antiracism – Page 3 – Dan Harper

After the Election

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained many extemporaneous remarks and improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading comes from the BBC Web site, from a piece titled “From Our Own Correspondent: The greatest political show on earth,” by Justin Webb, dated Saturday, 1 November 2008. Reflecting on the importance of this U.S. political campaign as Election Day approached, Webb told an anecdote from August when he was in Denver, at the Democratic national convention, and he saw a motorcade begin to form…

“Suddenly, in front of me there is activity. Men in grey suits are talking into their sleeves. Huge, sleek cars are being revved. Motorbikes are getting into formation.

“It is not [Barack Obama], it is his family.

“As the SUVs pass — including several with the doors and back windows open, men with large automatic weapons looking out with keen hard glares — I catch just a glimpse of the children, of 10-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha peering out. I think their mother was sitting in the middle.

“This is the true revolution.

“There have been, after all, prominent black politicians for decades now, men and women afforded the full protection and respect that the nation can muster.

“But seeing little black children gathered up into the arms of the secret service, surrounded by people who would die rather than let them die, is to see something that must truly make the racists of Americas past revolve in their graves.

“I do not think Barack Obama will win or lose [the election] because of his race, but if he does win, the real moment you will know that America has changed is not when he takes the oath, but when we see pictures of tiny people padding along the White House corridors — a black First Family — representing America and American-ness.”

[Site accessed 8 November 2008.]

The second reading was a responsive reading from the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, #584 “A Network of Mutuality,” adapted from a passage by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. which begins as follows:

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny….”

Sermon

I have been planning to do a sermon for the 300th anniversary of our church, a sermon on how our church has used covenants as the central principle of our religious community, but somehow it seems that every time I schedule such a sermon, the outside world intervenes. Last time I planned to preach a sermon on covenants in our church, there was a global financial crisis. And this week, there was a historic election which seemed to me to require extended reflection in a sermon. However, Fred Gifun pointed something out to me — even though we will end our official celebration of our church’s 300th anniversary at the end of this calendar year, really our church was established in June of 1708, which means that we can keep on talking about our 300th anniversary for a full year thereafter. After all, a 300th anniversary is a big event, and it seems a shame to stop the celebration early. So I promise I will get to that sermon on covenant before next June….

But this morning I would like to speak with you about the recently concluded election. It feels as though this past week’s election represents something of a change in the popular consciousness or mythology of the United States. When I say it represents something of a change in the popular consciousness of the United States, I do not mean to imply that the election was some kind of “victory” for the Democratic party. I have no interest in preaching about how some political party has achieved some kind of “victory” over another political party, because from a religious point of view such partisan “victories” are pretty much meaningless; from a religious point of view, I don’t care about one party “winning” and another party “losing.” No, I’m not much interested in political parties, but I believe we are seeing a change in the American popular mythology, and this is a legitimate topic to contemplate in a sermon.

I believe we are witnessing at least three changes in our collective popular mythology:– First, we now have a president-elect who is black and who is the son of an immigrant, and that is a big change in the evolving American mythology of who is a “real American.” Second, I believe we are witnessing a shift away from selfishness as the highest value, and that represents a change in the evolving mythology of American individualism. Third, I believe we have witnessed the ascendancy of pragmatism over eye ideology, that is, a change from the American mythology of the past few years that ignored facts if the facts weren’t matching up to one’s ideas.

1. Let me begin by talking about Barack Obama. I’m not going to talk about his politics, nor am I going to talk about his political party. Even though the not-yet-official election of Obama to the presidency of this country has given great joy to the Democratic party faithful, as I said before I’m not particularly interested in partisan politics, so I don’t particularly care one way or the other that there will be a Democrat in the White House. But I do care that the president-elect is black, that he is the son of an immigrant; and I also care that he comes out of the non-profit world.

I will begin with the fact the Barack Obama is black, and perhaps more importantly that his family is black. The family of the president has taken on a peculiar role in the popular consciousness of this country. Long before I was born, there was Franklin Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor Roosevelt, who with her prominent leadership in promoting the New Deal and her advocacy of civil rights for African Americans created a myth of a strong, altruistic American woman. Then in the early 1960s — I’m too young to remember it — I’ve seen the photographs of the glamourous wife and small children of John F. Kennedy, and I’ve read about how the White House of those days was referred to as the mythical Camelot. Then there Chelsea Clinton, who was twelve years old when her father was elected president, and who had to endure all the publicity surrounding her father’s much-publicized affair with a young White House intern, and made us think about what happens to children when their parents misbehave. And then, heaven help them, there were the poor teenaged twins Jenna and Barbara Bush, who had the misfortune to get busted for underage drinking when their father was president, which certainly played into all kinds of mythical ideas about American teenagers. For most of us, the mention of these things brings up powerful images in our mind’s eye; and I think these images we have reveal very little about the flesh-and-blood people who have lived in the White House, but a great deal about our myths surrounding American families.

