Religion in society – Page 9 – Dan Harper

Memorializing Iraq and Afghanistan

The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 9:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. services. The sermon text below is a reading text; the actual sermon contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2012 Daniel Harper.

I’d like to begin this morning by talking with you a little bit about the origins of Memorial Day: where and when it started, and for what purpose. And after we talk about the origins of Memorial Day, then I’d like to talk with you about how the situation we find ourselves in today is quite different from time of the origin of Memorial Day, and given the changed situation I’ll speak about how we might adequately memorialize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Historian David Blight tells us that the first recorded instance of Memorial Day took placed in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865. The city of Charleston had been evacuated, and most of the non-combatants remaining in the city were African Americans who could not get out. Also present were the Union troops who had defeated the Confederate Army, and a few white abolitionists.

During the war, the Confederate Army had established a prison camp on the site of a race course in Charleston. 257 Union soldiers had died in that prison camp, and were dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave. In April, 1865, the African American community of Charleston decided to create a proper gravesite for the Union dead buried in that mass grave. They disinterred the bodies from the mass graves, and reinterred them in individual graves; then African American carpenters built a fence around the new grave yard.

To officially open this new grave yard for Civil War dead, the African American community organized a parade of some ten thousand people, including African American schoolchildren and ordinary African American citizens. White Americans were represented by some nearby Union regiments, and some white abolitionists. All these people gathered in the new graveyard. They listened to preachers. They sang songs like “America the Beautiful” and “John Brown’s Body” and old spirituals. And at last they settled down to picnics, and while they ate they could watch the Union regiments march in formation.

That, according to David Blight, was the first recorded celebration of Memorial Day. But times were different then, and that was a very different war from today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On his Web site, Blight writes: “At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia.” Today, we don’t see the war dead. The most we might see is a photograph or video of a coffin neatly draped with an American flag, accompanied by soldiers in full dress uniform, being taken off an airplane that has just arrived from overseas. Today, we are not confronted with the physical reality of the bodies of war dead.

When it came to memorializing the war dead, the African American community of Charleston had a straightforward task in 1865: after the fighting was over, create an adequate graveyard, and respectfully reinter the Union war dead into that new graveyard. But we have no such well-defined, concrete tasks. Because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are so far away and such a small percentage of the population have actually fought in those wars, memorializing them is not going to be straightforward; and to complicate matters further, the fighting isn’t even over in Afghanistan.

The 2005 poem “Ashbah” by Brian Turner, a talented poet who served in the infantry in Iraq in 2003-2004, captures something of the problem we face.

Click here for the poem “Ashbah” (both the text, and an audio recording of the poet reading the poem).

In the poem, the ghosts of American soldiers are alone and cannot find their way home. Even though they are exhausted, they keep trying to find their way home, unsure which way to go. The Iraqi dead are, of course, already home, and they can watch the American soldiers from a safe perch on the rooftops; but as I imagine the scene, the Iraqi dead would just as soon the American dead would figure out how to get home so that they, the Iraqi dead, could have their streets back.

Now obviously this poem is not literally true. The poet did not see the ghosts of dead Americans literally wandering the streets of Balad, and the Iraqi dead were not literally sitting on the rooftops watching them. But there is symbolic truth in this poem.

For me, part of the symbolic truth in the poem lies in the fact that the war dead of Iraq and Afghanistan remain ghostlike and insubstantial to most Americans. The vast majority of us have not seen the body of someone who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Indeed, I would be willing to bet that the majority of Americans don’t even know someone who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Although something on the order of six thousand five hundred soldiers have died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan [link], this number is tiny compared to the three hundred million people who live in the United States today.

Because so few soldiers have died relative to the total population of the United States, it’s easy for us to spend very little time thinking about the war dead. I don’t want to say that we ignore the war dead; certainly we don’t do that; but we concentrate on other things. Those of us who are politically active might concentrate on advocating for policy changes that will keep us out of another long-term military engagement like Iraq and Afghanistan. Or — and I think this is more likely among us here — those of us who are politically active have turned our attention to problems that seem more pressing, like global climate change or election reform or homelessness in Palo Alto or food security or one of the many ethical and political challenges facing us today. This is not a bad thing: Lord knows, we are faced with a great many pressing problems; and we do the best we can to address those problems, but one person can only do so much. If, for example, you’re going to tackle global climate change, a problem that can be morally and psychologically draining, you may not have much energy left over for other ethical challenges.

We’re doing the best we can to make this world a better place. But most of us have turned out attention away from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as a result, those ghosts of American soldiers that Brian Turner writes about in his poem still wander the streets of Balad by night, still unsure of their way home, still exhausted.

I’m not trying to make you feel guilty about the war dead. I’m not asking you — many of whom work 70 hours a week at your job, take care of your family, volunteer in the community, and work on social justice projects besides — I’m not asking you to do one more thing to make the world a better place. You do enough as it is. But because this is Memorial Day, I would like to remind you of three things we already do that can help memorialize the war dead, and thus help those ghosts of American soldiers find their way home, find rest.

