The Problem of Columbus Day

History has gotten a little more complicated since the mid-point of the 20th century. Time was there used to be a single narrative about the history of our nation. It was taught from coast to coast, Canada to Mexico.

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.

Unity & Diversity

On Friday evening I attended a concert of the Modesto Symphony Orchestra at the Gallo Center. The concert opened in a way that no other symphony concert I have ever attended opened. It started with the whole orchestra standing, playing our National Anthem.

When I played in the Modesto Band during the summer, each concert started with us playing The Star Spangled Banner, and this wasn’t so shocking to me. It was an outdoor venue, it was summer, and I’d played our National Anthem hundreds of times since I first picked up the clarinet in 1979.

But I’d never been in an orchestra, or seen an orchestra do this.

I guess I should also say that I am a sucker for the National Anthem. I know that the song is a struggle for many to sing because of the vocal range, I know that many don’t like the song as it’s original poem was inspired by a battle and a war.

So Friday night, as I stood in the Gallo Center, hand over my heart, singing our National Anthem, we get to the end and the lyric is “Oh, say does that Star Spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

And for the first time in my life, my heart asked the question, “Does it?”

Yes, the Stars and Bars still flies over our land from sea to shining sea, but are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?


One of the difficulties of writing a sermon that is based on current events is that current events keep changing, and one is trying to build a theological structure on shifting sands. Particularly in a 24 hour a day news cycle.

In today’s Reading from the Global Scripture, Methodist minister, Rev. Morgan Guyton takes a look at the “truthiness” of Representative Ted Cruz’s speech to the Iowa Family Leadership Summit.

This post modern “truthiness” that Cruz employs is not brave. Cruz is not being brave in the way that our National Anthem is asking about. Cruz is bold, true enough, and he’s learned about Christian Dominionism from his father, Rafael Cruz, a preacher in a very “fundamentalist” Christian Church.

But bold and brave are not the same thing.

Anyone can be bold. Even the words on your page can be bold, all you have to do is highlight them, and go to your word toolbar and hit b.

Brave though is more difficult. Bravery is about honesty, integrity and potentially dangerous consequences.

Bravery changes the world.

Kathrine Switzer, who in 1967, was the first woman to officially run in the Boston marathon was brave. She was actually assaulted on the course by some men, and then other men came to her aid, they surrounded her and ran with her.

In 2007, 50 year-old construction worker Wesley Autrey, had a seizure and collapsed, falling into the train tracks between the two rails. A 20 year-old stranger, seeing the train coming, jumped down into the tracks putting his body between Mr. Autrey and the train, holding him down to the ground as the train went over them. When the train stopped, Cameron Hollopeter shouted up to the crowd that had been silenced by shock, to “We’re both okay! Please tell the girls their Dad will be with them shortly.” The train cars were so close to the two men that Hollopeter’s hat was covered in grease from the train’s undercarriage.



What Ted Cruz, and the rest of the Republican Representatives have done with this government shut down is not bravery. This is not a partisan statement. I am not telling anyone from the pulpit who to vote for, or who not to vote for.

I am using the pulpit to speak about what is morally right and correct.

In his book 1984 George Orwell wrote:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

Of course, the party that George Orwell is writing about when he wrote this book in 1948 was the party of Big Brother, not our American Republican Party.

What those representatives in Washington who have voted to halt the government have done is not bravery. It is not “good and responsible government.” It is wasteful.  I have read that estimates are that this shut down is costing the U.S. Government $300 Million dollars a day.

Wasting $300 Million dollars a day may be bold, and it may make a statement, but it is not bravery.

There are many things that make these actions upsetting, and listing them would take some great while. With the suffering of one program I can demonstrate the monstrosity of the power play going on in Washington DC right now. WIC, the program that helps poor women with infants and children feed there kids is on furlough.

The most vulnerable in our nation are the ones who are suffering the most right now, and it isn’t like the Members of the House of Representatives pay is being interrupted.


Are these the actions of “the Free”?

Yes, I suppose these actions could be seen as actions of free men and women.

But freedom is relatively easy, once you have it. It’s easy to abuse, and misapply. One can claim freedom to do just about anything.

In this nation we are free to do all sorts of things, but it doesn’t mean that they should be done. That they are the moral and correct things to do.