As of January 20, 2009, we’ll have another set of images to add to the popular mythology of the American family. I’ll bet we are going to be seeing a good many images of Mahlia and Sasha Obama. I don’t think Barack Obama is going to change people’s consciousnesses as much as Mahlia and Sasha Obama are going to change people’s consciousnesses. Mahlia and Sasha’s father said he is going to give them a puppy when they move into the White House, and if you don’t think that we’re going to be inundated with pictures of those two children playing with a puppy, then you’re crazy. And those super-cute pictures of two cute black children playing with a cute little puppy in the White House are going to work their mythical magic on our popular consciousness in ways that we can’t even imagine right now.

We have an American myth that anyone can make it in America, that even a new immigrant can become rich and powerful. But we have had another, more complicated, myth about who it is we regard as a “real American,” and this second more complicated myth gives us different levels of American realness. The realest Americans (or is that the most real Americans? — what is the comparative of an absolute?) — the realest Americans are the white people who came over on the Mayflower. This group has shifting boundaries, though — I was allegedly a member of this group until a few years ago when the Society of Mayflower Descendants fortuitously decided that it was flawed genealogical evidence by which my family could have claimed a link to someone who came over on the Mayflower;– which means, I suppose, I am no longer quite as real an American as I once was. Curiously, Mayflower descendants somehow seem to have more American realness than descendants of the original Indian nations that have existed in America for thousands of years, but maybe that’s because the Indians fought and killed settlers and cowboys and weren’t white. No one said this is rational.

There used to be many gradations of whiteness, with Mayflowerites and old Virginia families being the most white; and in the last presidential election, George W. Bush and John Kerry were both Mayflower descendants, and therefore tenth cousins. It gets progressively less white and less real from there, so that my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors were not so white and therefore not so much “real Americans,” especially during the First World War when they had to stop speaking German. It’s so confusing, isn’t it? It’s not just the color of your skin, it’s what your name sounds like, it’s your accent and the language you or your parents speak or spoke, it’s your religion, and it’s the country where your parents or ancestors came from.

This myth of who constitutes a “real American” keeps changing. That’s what myths do: they are a peculiar kind of truth that changes over time. And right now, the myth of American realness is changing real fast. Now that Barack Hussein Obama is president-elect, he’s clearly a real American, just as real as you can get. Yet he has this funny-sounding name, his father came from Kenya, he’s black, his wife and kids are black, he attended a somewhat questionable liberal church and his father was a Muslim, and when he was a kid he lived in places where they didn’t always speak English. Wait, didn’t all those things used to mean that you weren’t really a real American? But if Barack Obama is now president-elect, that means he’s a real American, which means the myth has changed.

This is all about myth, so it has no relation to politics. But just because it’s myth and not politics, don’t think it’s any less real. When it comes to myths, it doesn’t matter what political views Obama holds or does not hold. It does matter that he is black, and that his family is black. It does matter that he is the son of an immigrant, and his grandmother still lives in Kenya. It does matter that he considers himself bi-racial and multicultural. And it does matter that he has two really cute daughters who will soon be photographed and videotaped playing with their new puppy in the White House — and those photographs will probably do more to change the myth of what constitutes a real American than anything else.

So this is the first change we’re seeing in American mythology — a change in how we define a “real American.”

2. Now let us turn to the myth of selfishness and self-interest, another myth which this election has shown to be changing.

On October 23, Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, appeared before Congress to answer questions about the financial meltdown. Here’s how the New York Times business section reported his appearance:

“On Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

” ‘Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,’ he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.” [“Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation,” Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times, October 24, 2008, p. B1]

So wrote the New York Times.

I don’t want to get into a long discussion of Alan Greenspan’s economic policies, nor am I qualified to do so. But I do want to spend a little bit of time analyzing that quote by Greenspan, where he talks about self-interest. We have had a persistent myth within United States mythology in which self-interest assumes the god-like status of a sacred creed that will solve all our problems. ((Again, no one said this is rational.) According to this persistent myth, the highest virtue is looking out for yourself, and the highest form of individual is the kind of person who is completely self-sufficient. This view is summed up in something written by Ayn Rand, who was one of Alan Greenspan’s idols — Rand wrote, “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Remember, I said this is a myth, and obviously it’s not rational because it’s obviously utter nonsense. Biologically speaking, a young homo sapiens is utterly dependent on its parents for quite a number of years, which means at minimum the survival of the species requires us to live for the sake of babies and children (in this context, I find it significant that Ayn Rand never had children of her own). Evolutionally speaking, homo sapiens evolved not as solitary animals like tigers, but as social animals like monkeys. Ethically and morally speaking, the theory of radical self-interest has been never been a mainstream ethical or moral theory.

