Author: Doug Slagle

(c) Reverend Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

 

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Winston Churchill said that the contributions of Alan Turing in winning World War II, who is the subject of the film Imitation Game, were the most important made by any single person.  Turing broke the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma code.  By doing so, it is estimated he shortened the war by over two years and saved millions of lives.  To break Enigma, he built what was a prototype of the first super-computer – one that the original IBM computer, ENIAC, was based.  He helped establish the Church-Turing math thesis which is the foundation of computational and computer science theory.  His mathematical algorithms are widely recognized as laying the theoretical basis for internet search engine algorithms used today by Google.  When President Obama spoke to the British Parliament in 2011, he cited Turing as one of the five greatest scientists of all time – joining the ranks of Newton and Einstein.

Despite all of his achievements, Turing was arrested in 1952 by British police and charged with gross indecency after he was found having sex with another man.  During questioning and at his trial, Turing admitted to the liaison but claimed he was not guilty.  Being homosexual is not a crime, he asserted.  Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to spend two years in prison or, as an alternative, to undergo chemical castration.  That is what he chose, so that he could continue his work.  Injected with massive doses of synthetic estrogen, Turing gained weight, lost all his body hair, grew breasts, became lethargic and was profoundly affected mentally.  Medical experts confirm mental confusion and depression result from rapid replacement of testosterone with estrogen.

In 1954, Turing was found dead in his apartment from an apparent suicide.  A large amount of liquid cyanide was found in his stomach.  He had been deeply depressed by his chemical castration and by an inability to continue his work.  Since many of his wartime accomplishments were kept secret for national security reasons, his death was barely noted.  By 1967, when the British law forbidding homosexual acts ended, over 49,000 men had been convicted and punished for breaking it.  In 1995, Queen Elizabeth posthumously pardoned Turing even as she refused to acknowledge the law had been a mistake or to pardon any of the other men convicted by it.

A few years ago Stuart Blersch held a Gathering Book Club in which we read of the imprisonment of homosexuals by Nazi Germany.  They were the first concentration camp prisoners.  While many countries share in the shame of persecuting gays and lesbians, it is shocking that a country like Great Britain was doing so during many of our lifetimes.

Much of what I’ve just discussed is alluded to in The Imitation Game, one of this year’s Academy Award Best Picture nominated films.  The title is borrowed from Turing’s theoretical work exploring the subject of machine intelligence or, what we today call artificial intelligence.  The title also points to the major theme of the movie – that of imitation versus reality.  During most of his life Turning was forced to imitate a straight man – even at one point becoming engaged to his code breaking colleague, Joan Clarke.  In the film, he rhetorically asks one of his police interrogators “what is genuine love and what is an imitation?”  Well ahead of his time, he asked in a letter to a friend if going to bed with a man was not the equal to that of being with a woman?  I like vanilla, you like chocolate.  What is the problem?  Why is one form of sex condemned as indecent, criminal and an imitation, while the other is considered ideal and good?

Turing was also far ahead of his time in predicting that machines could mimic many forms of human thought – even claiming that machines think and process mathematical equations far better.  He conducted “imitation games” during which people were tasked with trying to guess whether they were playing chess against a computer or a human.  Most people could not tell the difference.  As he wondered, what is real intelligence and what is an imitation?

And the movie also pointedly asks what constitutes genuine morality versus one that is situational and seemingly imitation.  In order not to tip off the Germans that the Enigma code had been broken, Turing and war generals had to decide which German military actions would be prevented, and which would not – thus forcing them to choose between British and American soldiers who would live and those who would die.  Is genuine morality a fixed constant as found in the Ten Commandments – “Thou Shall Not Kill”, or is it flexible – perhaps allowing for the killing of some so that far more are saved?  Which morality is the imitation and which is real?

Since my task is to find spiritual insight from this film, the question of what is real and what is an imitation must be asked.  Indeed, that is the great philosophical and spiritual question of all time.  Why do we exist?  What is it that determines our existence?  What determines reality?  What is truly and universally good – the One Great Truth – what some call God?  What things, thoughts or morals are ideal and what are simply imitations?

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote at length about his understanding of reality.  Humans use art, he said, through media such as music, painting, sculpture and literature to portray what they believe is life reality.  Plato wrote that human representations of life are more true, or perfect, than the actual object.  A painting of a flower is a better representation of the object since the artist idealizes it – eliminating distracting elements that occur in real life like imperfections of shape, color  or things that diminish its beauty.

Plato elaborated on this idea by suggesting that even artistic representations of life are not truth, nor is the actual object.  Instead, what is true is our collective idea of an object or emotion – a fixed universal constant – of what, for example, a flower should look like.  That amorphous idea of an object, thought or emotion is Truth, according to Plato.  It’s not the actual object or our representation of it.  Ultimate Truth and goodness are intangible ideals.  In other words, human representations of objects or thoughts in art are imitations of the actual thing – and those actual things are imitations of universal ideals of that object or emotion.  For Plato, art imitates life which imitates a universally accepted perfect ideal.

All of this is heavy philosophy and if it seems too cerebral, I apologize.  But Plato’s influence on Christianity and its theology of an imperfect world contrasted against an ideal God and heaven has had a profound impact on western morality.  Confronting this issue of what is real and what is a flawed imitation helps us in our spirituality.

I assert that the perfect ideal truth of which Plato theorized is what many religions call God, Yahweh, Allah or Brahmin.  For many of us who choose to define Truth as something which is not a supernatural, theistic being, we are still left with question of what is Ultimate Truth and goodness?  What is the original creative power?  What is the purpose and meaning for all creation?  What is universally good?

Turing posed existential and spiritual questions with his development of the first machine that could act like a brain.  While we often believe that our hearts and souls are the seats of personhood, it is our brains that lead us to form moral and spiritual identities.  If we can build an artificial brain, can we thus build an artificial soul?  And if we do so, which is the real brain, the real soul – our flawed and fallible ones influenced by desires, hatreds and jealousies or, machines which employ constant mathematical truths to think in ways that are untainted by other influences?  Does a computer represent the perfect ideal of thinking and intelligence – one that Plato might have recognized?  Or, are our minds and thus our souls something far more complex – ones that are made perfect and ideal precisely because they are seemingly imperfect?

In Turing’s life, he constructed a prototype of the modern computer  and called it “Christopher” – named after a schoolmate who introduced him to cryptography and with whom he had fallen in love.  The tragedy of Turing’s life was his struggle with the purity of Christopher the machine – something that could “think” and crack complex codes – versus the seeming  imperfection of his highly intelligent brain which was strongly influenced by homosexuality.  Society told him such thoughts and behaviors were immoral and imperfect.  By building a machine without such impulses, and naming it after his beloved Christopher, Turing seemed to agree.  Math, codes, puzzles and computers are pure of thought, he asserted.  Human brains and thus human souls are beset by other influences like desire and emotion.  Which intelligence is better?

Turing was adamant, however, in asserting that being gay was an intrinsic part of his being.  While he imitated a straight man to persons who did not know him, to his very close friends he was fully out of the closet.  In order to be a friend of Turing, one had to accept his homosexuality as a part of his personhood and thus his reality.

But Alan Turing struggled with this idea of perfect intelligence.  He was able to conceive of theories and math far beyond other humans.  His brain was brilliant – one almost the superior of computers since he invented them.  But his thinking was also subject to sexual desire – a kind of thinking that would unfairly cause his ruin.  Logically, he knew the consequences in Great Britain for engaging in homosexuality.  But for him, that way of thinking was very real and thus not like the analytical machines based on math – a kind of thinking that logically eliminates non-procreative sexual desire.

My point is this: does the story of Alan Turing call us to better define the spiritual realms of Ultimate Truth and Ultimate goodness?  We assume that ideal human thought and behavior are not influenced by illogical actions such as anger, lust, arrogance and jealousy.  But Turing’s life and his homosexuality tell us the opposite.   Ideal human thought IS subject to illogical influences like emotion and desire.  In other words, Ultimate Truth – or God, if that is your word for it – is all about the supposedly imperfect.  Plato was therefore wrong and much of religious theology is also wrong.

To rebut Plato, the ideal flower is not a perfect concept of what we believe a flower to be.  The ideal flower is slightly mis-colored, misshapen or absent a few petals.  The ideal form of intelligence and thus the soul is not one that would never think of lust or anger, but one that does.  We can believe what we want but reality is reality.  Ultimate Truth – or God – is right here, right now, in each of us with all of our supposed imperfections.  We might change the here and now to improve it – much like we work to eliminate racism and hatred – but with all due apologies to those who are scientists and mathematicians, God is not a perfect mathematical equation.  She’s not logical with a fixed ideal of morality and goodness.  She’s often illogical, imperfect and certainly not like a computer.

In an ideal existence, what religions often call heaven, homosexuality and anger would not logically exist.    But, as I often claim, heaven is not an otherworldly idea.  Heaven is right here, as Jesus taught.  Indeed, people and things that seem to many religions to be imperfect are, ironically, ultimately true and good.

I assert my theory of Ultimate Truth and goodness is found in the Bible.  Jesus was good not because he was a supernatural God but because he was fully human with anger, temptation, doubt and fear.  He was good because he worked to change such things in himself and in others.  Indeed, I can even accept Jesus as a type of God, in an ironic way, precisely because he was not perfect.

This is the same truth I find in Alan Turing and which took me decades to find in myself.  It’s discovery profoundly changed my spirituality as it has with many others.  Platonic, Christian and western philosophy has twisted a sense of what is perfection.  They claim that certain thoughts or actions are not true, ideal or good.  But that has no basis in reality.  Religions and many societies tell people they must live up to their version of what is ideal even though that is impossible.  The greatest saints and heroes throughout history were often imperfect in thought or character.  Why do we, even those who are not religious, choose to judge human character using false notions of goodness – on matters like sexuality, reproductive choices or faith?  In my own life, I’ve had to come to terms with this question – am I good because I am human and imperfect or am I bad because I don’t try to imitate some religious standard?

Alan Turing was a tragic hero brought down by forces in our world that falsely determines what is ideally good.  Turing’s idealized visions of his boyfriend Christopher, his computer and all future computers – these are not representations of what is ideal intelligence and the soul.  And that is because they are too perfect.  Good and true is a way of thinking that includes seemingly illogical desires and emotions.  It is a man who loves another man just as much as good is also a straight woman who loves a man.  Good and real is a human soul who strives to be ethical and compassionate – even as he or she falls short with lapses of intolerance, fear or bitterness.   Goodness is is not to play an imitation game as religions tell us we must.  We are good, we are Ultimate Truth precisely because we are each occasionally NOT good or not a supposedly perfect ideal.  God is you, God is me, in all of our illogical, imperfect but beautiful humanity.

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering UCC, All Rights Reserved

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Many of you are aware that Time magazine recently selected Ebola healthcare workers for their Persons of the Year recognition.  The workers made headline news in 2014 both for their work and for the fact many also became victims of the disease.  They clearly deserve the respect Time’s designation offers.

The lives of most ebola caregivers are stories of danger, sacrifice and heartbreak that few of us can understand.  They volunteer from all over the world as they routinely work in conditions that would be unbearable for most.  The risk they face is huge:  the disease is easily transmitted through body fluids and the death rate often approaches 90%.  Workers must treat patients in protective suits that can only be worn about an hour at a time due to the stifling heat.  When they take off the suits, they face their greatest danger.  Any skin contact with the virus could result in their own death.  In a profession that calls for human touch and empathy, the workers can offer very little.  They are overwhelmed with the number of patients.  They experience a psychological toll of telling countless patients they have the deadly disease.  One ebola health care worker describes the work as like being at the front lines of a war and under continuous machine gun fire.

For this heroic work in terrible conditions, physicians with the Doctors Without Borders charity are paid $1731 a month.  Nurses make two-thirds that amount.  Native health workers in Liberia and Sierra Leone make much less – about $50 a week.

In the Time magazine article, Dr. Kent Brantley is quoted.  He worked at a Liberian hospital run by the Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse.  Dr. Brantley contracted the disease when he took off his protective face mask to console the daughter of an ebola patient.  He then became the first ebola patient treated in the US when he was airlifted home.  He survived and is now disease free. He told Time that he hopes to soon return to Africa to treat more ebola patients.  He said, “I chose a career in medicine because I wanted a tangible skill with which to serve people.  Deep in the core of my heart, I still think that’s my calling.  I don’t want to go on with life and forget this.”

Soon after he was evacuated home to be treated for ebola, Donald Trump went on a cable news channel to criticize our government for allowing Dr. Brantley, and thus ebola, into the country.  Trump sat in his penthouse office, a man who is reportedly worth over a billion dollars, and criticized efforts to save the life of a doctor who makes a little over $20,000 a year trying to end an epidemic that could spread across the planet – a man who feels called to put himself at great risk in order to serve others.  The contrast between these two men is stark – one a billionaire who makes money manipulating financial markets, and the other a relatively poor man who saves lives and perhaps much of humanity.  Who is richer?  Who is likely happier and more satisfied with life than the other?  Who is amassing the kind of wealth that cannot buy things but which provides lasting value to our world?  By purely monetary yardsticks, Donald Trump is exponentially richer.  By the yardstick of social wealth or, what I call purpose driven wealth, Dr. Kent Brantley has acquired a fortune.