First, as religious people we are not afraid to talk about death and about those who have died. In this, we are quite different from mainstream American society, which prefers to ignore the fact of death. At the beginning of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration carefully enforced a long-standing Pentagon ban on media coverage of the arrival of coffins containing dead soldiers from overseas. This Pentagon ban had been in effect since the First Gulf War, and while some critics accused the Bush administration of using the ban for propaganda purposes, it always seemed to me that the Pentagon and the government were also motivated by a typical American squeamishness when it comes to death, a typical American denial of the reality of death.

But as religious people, we are less likely to deny the reality of death. A central part of what we do as religious people is we celebrate rites of passage, including memorial services for those who have died. Many of us here this morning have been in this room for a memorial service; and when we come here on Sunday mornings, we will always be aware of the dual use of this room. The very nature of our religious community helps us be free of the unhealthy American denial of death. Because we don’t deny the reality of death, we are better able to understand that our actions as a nation have resulted in very real deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By confronting the reality of the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are taking a step towards allowing the ghosts in the poem to find their way home, metaphorically speaking. And when those ghosts of American soldiers leave the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan, then the Iraqi war dead, and the Afghani war dead, can come down from their roof tops.

Second, as religious people we engage in critical patriotism. Let me explain what I mean by “critical patriotism.”

As religious people, we have a strong allegiance to certain moral and ethical principles, and our allegiance to those moral and ethical principles can be stronger than our allegiance to our nation. For example, as Unitarian Universalists we say that one of our ethical principles is that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. We adopted that particular principle in 1985, but it has roots going back much further than that. That particular ethical principle can trace its roots back to the Golden Rule, a far older ethical principle that states that we shall do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Unitarians and Universalists got the Golden Rule from the ethical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who was reported to have told his followers a form of the Golden Rule some two thousand years ago.

But Jesus did not make up the Golden Rule; he was restating an even older ethical precept that he got from his Jewish upbringing. In the Torah, those Jewish books traditionally supposed to have been written by Moses, in the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18, it states: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The book of Leviticus is at least two thousand five hundred years old, in its present form, though it is made up of even older material; and surely the Golden Rule is among the older material in the book. Suffice it to say that we are the inheritors of a religious tradition that has affirmed the ideal of this ethical precept for thousands of years.

Obviously, then, our ethical tradition can trace its roots back to well before the founding of the United States. In fact, some of us would say that our ethical principles transcend any one people or nation or moment in history. The Golden Rule has been worded differently at different times, and we further know that there are examples of ethical principles in other cultures that sound a good deal like our Golden Rule. All these are specific manifestations of a general transcendent principle; as a religious people, we owe our allegiance to this transcendent, eternally true ethical principle; and as a religious people, we owe a greater allegiance to this transcendent ethical principle than we do to the relatively short-lived American nation.

Our adherence to such transcendent ethical principles leads us to what I’m calling “critical patriotism.” We do owe patriotic feelings towards the United States; but our patriotic feelings will never overpower our allegiance to our higher ethical precepts. Indeed, the opposite is the case: we must critically examine our country’s actions and policies in light of our higher ethical precepts.

Such critical patriotism allows us to look with open eyes on the reasons and motivations behind our military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we as Americans are not honest about our motivations for going into Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s going to be difficult for those ghosts of American soldiers in the streets of Balad to be able to come home. Critical patriotism allows us to see that some of the reasons for starting these wars could be ethically justified, and other reasons could not be ethically justified; critical patriotism allows us to decide which reasons for war pass muster with our own transcendent ethical principles, and which reasons for war do not pass muster.

This kind of careful ethical examination of the war, and an attendant acceptance of responsibility as American citizens, is one of the things that we as a religious people do as a matter of course. We take the time to reflect upon, and to sort through the enormously complex ethical arguments surrounding the war. And this kind of ethical reflection, this kind of critical patriotism, is another step we take towards allowing the ghosts in the poem to find rest, to find their way home.

Third — and this is a corollary to the last point — we can affirm that religion is an important moral and ethical counterweight to politics. Political decisions are often made from expediency, and made in a hurry, without time for adequate ethical reflection. At its best, organized religion can serve as a metaphorical place where we can take the time to reflect seriously on the ethical implications of political decisions.

One of the reasons that the ghosts of the American soldiers roam the streets of Balad in the poem is that they have not been memorialized by American society, except in the most superficial way. Of course they have been memorialized by their Army buddies, and of course they have been mourned by their families. But wider American society has done little more than assert “We support our troops.” That last statement does not constitute adequate ethical reflection on the death of American soldiers. But by carefully reflecting on the death of American soldiers — and on the death of Iraqi and Afghani civilians, and on the death of other soldiers, for that matter — by such careful reflection, we can lay the metaphorical ghosts to rest.