Right now, one of us could yell “Fire!” in the sanctuary. You are free to do so at any time, but if there is in fact no fire in the sanctuary, it is the wrong thing to do. It is immoral to do it, yet still you are free to do so.

I expect that you won’t, though. Because if nothing else, the minister will give you a very stern talking to.


So it’s true, that with their freedom, those who have voted to halt the government because they don’t like the Affordable Care Act, can do so. They are perfectly within their rights to do so. But in doing so, they are ignoring their responsibility.

I hope you’ll indulge me for a short minute while I quote an old Spiderman comic book.

It is in The Amazing Fantasy Comic #15, published in 1962 that Stan Lee first wrote a phrase that will forever be attached to his fictional Spiderman character. “…with great power there must also come—great responsibility.”


When one does not act with responsibility as one uses one’s freedom, a freedom hard won by the blood of many warriors, then one is most certainly NOT acting in bravery.


Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. Diane Dowgiert, captured the essence of why the government shutdown is shameful:

"There are moral issues at stake, which is why I care so much. The disconnect between elected officials and those they allegedly serve is apparent to me. To pit the interests of one group of people against those of another is, well, sinful. In this case it's federal employees against the medically uninsured. An orchestrated Faustian dilemma serves no one, except the already outrageously rich. Common folk cannot afford to be silent or complacent."

It is Rev. Diane’s phrase “To pit the interests of one group of people against those of another is, well, sinful”, that brings us to our home stretch, so to speak.


Here in this faith, we talk frequently of our unity and our diversity. We are rightly proud of our openness to peoples who are different than we are as individuals. Here in our congregations we have people who love differently, we have people who have different kinds of job and people who have ancestors from across the globe.

Here there are people of differing theological orientations. We go from those who will be frustrated that the minister used the phrase “theological orientation,” to those for whom a phrase like that makes their heart swell with possibilities.

We can have all these things because we are a free church.

We are not the only free church, mind you, but we are our free church. And in our free church we can have women clergy, we can have openly gay clergy, we can have clergy whose ancestry includes people who have been historically marginalized.

It might also be noted that we happily allow straight, white men to be clergy, too.

Our professional ministry reflects the people who are in our pews.


With all of this freedom, though, how are we practicing responsibility?

Are we ever on guard so that we never use the kind of “post-modern truthiness” that Mr. Cruz used in Iowa?

It would be easy to slip into using “truthiness.” You get a little information, you mind and heart responds to that news, and you begin to form an opinion. And then maybe you share that opinion. But have you checked on the facts? When an argument is logically sound, but not based on actual facts, it becomes “truthiness.”

I know this happens because I have been on the wrong end of truthiness. People have heard, surmised and shared all manner of things about why Rev. Joe has done X-thing, and by the time I actually hear about all of this, people are upset, mad, frustrated and even hurt.

In our diversity, we have many ways of approaching life and our shared life, together here.

In order to deepen and enrich our lives together, we must act responsibly with our freedoms together, and not, as Mr. Cruz has seemingly done, use personal agenda, disguised as moral outrage, as a weapon to get one’s way to the determent of others.



Our great diversity is, like all things it seems, a gift and a challenge.

Unitarian Universalism has spent decades trying to manage both the diversity that we have, and the diversity we wish for. Like many faiths, we believe that we have a message, a gospel, some good news for the wider world. We believe that our message of openness, a religion without creed and with little or no dogma, can welcome people of all sorts to our doors and into our pews.

I too, believe this is true.

But I also feel like it’s high time we change the way we engage in this work of seeking greater unity and diversity. For decades our sort of catch-phrase has been “unity in diversity.”

It’s true, you can find it on all manner of publications.


We should change the order of those words, though. Unity in diversity says that Unity is a given, that unity is our default, that we are united.

The truth is that we are not always united.

But we are always diverse.

We are diverse in our approach to what we believe. We are agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Humanists, Muslims, Pagans all the way down the alphabet to Zoroastrians, and for many of us, we are some blend of these things and more.

Diverse is our default. It is inextricably part of who we are. We need to stop focusing on diverse, and start moving our energy to unity.

In order to move our faith forward, we must be willing to do what Ted Cruz and his co-hort is not willing to do, and that is act for the greater good.