I believe the recent election represents a partial repudiation of the virtue of selfishness in the American mythology. This partial repudiation was quite evident in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where Question One was defeated. Only thirty percent of the electorate voted in favor of doing away with the state income tax; seventy percent of us realized that our self-interest is well-served by paying taxes to be administered by the Commonwealth.

This myth of self-interest offers a challenge to us Unitarian Universalists. Because we aren’t tied up with creeds and dogmas, we make a virtue of freedom of thought. Some people, including some Unitarian Universalists, interpret our freedom of thought as a form of ultra-individualism. It goes like this: the lack of creeds and dogmas gets interpreted to mean that “we can believe anything we want,” and that in turn gets interpreted to mean each individual in one of our churches can do anything he or she wants. But this is a misinterpretation of what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. The mistake comes when you start by saying we have no creed or dogma, which is a negative definition of who we are;– whereas what’s truly important about us comes out in a positive definition: we are a people bound together by covenant, that is, bound together by the promises we make to one another voluntarily; and we are a people who affirm the essential goodness of humanity, which includes the many supporting social structures which help us stay good in the face of temptation.

I like to think that our religious ideals can lead (and sometimes do lead) to balance between, on the one hand, valuing each person, including ourselves, as an end in themselves, rather as means to someone else’s end; and on the other hand, recognizing the value of the community that supports each individual, recognizing the “inescapable network of mutuality” which binds us together. So it is that we balance individuals as ends in themselves, with the network of mutuality. And so it is that we hope that American mythology is moving away from the excessive selfishness of the past couple of decades towards something better

3. Finally, let us turn to the myth that ideology should run our nation. In mythological terms, ideology is opposed to pragmatism. The general myth of tells people to stick to their ideas no matter what; don’t get confused by the facts; our country, right or wrong; if the facts contradict ideas, then ignore the facts.

I’m not a political scientist; my area of expertise is philosophy and theology. I may not be qualified to speak on political matters, but when I look at the behavior of the executive branch of the federal government over the past few years, it is quite clear to me that the executive branch of the government has been dominated by ideologues who don’t want to be confused by facts. I say this knowing too that that the current administration holds weekly Bible studies in the White House,– and we’re not talking about the kind of Bible studies we have here in our church, we’re talking about conservative Christian Bible studies that don’t allow you to question what’s in the Bible. It seems to me that the two go hand in hand: unquestioning Bible study, and unquestioning adherence to certain political ideologies.

And what is the political ideology that has been blindly followed by the executive branch of the federal government? It seems to me that the current Bush administration adheres to the ideology that government is essentially a bad thing, whereas selfishness is a good thing; this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, an ideology that proclaims the virtue of selfishness, in opposition to the notion that government is an exercise in selflessness. It also seems to me that the current Bush administration represents an attempt to impose the ideology of a certain brand of evangelical, conservative Christianity on an entire nation, a form of Christianity that is opposes abortion, that is anti-gay, and above all that doesn’t believe in providing help or charity to poor people.

Let me expand on that last point. If you have been watching conservative Christianity over the past few decades, you will have noticed that something called “prosperity Christianity” has dominance. Prosperity Christianity teaches that God wants you to be prosperous, and that if you will just believe in the right kind of God and pray hard, you too will become rich. One scholar of religion defines it this way: “Prosperity Christianity may… be interpreted as a psychological reaction to theological pessimism combined with a willingness to embrace the benefits of rampant American capitalism.” [New Religions: A Guide ed. Christopher Partridge [Oxford, 2004], p. 91] It’s a very convenient kind of religion, because you don’t have to give any of your own money to poor people, you just have to tell them to come to your church, believe in your God, and then they will become rich — and if they don’t come to your church, well I suppose then they deserve their poverty. I’m sure you will notice that prosperity Christianity celebrates the virtue of selfishness.