We can engage in this ethical reflection through our ongoing participation in the democratic process. Most obviously, you and I can engage in ethical reflection through carefully exercising our right to vote. We have a primary election coming up very soon here in California, and the national election is only a few months away. It is our duty as religious people to carefully study the issues in the election, and then to reflect on the moral and ethical implications of those issues, to consider how our vote can be a moral and ethical response to American policy. Of course any vote is going to be something of a compromise — reality never seems to match our transcendent ethical ideals — but with careful reflection, our participation in the democratic process can have a worthwhile moral and ethical outcome.

Back in May of 1865, the African American community of Charleston, South Carolina, had a fairly straightforward task: to memorialize the Civil War dead by disinterring their bodies from a mass grave into a graveyard that was more in keeping with the respect that was due to them. Our task today, memorializing the dead from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not quite so physical and concrete.

But there are some straightforward things we can do to memorialize our war dead. We can be honest about death, and not try to deny the reality of the war dead. We can affirm our transcendent moral and ethical ideals, and in so doing we can engage in a kind of critical patriotism. And finally we can understand our religious ideals as a moral counterweight to politics, so that when we participate in democracy we will have a moral impact on the country.

These are the things we can do to memorialize the war dead. And so, at last, may the ghosts of American soldiers wandering the streets of Balad at night find their way home once again.

Spirituality at Work

The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Starr King Unitarian Universalist Church in Hayward, California, 10:30 a.m. The sermon text below is an uncorrected reading text (typographical errors and all). The sermon as delivered contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2011 Daniel Harper.

Reading

The reading this morning is from a book titled Let Your Life Speak, by the Quaker writer Parker Palmer. As this reading opens, Palmer has left his job as a community organizer, and he has gone to Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center, as he tries to figure out what he should do with his life. He writes:

“If I were ever to discover a new direction, I thought, it would be at Pendle Hill, a community rooted in prayer, study, and a vision of human possibility. But when I arrived and started sharing my vocational quandary, people responded with a traditional Quaker counsel that, despite their good intentions, left me even more discouraged. ‘Have faith,’ they said, ‘and way will open.’

“‘I have faith,’ I thought to myself. ‘What I don’t have is time to wait for “way” to open. I am approaching middle age at warp speed, and I have yet to find a vocational path that feels right. The only way that’s opened so far is the wrong way.’

“After a few months of deepening frustration, I took my troubles to an older Quaker woman well known for her thoughtfulness and candor. ‘Ruth,’ I said, ‘people keep telling me that “way will open.” Well, I sit in the silence, I pray, I listen for my calling, but way is not opening. I’ve been trying to find my vocation for a long time, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of what I’m meant to do. Way may open of other people, but it’s sure not opening for me.’

“Ruth’s reply was a model of Quaker plain-speaking. ‘I’m a birthright Friend [Quaker],’ she said somberly, ‘and in sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me.’ She paused, and I started sinking deeper into despair. Was this wise woman telling me that the Quaker concept of God’s guidance was a hoax?

“Then she spoke again, this time with a grin. ‘But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.'” [p. 38]

Sermon: “Spirituality at Work”

I said that I’d speak with you this morning on the general topic of spirituality and work. In the interests of full disclosure, right at the outset I have to tell you that a good chunk of my working life has been far from spiritual. I spent twelve years in the residential construction business, as a yardman and salesman in a lumber yard, and later working for a carpenter; I spent a year each as a sculptor’s assistant and clerk in a health food store; I’ve worked as a religious educator and as a parish minister. (Parenthetically, I should say that working for a congregation has its spiritual moments, but neither more nor less than other jobs I’ve had.)

In my limited experience, very few people find much that is spiritual in their work life. Spirituality can be defined as that which puts us in touch with something that is fine and good; if you experience God or some kind of divinity in your life, spirituality is that which puts you in touch with that which is divine; and if your experience of life doesn’t include God or divinity, spirituality is that which puts you in touch with that which is highest and best in humanity and nature. By contrast, it’s perhaps most common in our society to see work merely as something to be gotten through; as something necessary for survival, but nothing more. I include housework and child-rearing and caring for elders in this, for these are all kinds of work, and many people who do housework or raise children don’t find much that is spiritual in changing diapers or cleaning floors. And if you’re unemployed or out of work, that’s the hardest work of all: I’m fortunate and have only spent a month out of work and three weeks being laid off, but those were two of the toughest and least spiritual times of my life; I did not then feel in touch with anything divine, nor with anything that might be considered highest and best in humanity.

Thus, for many of us, whatever spiritual lives we might lead feel disconnected from our work lives. But I don’t think spirituality and work are as disconnected as they seem at first. So I would like to talk with you about the ways in which I believe work life and spiritual life are connected.

1. The first and most obvious connection: your work, your job, can be what supports your real calling in life. The circumstances of life might limit your options such that your job is neither going to fulfill you, nor give you scope to live out your highest ideals in the world. Then your job might be that which keeps food on the table and a roof over your head, while you do something else with the rest of your life. And I can offer you an example of what I mean in the life of Rosa Parks.