Sometimes you have to just get in the boat, grab and oar and row, without being the one who determines where the boat is going. Not because you’re a blind sheep, willing to do whatever it is you’re told, but rather because you believe that the people you’ve chosen to travel with, your fellow congregants, your fellow Unitarian Universalists, because you believe that they, too, are working to make the world a better place, a more fair place, a more loving place.

This is what diversity in unity is about. We use our diverse talents and gifts in the service not of our own goals and agendas, but in service with others of amazing talents and gifts toward a larger goal.

I have quoted this passage from Theodore Parker before, and it’s oft quoted elsewhere, so you may have heard it before: “The arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice.”

The arc will continue to bend with the work of many hands, many diverse hands, working together with a unified purpose.

Please join me in a moment of prayer.

Spirit of Love, may my own hands be one of a million pair that work in harmony with others, so that we may, each of us, play a small part in the bending of the arc of the universe toward justice.

Amen.

The Problem of Busyness

Reading:

Excerpt from The ‘Busy’ Trap by Tim Kerider (New York Times, June 30, 2012)

“If you live in American in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot o people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts at the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence."

Sermon:

In the past week, how many people here have used the phrase “I’m so busy,” or “I have too much to do,” or something in that same spirit.

We are living in an epidemic of “busyness.” This morning’s reading came from an article in the New York Times from June of 2012. A quick search through the internet though, shows that it’s an article that has been written, in differing forms, pretty consistently over the past decade.

And Mr. Kreider is correct, it has become our default answer to things. “How are you?”

“So busy!”

I am, myself, not immune to this. Just Thursday after I went home for dinner before I returned to church for the meeting or the Board of Trustees, I told Denis that I left my laptop AND my iPad at work… on purpose. His surprised expression contained a strong lesson to me.

I am never without a computer, an iPad or a smartphone.

Never.

Which means I never really disconnect.

As I was writing this, I was sort of hoping I’d be able to catch someone texting during church or checking their email. I was hoping this because part of me thought it’d be funny and ironic, but I wouldn’t want to shame anybody for actually doing so.

Sometimes I have a sardonic sense of humor….

Even our dog, Toulouse, has taught me a lesson about my computer usage at home. Whenever I close my laptop, he perks up and looks around, because he thinks I’m heading for the door, and he likes to go along wherever the car goes.

So the dog taught me that I spend too much time on the computer at home, and I really only close the computer to leave.

Who’s training whom?

All last church year we used monthly themes to guide our time together. We explored nine topics: Vision, Evil, Covenant, God, Creation, Religious Authority, Redemption, Freedom and Mercy.

I know that on first glance, not all of those topics were ones people were terribly interested in hearing about from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit, but by the time the year was over I heard a lot of positive comments about the idea of using the monthly themes.

The themes this year are: Vocation & Calling, Unity & Diversity, Gratitude, Peace, Grace, Prayer/Spiritual Practice, Letting Go, Salvation and Truth.

Which makes this month’s theme Vocation & Calling.

So, why then, a service on the Problem of Busyness, when it can be argued that Vocation and Calling are all about being busy?

Busyness can get in the way of your true call to a vocation or an avocation. Busyness can become a screen or a fog which clouds your vision about what is truly of deepest value to you. Unless you turn off all of your electronics and go for a walk in the woods, take a drive out to one of the reservoirs at night to look at the Milky Way, how will you listen to your deepest self to find out what matters most to you?

Sure, you could go along, living life, bouncing from activity to activity, driving your kids from soccer practice to viola lessons, but what are you teaching yourself about what matters to your inner poet, your inner day-dreamer, your inner philosopher?

By rushing them from place to place, what are you teaching your children about their own inner poet?

To quote our own Transcendentalist forebear, Henry David Thoreau “It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”

Now not all of us are lucky enough to be friends with a man like Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose back yard we can build a little home near a pond and spend some time contemplating life, and then write a book about our experiences.

But you might have a friend named Ralph. Or know of a little place you can stay for a lessor time than two years, and sit in the quiet and think about big important and little important things. 

Mary DeMocker had an interview about climate change with nature writer and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore in 2012. Dr. Moore is Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University.