And that is the subject of my message today.  Might we resolve in 2015 to better practice an uncommon New Year’s resolution – to focus on acquiring purpose driven wealth as much or more than we do on making financial wealth?

Social, or purpose driven wealth, is defined as the intrinsic moral and cultural value of efforts to support and serve others.  It is the intangible value we place on work that is not economically rewarded, but which fulfills our need for meaning and purpose.  Robert F. Kennedy, in an oblique way, defined it best.   Our nation’s Gross National Product number, he said,  “does not count the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything – in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”  In other words, money does not determine the value of who we are as caring people.

Indeed, experts and economists struggle with assigning dollar value to the concept of purpose driven wealth.  How, for instance, do we measure the value to society of caregivers and parents who work at home tending children, the elderly or the sick?  How does society account for the benefits of volunteer work, of equal opportunity, of preventive medicine, of sanitation, of access to decent and affordable health care?  What about the unpaid value of parents, teachers and social workers versus the inflated amounts we pay movie and sports stars?

The answers to these questions are not easy but they nevertheless point to the fact that there exists wealth beyond what we traditionally or culturally count.   Such wealth is earned but it is often under-compensated in monetary terms.  It is our inner selves that yearns for this non-economic wealth, like it did for Dr. Brantley.  We’re inspired to reach beyond our own needs, to sublimate ourselves and meet our calling in life.  In doing so, we begin to amass purpose driven wealth.

I call it that because to acquire it, one must fulfill one’s purpose for living.  Our lives are not just our own.  Our human purpose is to serve the needs of family, friend and community over those of our own.  To do that, we must sublimate many of the innate instincts humans feel.  As Darwin and other evolutionary biologists pointed out, species survive by following four “F” instincts of survival.  In order to live, all life forms must 1) feed, 2) fight in competition for scarce resources, 3) flee danger, and – to avoid using the word for the fourth “F” – all life must 4) reproduce.   Such instincts lead all life to instinctively be focused on self-interest.

But humanity has realized over the ages that community, cooperation and compassion for others enables a better way to survive.  Humans have discovered the value of going beyond the four “F” instincts to also care for others – much like what ebola healthcare workers do.

We find purpose driven value not only from communal cooperation but also from what experts call the “warm glow” affect.  We ironically derive as much or more pleasure when we help meet the needs of others – as opposed to only meeting our own needs.  While we can and should contribute the excess of our money to help others, studies show that voluntary, hands on service to others produces the greatest warm glow affect, as well as offering the highest return on value.  Donating one’s labor is a greater sacrifice than donating money since we give only a portion of the money we have or earn.   When we donate our labor, we give its entire value.

Purpose driven wealth therefore has immense emotional and psychological value.  Numerous studies indicate that people give to others in order to find meaning and purpose and thereby achieve greater happiness.  Indeed, experts assert that the warm glow we earn from serving others is stronger than what we feel when we buy expensive things or when we receive a large amount of money.  And the warm glow is not fleeting.  It influences how we feel about ourselves as valuable members of society.  This positive sense of self worth adds to what constitutes purpose driven wealth.  Ultimately, larger bank accounts or more material things create temporary emotions of happiness.  Meeting one’s purpose in life through serving others is longer lasting.  Our actions to help others extends far beyond our lifetimes – creating the kind of legacy that offers a form of life after death.  The old Jewish proverb holds true – when we save one life, we save the world.

The Bible tells us that Jesus encouraged his followers to acquire purpose driven wealth.  As he said, store up the kind of treasure that rust and moth cannot destroy.  The wealth that lasts is the kind of wealth that builds a form of heaven on earth and is multiplied far into the future.  That uncounted future wealth is today’s purpose driven wealth.

The Buddha, during his early years, practiced mindful yoga and self denial to such an extent that he achieved the highest state of meditation.  But such mindful ecstasy faded quickly as his body clamored for his four “F’s to be fulfilled.  Only when he began to express selflessness – not just through denial but through compassion and serving others – did he achieve lasting happiness.  As he said, empathy for others is the positive way to get out of endless introspection and focus on the self.  How can we dwell in self pity or in the pursuit of worldly gain when we feel the needs of others?  Encouraging loving kindness toward others is a primary way to release the mind from selfish desires.  According to the Buddha, service, empathy and compassion are pathways to enlightenment and inner joy.  And that inner contentment is another way to define purpose driven wealth.

What I propose is as much for me as it is for you.  I often say to the Gathering that I choose message topics that I need to learn and follow.  As most at the Gathering know, I spend 12 days a month in Florida.  I had already found a home there when the Pastor position at the Gathering became available.  Instead of moving back to Cincinnati, the church and I worked out my schedule of three Sundays a month working here with one Sunday a month off.  And it is during those 12 days that I work offsite in Florida.  Many of my friends down there often ask me why I continue my Cincinnati church work for modest pay and don’t permanently move south to enjoy life.  While that is admittedly tempting, I’ve never seriously considered it.  How do I leave work that gives me happiness, meaning and purpose?  How do I leave a church and people I deeply care about?  How do I value work that allows me to make a small difference for good in the world?

My story is certainly nothing special.  Many people, including all of you, build purpose driven wealth in serving family, friend and stranger.  But my schedule and work remind me of my life purpose.  They remind me of my struggle to release my mind, as the Buddha taught, of selfish thinking.  Few of us will ever reach his Nirvana state of happiness through serving others, but that ought to be our goal not just because it is the right thing to do, but in an ironic way, because it is selfish.  We make ourselves happier when we are SELFLESS.  Like the Buddha, we find contentment when the meaning for our existence goes well beyond the satisfaction of personal needs.  To be focused more on ourselves is, instead, a lonely and often sad state of being.  Only by connecting with others in understanding their pain, in listening, in offering assistance for their needs – do we find community, common cause and, ultimately, joy.

To that end, I encourage in this New Year a resolution to think as much about purpose driven wealth as we do about financial or material wealth.  I encourage this resolution for us individually as I do for our two churches.  Specifically, I humbly offer three suggestions for how the Gathering and Northern Hills congregations can cooperate in 2015 on ways to expand purpose driven wealth.

First, I suggest we strengthen congregation efforts to serve fellow church members.  That includes building well functioning teams of trained care givers and listeners for members who are hurting.  It involves further inspiring youth and adults to practice empathy and compassion.  It involves continued work to make our churches known for member support – for staying in touch with those who have not recently attended, for insuring all members in need are cared for.  By helping one another, we better enable our congregations as a whole to serve the outside world.

Second, I suggest we explore and then implement ways our two congregations can cooperate in charitable outreach service – for the Inter-Faith Hospitality Network, for the Freestore, for the People Working Cooperatively organization, for other charities.  By combining our volunteer efforts and working together in the community, we will double our impact, get to know one another, empower our spiritual journeys and better attract new members who seek places where they can serve.

Third, I suggest we further expand ways to advance racial understanding and reconciliation.  One way is to volunteer in at risk schools as tutors and mentors.  Many people believe education inequality is the single greatest factor contributing to racial and income inequality.  Another way is to continue to reach out to African-American congregations to join us in building racially sensitive communities.  The work of Ray Nandyal and other Northern Hills members, reflected in plans for next Sunday’s Martin Luther King service, is a great example of such efforts.

Along with my own work, we will need volunteers from both churches to step forward to help meet these cooperative goals and others suggested by any of you.  Our churches have long been focused on serving others.  But we do so by inspiring people and………never by failing to understand that health or family situations can prevent the work of some.  We each give and serve in our own ways and ALL efforts are deeply valued.  For the new year, let us build upon our traditions of service.

It is doubtful any of us will acquire the financial wealth of Donald Trump.  It is also doubtful our two churches – either alone or merged – will reach the status of a mega-church – one that has thousands of members and million dollar budgets.  I doubt that these are even desirable goals.  But we can individually, and as churches, aspire to amass purpose driven wealth – the kind of intangible wealth built by caring parents, volunteers and compassionate people everywhere.  Let us, therefore, resolve to be rich in the kind of wealth that truly matters.

 

 

 

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, UCC, All Rights Reserved

To download and listen to the message, please click here.  To read the message, please see below.

 

In 1989, Spike Lee released perhaps his best movie, one entitled “Do the Right Thing.”  While controversial at the time, the movie has since been acclaimed by numerous movie critics as one of the 100 best films ever made.  It was extended the rare honor of being accepted into the Smithsonian Museum’s National Film archives of historically landmark movies.  Spike Lee was nominated for an Academy award for the screenplay.   Recently, the film has been further praised for describing in that film events and issues eerily similar to those in the recent killing of young black men.

Spike Lee plays a character in the film named Mookie, who works as a pizza deliveryman.  Mookie works for Sal, who is of Italian descent, and who owns a pizzeria which is the center of life in the predominantly African-American New York neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvessant.  Sal has two sons, Pino who intensely dislikes blacks, and Vito who is a friend of Mookie.  The two sons represent the twin poles of white attitudes toward African-Americans.

The story takes place on one of the hottest days of the year.   The heat adds to a simmering tension in the neighborhood which gradually builds from small confrontations, to a race tinged argument between Pino and Mookie, to a racial killing and mass protest.

One of the film characters, a man named Buggin’ Out, challenges Sal the pizzeria owner, about a Wall of Fame inside his restaurant which displays pictures of famous men – mostly Italians but noticeably lacking anyone of color.  Buggin’ Out demands that Sal include on the wall photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other famous blacks since the pizzeria is in the middle of a black neighborhood.   This issue becomes the spark that ignites racial conflict.  Sal refuses the request claiming that as owner of the restaurant, he can depict anyone he wants.  Buggin’ Out quickly tries to start a boycott against Sal and enlists both Radio Raheem and Smiley to join him.

Tensions continue to rise in the community with several small provocations until Radio Raheem confronts Sal about his racist attitudes all while his boombox loudly blares.  Sal becomes enraged, calls Raheem the “n” word multiple times and smashes the boombox to pieces.

With Sal’s blatant racial epithets, a fight ensues.  Many come to Raheem’s defense including Mookie.  Pino and Sal confront them along with several white customers.  The fight spills onto the street and the police are called.  They arrive and a white officer places Raheem into a chokehold even though Sal is fighting too.  Raheem is literally pulled into the air in a chokehold as his feet twitch and reach for the ground.  He goes limp and is thrown to the ground.  The police look on impassively.  A police officer thinks he is faking and brutally kicks him but it is soon clear Raheem is dead.

At Raheem’s death, the crowd turns on Sal and his sons.  Mookie, however, picks up a trash can and throws it through the restaurant’s front window.  It is later clear that Mookie’s action was intended to divert the crowd away from attacking Sal.  The protesters, however, cheer Mookie’s action and start a fire.  The restaurant is soon engulfed.  The police arrest most of the protesters.  Once the crowd has been arrested and dispersed, Smiley, the mentally challenged man, walks into the burned out restaurant and hangs a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X on the Wall of Fame.  The film ends with Sal and Mookie warily reconciling.  There is a fade to black as two quotes fill the screen – one from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other from Malcom X.

King’s quote is one of his most famous:  “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.”

Malcom X’s quote offers a contrasting view:  “There are plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in those positions to block things that you and I need.  Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to it, and that doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense.  I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”

Viewers are left with the troubling question of just what constitutes “doing the right thing.”  Turn the other cheek, OR intelligent self-defense in reaction to institutional white violence?  Let’s watch the chokehold scene from the movie and compare it to video footage of what happened to Eric Garner this past summer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LSBpwmMnVM

(Stop this video at about the 1:30 point – if you wish.)

“Do The Right Thing” is clearly not a standard holiday story.  And yet, for this year’s Kwanzaa holiday, and indeed for Hanukkah and Christmas, it seems an appropriate one for me to tell today.  It is a troubling story that examines racism in all of its overt and subtle manifestations.  Why are blacks disproportionately members of the underclass?  How do hidden institutional forms of discrimination – like substandard education and an unjust legal system – work to deny opportunity to African-Americans?  How does institutional privilege, on the other hand, give whites distinct advantages?

Kwanzaa is a non-religious holiday intended to empower African-Americans.  It was specifically begun in 1966 by Ronald Karenga, founder of the Black Power movement, as a way to counter the predominance of white oriented holidays.  Blacks, Karenga believed, should celebrate ideals that are unique to their heritage and to their cultural advancement.  Kwanzaa, which means “first fruits” in Swahili, celebrates seven African ideals to be focused by and for the Afro-American community.  They are:  Unity, Self-determination, Purpose, Economic cooperation, Service to others, Creativity, and lastly, Faith.  While “Do the Right Thing” is not a Kwanzaa story, we find in the film a struggle to assert African-American culture, to find pride in that identity, to fight against unjust white privilege.  This sense of being marginalized, isolated, disregarded, ignored and controlled – all by white economic and police powers – are the provocations that lead to angry protest in the film and, indeed, in recent protests around our nation.  Juxtaposed against such African-American anger is an often clueless white attitude that seems incapable of understanding the daily violation and humiliation many blacks feel.