Growing up as a black woman in the segregated South, Rosa Parks did not have a wide range of careers open to her. As an African American, Parks had to attend segregated schools that were poorly funded compared to schools for white children; and even in those schools, less was expected of girls than of boys. In her junior high school, mostly what she was taught was what was called “domestic science”: sewing, cooking, and taking care of people who were sick. Later she had to drop out of high school to take care of her ill mother. When she got married, her husband encouraged her to finish her high school diploma, and towards the end of her life she wrote about what happened after she received her diploma:

“But that [diploma] still didn’t help me much in getting a job. I had a high school diploma, but I could only get jobs that didn’t need a high school diploma. I worked as a helped at St. Margaret’s Hospital. I took in sewing on the side. In 1941 I got a job at Maxwell Field, the local Army Air Force Base….” (1)

Then in 1943, Rosa Parks found out that a friend of hers, another woman belonged to the Montgomery, Alabama, branch of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Before that, Parks didn’t know that women could join the NAACP; but in December, 1943, she decided to go over and attend one of the meetings. As it turned out, she was the only woman there, and when it came time to elect the new officers for the year, they elected her, the only woman, to be the secretary.

So Rosa Parks wound up joining the leadership of the NAACP, and so she also found a place where she could use her education. As secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, one of her principal duties was “to keep a record of cases of discrimination or unfair treatment or acts of violence against black people.” [p. 84] Parks later wrote: “We didn’t have too many successes in getting justice. It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to continue being treated as second-class citizens.” [p. 89] Though she didn’t call it spiritual, this unpaid work was a form of spirituality, in which she turned her thoughts and her efforts to the highest ideals of humanity.

Rosa Parks began serving as the secretary of the local branch of the NAACP in December, 1943. Twelve years later, on Thursday, December 1, 1955, she was riding a segregated bus, and the driver told her to give up her seat to a white person. She refused to do so, and the bus driver had her arrested. Her arrest sparked the African American leaders of Montgomery to call for a boycott of the buses. A dynamic young minister no one had ever heard of named Martin Luther King, Jr., got selected to lead the boycott. And the Montgomery bus boycott marked the real beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the beginning of non-violent direct action aimed at eliminating segregation and legalized discrimination.

So it was that Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white person grew out of her long work to confront and eliminate discrimination; and confronting discrimination was spiritual work: she was living out her highest moral and ethical ideals. But this spiritual work had nothing to do with her job. In 1955, Rosa Parks was working as a seamstress for one of the downtown department stores. Her job was a means for supporting herself; it allowed her to continue serving as secretary of the NAACP, and to continue confronting racial discrimination in a variety of ways, including not giving up her seat. Her job was simply a means to a higher end.

Indeed, the values of her workplace opposed her spiritual work to confront and end discrimination, for once she achieved notoriety by refusing to give up her seat on the bus, her employers eliminated her job. And we can learn something from Rosa Parks’s example: if your spiritual life is centered around living out your highest ideals, you may well have to keep your spiritual life in large measure separate from your work life. That does not mean your work and your spirituality are disconnected, for you will still be a whole person, just as Rosa Parks was a whole person; but you may have to separate the time you spend at work, taking care of the necessities of life, from the time you spend on spiritual matters.

2. And this brings me to a separate but related matter. Back in 1973, New York Quarterly interviewed the poet Gary Snyder about the craft of writing. And the interviewer said that New York Quarterly had received a note from the poet Charles Bukowski who said that interviews about the craft of writing reminded him of people polishing mahogany. (Since polishing mahogany is boring, I take this to mean that Bukowski felt craft was boring.) The interviewer then asked Gary Snyder for a response. Snyder said:

“I like polishing mahogany! I like to sharpen my chain saw. I like to keep all my knives sharp. I like to change the oil in my truck. Creativity and maintenance go hand in hand. And in a mature ecosystem as much energy goes to maintenance as goes to creativity. Maturity, sanity, and diversity go together, and with that goes stability. I would wish that we could in time emerge from traumatized social situations and have six or seven hundred years of relative stability and peace. Then look at the kind of poetry we could write! Creativity is not at its best when it’s a by-product of turbulence.” (2)

So says poet Gary Snyder. Now if you think about it, maintenance, in the way Snyder means it here, is necessary but boring work. If you have ever sharpened a chain saw, you know it’s boring work; not as fussy as sharpening a hand saw, but still a simple and repetitive task that requires the full attention of hand and eye and mind. And the maintenance that you do around the house may be just as simple, repetitive, and boring: cleaning the toilets and doing the laundry and changing the diapers if you have children, and so on.