The opposite of rigid ideology is pragmatism. Whereas the ideologue believes in ignoring facts and sticking to ideology, the pragmatist believes that when facts contradict a hypothesis, you change the hypothesis in order to take into account the facts. In the world of religion, the ideologues include the fundamentalists who deny the fact of evolution because it doesn’t match their ideology, it doesn’t match their creed. In the world of religion, we Unitarian Universalists would count ourselves among the pragmatists; we were among the first religious movements to acknowledge that Charles Darwin’s theories were correct, and to modify our religious beliefs accordingly. In politics, the ideologues are the dogmatic ones who hold to their political beliefs the way the fundamentalists hold on to their religious beliefs. The political pragmatists, on the other hand, do have high ideals but they recognize the need to modify their behavior when circumstances dictate. From my vantage point, both major presidential candidates were more pragmatic than ideological. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have showed their willingness to change their opinions over time in the face of facts; and neither one of them seemed blind to the realities of the world around them.

I have hopes that this means our country is moving away from the myth that a rigid ideology is good. We have not been served well by the ideologues. Our current failure in Iraq seems to me to have resulted from our country’s inability to face the facts. The current global financial meltdown seems to me to have resulted from our country’s insistence on a rigid ideology of self-interest and selfishness, in the face of lots of evidence that that ideology was not effective. The real strength of American thinking has always been our reliance on pragmatism; and I have hopes that we are now turning away from ideology and towards pragmatism.

Thus, in conclusion, I believe this election has been a historic election — at least, it has been historic insofar as it represents a change in our national mythos. We have witnessed at least three changes in our collective popular mythology:–

First, as of January 20, we will have a president who is black, a president who is the son of an immigrant; we will have a black family living in the White House, a family that has historically provided images that help to shape our image of what it means to be an American. This is the biggest and most immediate change, a positive change in the evolving American mythology of who is a “real American.”

Second, I believe we are witnessing a shift away from selfishness as the highest value. While we Unitarian Universalists value individual freedom, we also know that selfishness isn’t necessary for freedom, and we have been skeptical of the ultimate virtue of selfishness. Thus we welcome what appears to be a change in the evolving mythology of American individualism — a change away from mere individualistic selfishness, and towards individualism within an inescapable network of mutuality.

Third, I believe we have witnessed the triumph of pragmatism over ideology. This movement away from blind obedience to a set of ideas will return us to our great strength as Americans, the strength of pragmatism.

May all three of these changes lead us all further along the path of goodness and justice.

Duncan Howlett, Quiet Revolutionary

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained more than the usual number of ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. In addition, minor factual errors have been corrected in this text. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is from an undated typescript by Duncan Howlett in the church archives. In this essay, Howlett the question of what Unitarians “believe”:

“No really satisfying answer to the question, ‘What is Unitarianism?’, is possible because of the assumptions that are implicit in the question itself. Alfred North Whitehead used to say, and I’m quoting, ‘If you cannot agree with a man’s conclusions, but cannot find anything wrong with the argument by which he reaches them, look at his premises — spoken or unspoken — admitted or unadmitted — and there you will find the answer to your question.’ I believe the difficulties we encounter [in] describing Unitarianism are found in the assumptions that we bring to the question itself….

“Our error lies in the fact that we, like the orthodox [Christians], have always taken the creed structure of Christendom for granted. We have tried to explain ourselves in terms of it and apparently it has never occurred to us to do otherwise…. [But] You don’t say anything really significant about a Unitarian when you give a summary of the theological opinions he happens to hold….”

And, later in the typescript, Howlett continues:

“Unitarians, rejecting fixed creeds and confessions of faith, hold that the task of religion is to state its first principles, constantly to test the validity of those principles in open encounter where every voice may be heard, and to be ready to restate them whenever clarity requires. The Unitarians believe that truth in religion, as in all things, lies at the end of the process of inquiring. Every possible facet of human experience must be brought to bear upon such an inquiry if any approximation of truth is to be achieved as a result of it. Unitarians believe that religious differences between men [sic] ought to be measured by their belief in this process or by their lack of it.”

The second reading comes from a sermon delivered by Howlett in 1941. A little background is necessary: In 1940, Howlett addressed the annual meeting of this congregation, the first minister of this church to be allowed to address an annual meeting for perhaps a century. In that address, Howlett had told the members of the annual meeting that he expected them to attend church on a regular basis. This apparently caused an uproar, and a year later, in this sermon, Howlett was still trying to explain himself. Characteristically, although he softened his words, he continued to strongly affirm his basic points, as we will hear in this excerpt. Howlett wrote:

“We are growing steadily in every phase of our activity. This includes the congregation. And eventually, our normal growth will carry us to the point where this church will be comfortably full. But most of us do not want to wait for that time to come. We want now to have a congregation in this church that will make possible natural growth without losses.

“…people will go to the church whose members believe in it, because they want to belong to a church of which they can be proud.

“Our church can be that church. The congregation we have here this morning is testimony to the potential power we possess. There is no reason why we should not be a great church. There is no reasons why we should not enjoy the steady growth to which we are entitled. If each of us will realize the part which he [sic] can play in the whole task, it can easily be done….