What sadly seems apparent today with the recent killing of young black men and resulting protests is that Kwanzaa ideals of black dignity and pride are under assault.  Despite decades of advances in civil rights, despite twice electing a black man as President, white privilege is still predominant.  Kwanzaa ideals of black empowerment seem powerless.

Data released last week shows average black household net worth declining while that of whites has increased.  The education gap between blacks and whites has increased since the 1960’s – over thirty percent of whites have a college degree compared to less than 20 percent for blacks.  Nearly half of the 2.5 million people incarcerated in the US are African-American men – most due to relatively minor drug offenses even though whites use drugs at five times the rate of blacks.  Young black males are 21 times as likely to be killed by police then similar aged white males.  Sadly, we are still pondering the implicit question Spike Lee asked in his movie, what is the right thing to do?

That question seems most pertinent to white Americans.  How do we do the right thing for fellow members of the human family?  How do we take the ethics and values of this holiday season – those of peace, justice, equality – and incorporate them into our permanent attitudes?  How do we use a holiday that honors the birth of Jesus – himself a man of color – to remind ourselves of our continued call to understand, to learn, to grow, to empathize with those who live on the margins?

I am struck by the irony that Christmas in particular celebrates the birth of Jesus who came as a liberator and spoke of peace on earth not in a simplistic turn the other cheek way, but in order to confront poverty, inequality and hypocrisy.  Indeed, the mythic story of Jesus’ birth tells us of a poor family of color following the orders of white Europeans.  This mythic family had to travel a long distance to be counted by whites, and they were marginalized as poor and unworthy once they arrived.  Jesus’ birth, as the myth goes, so alarmed King Herod, the white Roman King of Israel, that he ordered a mass killing of young boys – all boys of color – so that he could insure the death of the one who was born to be a revolutionary.  Jesus, as his birth story goes, was born to liberate all people from injustice, hate and intolerance.  How many white Christians today contemplate that fact as they celebrate Christmas?  How many of us as humanists see the holiday in this light?   Should we not celebrate a peace on earth that is real for everyone – of being secure in one’s neighborhood, of not being unjustly killed, of economic fairness, of equal rights and equal opportunity?  Two thousand years of honoring a man of color and his birth, a man who taught genuine peace between all people, and yet we still fail to practice his teachings.

Jesus, much like Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, was unjustly killed by white power.  He was a radical martyred because of his words:  blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the persecuted.  Are not such blessed people he referred to – those who are today often marginalized, feared or killed – Are they not blacks, undocumented immigrants, the homeless, people of color, the poor?  I stand here as a white minister speaking to a largely white congregation.  What is the right thing for us to do?

I have few answers.  Indeed, my hope is that I and other whites will simply listen to African-American suggestions.  Too often, well intentioned whites want to determine what blacks must do.  My own intention is to continue to try to understand not just my role in helping to make things better, but my implicit role in how I have shared in the sins of racism.  I, like many whites, still harbor vestiges of racism – a lack of compassion, a failure to understand, an unwillingness to see how our society extends to me advantages just for being white.

As I repeatedly say, the only way we can adopt attitudes of humility, mercy and empathy, is to simply listen more than we speak.  Our opinions and thoughts do not matter as much as do our attitudes and our willingness to self-reflect and then change.  All of the programs and efforts to address racism seem pointless unless we are able to change white hearts – and that change must begin in our own hearts.  We must figuratively put ourselves in the shoes of others in order to perceive as they perceive, to suffer as they suffer.

Recently appearing in the New York Times was a story of a young boy born to African-American parents asking his mother if, in any interaction with the police, he could simply pretend to be white.  “That’s safer”, he said.  It seems he has a very light skin color.  His mother lamented, but understood, his desire to appear white and forego a pride in his own heritage, culture and community.

Kwanzaa, however, seeks to address that.  Many Christians are critical of the holiday because they read Karenga’s words that blacks must assert their own holiday and their own culture.  Sadly, that approach would not be necessary if all people heeded the ethics of Jesus and other prophets like Buddha, Ghandhi and King.  As we all know, just beneath the melanin of our skin colors, we are all the same.  Even more, we all have the same universal desires for freedom, opportunity, respect and love.  Our hearts beat the same.  Our souls dream the same.

This holiday season, I want to deeply reflect on the ethics of Jesus – the man whose mythic birth is the substance of what many celebrate.  As we hear chants of “Don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe”, might we hear echoes of Jesus as he called out from the Cross and gave voice to all people of color: “Why have you forsaken me?”  His words may or may not be historically true, but they ring across the ages precisely because they were uttered by an outcast, by a man familiar with the stings of poverty and the taunts of powerful elites.  If many in our society worship him, if many of us look to him as a great human prophet, why can’t we adopt his ethics – particularly towards people of color?

Perhaps most of all, I must read and understand the 7 principles of Kwanzaa – to honor them as declarations by African-Americans of their proud and unique culture.  Their’s are voices calling out in the wilderness, much like of that Jesus: “Our lives matter.  We are people too.  We are mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers who have been too long harassed and hated.  We ask for dignity.  We ask for justice.  We ask for the simple peace on earth that all humans seek.”

Let me, let us – truly listen to those words this holiday season, this coming Kwanzaa – and deeply reflect on them.

 

 

(c) Rev. Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering UCC, All Rights Reserved

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In the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II, those Jews who were not immediately sent to gas chambers were forced to work at hard labor until they were physically worn out.  They were fed one meal a day consisting of stale bread, watery vegetable soup and a dollop of rancid margarine.

At the conclusion of the meal, camp guards allowed the starving prisoners to jump into the empty margarine barrel and lick the sides of it.  This provided sadistic amusement to guards who laughed at the sight of desperate people fighting to get a few extra calories.  At one feeding area, there was one man who daily refused to engage in the frenzy.  Even though he was as emaciated and hungry as the others, he would not give the guards satisfaction at watching him lick a wooden barrel.

One evening, that changed.  This man who had tried for so long to hold on to his dignity, finally gave in as he jumped into the barrel and rolled around with abandon.  He took special effort to smear the oily margarine over as much of his body as possible.  His actions drew the attention of the camp commander as he and other guards were especially pleased to see this particular Jewish man finally broken.

Once that man returned to his barracks, he quickly tore off his shirt and pants and began to search them for areas smeared with grease.  He tore his clothes apart into long thin strips.  Others in the barrack were alarmed.  They said he had gone mad as they tried to stop him from tearing up his clothing.

“Do you know what tonight is?” the man replied.  “Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah!”

He continued to examine his shirt to find more spots stained with margarine – which he then tore apart.  Later that evening he led an entire group of barracks in lighting Hanukkah flames.  The wicks came from the oily strips he had torn from his clothing.  The story is a true one retold by several Bergen-Belsen holocaust survivors.

Like most of you, I cannot imagine the horrors of life in a concentration camp.  They must have been especially bleak places with rows of unheated cabins, muddy pathways between them, and an ever present pall of smoke and ash hanging in the air – a reminder of the brick buildings and chimneys where fellow Jews were gassed and cremated.   Forced to exist in that kind of hell, few could have found anything positive or hopeful in it.

And yet the story I just related indicates that the human spirit in those camps had not been extinguished.  In the depths of unimaginable suffering and terror, hope would not die.  It must have been a hope in goodness, a hope in persistence, a hope in life itself that motivated this man to help many others celebrate Hanukkah.

As a minor Jewish holiday, Hanukkah, which begins in two days, has often seemed more of a response to the prevailing dominance of Christmas – a desire not to be overwhelmed by the Christian celebrations.  Nevertheless, Hanukkah has itself become commercialized, trivialized and combined with other December holidays to the point where its meaning is often lost.  While many scholars believe it comes from a myth – that of a miracle when one day’s supply of oil used to light a lamp lasted eight days – Hanukkah has nevertheless been celebrated because of its inherent lessons.  Ideals such as faith, endurance, and hope have long defined the holiday.

While Jews celebrate Hanukkah as a story that hallmarks that religion’s survival over centuries of time, it also teaches important universal values everyone can appreciate.  In a world where wars and violence happen as I speak, where diseases ravage nations, where millions live with poverty and hunger, where injustice and discrimination affect too many, where young black men are murdered in our nation’s streets for no reason and the racial divide seems to get worse, the holiday season can seem like a cruel way to pretend such problems do not exist.  And yet Hanukkah asks us to remember our problems while hoping and working for their solution.  For me, Hanukkah – much like the story I just told – invites us to hold on to the thin strips of hope we can muster – that all humans are, at their core – good, that a world of misery can be made better, that our own lives of hurt, grief and setbacks can be improved, that as long as people with compassionate hearts endure, there is hope, after everlasting hope.

Several contemporary psychologists have recently proposed a new theory about the psychology of hope.  According to them, hope is essential to life.  People cannot successfully live without it.  But hope, as it is defined according to these psychologists, is not a simple emotion consisting of optimism and positive thinking.  It is, instead, a cognitive sense that originates from our reasoning abilities.   To have hope is to believe that the future will be better than the present and, most importantly, that one has the will and the power to make it so.

According to this new psychological research, hopeful people are more successful than others – they are happier, more fulfilled and healthier.  Genuine hope comes from the ability to rationally set goals, work towards them and deal with inevitable setbacks.  Hopeful people might even be cold-eyed realists and seemingly lack an optimistic spirit but they have the cognitive determination to devise strategies for overcoming the struggles that everyone faces.  They have the will to work towards a better tomorrow.

And Hanukkah as a holiday clearly embodies that ethic.  As the original Hanukkah story is told, the Jews who re-captured the Jerusalem Temple from the control of a non-Jewish nation, found they only had enough consecrated oil to light the Temple lamps for one day.  Instead of simply giving up, Jews persisted in restoring the Temple and lighting the lamps anyway.  The lamps, according to the story, miraculously stayed lit for eight days until new holy oil could be made.  Hope gave those Jews the desire to restore their Temple as an inspirational symbol, to believe they had the ability to do so and then to perform the necessary actions to achieve the goal.

That same kind of hope allowed a Jewish concentration camp man to refuse to abandon his dignity, to instead make a plan to inspire himself and others, to then carry it out and thus provide some light in a dark and horrific place.

Most people in the Gathering know that I and my family have been dealing the past two years with the onset of Alzheimer’s in my mom.  A crisis happened several days before this last Thanksgiving when my mom became extremely agitated, paranoid and upset.  It was almost impossible for anyone to reason with her and calm her down.  My siblings and I were deeply worried.  My mom was getting worse, my dad was giving up in his ability to care for her and there seemed to be few good options.

But then my sister and I took action.  We consulted with an expert who offered assurance and valuable advice.  We researched the suggested options and made plans for a Thanksgiving day family conference call to discuss them.  I was nevertheless fearful the meeting would not go well.  My dad seemed defeated, at the end of his rope and leaning toward finding an Alzheimer’s residence center for my mom – something that has long been a great fear for her.

But our family conference produced its own holiday miracle.  Instead of argument or fear based decisions, we came together to rationally set goals for the future.  Out of concern and love for both my parents, we came up with a list of agreed strategies that will allow my mom to stay in her home and give my dad his rest.  My family is as dysfunctional as any other, but we did not give in to our demons.  We came together in the promise that tomorrow can be better for all of us – even my mom.  With her progressing confusion and our heartache at this long goodbye, her life need not end, it need not lack her comforts of home, it can continue to be one where her friendly and loving personality can still shine.  For my family, hope still endures.

I tell this story of my own because it highlights in its own small way the work of millions of families throughout history – particularly Jewish families who in many ways represent all those who face persecution, difficulty and suffering.  Jewish families and friends unite for each of the eight days of Hanukkah to remember values that keep them together – those of unity, loyalty, love, and faith in human goodness.  Such family and friend celebrations need not only be for Jews but for all people this holiday season.  We can give thanks for all that we have as we renew our goals for the future.  We can express our collective promise to do the work of building a better future for all humanity.

The shattered lives, nations and institutions we see all around us  need not be despaired.  But neither should they be ignored in a holiday effort to turn a blind eye and be happy.  Rather, such suffering forces us to remember the human spirit evident in the centuries of Jewish survival, in the struggle of modern day Palestinians, in the many who peacefully march in our own nation to demand a fair and color blind justice system.  Their stories inspire us about the importance of having hope in our own lives and in persevering despite the odds.

The great Jewish scholar Theodore Herzl Gaster once said that “the Hanukkah story teaches the value of the weak against the strong, of passion against indifference, of the single unpopular voice against the thunder of public opinion.  The first Hanukkah was a struggle fought in the wilderness and in the hills; and its symbol is appropriately a small light kindled when the shadows fall.”

My thoughts regarding the importance of hope in our lives is not intended to diminish the very real pain many of us can feel.  Such pain seems all the more acute during the holidays when Sundays at church, various parties, gift giving and the media all seem to conspire to tell us we should be merry.  Far be it for me to tell anyone how they should feel, or that experiencing grief and heartache are somehow wrong.

