize Columbus Day as a holiday. In the late 19th century, Italian-Americans were in desperate need of something to celebrate their culture, because at the time they, along with other immigrant groups, were very poorly treated, and frequently treated as “non-white.” Certainly, they were non-protestants, in a land where it would take another almost 80 years for a Catholic to be elected President of the United States, and he wasn’t even Italian, but Irish!
Now we have a conflict. In a similar way that the Italian-Americans wanted to lift up their cultural contributions to the Great Melting Pot that is our nation, so to, as their own voices began to be recognized and honored, so did the descendants of the people who were already in the Americas want to have their own history recognized and valued.
These two stories are at cross-purposes.
This is the Problem of Columbus Day. Well, one of the problems of Columbus Day.
The exact specifics of Christopher Columbus’s trip to the Americas is of course very interesting for those who love history. There were four voyages, not all of them went smoothly, and now parts of his remains are in the Dominican Republic and some are in Spain. He was not Spanish by birth, Italian in fact, but before the modern Nation State of Italy, and he tried to get three other monarchs to sponsor his trip before Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand agreed to fund him.
In his first trip, only two of the ships actually completed the journey. The Santa Maria, Columbus’s Flag Ship ran aground on a coral reef and had to be abandoned.
All these facts, though, are sort of beside my point though. Interesting as they may be, accurate as they may or may not be, what is of interest to us today is the conflict that grows out of knowing a more complete picture of the story, not the minutiae of one version of the story.
On the one side, you have this Italian hero, celebrated by Italian-Americans in the late 1800’s. And they need a hero.
Their hero, though, is a villain to those people whose ancestors were already on this continent. The question of what we do to honor both of these stories in concert with each other, is in fact the Problem of Columbus Day.
Columbus was a very early explorer, certainly NOT the first European to find their way to the shores of what would eventually come to be known as “North America.” When he arrived, he found himself confronted by peoples who were not like him, but also who were not the Indians he expected to find.
Following Columbus came many others, and these people some unintentionally, some by design, ravaged the population of people who were already living here. Due to disease, poverty, conquest, subjugation and slavery, the indigenous population was decimated.
And there is a lot of pain and anger felt by their children.
This month’s theological theme is “unity and diversity.”
How can we hold, in just this one example—these two realities of history that surround one man—how can we honor both stories, deeply honor them, when they are so wildly divergent?
Unitarian Universalism enjoys a reputation in “church-circles” for being really excellent at doing interfaith work. About 18 months ago, I came back from a Minister’s Training to report to you how a Black Southern Baptist preacher, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, sang our praises regarding our leadership in Interfaith work, work that he sees as the future. But Dr. Forbes also said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that we needed to get our collective selves in gear, because the world needs us NOW and we are still too busy being “God’s still small voice.” He said, Stop it! Go out, and show the world what we can be if we work together!
I think one way in which we are able to work so well in Interfaith circles is that we have a faith that requires no testament, no single statement of belief, that we have no creed or dogma. We don’t feel the HONEST need to save people by showing them our way of believing, because we don’t, at our core, feel that people need to be saved.
This is a gift from our Universalist ancestors. It is a gift for which I am profoundly grateful and inspired.
Last month when I was attending a meeting with the Stanislaus County Interfaith Council we were planning the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service together. As I sat at the table with Christian and Sikh religious leaders, I was very pleased. Pleased to learn more about Sikhism, pleased be a part of something greater than just me.
I could do this more easily because I didn’t have a deep and serious investment in the outcome. I mean, I want the service to be a success, of course, but I didn’t walk in the door with an idea of how I thought it should look when all the planning was done.
Not having an idea about that, I’m less likely to be frustrated, upset, and even hurt if things turn out a way that is different than what I imagined they would be.
It’s easy not to have a deep investment in one, singular Interfaith Thanksgiving service. Easy because that service doesn’t represent hundreds of years of oppression, theft and other spoils of conquest.
Well, actually, it does, doesn’t it.
But what it also represents is people gathering together, intentionally gathering together, to heal the wounds of the past. To address the wrongs that have happened, something that religious liberals and political liberals are VERY GOOD at doing.
But in order for this to happen, we must come to the table not only ready to discuss what has happened that has wronged us, but we must also come to the table with the incredible sense that we are also prepared to forgive.
We must be prepared to sit at whatever table we do, at work, at church, with extended family, and while we’re passing along the mashed potatoes, we must also be prepared to share forgiveness.
To forgive someone who has wronged you does not mean that you pretend something didn’t happen. It means to move beyond that hurt and to search for the inherent worth that person has. It means to treat those persons with dignity.
If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred. — The Bhagavad Gita
This ancient book, like many others, has wisdom for us.
The problem of Columbus Day is in part that it represents two ethnic groups, each of whom have felt the need for the wrongs perpetrated against them, to be addressed.
And we are not addressing them.
Also, we have turned this day into a sales flyer, which only adds insult to injury.
Let us follow the wisdom of this Hindu Holy Book. “If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.”
Go forth from this, our sacred place, and practice bravery and heroism.
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