There are two quotes from DeMocker’s interview that I think are relevant to today’s sermon. Particularly placed in juxtaposition. The first is:

“Are we going to let it all slip away—all those billions of years it took to evolve the song in a frog’s throat or the strip in a lily—because we are too busy?”

and the second is:

“The thought that we might be losing songbirds, trading them for something I don’t care about at all, like running shoes, makes me angry. And still I drive to the store and buy running shoes.”[1]

Dr. Moore is the author of 9 books on nature and philosophy. She teaches in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion. This is a thinking person, a person whose spent some serious time investigating questions of ultimate importance, and yet even she buys the running shoes.

I brought this up so that you don’t have to leave here feeling like a total failure at living a spiritual life that is well and deeply integrated with all of nature. That we do make compromises in our lives, that the spiritually pure action isn’t always the practical action.

We can’t all be Thoreau.

But neither should we throw our hands up in the air in frustration and give up at the first, second or 157^th thing that tries to separate us from our desire to figure out a way to live a life that is balanced with the earth, and with that which is of the ultimate importance.

Busyness is a problem. Busyness has become our default as a culture. Busyness has become a mechanism by which we can avoid the very uncomfortable questions of meaning and meaning making in our lives.

Busyness is an avoidance technique, disguised as virtue.

Busyness steals time away from deep contemplation about what your soul really wants in life.

What is your busyness keeping you from discovering?

How are you using busyness to hide something from yourself?

Going back to the story I shared with “the kids” earlier, you do know that those stories are also for you, right? Going back to the story, who do you think has a deeper, richer, more awake life? Is it Whitney the Go-Getter, or is it Hollis, the contemplative one?

It seems to me that a life led by default, the kind of life where when you ask someone how they are, and you expect “I’m fine,” as an answer; the kind of life where you go to work, and there around the water cooler you make routinized complaints about your spouse and children, the kind of life wherein your theology is fed to you from a preacher who represents a faith that is answer driven… 

That sort of life is probably easier than the life you may be leading.

The sort of life that lets you seek out answers from a God who cares about you, so much so that not even a little sparrow falls without His knowledge.

I will confess that I have sometimes yearned for a life like that. A life wherein answers come when I ask the hard questions. And I know that I am not alone in that.

But we are who we are, after all.

We don’t easily accept answers; we struggle against them. This is in fact, part of our spiritual work: to struggle with the meanings of things.

That struggling takes time, and our cultural default of busyness robs us of the precious time we need to wrestle with ideas, hopes and dreams.

Marianne Williamson wrote in her Course in Miracles, an often quoted paragraph, one that is probably familiar to many of you, but likely not all of us here in the room.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.[2]

Busyness is a form of this shrinking that Ms. Williamson is talking about. Busyness keeps us from attending to our light; form re-filling the oil lamp, or polishing the reflective surface through which our light shines into the world.

Busyness lets us hide our fears of inadequacy behind a façade of “doing important things.”

Busyness does not mean doing things like going to work and tending to your families, it means using activities to fill the gaps in between.

The gaps that are frightening because they contain the unknown, or more clearly, they contain space in which one encounters the unknown. And like children afraid of the dark, many of us have not developed the tools we need to encounter those gaps, to peer into the darkness of the mystery of our lives.

And busyness is a good band-aid for that.

Or at least that’s how it appears.

Williamson asks the question “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”

I have some good and bad news for you.

I already know that you are brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous. 

The jig is up.

The truth is out.

I see on a regular basis the wonderful people that populate this room, that come together in meetings, that call each other when sick.

You have fabulous written all over you.

You can’t hide behind busyness anymore.

Take time to eschew busyness, this pretend safety net that our culture is so enamored of, a problem going back so far that even Thoreau talks about it, and spend some time with your heart.

Listen to it beat.

Hear what it’s calling you to do.

Really, really listen.

Don’t respond with “But I can’t” or “it’s not practical” or any other negating language.

Say instead “Thank you.”

Say instead “I may not be able to do that right now, but I can work in the direction of that which is my burning passion.”

When you listen to your heart, may it reveal to you what others can already see in you. May you offer the world liberation as you live as an example of a person who is bold enough to follow their dreams and through their work and example, help manifest a world more fair and loving.

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[1] Sun Magazine, December 2012, Issue 444

[2] Williamson, Marianne, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles", 1992

Why We Walk

Sunday, August 28, 1963 was a seminal day in the history of our country.