Holding on to hope and having the cognitive will to create it by using our minds and our reasoning abilities – these strategies do not tell us feelings of despair are invalid.  Rather, in an ironic twist, the very effort to create hope is itself a form of hope.  Belief in the power of hope to create change in our lives is a form of healing and a way out of pain.  As I said earlier, it is not blind optimism.  It is rational.  It is planned.  It is firmly rooted in all that we believe at the Gathering and at Northern Hills Unitarian Universalist – we rely on reason combined with the pull of our hearts to define how we live.

Perhaps some of you saw a recent news story about a young man who died in August from smoke inhalation in a tragic college dormitory fire.  When he had turned sixteen and obtained his first driver’s license, he signed up to be an organ donor.  Upon his death, his wishes were fulfilled.  Many of his organs were used to help others and his heart, in particular, went to a Viet Nam war veteran who has been active in serving the needs of other vets.

Recently, the young man’s family expressed a desire to meet the heart recipient who was also willing to meet them.  A meeting was set up and one news camera was allowed into this very private and poignant gathering – something they all hoped would promote organ donation.  As I watched video footage of the meeting, I could not help but be deeply moved.  Each of the boy’s parents and his sister embraced the heart recipient upon meeting him.  They held onto him as if they were not meeting a stranger but someone they intimately knew.

Later, each family member was offered the opportunity to listen with a stethoscope to their son and brother’s still beating heart – one that was giving life to someone else.  The sister put the stethoscope on the man’s chest and listened for several moments as tears poured from her eyes – here was her beloved brother’s heart – she was hearing it beat away – his spirit was still alive.  Here was proof of hope in a better tomorrow.  Out of the tragedy of a young death, life beat onward in its never-ending struggle not just to survive…………..but to thrive.

That is the message of Hanukkah.  That is a message for our holidays.  In the days ahead for each of our celebrations, in the eight coming nights of Hanukkah, let us remember the lights of hope we each have, and in our abilities to shape a brighter future.  May Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Christmas never cause us to ignore suffering.  But may they also remind us that it takes only one small light to overpower a world of darkness.

 

I wish us all Hanukkah peace and joy.  

 

(c) Rev. Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, UCC, All Rights Reserved

 

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The December holidays find symbolic substance with the telling of stories.  Indeed, both Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations are based on stories – each being ones that most scholars believe are myth.  Even so, we still use contemporary stories to add greater meaning to the ideals behind the original holiday stories.  I’ve used more modern stories in my messages over past Decembers – using ones like A Christmas Story, The Grinch that Stole Christmas or the Peanuts Christmas TV show.  I plan to do the same this year using different stories each Sunday to add dimension and, I hope, spiritual reflections to our holiday season.

The “Gift of the Magi” is an enduring and famous short story written in 1906 by O. Henry, a pseudonym for William Sydney Porter who was a popular author of his time.  The story is set in a large city.  Della and Jim are young, they live in a modest apartment and have only two possessions which are prized by both.  Della has long, luxuriant hair which is a feature that grants her great beauty.  Jim owns a prized gold pocket watch that once belonged to his grandfather.

On Christmas Eve, Della tearfully contemplates the fact that she does not yet have a gift for Jim.  She had tirelessly saved a total of $1.87 to spend on a gift  – a small sum even in that time period.  She decides to head to a local beauty shop where she sells her long hair – likely to be used in making a wig.  She then goes out and finds the perfect gift for Jim – a $21 gold pocket watch chain.  She rushes home to prepare Christmas Eve dinner and excitedly wait for her husband.

Della is sitting at her kitchen table as Jim arrives home.  He is immediately stunned at the sight of Della.  His reaction causes Della concern as she had moments earlier prayed that Jim would still find her attractive.  She admits she cut her hair and sold it in order to buy him a Christmas gift.  Jim then ruefully gives Della his gift which is an expensive set of hair combs – no longer useful but for which she is overjoyed as she had long wanted them.   Della then shows Jim the pocket watch chain she had bought him with money from selling her hair.  It is then that Jim explains he had sold his watch to buy her the expensive hair accessories.  The story ends on a poignant note – each had sacrificed the one material thing in the world they held dear in order to express love to the other.   O. Henry concludes by invoking the original Christmas story of the three wise men, the Magi, who brought expensive gifts to the baby Jesus – gifts rooted not in their value but in worship – much like what Della and Jim offered to one another.

While themes from the story are beautiful and obvious – those of deep affection and sacrifice, there is also an underlying truth about giving that O. Henry conveyed.  When we give to another, it is often not the material item, the time or the money that matters most.  What we do when we give to a person or organization is to make a statement.  The gift is merely a symbol of a deeper motivation, a deeper thought, a deeper emotion.  Similar to many other occasions in life, our deeds say volumes more than do our words or, in this case, a material gift item.

As in many areas of life, Jesus taught certain ethics that often ring universally true.  We need not consider him divine in order to still appreciate his wisdom.  Throughout the gospels, Jesus warns both his followers and his enemies to be true to themselves.  Be honest with your heart and don’t be hypocrites, he warned.  Search and seek after the real nature of God in order to be a version of the same.  Practice spiritual attributes that ring true to all people.  If you wish to be devoutly religious, he taught, do so in private to preserve your spiritual humility.  If you wish to give to a church, charity or person in need, do so anonymously to preserve the kindness of your motivation.  If you endeavor to sit in judgment over someone, he said, examine yourself first and seek to correct your own inadequacies.  And, most importantly of all, if you want to practice genuine spirituality, then go out and serve the least of humanity – the poor, oppressed, hungry and sick.  These are the kinds of Jesus ethics that made him not the Christ Son of God but a great human guide who pointed to universal values that can be used to describe the divine, or simply the power of love.

Illustrating that fact, the gospels describe Jesus as coming across a tax-collector named Matthew, sitting at table set up at a crossroads – the better to encounter as many taxpayers as possible.  Tax collectors of the time were Jews hired by the Romans to enforce and collect money owed to the empire.  As payment for their collection services, they could charge over and above the mandated tax.  As Jewish employees of Rome, they were seen by other Jews as greedy traitors.  Tax collectors were hated and considered to be profoundly evil since no devout Jew would associate with, or work for, pagans.

For some reason, tax collector Matthew and Jewish rabbi Jesus hit it off.  Matthew may have been struck by the power of Jesus’ outreach to him and to his teachings to serve others and not just himself.  He decided to join Jesus and his band of followers.  Soon after, he told other tax collectors about this amazing man named Jesus.  A dinner party was soon held where Jesus mixed in the company of despised tax collectors.

As always with human nature, judgmental tongues began to wag about the notorious dinner parties Jesus attended.  He was accused by self-righteous Jews, the Pharisees, that he must be a sinner too since he liked to hang out with all kinds of bad people – prostitutes, thieves, tax collectors and drunkards.  How could he claim to be a spiritual teacher, how could he claim to be a rabbi when he did not act like a proper Jew?

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees was perfect.  He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’   I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Jesus quotes from the Old Testament book of Hosea when he tells the Pharisees to learn what “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” means.  He effectively silenced these religious Jews, who would intimately know the book of Hosea, by reminding them of the true nature of God.  God does not care about receiving things out of obligation.  She desires that humans instead understand genuine spirituality – to love, serve, and give from an honest and compassionate heart.

A sacrifice, for practicing Jews of the time, was a religious obligation – something one must do in order to be considered a believer.  Animals were sacrificed as a way to give away wealth in a show of worship and to atone for sins.  Much like many routine and repetitive religious practices in any church even today, sacrifices became little more for most Jews than a box to check if one wanted to be pious.   The real desire of God, Jesus taught, is not to receive ritual gifts designed to show devotion.  The goal is for humans to grow and change their hearts by acting more spiritual – to show compassion and love, mercy over sacrifice.  By dining with and extending friendship to tax collectors, Jesus was modeling true spirituality instead of hypocritical judgement and ritual box checking.  He did not go to the Temple and openly display his piety by giving to God obligatory animal sacrifices.  Instead, he gave away compassion to people inwardly wounded by their greed.  This kind of love, when given to so-called sinners, is a gift of mercy.  It is a god-like gift.  No judgement.  No condemnation.  “Come, follow me, have dinner with me.  Learn a better way to live by serving others.”

Ultimately, Jesus implied that the Pharisee’s hypocritical judgements spoke the truth about their spirituality more than did their obligatory sacrifices and prayers.  With their self-righteous attitudes and arrogant displays of public piety, the Pharisees showed themselves to be falsely spiritual people.  Their actions displayed the true motivations of their hearts – to merely appear devout, to boost their egos, to go through the motions of religiosity without any heart or soul.  Jesus, on the other hand, modeled loving spirituality.  He didn’t judge.  He simply showed people how they could be better.

The very same lessons are implicit in O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”.  They are lessons we might heed this holiday season in our own gift giving to friends and family.  They are lessons we might heed in our pledges to the Gathering or to any other organization.  What kind of message are we sending with our holiday gifts?  What kind of message do we want to send?  Is it one merely of obligation and duty?  Is it one of repayment for past kindnesses?  Is it a message of appreciation?  Is it one of love?  Is it a statement to endorse the ideals, ethics and values of another?  No matter what or how we give, we are quietly but emphatically sending a message.

I assert that our gifts can and should be spiritual statements.  I repeat, they should be spiritual statements – as opposed to obligations or rituals we feel compelled to offer.  Gifts can reflect not only our thinking toward another, but also our inner values like love, compassion and sincerity.  If we seek to understand ourselves, if we seek to plumb the depths of our honest motivations in how and what we do or do not give, we will find the true spiritual feelings we want to express.  That kind of inward search strives to eliminate negative attitudes like arrogance, anger or jealousy – the kinds of motivations Pharisees had.  Might we find the humility of Jesus to love someone who seemingly might not deserve it – a modern day outcast like a tax collector?  In giving to people we cherish in our lives, might we find the kind of pure love of Della and Jim – a love that is greater then the sum of our worldly possessions?  If we do that, might our gifts to those we love be somehow different?  Perhaps they would be less lavish in their financial cost and, instead, more thoughtful and meaning filled.

To the Gathering and other organizations we support, might our gifts of time, talent and treasure be measured not just by our generosity, but by ethical beliefs we hold dear?  We may not like all of its actions, but we can acknowledge with our gifts that it stands with us in what we value, that it is a place into which we are adopted as people who both love and are loved, that it is an organization that gives us meaning in our lives.   Might our spiritual sacrifices to this Temple we call the Gathering be motivated by the good that is in each of our hearts – a desire to make a difference, to further the work of a worthy organization, to symbolically express, through our giving, the ideals we each have – service to others, open celebration of all people, a shared quest for enlightenment?

Might our Sunday mornings be gifts of time to ourselves and to each other – motivated by the inner yearning to touch the transcendent, to experience moments of heightened awareness, to connect with people we care about?  Might our meditations and prayers be gifts of sincere caring, words of hope and appreciation we send out into the ether of universal consciousness?  I ask us each to reflect on the the motivations of what we give in time, money and spirituality here and elsewhere – do they honestly reflect what our hearts and souls believe?

The “Gift of the Magi”, as a holiday story, strikes a chord in many people because it shows us what giving can look like.  Della and Jim’s gifts were materially useless and yet spiritually profound.  In their worthlessness, the combs and gold chain were transformed into talismans of the giver’s hearts – items to be cherished not for their utility but for what they represent.  Jesus likewise taught what giving can and should be – spiritual expressions showing mercy, kindness, humility and love.  To find those wellsprings of spiritual goodness in ourselves, we must examine our inner motivations honestly to eliminate negative thinking.  In giving to loved ones, to friends, to the Gathering this holiday season, let us find the spiritual center from which all our words and deeds flow.

 

I wish all of us a spiritual, and peace filled holiday season…

 

 

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved  

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There is a story about a first time woman visitor to a Unitarian Universalist church.  She was invited by a friend of hers who was a member of that congregation.  During the sermon, this woman visitor became increasingly upset at what she heard from the minister.  She frowned and shook her head repeatedly.  After the service she remarked to her friend, “I can hardly believe what that minister said!”  Her friend smiled and replied, “That’s wonderful!  It sounds like you already fit in!”

I offer that bit of humor as an appropriate introduction to my message today.  My message theme this month is on exploring Unitarian Universalism and my topic today is on Universalism.   All of you from Northern Hills might wonder what I could tell you – with your years of experience in the UU.  I hope I don’t see too many shaking heads and frowns as I speak!  But even as my purpose this month is to inform myself and the Gathering about the history and ideas behind Unitarian Universalism, I hope my thoughts today might both inform and inspire each of us just why it is that we are a part of good and proud congregations like Northern Hills Fellowship or the Gathering.