Most of the jobs I have held have tended to be dominated by maintenance tasks; as near as I can tell most jobs are dominated by maintenance tasks. I already told you that I once worked for a sculptor, and you might think that sculpture would include more creativity than maintenance, but you’d be wrong: the actual creative work was done relatively quickly; then the sculptor and his assistants had to make a mold, cast the piece in bronze, chase it, put a patina on it; and for each of those steps, he had to set up assistants and equipment and clean up afterwards; and then he had to sell his work; and on top of that he had to teach sculpture classes to make ends meet. That sculptor, like the rest of us, spent most of his work life taking care of boring repetitive maintenance tasks.

But Gary Snyder reminds us that repetitive maintenance tasks are not a bad thing. You can’t have creativity without maintenance; I would add (and I think Snyder would agree) that you can’t have spirituality without maintenance. Snyder points out that in a mature ecosystem, there’s as much energy going into maintenance as into creativity and generativity. Snyder doesn’t associate maintenance with boredom and repetition; he associates maintenance with maturity, stability, diversity, and sanity.

For many of us, a good part of our work life is a kind of maintenance work. If you’re like Rosa Parks, you do your job so you can support yourself while you do something more meaningful with the rest of your time. Even if you’re like the sculptor and have a job that allows you great scope for your creativity and spirituality, like the sculptor a good part of your job will be taken up with maintenance tasks. The higher things in life — creativity, spirituality — can’t exist without maintenance; I’m not even sure we should call them “higher things”; maintenance and spirituality are part of the same connected whole.

Having said that, in a turbulent society, it is probably impossible to achieve a balance between creativity and maintenance. In our turbulent economy, it’s easy to lose your job, and when you lose a job, you’ll be spending nearly all your time looking for a new one, which is to say, you’ll be spending all your time on maintenance. In our turbulent society, where social supports are often lacking, if you’re working full time while caring for children, or caring for aging parents, once again most of your life will be spent on maintenance. And in our turbulent workplaces, you may be called upon to work ten or twelve hours a day or longer on demanding projects that require all your creativity and energy, so that you have no time for maintenance. Because of the limitations of life, we may not achieve a balance between creativity and maintenance at this moment; we can only try to achieve it over time.

3. And this brings me to a final point. A necessary part of anyone’s spiritual life is confronting limitations. In the reading, the one by Parker Palmer, when the Quaker elder named Ruth talked about “way closing behind you,” she was talking about facing up to limitations. Let me point out that limitations can be imposed on us from the outside, as they were with Rosa Parks, but limitations can also be within us. Parker Palmer goes on to add that he once got fired from a job, and he says that it took a major failure like this for him to face up to the realities of his own personal limitations. He writes: “Despite the American myth, I cannot be or do whatever I desire….” (3) I think this is one of the more difficult spiritual lessons we have to learn in our society. The American myth tells us that we have no limitations; we can do or be whatever we want; but that simply isn’t true.

Spirituality is that which puts you in touch with the highest and best in humanity and in nature; spirituality is that through which you live out the highest and best in your life. But the spiritual life is not completely separate from your work life and the rest of your life; all parts of your life are connected. This is what can make it hard. It is not easy to bump up against the limitations in our lives. It is not easy when “way closes behind” us, and suddenly we have to figure out a new way forward.

And this points out one of the limitations of spirituality. Spirituality is what you do on your own; it is your own personal connection with that which is highest and best in life. Religion is related to spirituality, but it is what you do in community. When Parker Palmer was confronted with his own limitations, when he ran smack up against a career crisis, his own personal spirituality was not enough to carry him through. He turned to a religious community. He talked to several different people in his religious community, and finally he talked to Ruth, one of the elders in his religious community, and she gave him the insight that helped carry him through his crisis.

When way closes behind you, and you’re trying to figure out a new way forward — that’s when it can help to have a religious community to turn to for help. You may turn to a formal, organized religious community: Rosa Parks had several black churches she could turn to for support when she needed it. You may turn to a less formal religious community: Gary Snyder, as a practicing Buddhist living out in foothills of the Sierra Nevada, doesn’t have a formal Buddhist community nearby, but he can reach out for communal support when he needs it. When way closes behind you, when you find yourself drifting, when your work life and your spiritual life become disconnected, it helps to have a religious community to which you can turn so that you can reconnect the pieces of your life. When your work seems to take over the rest of your life, when maintenance tasks overwhelm you so that there’s no room for anything else, it helps to have a religious community to remind you that there is a spiritual side to life.

The various parts of our lives can become disconnected; work and spirituality can become disconnected. And we can reconnect the disconnected parts of ourselves with the help of other people. That’s why we’re here this morning: with the help of other people, we are once again reconnecting all the parts of our lives into one whole person.

———

Notes:

(1) All information about Rosa Parks’s life (including quotes) are from Rosa Parks: My Story, by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins. This quote is p. 65.

(2) Gary Snyder, Look Out: A Selection of Writings (New York: New Directions, 2002), p. 139. Interview previously published in Snyder, The Real Work, 1980, and in New York Quarterly, 1973.

(3) Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000), p. 44.