It was so important and transformative that even now, 50 years later, we are still trying to figure it all out.

The march on Washington is remembered for the “I Have a Dream” speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

For those of us who were born after that march, time has been compressed. We cannot know, and thus cannot remember, the month and months of tension that preceded and followed that march.  Yes, we have seen the film clips and footage, in classrooms, in television shows, on youtube even. But we can’t really know the anguish of times.

We know that social anguish of our own times, though, that are happening now.

This morning’s order of service features two black leaders who helped to bring the 1963 March on Washington to fruition. Whitney Young, Jr. and Arnita Young Boswell. Arnita and I went to church together for years before I knew she was Whitney Young’s sister. Before I knew how deeply involved she was in the 1960’s.

I had to learn about that part of her life from a class I took at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I opened a book for a class I was taking on the 1960’s, and there was a picture of Arnita and her brother.

Now you have to know that to me Arnita was just the nice lady at church who felt it has her responsibility to make sure that all dishes from coffee hour got washed each week. She was a professor at the University of Chicago, and that was about all I knew.

So I went to her to ask about the photo. And she admitted to me that yes she had been involved in that work, and yes, Whitney had been her brother.

My mind was blown.

She told me that the work was not done.

When Arnita died in 2002 it was a big loss for our church. And I guess, our world.

The work is not done.

This morning, there are 11 Pilgrims walking into the town of Selma, California, each of them representing 1 million others, each undocumented, each seeking a pathway to citizenship. By this morning these 11 people will have walked 186 miles down the Central Valley, on their way to Bakersfield. They have walked day after day.

285 miles in 21 days.

Several of us met the 11 Pilgrims in Merced last Monday. Kevin, Cass, Janice, Denis and I were met in Merced by Mary Ann and Rosa. Kevin, Cass, Denis and Mary Ann all walked a mile with the 11. Janice and I waited for them at the church, with cool water and hugs waiting for them.

Our four arrived at the church sweaty and looking and solemn in their yellow Standing on the Side of Love colors.

The pictures I’ve seen of the March on Washington show faces exuberant in the moment. Estimates of the attendees range from between 200 and 300 thousand people, people who were there estimated that 75-80% of the marchers were African American.

Clancy Sigal wrote this week in The Guardian, that there had been fears about the march…

But, against the doomsayers, an almost supernatural peace and good will reigned. Strangers became lifelong friends. A lot of us were astonished at how beautiful and strong we felt. On that hot, sunny day a genuine rainbow coalition of Quakers, Catholics, atheists, black and white church and social justice groups, labor unions, socialists and God-fearers poured into Washington because we felt that it was terribly important to be there.[1]

It was terribly important to have been there, to have participated…to have lent one’s voice and one’s body to a cause.

And this behavior continues.

This morning’s Reading from the Global Scripture was taken from the Final Instructions[2] that were sent out to participants before the 1963 March on Washington took place.  There are 11 pages of instructions, and one form to fill out.

The instructions lay out clearly the level of behavior expected by the leadership who organized the march. Instructions ranged from the signs you were allowed to carry, right down to a suggested lunch that you should pack.

There were clear instructions about what to wear. “Dress as if you were going to church.”

At first, my inner-Unitarian Universalist bristled at all of this instruction and seeming commands from on high.

And then I thought about it for a while.

A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, the chief organizers of the March knew that this was a sort of coming out party for a movement. They knew that after a particularly horrid couple of years in race relations, this march would be a media frenzy. The media was going to be there to either cover the biggest race riot in American history, or it was going to be there to show the biggest single event of racial unity and respectful request for equality.

They knew how they wanted to frame this moment in history, and so they laid out, in clear detail, what they expected from people.

And the people responded to their requests with compliance, because they sensed and knew also that this was going to be a moment in history, and that they were responsible for it.

So they came in their Sunday best. The men in suits and ties, the women in finery, in the 90 plus degree heat of a Washington DC August.

They have inspired millions of people to follow in their footsteps.

There have now been so many peaceful marches on Washington that it would be difficult to count them all. But the number of the marches does nothing to minimize the meaning that each march has to those who are walking there.

As I said a moment ago, when I was reading the rules that were laid out for the March, I bristled a little at the idea of the authority being expressed in them. I thought “who are these guys to tell me how to dress and what to bring?”