Last month, when I spoke here on October 5th, I related to you some of my life journey and how I came to my present understanding of spirituality.  We each have our own important stories to tell but I wanted to relate mine so that you can better understand me.  I related that an important moment in my life was when I decided to come out as a gay man – to speak my truth.  In coming out to my family, I was extremely nervous – particularly with my two daughters who were teenagers at the time.  I knew I might alter their understanding of themselves, their family and their relationship to me.   When I sat down with them, I was visibly shaking and my words poured out in a jumble.  After I finished, they were briefly silent as what I had said sunk in, but then they each looked at me reassuringly and my youngest daughter reached over to me, wrapped her arms around me, and said, “Daddy, It’s OK.  We love you no matter what and that will never change.”  (pause)

I was dumbstruck.  I still choke up when I recall their words to me that day.  Their reaction is the single greatest gift I’ve ever received.  At a moment in my life when I was most vulnerable, they simply loved me.

What they offered was what I want to discuss today – no strings attached love.  It did not matter to my daughters what defined one small part of me.  They offered in that moment a love we all desire to receive and we all hope to give – unconditional, total love without any expectation or demand.  It is the kind of love the ancient Greeks called agape – a love that is almost unreal because it is so pure – untouched by romance or hopes of reciprocity.

I also relate this story because it reflects the principles and values of Universalism.  In a world that often demands retribution, in a world that judges others and expects reward or punishment for human actions, Universalists saw and continue to see a different approach.  Whatever force it is that we choose to believe animates the universe, that force does not judge humans on the basis of their merits or their actions.  We are not sentenced to hell – even if we don’t believe in such a literal place, as I do not.  Instead, according to Universalism, all people will find eternal grace and eternal love.  All people have inherent dignity and value.  All people are to be loved without any strings attached.  It is a beautiful and uplifting belief that is difficult to practice.  It is totally contrary to most other religions which assert that people earn reward or punishment and that a god will only love us if we return that love in the form of obedience, worship and belief.  Universalism tells us we each deserve to be loved no matter what!  No hell.  No judgement.  No condemnation.  Only love.

The history of Universalism is long and often deeply theological and philosophical.  It originated with the Greek philosopher Plato who taught that all creation emanates from a divine source and all of creation, including humans, will return to that divine source.  A very early Christian leader Origen believed much the same – all humans were born into grace and all will eventually return to that state.

But with the Protestant Reformation and its reaction to Catholic ideas that humans must earn their way to heaven, John Calvin in particular taught that everyone is born with the stain of sin, total depravity as he said, that is passed down from Adam and Eve.  God is so powerful, he believed, that there is nothing we can do to overcome her omnipotence.  She loves who she loves and she condemns who she condemns.  We are powerless to influence her mind.  Some are predestined from the beginning of time to be rewarded with heaven, many others are predestined to go to hell.

Early Unitarians and Universalists perceived a slightly different God from each other.  Unitarians saw in Calvinism a denial of human reason and its ability to cognitively choose to do good or bad.  If there is a god, Unitarians said, he or she offers humans the freedom to think and determine their own destiny.

Early Universalists saw a God of love.  It made no sense, from their reading of the Bible, for a capricious God to exist.  As they saw it, God cannot be a loving God if he randomly chooses to send some to hell.  Nor can that God encourage human love for others if so many are destined for hell.

While there were several streams of early Universalist theology, some believing that evil humans will spend a few hundred years in hell but their souls will eventually repent and go to heaven, the prevailing view was taught by F. D. E. Schleiermacher, the father of Universalism, who taught in the early 1800’s that hell cannot exist since those sent to heaven could not enjoy that paradise with the knowledge that many of their friends and family are forever suffering in hell.  Since he believed everyone will enjoy eternal grace and love – a symbolic version of heaven – it is therefore impossible for hell to exist.  His was a modern understanding of suffering – even those who might deserve to suffer are nevertheless to be pitied.  This contrasted with some theologians, and with fundamentalists today, who believe that those who are in heaven will be so in touch with the will of God that they will rejoice in his punishment of unbelievers and sinners.  Personally, I find that viewpoint incomprehensible.

In the 20th century, Universalists leaned toward a more Unitarian approach to theology and philosophy – that the human mind is capable of discerning truth apart from ancient texts.  In this regard, Universalists reasoned that if there is a supernatural force, it is logical it will be one of love for what it created.  Why create if the intent is to eventually condemn?  Even further, if any love, including that from a god, is to be genuine, it must be offered unconditionally.  If I tell you I love you but expect in return your devotion and worship of me, is what I offer really love?  Or is it, instead, a commodity I have dangled in front of you as way to buy your devotion?  Even worse, as in the case of a hell condemning god, is it a threat to worship me or else?  Universalists logically asked if one’s belief in a greater power is motivated by love, OR by fear that one might go to hell?   Bribery is not love.  Threats are not love.  Fear is not love.  Logic and our own experiences, much like what I felt from my daughters, shows us what real love looks and feels like.

As all of you Unitarian Universalists know, the two streams of today’s UU denomination came together in 1961 – a perfect blending of Unitarian emphasis on reason with Universalist emphasis on compassion, charity and love.  The head and heart wonderfully combined.  Our brains – or Unitarianism – operating on their own can lean toward cold intellectualism.  Our hearts – or Universalism – operating on their own can lean toward sloppy emotionalism.  Both need the other in order to effectively change the world.

Several months after I began as minister to the Gathering, I shocked many of its members by beginning a sermon with the statement that I believe in hell.  I heard gasps of wonder at just who they had hired as minister!  But I went on to explain that I had visited hell and that many of them had too.  Hell existed outside our doors in Over-the-Rhine for those caught in poverty, drug addiction or homelessness.  I had visited the worst of hells during two construction trips to Haiti where I was aghast at the extreme poverty I saw.  My group and I travelled through many of Haiti’s slums.  Our senses were bombarded with piles of trash, sewage running through gutters, pigs wallowing in filth, and, on one street, a dead human body covered with flies as people stepped around it.  Yes, I said in my sermon, symbolic hells do exist.

In Haiti, I visited a clinic run by Catholic nuns for children suffering from AIDS and tuberculosis.  Three and four kids were lying in cribs made for one.  There was no crying.  Most were so sick they mutely stared at us.  The nuns told us they had little money to provide medicine or treatment for these children – most of whom had been abandoned.  Very few survived more than a few weeks.  What they did offer, the nuns said, was comfort and love.  It struck me at the time that outside that little clinic was a version of hell on earth.  Inside those walls, however, the nuns had built a version of heaven, a place these children might experience a glimpse of unconditional love, a soothing voice, a gentle transition into an early death.

What I believe then as I believe now is that what those nuns were doing may not be for all of us, but it was and is consistent with our human purpose in life.  It is consistent with Universalist ideals that all people have inherent dignity and are deserving of love – no matter what.  If we hold those principles to be logical and true, then it is part of our responsibility to build places of heaven on earth for everyone – especially for the outcast, the poor, the dying, the oppressed, the least of creation’s children.

As I have been a Unitarian Universalist for many years without knowing it, I can now give my beliefs an identity.  My spirituality has called me to worship and serve a universal force of love – to strive to give that love away to family, friend and stranger alike.  I must do so with humility, kindness, joy, empathy, and gentle speech.  Reason tells me that my love must be focused through the prism of my mind – that sometimes love cannot be given as my heart desires but that it must often be in a form of so-called “tough love.”  It must be the kind of gentle and helpful love that initiates change of behavior in another person – not to punish or judge but to teach.

I also believe in the Universalist ideal that tells me love can never be compelled.  It must be given without coercion.  I can, therefore, only model it for others to see.  I cannot and will not tell others how they should love nor shame them if they do not love as I believe they could.  Each person loves in different ways and many of us find that during certain periods in our lives, expressing charitable love is limited by circumstances – by family, by health, by finances.  Empathy calls me to focus on my own actions and to acknowledge we each love differently.

I see at the Gathering and here at Northern Hills visions of what loving communities can look like – places of celebration for all people, places of wisdom and reason, places where each person strives to practice love toward everyone.  I see churches where visitors can come and instantly feel welcomed, churches that serve and speak out in behalf of the marginalized.  I see places that witness to the wider community how members peacefully cooperate and communicate with one another.  I see churches that are small beacons of light in an otherwise dark world of dogmatic, angry and competing religions.  The children here will soon model these visions of love as they hand out angel biscuits to each of us.  Our two congregations modeled such love yesterday – some from the Gathering assembling hygiene kits for homeless youth, a combined group from Northern Hills and the Gathering helping to winterize the homes of elderly and disabled poor.  Northern Hills Fellowship and the Gathering are important places – not perfect – but vital to this city, nation and world.  They are places free of religious judgement, sectarian rivalry and spiritual arrogance.  They are places of love for all people – no strings attached.  They must exist, in some form, long into the future.

Let us, in conclusion, live out the historic traditions of Universalist forebears and strive to give away glimpses of unconditional love – love that is based on reason, love that is generous, lavish, and true.  To me, to you, to those around us in here and in the communities in which we live, may it be said that we speak about universal love…and that we then truly practice it.

I wish you all much peace and joy.

 

For the heart to heart time or, as the Gathering says, “the sermon is not over until the congregation also has its say”,  I am interested in your thoughts about what constitutes unconditional love?  And, what are good ways to show that love to others?

 

 

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

 

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Galileo Galilei, as many people know, is famous for his multiple discoveries on the atomic nature of matter and our solar system.  Using his own observations and mathematical models, as well as borrowing ideas from Copernicus’s original observations, Galileo showed that the planet Venus revolves around the sun, that comets do the same and that moons circling Jupiter, which he discovered, prove his theories.  But such facts that he observed by telescope and had shown to many others, they were immediately labeled as heresy by the Catholic Church.  They contradicted several verses found in the Bible saying the earth is stationary and that the sun revolves around it.  Centuries of Christian dogma holds that the Bible was and is the inerrant and infallible word of God.  It is the source for all Truth and cannot be incorrect.

The earth was made by God as the center of the universe, such dogma claimed.  The sun, stars, planets and other celestial bodies revolve around it.  This geocentric universe was crucial to theological belief in God’s creation and his establishment of humans as the purpose for all existence.  A heliocentric or sun oriented planetary system, as Galileo observed and proved with his math, was a direct threat to that viewpoint.  If the earth and humans were not central to God’s creative plan to have all things worship him, if the Bible was somehow wrong in its geocentric verses, the whole structure of belief in God and the Bible could be questioned.  And, of course, that was a dagger at the heart of ecclesiastic control over human affairs.  Despite irrefutable evidence that even Church astronomers of the time had observed, the Church told Galileo he was wrong.  His observations, science and math were false.  The Bible is Truth no matter what.

At an advanced age, Galileo was put on trial for heresy.  A unanimous Inquisition verdict was rendered against him on June 23, 1633.  It stated, “The idea that the Sun is stationary is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture…”  Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment.  Because of his fame and age, the sentence was commuted the next day to house arrest for life.  Galileo was then confined to his home, under guard, until he died in 1641.

It was not until 1758 that the Church ended its ban on Galileo’s books and teachings.  Nevertheless, the Church has continually held that it was correct in putting him on trial because, it says, the science at the time was imperfect and Galileo’s ideas threatened social order.  As recently as 1990, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future and current retired Pope Benedict, stated in a speech about the Galileo affair, “The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just.”  Such a statement is breathtaking in its refusal to admit error.  And that points to a major problem with religious dogma.  Once a religious creed or dogma is stated as fact, once Scripture is determined to be infallible and inerrant – as fundamentalists say about the Bible and Koran – there can be no subsequent admission of error.  To do so brings the entire creed, doctrine and Scripture into doubt.  If one part can be wrong then the entire whole can be wrong.

My shortened history of Galileo’s persecution, therefore, offers us a reason why religious dogma and creeds, like the Christian Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds, are not only impractical but dangerous.   They are inflexible and give rise to irrational thinking that refuses to accept new understanding, revelation and discovery.  As I have set out this month to review Unitarian Universalism, the primary hallmark of that denomination is its refusal to accept, enforce or state any religious creeds.  As we saw last Sunday in my message on the history of Unitarianism, it has used human reason to logically evolve its understanding of spirituality.   Humans, Unitarians believe, have yet to discover absolute Truth.  Even science continues in its quest to understand existence and the cosmos.  As rational humans, therefore, we must open ourselves to many streams of spirituality, philosophy and science all to be used as tools to question, search and understand what is true for us individually.  Unitarians are radically tolerant in that regard.  Instead of insisting on one set of beliefs or Scripture, persons have the freedom and responsibility to determine their own spirituality and then to freely believe it.  All are welcome within UU churches as long as each respects all other persons and their beliefs.  Ultimately, Unitarian Universalists believe there are many paths that lead toward Truth and all are valid.

Since there are many viewpoints within Unitarian Universalism, members nevertheless unite in a common understanding of life from a humanist perspective.  Human ethics and rights are the common focus – instead of dogmatic theological beliefs.  In that regard, it is our duty and purpose to continually work to improve life for ourselves and others – to be change agents who work to create a better earth right here, right now, for everyone.