Cast Off Tyranny

The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Parish of Concord, Massachusetts, at 10:00 a.m. The sermon text below is a reading text; the actual sermon contained a good deal of improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon and meditation/prayer copyright (c) 2010 Daniel Harper.

Readings

“When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

(from the Declaration of Independence)

The second reading this morning is an excerpt from the Election Day Sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Samuel West of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, to the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, in May of 1776.

“The most perfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When a man goes beyond or contrary, to the law of nature and reason, he becomes the slave of base passions and vile lusts; he introduces confusion and disorder into society, and bring misery and destruction upon himself. This, therefore, cannot be called a state of freedom, but a state of the vilest slavery and the most dreadful bondage. The servants of sin and corruption are subjected to the worst kind of tyranny in the universe. Hence we conclude that where licentiousness begins, liberty ends….” (Complete text of West’s Election Day sermon.)

Meditation/Prayer

Let us join our hearts together in a time of meditation and prayer.

On this two hundred and thirty fourth anniversary of the declaration of independence, let us first think of all those who have fought for the existence and betterment of this country of ours. We think of the American servicemen and servicewomen who have done their duty by fighting this country’s wars and battles, from the Minutemen and militia of April 19, 1775, up to those who are serving now in Iraq and Afghanistan. We give thanks for all those who have fought within and outside this country’s borders.

We think of the many others who have fought to protect the American ideals of justice and freedom: the abolitionists who faced scorn and violence to fight against the evil of slavery; the women who faced ridicule and disbelief to fight for the right to vote and later for broader women’s rights; the Civil Rights workers who faced violence and death to fight for the rights of African Americans; those who have fought for gay and lesbian rights, for the rights of immigrants, for the rights of many different ethnic groups — we give thanks all those who have struggled for freedom and justice within this country. And we pledge ourselves to continue our fights for social justice.

We give thanks for the rich natural resources with which our country has been blessed, from purple mountains’ majesties to fields of waving grain. In light of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we pledge ourselves to use our natural resources wisely and well.

From these broad concerns, we turn our thoughts to more personal and immediate concerns….

Hymn — “Chester”

A word about this hymn: This is an old Revolutionary era hymn, which we sing as a sort of historical reenactment, to better understand the Revolutionary mindset. Those of you with an interest in theology will note that the deity to which Billings refers in this hymn is a far from orthodox Christian God, and must surely have been considered rankest heresy by the English church and government whom Billings and other New Englanders were then fighting.

PDF of musical score for “Chester”.

Sermon — “Cast Off Tyranny”

Today is Independence Day, the fourth of July, the day on which, more than two centuries ago, the United States of America declared that it was independent of England’s tyranny. Imagine the excitement as word spread through British North America: we had declared ourselves a new country! Everyone knew there were still battles to be fought, and the war for American independence dragged on for years after the Declaration of Independence, until 1783. Nevertheless, imagine what people felt in 1776! People were excited, no doubt about it — excited to cast off the tyrannical colonial rule of King George — excited to begin a grand experiment in democracy.

The second hymn we sang is one product of the excitement of the Revolutionary era. Published just two years after the Declaration of Independence, the words were written by the William Billings, the first really noteworthy American composer.¹ He lived in Boston, right in the middle of one of the hotbeds of Revolutionary-era cultural and political ferment. “Let tyrants shake their iron rod, / And Slav’ry clank her galling chains, / We fear them not, we trust in God, / New England’s God forever reigns.” I suppose New England’s God differs radically from Old England’s God; I imagine a sturdy figure wearing a tri-con hat, carrying a Brown Bess musket, and bestowing the blessings of lobster and cod; a deity beneath whose stern eye the God of Old England would tremble and quake. Under the protection of New England’s God, the progress of the war would be swift: “When God inspir’d us for the fight, / Their ranks were broke, their lines were forc’d, / Their ships were Shatter’d in our sight, / Or swiftly driven from our Coast.”

During the Revolutionary era, the people of New England mingled their religion with their revolution. It didn’t matter what sect or denomination to which you belonged, you found a way to put revolution in your religion. The religious revolutions of both Unitarianism and Universalism began at the same time as the American political revolution. Before 1775, King’s Chapel in Boston belonged to the Church of England, but after their Tory minister fled Boston, the patriots who were left in the congregation rewrote their Book of Common Prayer to remove all references to the Trinity, and in 1785 they became the first overtly Unitarian congregation in North America. In 1774, Caleb Rich had organized the first Universalist congregation in Warwick, in the hills of central Massachusetts; and when the message reached their remote village, early in the morning of April 19, 1775, that His Majesty’s troops were marching on Concord, Rich took up his musket and marched as quickly as he could here to this town; he had such a long way to come that he arrived on April 20, the day after the battle, but he proceeded on to Boston and served for eight months with the Continental Army.² So you see, not only did the Revolutionary era witness the beginnings of organized Unitarianism and Universalism in New England, but those early Unitarians and Universalists were right in the thick of the Revolutionary War.