Me, as if I had even been alive to be there. But you get my meaning.

One of the dangers and benefits of loving another minister is that often work follows you home. And when you talk about things, not just related directly to this congregation, but to our greater faith of the global Unitarian Universalism, sometimes the other guy says something that you just can’t help quoting.

Wednesday, when the choir hosted a pot-luck, get together, invite new people to sing with us, we were talking about the Sanctuary, and the Rev. Denis Paul started talking about the sacred.

He said that when something is sacred, you treat it differently, with a reverence. And then he grabbed a hymnal that had been water-damaged and mold had set in. A hymnal that he found on his chair the Sunday before.

What we do here, week after week, when we gather is not of the same level of import on the national stage as the 1963 March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs, or the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, or what the 11 very vulnerable human beings are doing today walking from Sacramento to Bakersfield, in homage to Cesar Chavez’s march to Sacramento.

What we do here though is important.

When I think about the differences between the 1963 March and the 1993 March on Washington, some glaring differences strike me.

For one, in 1993 there was no dress code, implied or otherwise, and the photos show it. The 1993 March lacks the dignity of the 1963 march.

The 1963 March had a solemnity to it that made the world pay attention.

In part, I can’t help but think, because people put aside their side issues, and their side concerns and all focused on one goal: raising awareness of the plight of people of color in our nation. The organizers and the marchers recognized that in order to be successful they had to be able to engage those who would be seeing this march, that they the participants would have to be able to use an event in which the collective dignity was unquestionable.

In presenting unquestionable dignity to the nation, the nation, the white majority, would have to re-examine they way their fellow Americans had been mistreated for centuries.

It was a sacred duty they were carrying out, and they all knew it.

In order to affect a change, a change that has still not come to fruition, 300 thousand individuals had to agree to come together and focus on one task.

And when they did that, change came.

As in all things, our Unitarian Universalism has blessings and challenges.

We are a church of the free mind. We have no creedal test. We have no dress code, few expectations and we like it that way.

But my question about that is this, “Are we losing something in the exchange?”

Are we by our very casualness diminishing the very important work of caring for our spirits? Is our lack of taking ourselves too seriously costing us the gravitas that our spiritual and religious work deserves?

Is this why so many people refer to our churches as country clubs of like-minded people?

Maybe what they don’t see in our churches nation-wide is a sense that we are engaged in anything important, because we don’t act as if we are doing anything important together.

The people who took busses and trains to Washington DC in August of 1963 knew they were doing something important. So important that I worry the word important doesn’t do it justice.

They knew on some level that they were fighting either for their lives, if they were African American, or if they were a white ally, they knew they were struggling for a world made more fair for all.

Isn’t that also our goal? A world made more fair for all?

Why do we walk? Why do we march on Washington?

We do so to demonstrate to the world what matters to us deeply.

I do hope you’ll consider travelling to Bakersfield on September 2^nd for the culminating event for the Pathways to Citizen effort. This is the event that the UU Legislative Ministries, and PICO have asked as many Californians to attend as possible. I know there will be busses from Modesto to Bakersfield, but I don’t have all the details yet. If you can come along, please contact the church office, so that when I get information I can pass it along. 

What lessons can we take from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom?

One of those lessons I think we can learn is that there is a time for play and a time for work. Work time doesn’t need to be without joy and laughter, but it does need it’s own honored time. I’m sure that more than one marcher in 1963 had spent the Friday night before the march at a jazz club.

But when it came time to do the sacred work of societal change, that reveler put on their Sunday best and focused on the task at hand.

Our important work, our sacred work, of attending to our spiritual lives, deserves a time of it’s own, set apart from the rest of the week. Our work deserves to be elevated to a place wherein something special happens.

As we enter into our 60^th year of Fellowship, let us celebrate the work that has already taken place. Our forebears and we ourselves have offered up the sacrifices of time, talent and treasure.

Let us honor those sacrifices by treating what we have here in this Sanctuary, the people, our covenant, with deep respect and caring for one another.

Amen.

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[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/24/march-on-washington-anniversary-martin-luther-king

[2] http://www.crmvet.org/docs/moworg2.pdf

Why We Walk

© Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and Delivered to

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County