Such Unitarian principles have been arrived at by logic and experience.  And that is why Unitarians refuse to proclaim any form of a religious creed.  While people have the freedom to believe in them, creeds  are not based on empirical evidence that all people accept.  Creeds exist within the realm of religious faith, and such faith is a matter of the heart and soul, not of the mind as confirmed by observation and experience.  While all beliefs are respected in the UU, none are stated as absolute Truth precisely because they cannot be proven.  In other words, humans cannot know creeds, they can only believe them – and that is a very important distinction.

And therein lies a problem, as we see in the Galileo affair.  Religions assert that they know their doctrines and dogmas as facts when they are, instead, beliefs.  For instance, I can believe pigs fly – and forgive me if that sounds condescending toward religion.  But I and others cannot know that pigs fly as a fact because reason and experience do not prove it.  If, however, I am respectful to you in my beliefs about flying pigs, and I’m willing to listen to your counter arguments about them, you will hopefully accept me within your congregation.  We each have the freedom to believe as we wish.  And that is precisely what Unitarian Universalists do – all are welcome but nobody’s religious beliefs are stated as creedal fact. Unitarians further ask that each person remain humble enough in what they personally believe such that they are open to accept new knowledge – something the Catholic Church refused to do for Galileo.

Unitarian Universalists do, however, believe in the ability of human reason and experience to determine what is universally good and ethical.  Toward that end, they put forth a set of visions or principles which are based on human logic and thus the foundation for their denomination.  The seven UU principles are:   (show slide)

1)  The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

2)  Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

3)  Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritually grow;

4)  A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

5)  The use of the democratic process within congregations and in society at large;

6)  The goal of world community to promote peace, liberty, and justice for all;

7)  Respect for the interdependent web of all existence.

Other religions demean these principles saying they are so all encompassing that they do not form the basis of a distinctive spiritual community.  They are wrong.  The principles assert a belief in universal values to which almost nobody, no matter their religious beliefs, could disagree.  In other words, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others can all agree with them, and most importantly – and this is a key idea – all can BELIEVE in them because reason and experience tell us each principle is true.  The UU denomination is one of the few places (the Gathering being another) in which true religious cooperation and acceptance are goals that members, however imperfectly, attempt to meet.  Is this not a vision of a society to which all aspire – a place of coexistence between persons of every color, gender, sexuality, religion and ethnicity?  Is this not a vision of an earthly heaven, a kind of kingdom of God that Jesus and other prophets advocated?  I assert that it is.  (Next slide)

If you recall from my review of Unitarianism last week, in 1819 William Ellery Channing delivered a sermon which quickly led to the establishment of the American Unitarian Association.  In it, he stated his desire to establish a church that was purposefully non-sectarian – one that members of all faiths could find fellowship in a joint effort to practice the ethics of the human Jesus.  This church would not claim to be the one true church, as Catholics assert, but instead be the one human church in which all people, of all religions, find freedom, acceptance and respect.  The only way this could be achieved, Channing said, was to abolish all creeds.  He foresaw the problem that was revealed in Galileo’s heresy trial.  Creeds divide.  They are factual assertions that are implicitly non-factual because they cannot be proven.  But religions say they are fact and that very claim creates divisions because other people make similar claims about their own creeds.  Hate, conflict and violence follow.  Unitarianism, on the other hand, was founded on the very same ideals which we hold at the Gathering: we welcome everyone but, in order to promote peace, we will not assert a particular religious creed or dogma.

After my message last Sunday, Mary Anne Berry shared with me her insight that belonging to a Unitarian church is more challenging than belonging to a traditional church.  One has the responsibility to determine one’s own beliefs – to search, study and think one’s way through multiple theologies and philosophies to arrive at a spiritual path that is personally meaningful.  That is not easy, she said, because one is not told what to believe.

And that echoes a Reformed Jewish understanding of God.  If you recall the Biblical Exodus story of Moses encountering God at a burning bush, Moses is startled when the bush speaks to him.  “Who are you?” Moses asks.  “I am who I am,” God, in the form of a burning bush, replies.  That translation from ancient Hebrew has been shown to be incorrect by several Reformed Rabbis.  The Hebrew, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh”  is more appropriately translated as “I am becoming whatever I am yet to be.”  And that is a totally different statement of God’s self-identity than “I am who I am.”  In the original Hebrew, he is not claiming to be unchangeable.  Instead, the updated translation has him saying he will change, he will evolve, he will continue to become whatever he will finally be – a truth yet to be finalized.  He’s not locked into being, as the Christian dogma asserts, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  He might become god the gay drag queen, god the impulse to love and be loved, god the dirty homeless woman crying on a street corner.  Who knows?  But let us endeavor to find out!

Whatever it is that people believe defines ultimate Truth, or god, this has yet to be finalized according to Unitarian Universalism.  We say the same here at the Gathering.  And that is uncomfortable.  We must live with uncertainty about an afterlife; uncertainty about the existence or non-existence of God, about if there is a supernatural creative force, about a reason for life.  As much as we can believe certain things about a creator, existence and an afterlife, we are nevertheless uncertain.  Nobody has the evidence to claim their religious or non-religious beliefs are facts.  And that ought to fill everyone with profound humility in what we do or don’t believe.  We could all be terribly wrong!

What I find attractive about Unitarian Universalism is that it offers a spiritual identity within the confines of a historic church.  It has a long history of rigorous philosophical thought and struggle behind it.  I like that the UU church emerged from western and Christian roots – of which I am familiar by tradition – and it has now also embraced eastern and other streams of spirituality which I find attractive.  I can worship the transcendent and the ineffable, I can personally pray or meditate, without needing to fully understand what I am experiencing.  I can rest in uncertainty and still find spiritual beauty, wonder and awe.  For me, Unitarian Universalism embodies three short phrases: Open minds.  Open beliefs.  Open hearts.

Too often I find that dogmatic religious beliefs become arcane discussions much like the debate Thomas Aquinas is said to have had over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  Ultimately, what is the point?  We at the Gathering and our UU friends say much the same.  There are starving kids outside these doors.  There are people who hurt and grieve.  There are the defeated and forlorn who have given up on life.  There are millions of oppressed who are denied rights of dignity, freedom and justice.  These are things that really matter.  People everywhere ask the very same question: how can this life and this earth be improved for the one human family?  No matter what any of us believe spiritually, that is an eternally true creed ALL people can accept.

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

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Most of us are familiar with the TV show “The Simpsons” which, in its earlier years, was derided as animated radicalism that ruthlessly satirized our culture.  Many conservatives and Christians were alarmed at the show’s popularity and its seeming attack on their values.  Over the years, however, the show has won praise from those circles as they noted subtle but genuine ways the show holds an honest mirror to our culture but has fun with its idiosyncrasies.  Unitarian Universalism has suffered, or enjoyed, its own attention from the show as its creator, Matt Groenig, is believed to be a Unitarian.

In one episode Bart Simpson, the troublemaking boy in the show, visits the home of his evangelical Christian neighbors.  He finds the two Flanders boys, Rod and Todd, playing a video game where they are shooting virtual enemies – a surprising pastime in this religious home.  But the boys explain to Bart that they are playing Bible Blaster – a game where they fire Scripture at Heathens.  If they get a direct hit, the Heathen becomes a Christian believer and is saved.  Ten hits and the player wins the game.  As Bart tries his hand at the game, he is unsuccessful until he scores a wimpy ping sound – unlike the explosion of a direct hit.  “Aw Bart,” Todd says to him, “you only nicked him.  You made him Unitarian!”

In another episode, Lisa Simpson, the precocious girl on the show, is enjoying an after church ice cream social.  She walks up to get her bowl of ice cream from Reverend Lovejoy, minister at the fictitious “Presbylutheran” church, and finds multiple flavors to choose.  But Reverend Lovejoy smiles at Lisa, knowing her liberal tendencies, and offers her a bowl of Unitarian ice cream.  Lisa frowns as she looks into the bowl and exclaims, “But its empty.”  “Exxxxactly!” says a smug Rev. Lovejoy.

Such humor reflects the attitudes of many people toward Unitarian Universalist principles.  In an effort to accept everyone, no matter their faith, and in promoting a core idea that there are many paths to universal Truth and all are valid, Unitarians are derided as believing in everything and thus in nothing.  The same could be said of our Gathering beliefs.  Religious critics see quasi-religious groups of people who lack the kind of strict doctrinal assertions of other religions.  They condemn Unitarianism as empty, weak and wishy-washy in its embrace of multiple principles that almost anyone could endorse but which offer no inspiration or solace in a confusing world.  Indeed, echoing critics of all forms of liberal religion, it is said that Unitarianism does not offer any means of personal salvation that can provide a person with the emotional and spiritual comfort most people desire.

John Shelby Spong, the famous liberal Episcopalian Bishop and author, agrees with most Unitarian beliefs.  However, he asserts that he could never be a Unitarian since it is, he says, too easy.  Its rejection of theism is too simple, he believes.  It’s better and far more challenging to grapple and struggle with Christianity and the Bible to find meaning behind their literal assertions, he asserts.

What most of us at the Gathering have implicitly known over the years is that our blend of ideals and values closely align with those of Unitarian Universalism.  We look to the Bible and other Scriptures for wisdom but we don’t take them literally.  We consider Jesus to be a great prophet but not a supernatural God.  What I have personally come to understand is that I’ve been a closet Unitarian for many years – without knowing it.  As a result, I’ve felt some unease.  Just what is it that I believe and find meaningful?  I imagine many of you might feel the same way.

From my research, I find critics of Unitarian Universalism mostly wrong.  Far from being empty, the denomination and its core beliefs are full of history, tradition and well thought ideas about what it means to be spiritual.  Indeed, any study of Unitarianism finds a church that has struggled with theological ideas for four centuries – a history that long outdates many of the emotional forms of religious fundamentalism we see today.   Contemporary Unitarianism is NOT simply a diverse group of people who have come together in rejection of doctrinal religion.  As simple as that assertion might sound, that modern Unitarians are defined more by what they are against than by what they are for, it ignores the well established framework of Unitarian principles, ethics and traditions that were built over the centuries, one atop the other, in a logical evolution of spiritual philosophy.  And those beliefs, much like what we claim at the Gathering, are not fixed in stone but are constantly updated with new understanding.  It is a church committed to both a diversity of ideas as well as a determined search for just what is true, good and beautiful.  If it has rejected anything, it has rejected the notion that a form of God or absolute Truth has been found.

But the search for greater spiritual insight goes on.  As answers are found, new questions arise and that has defined Unitarianism over the centuries – it has evolved with layer upon layer of new insights.   By claiming a set of principles instead of a defining creed, Unitarians, like us at the Gathering, celebrate the mysteries of spiritual living that call us to transform ourselves into better people so that we are equipped to serve and love others.  With all due respect for Bishop John Shelby Spong, a writer I admire, his views on Unitarianism are wrong.  It is far more difficult to embark on a sea of spiritual unknowns instead of accepting an already established religious template.

This month I plan to look at Unitarian Universalism in a way that hopefully both informs and inspires.  You will hear much that sounds familiar to what we believe at the Gathering.  I profess to my own incomplete understanding of the UU association and its traditions but I want to look for common ground as well as its usefulness in a world where religions compete in ways that are often violent and unloving.  I believe Unitarian Universalism, along with what we believe at the Gathering, offers a spiritual ecumenicalism that humanity desperately needs – a means for diverse people to come together to solve problems.  Instead of being divisive, it is radically inclusive – so long as participants practice universal human ethics of love, respect and humility toward the beliefs of others.   The historic scourge of religious based hate and arrogance must end and only an inclusive, loving spirituality – like that of the UUA – might end it.

Unitarian roots are found at their oldest level back in the fifteenth century in Poland and Transylvania.  They began in reaction to strict Calvinism and Lutheranism that emerged from the Protestant Reformation.  Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected Catholic belief in sacraments, purgatory and earning one’s way to Heaven.  Salvation is found only from God and his Son Jesus Christ they asserted.   As eternal beings who existed long before humans, this God in three persons knows all things and controls all things, past, present and future.   A Calvinist god has pre-determined who are the select few who will join her in heaven.  As creatures born with sin, we are incapable of saving ourselves.  We can only hope, pray and assume we were pre-selected to be saved.

Various theologians and ministers soon rejected this theology.  It negates human reason and the power of people to consciously choose to do good or bad, to believe in God or not.   Indeed, numerous Scripture verses point to the crucial concept of choice in belief.  God sent his Son so that those who believe in him shall not perish, reads a famous Bible verse, John 3:16.  Early anti-Calvinists were thus early Unitarians – asserting a belief in human capability to reason and freely choose a spiritual pathway.  This Arminian or anti-Calvinism was the first of four phases in developing Unitarian beliefs.

The second phase directly evolved from the first.  If humans have the ability to reason, as the anti-Calvinists believed, then they can interpret the Bible on their own.  If they do, they will find in it no basis for belief in the Trinity.  Indeed, a study of the Council of Nicaea, established by Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 CE,  reveals there were a significant number of people at that council who saw Jesus not as equal to God but as a prophet who might be divine but who is not God herself.  Such people were labeled heretics by the Council of Nicaea.  The Nicene Creed thus stated that God is a trinitarian being – she is God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  Such a belief has weak support in the Bible and many eighteenth century theologians, notably Justus Socinius, found no Biblical assertion by Jesus that he is God.  Instead, Socinians, as they were called, asserted Jesus and the Holy Spirit were not God.  Christianity had gone astray and rejected its monotheistic Jewish heritage.  It worshipped an idol in the form of Christ and it believed in a contradiction – God is three persons but God is also one.