The ideal of liberty, the ideal of freedom from tyranny, was a broad ideal in those days, and for a time in the 1770s and 1780s, I think some people felt that ideal would be broadly applied. But over time, that early ideal changed shape, and turned into something a little bit different. I’d like to tell you about that change with you by telling you the stories of two liberal ministers: Rev. Dr. Samuel West of Dartmouth, Massachusetts; and Rev. Ezra Ripley, who served this Concord congregation.

I’ll start with the story of Samuel West’s career as a revolutionary minister.³ Samuel West was ordained by and installed as minister in the congregation in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in 1761. By 1765, he was active in the Revolutionary cause, along with his Harvard classmates John Adams and John Hancock. Because Dartmouth was a provincial town far from Boston, West could never be as active a revolutionary as Adams or Hancock, but he managed to participate in a good deal of the excitement.

When fighting broke out in 1775, West was one of the delegates to the Provincial Congress which met in Concord; so he was here in Concord, in this very spot, in the old meetinghouse, in early April of 1775. Then he became a military chaplain at the Battle of Bunker Hill. His most dramatic moment as a military chaplain came when he assisted General George Washington by deciphering a letter written in code by Frederick Church, an American officer who was suspected of being a spy; West was able to confirm that Church was indeed a spy.

West was so much in the middle of the revolution that Massachusetts invited him to give the Election Day sermon in May, 1776, a sermon which was widely reprinted. West argued that, on the one hand, the colonies of British North America must break away from the British Empire, because the Empire’s rule was no longer just. At the same time, West argued that breaking away from the British Empire did not mean doing away with all government and descending into anarchy. He did not believe in radical individualism, and his real point was that liberty must be a communal affair.

In 1779-1780, West was a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. Then again in 1788, West was a delegate to the Massachusetts convention that ratified the United States Constitution. In fact, at a crucial moment West managed to convince his old friend and classmate John Hancock to shake off an attack of gout and return to the convention to address the delegates. Hancock wrapped himself up in his flannels, addressed the delegates, and tipped the scales in favor of ratification.

So you see that West was right in the thick of the Revolution here in Massachusetts. When the excitement was over, and he went back to the sleepy town of Dartmouth, West did not give up his revolutionary ideals. A few old church records from that era, presumably written by West himself, still remain, and one notation in those old records is of particular interest. It reads: “1785, Apr. 10, Venture, a negro man was baptised and admitted to full communion. This was the slave who purchased his freedom of Deacon John Chaffee in 1770.” West and the deacons of his congregation lived out their ideals of true liberty by accepting this African American man into full church membership. And their ideal of true liberty was one in which the liberty of the individual was effected through communal endeavor. It was not enough that Massachusetts abolished slavery and gave individual African American their liberty — true liberty meant that African Americans and European Americans must be together in an integrated society.

So it was that in 1778 Samuel West anticipated the process of racial integration that would finally take place more than a hundred years later, during the Civil Rights era of the mid-twentieth century. So it was that Samuel West lived out his revolutionary ideals, not just in the political sphere, but also in the religious sphere. I believe this was typical of his generation of revolutionary clergy. I suspect that additional research would show us that other liberal congregations admitted African Americans into church membership in that brief period of Revolutionary fervor during which individual liberty and the liberty of the communal congregation were understood as being bound up together.⁴ Thus we find the same understanding of liberty pervading both Samuel West’s religious ideals and his political ideals.

Now let me tell you the story of Rev. Ezra Ripley.⁵ Ripley was born in 1751, so he was twenty-one years younger than West; he belonged to the generation after West’s Revolutionary generation.

To tell you this story, I first have to go back to Rev. William Emerson, who was the minister here in Concord in 1775. Like West, Emerson became a military chaplain; he went off to Fort Ticonderoga, where he became ill, and died on the journey home. He left behind a widow, Phebe Bliss Emerson, who had been the daughter of the previous minister, Daniel Bliss. When Ezra Ripley came to Concord, he courted and then married Phebe Emerson, and she thus was part of the immediate family of three successive Concord ministers. Although the records of those days tend to pass over the accomplishments of women, I cannot help but think that Phebe Bliss Emerson Ripley had far more influence on congregational affairs than she has been given credit for; therefore, although this story is ostensibly about Ezra Ripley, I suspect that Phebe Ripley played a bigger role than may be found in the historical record.

When Ezra Ripley came to Concord, he came to a congregation that was largely organized along the old Calvinist lines. Among other things, that meant that in order to become a member of the church, you had to publicly confess your sins to the rest of the congregation. And you couldn’t participate in the Lord’s Supper unless you were a full member of the church. Furthermore, if parents wanted to have Ripley baptize their children, they had to publicly accept the church covenant.

Over time, Ezra Ripley managed to liberalize these strict old Calvinist requirements. Parents could get their children baptized by simply affirming Christianity and saying they would raise their children in that faith. The requirements for membership were also greatly reduced. Instead requiring a public confession of sins, and public assent to the Westminster Catechism, by 1795 prospective members could simply go to Ezra Ripley, offer “credible evidence of sincerity” and make some profession of faith, and he would make sure they became members.