William Ellery Channing, in 1819, delivered a sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity” which claimed that God is completely one being and that Jesus was only a man who pointed the way to her.  That message became the foundation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825 and hallmarked the second phase of Unitarian history.

The third phase came, once again, in natural evolution of thinking and inquiry.  Without the two preceding phases of history and tradition, the third would not have occurred.  It is labeled the Transcendentalist period.

If humans have the ability to reason and choose their spiritual pathway, as the anti-Calvinists believed, if they can use that power to better understand the Bible and assert the Unitarian nature of God, as the anti-Trinitarians believed, then they also have the right to skeptically examine other parts of Christian doctrine.  Transcendentalists began with rejecting the miracles of Jesus.  If Jesus was not God, if he was a human teacher, then miracles ascribed to him are not fact.  This idea was not based on mere belief but on human reason – that supernatural miracles described in the Old and New Testaments are myths lacking any supporting evidence.  Even further, we can find transcendent revelations on our own, without scripture, when nature, science and art fill us with wonder and new insights.  Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that humans must experience the divine on their own – particularly in nature – if they purposefully seek such moments.  Transcendence comes from the power of our own minds and experiences.

As one of the great Unitarian figures in history, Emerson delivered a commencement address at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, which was widely controversial at the time, but which established the basis from which Unitarianism evolved away from its Biblical and Christian roots.  Human experience and reason, in these first three phases of Unitarian history, had used logic and reason to turn away from Calvinism, from the Trinity and, in the mid-1800’s, from a theistic and supernatural God.

The fourth and most recent phase of Unitarian history began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  It was and is a logical evolution from the the first three Unitarian periods.  Two ministers in the 1880’s, Jenkin Lloyd Jones and William Channing Gannett, both began preaching that past Unitarian history was not as much about theology but about tolerating and accepting contrary beliefs.  Unitarianism, they claimed, is about openness, diversity and respect for any and all beliefs – and that must include those who do not believe in God.  More important, this kind of acceptance leads directly to universal values of humility over arrogance, love and tolerance over religious hatred, service and charity over self-interest.  Having discounted creeds and belief in a supernatural God, Jones and Gannett said Unitarians should instead follow an ethical approach to spirituality: right behavior toward others versus right belief in a theological deity.  They claimed we must honor the teachings of Jesus and other prophets instead of the prophet him or herself.  This humanist approach was accepted in 1894 by the American Unitarian Association.  It took until 1945 for most Unitarian congregations to fully accept humanism.

According to humanist ideals, people are the force that determines our well-being.   We are saved not for some mythical after-life, but for the here and now.  This earth and our present existence is what matters and must be the focus of spiritual endeavors.  While Unitarians merged with the Universalist Association in 1961, leading to a combined focus on humanism, love and social justice, my review of Universalism will wait for two weeks.  Even so, Unitarianism is known today for its emphasis on using our minds and experiences to determine what is ethical, beautiful and spiritually good.

The Seven Principals of Unitarian Universalism are said to embody its ideals.  Some have criticized them as being too broad so that anyone can agree with them.  But that is precisely the point – who could disagree with them?  All people can feel comfortable in a place that has such visions for human life: dignity, justice, democracy, truth seeking, peace, acceptance, and love for all creation.  While other faiths encourage people to “come as you are”, it is implied that if you do come, you must then change.  Unitarians encourage others to come as they are and not to change.  Just as it is at the Gathering, all are welcome and all are respected for who they are.

But as I elaborated earlier, such an open ideal can lead to a lack of direction, purpose and meaning.  We must give religious fundamentalists credit for understanding their singular purpose – to worship and serve God.  And with that purpose comes their identity.  UUA churches, like the Gathering, are prone to dilute a collective sense of purpose because there are so many different traditions and opinions.  That can create a lack of cohesive identity that spawns a vicious cycle – without purpose, no identity and without identity, no purpose.

But Unitarian tradition and history do offer an identity and purpose.  Unitarians have historically pushed the boundaries of belief while asserting the basic human right of self-actualization through sound reason.  That is a consistent identity.  From anti-Calvinists who were burned at the stake for their beliefs, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Unitarians of today, humanity has been the focus of spirituality.  It was not God or one individual that was and is celebrated, but the one human family.

In the contemporary UU ritual of water communion, people bring samples of water from hundreds of different sources.  And they pour them into a single large bowl – many waters, one common stream.  Such symbolism calls them and us to put humanist belief into practice – many people, but only one human species.  And that focus provides a clear purpose for Unitarians and, indeed, for all people.   We were each born with the purpose to serve and love others.  That is implicit in historical Unitarian ideals of dignity, reason, democracy and social justice.

By simple logic, we each matter.  We matter because alone we cannot survive.  We need to cooperate in order to thrive.  And we need to practice ethics required for cooperation – empathy, humility, gentleness, love.  We find in Unitarianism the kind of salvation story that resonate with our emotions.  Everybody has inherent dignity.  Everybody has rights and abilities to think as they wish.  Unitarianism champions the present possibilities in human affairs instead of the negative – sin, death and fear.  It worships the power of love, focused through a prism of our minds.  And that love works to create a type of heaven right now – for everyone.  From many paths, we find this one essential truth…..and a shining hope for the future.

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

 

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Within the past few weeks anthropologists and archeologists announced in the magazine Nature a discovery from the nation of Indonesia.  Cave art, that is nearly identical to the famous depictions found in the Lascaux caves of France, have been dated to be over 40,000 years old.  That dating puts the Indonesian art at approximately the same age as drawings of horses, human hands and bulls found in France.  This new revelation is an earthquake in our understanding of humanity.  Modern humans did not evolve from a single lineage.  We were diverse and yet much the same from the very beginning of development even as human groups and tribes were totally isolated from one another.

Most important, what these discovered cave paintings indicate is that the quest to understand human existence, the yearning to define who we are, is a timeless and universal one.  Humans living in France were pondering the same questions and arriving at the same assumptions at exactly the same time as were humans thousands of miles away in Indonesia – at a time when interactions between those two areas were impossible.  The impulse to define ourselves is one that is implicit within all humans.

During this month of October, I have looked at the topic of how we define ourselves both as individuals and in the larger realm of humanity.  Our quest for self-understanding is a spiritual matter and one that leads deep into introspection about meaning, purpose and worth.  Two weeks ago, I related to you and to Northern Hills Unitarian my journey of self-understanding – from my years of falsely defining myself as a straight man, to my time spent seeking a god that would define me in his terms, to my eventual awakening to an inner truth about myself and my belief in the absence of a theistic god.  We are masters of ourselves, I concluded.  We are the gods that control destiny and goodness in the world.

Last week, I examined how our jobs and careers are too often used to define us.  Our jobs are falsely used by the culture and us to determine individual value.  Instead, I asserted that it is not what we do to earn a living that defines who we are, it is our hearts that matter.  How are we engaging the world to improve it?  How are we loving, gentle, forgiving and caring people – in our families and communities?  Who is our one true self across the spectrum of life – at home, at play, at our inner core?  Ultimately, who we are is so much richer than what we do or did in a job.

Today, I want to look at the Indonesian cave paintings and several other examples of history’s most important art, as ways people have been defined in humanist terms.

Stanford University Encyclopedia published an article by several professors on the relationship between aesthetics and existentialism.  This inquiry gets at the heart of my topic today.  Why is it, and how is it, that artistic and musical expressions are so closely tied with what we think, feel and understand about ourselves?  Existentialism, of which Jean-Paul Sartre is the leading philosopher, asserts that art is the primary way humans reveal themselves and the universe.  In other words, we use art to confirm reality.  Not only that, but we use art to interpret existence and answer the eternal question, “Why are we here?”

Sartre and other existentialists see art as a deeply spiritual undertaking.  Art is a way to understand what it might be that created and animates all things.  Humans have used all forms of art to convey the beauty, wonder and complexity of nature.  Art is thus a manifestation of our ideal interpretation of things that exist – whether that be the human form, a flower or even an emotion.  And that ideal depiction becomes for us the reality of an object.  A subtle and softly colored painting of a mountain exists in our minds as identical to the actual upward thrusting rocky mass.  In other words, a mountain truly exists not because it IS, but because we depict it as existing – in a painting, in a song, in writing or in a photograph.  According to Sartre, an art work manifests the reality of an object or thought because humans have interpreted it and rendered it in art.  And that is why humans hunger and yearn to create art – from amateur scribbles to the evocations master artists create with paint, marble or sound.  Art is a picture of truth, it’s a window into the spiritual domain, it’s a way to assert existence and thus to define ourselves.

Take at look at one of the Indonesian cave paintings.

While we may not see this as high art by modern standards, it is nevertheless remarkable.  At the dawn of homo sapien existence, around 40,000 years ago, an artist used paint and colored dust to assert his or her existence.  I not only exist, he or she proclaimed, but I exist in relation to the physical world around me.  And here is the one tool that makes me uniquely human – my arm and my hand through which I can shape the world unlike any other creature.  From this artwork and others like it in France, came the first cry – much like that of a newborn babe – “I live!  I’m here!  I am a god of my own thinking able to paint, make tools, build a shelter, and profoundly change the environment.”

Now take a look at two art forms from over 20,000 years ago – at a time when human villages first emerged.  They are what archeologists call Venus figurines.

Such carved pieces depict women with exaggerated breasts, hips and genitalia and they were likely icons of worship.  They have been found, in various styles, all over the world.  This similarity in art form, from totally different cultures, indicates a common thread of self-identity and definition.  These artists were rendering their understanding of both humanity and the divine.  The one miracle to which they experienced and found awe-inspiring was the ability to spawn new human life.  People – and most particularly women – were spiritual beings – goddesses – who brought forth life.  Once again, we find an artistic self-definition:  humans are gods unto themselves imbued with the power of creation.  These artistic interpretations of an ideal woman who holds the power of fertility IS reality and defines what we as humanists think about ourselves.  We are goddesses and gods.

And that fact ought to give pause to today’s culture.  Archeologists indicate that the overwhelming majority of art depicting the human form  throughout human history have been of the female.  It has only been within the last 2,000-3,000 years, and the advent of Judeo-Christian thinking, that art turned to being male centric.  The arrogance and violence of the phallus has supplanted the gentleness, humility and nurture of the womb.  We would be wise to return to a worship of the feminine, much like early humans understood.

This next artwork reflects both paternalistic thinking and the re-birth of humanist ideals.  That reverence of humanity and its ability to reason flowered in ancient Greece.  It was replaced by moralistic Christian thinking during the so-called dark ages when reason was rejected and human flesh was demeaned.  Myths of a supernatural God were preeminent.

During the Renaissance, as we all know, a re-found appreciation for nature, as put forward by Greek philosophers Lucretius and Epicurus, led artists to once again define people by humanist ideals.  Even in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel religious paintings, one of which is shown here, the focus is not on God, but on humans.  We see bodies in their naked beauty.  We see eroticism in how Eve is the one first tempted by Satan and how she supposedly used sex to bring down Adam.  Her provocative posture, relative to Adam, seems shocking in a religious context and yet it perfectly depicts the Renaissance understanding of ourselves – as creatures of wonder, as sexual beings, as fully part of the natural world.  Once again, as with the Indonesian cave paintings and the Venus figurines, art offered a definition of us.  It is humanity that is acts as god.  It is the natural world, not a supernatural being, that is the pre-eminent reality.

Art, as we all know, takes many forms.  Art is also found in the written and spoken word.  William Shakespeare is one of the most influential of writers for his interpretations of humanity.  His descriptions of the human soul and his implicit definition of who we are stand even today as great insight.  Here is just a brief sample of his writing from the play Julius Caesar.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. 

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; 

Omitted, all the voyage of their life 

Is bound in shallows and in miseries. 

On such a full sea are we now afloat, 

And we must take the current when it serves, 

Or lose our ventures.”

The play is a thoughtful interpretation of actual history and, indeed, of humanity.  Who and what controls our destiny?  Is it fate or God that controls us?  Or, is it our minds and our choices that map a life journey?  Shakespeare clearly believes in the latter – seeing the actions of Julius Caesar to declare himself Emperor, and assert his power to serve the needs of Rome – as decisions he alone made.   Brutus makes a similar choice to assassinate Caesar and save Roman democracy.

As an aside, Shakespeare’s words are perhaps also art from the past that can inform us, the Gathering, in our current merger deliberations.  Shall we be bound in the shallows, or will we embrace the flooding tide to explore new possibilities?

Shakespeare plumbed the complexities of the human soul in his humanist centered art  – art that sees us not as puppets but as masters of our fate.  We choose evil or good.  Do we succumb to our strong willed convictions and the arrogance of imperfect thinking, as did Caesar and Brutus, or do we listen to and negotiate with others of equally strong convictions?  The tragedy of Julius Caesar is that he and others refused the higher ethic to understand, talk to and compromise with opponents.  The story of human failure is one of competing and violent passions – Caesar against democracy; Brutus against Caesar who wanted to serve the poor and the marginal over a democratic but elitist culture.

Shakespeare’s written words define humanity as essentially good but also tempted by darker inclinations – to lust for power, for money, for the arrogance to assume one is right and all others wrong.  Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Brutus – they are all characters in whom we can see ourselves – persons with often heroic intentions but who fall due to a lack of humility and empathy.  Nevertheless, once again, existence is defined according to human terms, and not by the fiat of a mythic and callous god.

The other art form that defines who we are is music.  And, as countless experts have asserted, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, particularly its fourth choral and instrumental movement, is considered the greatest and most influential piece ever composed.  “Ode to Joy” is the classic piece that, in some ways, has been trivialized.  One critic said that Beethoven was too successful in his musical expression of the joys of human brotherhood and sisterhood.  The movement’s intricate and yet uplifting melody perfectly embodies what we universally think about our higher selves.  Here are the words of the chorus, adapted by Beethoven from a poem by Fredrich Schiller.

 

Whoever has been lucky enough

to become a friend to a friend,

Whoever has found a beloved wife,

let him join our songs of praise!

Yes, and anyone who can call one soul

his own on this earth!

Any who cannot, let them slink away

from this gathering in tears!

 

Every creature drinks in joy

at nature’s breast;

Good and Bad alike

follow her trail of roses.

She gives us kisses and wine,

a true friend, even in death;

Even the worm was given desire,

and the cherub stands before God.

 

The words embody the humanist self-definition I assert is represented in all great art.  Beethoven’s triumphal orchestral sounds evoke, without image or word, the goodness inherent in all people.  His symphony is art at the highest expression.  It is humanity’s exultant cry, much like the Indonesian cave painting.  “We are beautiful by the mere fact we live.  Our bond with the natural world is the joyous song of ages.”

I turn now from the truly sublime to what many of you might call the ridiculous – the modern art of Andy Warhol.

Even as his art is sometimes demeaned, his works have commanded some of the highest prices ever paid for paintings.  They have equally been acclaimed as some of history’s most important artworks – even as they depict the seemingly mundane and common – a Campbell’s soup can or an altered image of Marilyn Monroe.  Nevertheless, Warhol is considered an artistic genius precisely because his art depicted the popular and common.  And that describes pop art in general.  It is not art for the elites, but for the masses.  It is not art in need of academic interpretation.  It is the everyday object, image and common artifact that becomes, in all their ordinary appearance, high art.   Warhol saw beauty and meaning in the things we value as modern humans; they are things we mass produce – articles representing the height of human achievement in science and industry.  What is the image of Marilyn Monroe absent her fame in the wonder of film and TV?  What is a Campbell’s soup can without the science of mass production?  Warhol’s art does not revere the natural world.  It reveres the manufactured world – that which humans by their own hands and reasoning have fashioned.  These are artistic depictions of existence made possible by people – not nature and not God.

What we consider art is in the eye of the beholder.  A painted black square on a white canvas is praised by many art critics.  For me, a child could have painted the same.  Fortunately, most of us perceive great art when we see it, hear it or read it.  Such pieces do something to us.  They excite our minds with all kinds of thoughts and emotions.  They also provoke us to reflect about ourselves and about all humanity.  Personally, I find the Indonesian cave painting of an arm and hand stunningly profound.   It is the voice of the real Eve, the symbolic original human being.  The hand reaches outward to us and to all eternity.  “This human exists,” it seems to say.  “This human comes with good intentions.  She comes for a purpose – not as force of control and destruction – but to unite and build.  Take my hand,” she says.  “Share with me the delights of life and love, join me in both creating and succoring our sisters, brothers, sons and daughters.  Together, we are one human family, bonded in the reality of this life, and destined to do wondrous things…”

I wish us all much peace and joy.

 

 

(c) Rev. Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

 

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Many of you may know the cartoon series “For Better of Worse” by Lynn Johnston that appears in the Sunday Enquirer.  It’s about two parents of young children trying to manage the challenges of career and everyday home life.  One of Johnston’s cartoons that appeared a few years ago, at the height of the recession, showed the mom having just lost her job.  She plaintively asks, “Without a job, who am I?”  Her husband looks at her stunned and without an answer – perplexed as many of us are at how to support those who lose their jobs.  In the final frame we see the couple’s toddler child wrapping his arms around the woman and simply answering who she is to him, “Mum” the boy says.

I shared in last week’s message the idea that we choose how we define ourselves by our beliefs about the world and about ourselves.  And this self definition has a profound impact on our actions, emotions and sense of self-worth.  While society tries to define who we are by its set of standards, we can choose to accept or reject that.   It is our definition of ourselves that matters and that dilemma is perfectly captured in the cartoon I just described.

As all of us know, when we meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions asked is “What do you do?” or “What did you do?”  Unfortunately, we and others use career and work life to define us.  We make assumptions about others based on their work – how smart they are, their work ethic, their education, their wealth, and their importance.  Too often we assume someone is either worthy or not based solely on their present or past job.

We also define our own sense of self-worth by our work.  Many of us are caught in the cultural stereotype that persons holding jobs with lots of power, high income and high prestige somehow have greater value.  We are caught in standards that tell us, for instance, that a movie star is of more value to society than is a teacher, social worker or homemaker.  My mom is someone who repeatedly told others she was of no use to the world since she did not work outside the home.

Today’s fluid economy also takes its toll on how we define ourselves by work.  No longer do most people remain in the same job at the same organization for a lifetime.  Who are we if our jobs continually change?  Added to that is how technology affects work and thus one’s self-definition.  Fifty years ago, people could usually leave their work behind at the office and have separate lives at home.  They had distinct identities that went beyond one’s job.  Technology, however, has tied people to their work 24 hours a day.  It is increasingly difficult to define ourselves outside of our work life.

Finally, changing work standards for women and men are also harmful to how we define ourselves.  70% of women with children under seventeen now work outside the home.  Young women say they WANT a career and actively pursue them.  But the demands of work and the desire to advance in a career mean that many women no longer define themselves as “mum”, “wife”, “partner” or complete person irregardless of career.

And the same pressure exists for men.  Many working men today want to define themselves by more than their job – by working significantly less hours, by being better partners, active and involved dads, sons, and friends – but they are finding that if they do so, their paychecks and possibility for promotion are limited.  In today’s fragile economy, the pressure to work harder both at home and at the workplace is intense.  Who is a woman with children if she is does not define herself as a mother or as a job title?  Who is a man caught in the same dilemma?  How can we define ourselves in a meaningful way that somehow moves beyond this problem?

Experts assert that no longer can we define ourselves by what we do.  Increasingly, defining who we are must be holistic and span across the range of activities in which we are involved.  What is our one true self?  Who am I both at work, at home and at play?  What are my transcendent beliefs and universal values that define me no matter what I do or where I am?

Importantly, we must move away from calling people by their job titles, by defining who they are by what they do for a living, by stereotyping human value by the supposed prestige of a particular career.  For one, I do not wish to be addressed in person as “Pastor Doug”.  I understand this is a title of respect and affection, but why are not others addressed in a similar manner using their job title and name?  My job is no more special than any other.  This kind of paradigm shift away from using work as a person’s status level will not be easy.  An athlete, actor or doctor will too often earn instant status over a teacher, nurse, social worker or homemaker.  To change this thinking will involve changing the culture.  But as we often say, we must be the change we want to see.

I often ask myself and others what it is we want to remember and cherish as we near the last days of our lives.  What memories will we hold dear?  What relationships will matter?  What accomplishments will provide meaning and perspective to our lives?  What legacies do we wish to leave behind?  We have the ability right now to shape our meaning and purpose.  Do we live to work or do we work in order to really live – to care, love, learn, listen and share?  Ultimately, the entry in the dictionary of life under our particular names must be written by us.

When I am talked about after my death, I do not want any of the jobs I have held to be used to describe who I am.  They are tasks that I performed.  They are not who I am at my core.  I want meaning and intrinsic values to define me.  Those will hopefully reflect, however imperfectly, the things I practice and do.  Neither saint nor sinner, I want to be understood by what I choose to believe.

My hopes about how I want to be remembered are consistent with modern ideas about human cognitive abilities.  How we think about life and how we define ourselves need not be determined by outside factors.  We choose what we think and believe.  We choose to feel or not the whole range of emotions and attitudes we adopt.  That includes how we think about and define who we are.  While circumstances and forces beyond our control can influence us, ultimately we decide what to think and feel and thus how we act.  This speaks both to the power and difficulty of cognitive change.  It is quite easy to tell someone to positively change their thinking and how they see themselves.  It is quite another matter to actually do so.  Far be it for me or anyone else to trivialize the process.  From personal experience, I understand how difficult cognitive change can be.

So, how we define ourselves is under our direct control.  Instead of allowing work to define us, we must first begin to change our thinking – about others and about ourselves.  We can begin by not asking soon after meeting other people what they do or have done for work.  We might, instead, seek a better understanding of others by asking about relationships, hobbies, books they read, and things that give them meaning.  We can better understand people in ways beyond stereotyping their intelligence, status and value by their career.

Men and women who choose to work within the home as a parent, homemaker and care giver, as one example, can no longer be demeaned.  We can begin by fully honoring what they do.  As we do so, others will too.  The hands that rock the cradle, as the old adage goes, change the world.

We must respect any honest labor that is diligently performed.  People whom we manage must be given opportunities for self-growth outside of the workplace.  Their families and home life must matter.  Longer maternity leave must be given.  Childcare should be provided.  Mandatory limits on hours worked – not by governments but by employers – must be set.  No employee should wrestle with competing demands of workplace and home.  Both are important but family and home life must always come first.  People are far more valuable than money.

Trust of an employer is the number one factor people site in whether or not they are happy at work.  As a part of trusting an employer, people say they want to be respected for their work, they want reasonable work hours and duties, they seek ample vacation time and personal rest, and they desire salaries that are fair.  Only by doing such things can we elevate work beyond its use as way to define people.  If all feel respected in their work, nobody need feel superior or inferior.  Certain jobs will lose their function as a means for status.

We must offer the same respect to ourselves.  No longer can we define ourselves by our work.  That means we no longer give it the highest priority in our lives.  No longer do we put it first and the well-being of families, partners, friends and our inner peace second.  Once again, this is a choice we must make.

Some of you know I was on vacation for ten days last month.  To my shame, I failed to let many of you know that in advance.  I failed to gently set boundaries on my work while I was on vacation by asking for time off for everything but congregation emergencies.  That is something I never do.  Even when technically off, I don’t actually turn myself off.  But I should have for at least this one vacation time.

I don’t say this as a complaint but as an admonishment and as an example of how I and others stay connected to technology and the constant demands of work and time.  I took time away from relationships that matter most to me in order to answer emails, make phone calls and deal with matters that could have waited.  I failed myself and others by not carving out just ten days of uninterrupted disconnection.  I allowed my own ideas about self definition to control me.  “I’m a Pastor whose work is just too important”, I implicitly told myself.  Instead, I need to define myself in broader terms as someone with more more important values.

Beyond refusing to define others by their work, beyond defining ourselves by our work, we can also ask that our culture and society do the same.  The United States ranks well behind other developed nations in the amount of benefits given to workers.   Paid time-off, provision of childcare and paid maternity leave are all much higher in most other developed nations.  As I’ve said earlier, this democratizes work.  It establishes that all who work have dignity and worth beyond job title and economic value to the employer.  Workers have value as human beings.

While it can be argued some nations have pushed the limit in granting greater benefits and that their economies suffer in lower productivity and gross domestic product, the question must be asked: what is it we really value?  People or commodities?  Relationships or wealth?  We cannot have it all and I am not so utopian as to believe we can have unlimited benefits.  Work has value and economies that are not based on diligent labor cannot thrive and thus cannot create jobs that allow more people to eat, live and find happiness.   But there is a reasonable balance and our culture is out of balance.  We worship at the false gods of wealth, power and status as the standards that both define people and that truly matter.

What must truly define us are the universal values to which we each aspire.  How large are our hearts?  How selfless are we?  How are we helping to change the world for the better?  How gentle are we when we speak?  How humble do we interact with others?  How diligently do we work to understand the needs, thoughts, dreams, hurts and fears of others?  How are we a force for good?

While we all want to be appreciated for skills and talents, it is our larger values that ought to define us.  Do we give to, reach out to, listen to and serve people at work and at home?  Do all who know us define us by our hearts and not our jobs?  Are we the same person no matter where we are?

These are questions we can aspire to answer affirmatively.  These are questions that will move us beyond seeing work as a means to status and definition.  Yes, we work to eat, clothe and shelter ourselves while enjoying modest pleasures.  But, we do not live to work as the only task set before us.  Who we are, at our deepest inner selves, is so much richer, complex and beautiful than our jobs.