These reforms were entirely in keeping with Ripley’s liberal Arminian theology — we might call it a sort of proto-Unitarian theology — a theology very similar to Samuel West’s beliefs. Both Ripley and West rejected the old Calvinist notion that only a small group of the elect, a group whose members were ordained before the beginning of time, would ever reach heaven, and reach it through no efforts of their own. Instead, Ripley and West believed that we have moral free will, that we are responsible for our own destinies.

Ezra Ripley went further than West, however. By getting rid of the public confession of sins, Ripley transformed church membership from a communal decision, to a personal decision made in private with just the minister and the prospective member. This was in keeping with a trend in American culture towards increasing individualism, and away from communalism. I would put it this way: Samuel West and liberal ministers like him were quite clear in their minds that religion was a communal endeavor; Ripley moved religion towards being a personal, individual endeavor.

The next and fateful step in this process was taken by Phebe Emerson Ripley’s grandson, and Ezra Ripley’s step-grandson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was Waldo Emerson who turned religion into a personal matter that was between an individual and the Oversoul. Waldo Emerson encouraged each individual to become self-reliant, and break away from the strictures of society that might restrict the utter liberty of the individual. Waldo Emerson’s disciple Henry David Thoreau went still further: Thoreau rejected all institutional connections, and severed his own connection to this congregation. Why should he be restricted by anything but his own intuitions of religious truth?

Of course I agree with this religious evolution. If I had to stand up in front of a congregation and confess my sins in order to become a member of that congregation, I would not do it. And my understanding of liberty is similar to that of Emerson and Thoreau: liberty is personal liberty, the liberty to say and believe and do what I please, without being hampered by social strictures.

Yet we lost something when we evolved away from West’s ideal of communal liberty. Yes, Waldo Emerson and those like him who advocated individual liberty of course opposed slavery; but they did not want to integrate African Americans into their own congregations, as did Samuel West. Yes, Henry David Thoreau was an abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad; but his rejection of communal institutions like this church meant that he never had to come to terms with what it might mean to live day after day with people who were quite different from himself. Liberty was a personal affair for Emerson and Thoreau and their followers; it was not a communal affair; and for them, the only purpose and role of government was to stay out of the way of the individual’s personal liberty. In all this, I think Emerson and Thoreau went to far in the direction of individual self-reliance; and since their day, we have gone still farther in that direction, until we have come to a place of extreme individualism.

Not that we can or should go back to Samuel West’s old ideals of communal liberty. Samuel West believed that churches should be supported by taxes; he believed in a God that I cannot possibly believe in; he did not believe that women were the equals of men. There was no mythical past in which everything was perfect. Samuel West did the best he could when faced with the problems of his time. Ezra Ripley did the best he could when faced with the problems of his times. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau did the best they could in their time. Each generation is called to address to the special problems of its time, and to do its best.

Our generation has its own problems to face. Our generation must revisit what liberty means to us. We need to move beyond the idea that liberty is the inalienable right to express our extreme individualism by sitting at home and enjoying our leisure time by watching television, playing video games, and reading our friends’ Facebook feeds. That kind of liberty is no liberty at all; as Samuel West might have put it, “This… cannot be called a state of freedom, but a state of the vilest slavery and the most dreadful bondage.”

In fact, this kind of individualism is no longer a form of liberty; it has become a new tyranny. In our generation, liberty must take on a new form. We are coming to understand that our American ideal of liberty, our constantly evolving ideal of American liberty, must become an ideal of communal liberty. In these days, our safety and happiness, our life and liberty, depend on our working together for the common good. If we’re going to solve the problem of global climate change, and the related problem of global overpopulation — problems which have both a religious and political dimension — we shall have to put aisde our extreme individualism, and work together for the common good. If we are to finally achieve racial harmony in this country, we shall have to put aside that extreme individualism we have clung to for so long, and we shall ahve to work together for the common good.

We hold this to be self evident: all persons are created equal; all person are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and to secure these rights, we join together to institute a common government, in which we all work together for the common good.

Notes to the sermon:

1 For a brief account of the importance of Billings to the development of American music, see Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture by Stephen Marini (University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 78 ff. (online preview available on Google Books).
2 For Caleb Rich, see: The Larger Hope vol. 1, Russell Miller; Stephen Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England, pp. 72 ff.
3 The details of Samuel West’s life come from an essay on West I am currently preparing for possible publication.
4 Mark Morrison-Reed makes this point in the manuscript of his forthcoming book on African American Unitarians and Universalists, now being prepared for publication by Skinner House Books.
5 For the account of Ripley’s life, I draw upon new research: “‘Doctor Ripley’s Church’: Congregational Life in Concord, Massachusetts, 1778-1841,” The Journal of Unitarian Universalist History XXXIII (2009-2010), pp. 1-37 (available online here).