“People gravitate naturally to the church in which the members themselves believe. They want to be part of a church that is alive and growing, and that is able to command the loyalty of its adherents. The impression this church makes, its impact upon the community, depends far more upon the people than the minister. Let us be true to the greatness of this church in the past; let us realize its growing power in the present, and let us carry it to even greater things in the days to come. And having done so, our church shall become one of the greatest churches in this city and one of the largest in the denomination.”

Sermon

This morning, I propose to tell you three stories about Duncan Howlett, who was the minister of our church from 1938 to 1946. There can be no doubt that Howlett was the greatest minister this church had in the 20th C. Under his leadership, this church saw higher sustained Sunday attendance than at any other time in the past hundred years for which we have accurate records. We can include the 21st C. as well: Duncan Howlett stands head and shoulders above any minister of this congregation for over a hundred years. However, great ministers do not exist without great churches. Any story about Duncan Howlett’s ministry here must also be a story about the greatness of this congregation, so when I say I’m going to speak about Duncan Howlett, I’m also going to speak about this church.

I am calling Duncan Howlett a “quiet revolutionary.” When I call him “quiet,” I don’t mean he was quiet in the sense of being mousy, or having a soft voice, or being a shrinking violet. When I say “quiet revolutionary,” I mean he was not the sort of revolutionary who wanted a sharp break with the past, or who wanted to stir things up just for the sake of stirring things up. Howlett was a revolutionary who looked for continual ongoing change because of his deepest religious beliefs.

Howlett studied with Alfred North Whitehead, the great process theologian, and from his studies with Whitehead he learned to believe that change is inevitable. As he wrote in the first reading this morning, he believed that “the task of religion is to state its first principles, constantly to test the validity of those principles in open encounter where every voice may be heard, and to be ready to restate them whenever clarity requires.” That is to say, the world is constantly in a state of flux, and therefore the purpose of a religious community is to continually move forward. This theology of process, of continual change, was the deep religious belief that drove Duncan Howlett to be a quiet revolutionary.

I’m going to tell you three interlocking stories about Duncan Howlett, beginning with his tenure here in New Bedford, and ending with his retirement in Maine. But I had better start by giving you a brief overview of his early life:

He was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1906; and was the son of a “well-to-do-painting contractor” [profile of Howlett in Washington Post, August 27, 1983]. After graduating from Newton North High School, he went to Harvard College, graduated in 1928, went on to Harvard Law School, was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1931 and practiced law for two years. In 1933, he entered Harvard Divinity School, where he studied with Alfred North Whitehead, graduating in 1936 with honors. While in divinity school, he began serving as the minister of Second Unitarian Church in Salem. In 1935, he traveled around the world, crossing from Europe into India via the famed Khyber Pass. (1) Our own church lured him away from the Salem church in 1938, and it is in our own church that my first story about Howlett takes place.

…

When Duncan Howlett arrived here in 1938, our church was not exactly thriving. Sunday attendance had been declining since before the Great Depression — this decline took place even though most of New Bedford’s Universalists joined this church when First Universalist Church on William St. closed its doors in the 1930s. So why was attendance declining?

One problem was that this church had maintained the old pew rental system that most New England churches abolished in the early twentieth century. In the early 19th C., many people owned pews here (literally owned the pew, for there were deeds and taxes); later, families no longer owned the pews, they rented them from the church. By 1938, most pews were rented by specific families, yet some of those families never came to church. Some people rented pews here, but were members of other churches! On Sunday mornings, the ushers closed the doors to the pews that were owned by various families. If you were a newcomer, you’d walk into this church, be placed into one of the few open pew, and look around and see all these empty pews that no one sat in, and that no one was allowed to sit in. It must have been a kind of spooky experience — pews full of ghosts that you couldn’t see! — and needless to say, most newcomers never returned. (2)

Another problem lay in another old, outmoded way of doing things:– the minister was absolutely barred from taking part in the financial and business affairs of this church. Indeed, the minister was not even allowed to say anything at the annual congregational meeting. Back in the 18th C., this congregation was established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony government, and according to law, Massachusetts Bay and the town government had authority over the financial and business affairs of the congregation. Back then, Massachusetts Bay congregations consisted of two separate organizations: the society, which governed the business affairs such as the building and the salary of the minister and so on; and the church, which governed the religious affairs such as communion (yes, they had communion in those days), the church covenant, and church membership. In old Massachusetts churches, the church was governed by the minister and the deacons, while the society was governed, initially by local government, and after 1833 by a separate corporation. What happened in our congregation is that in the late 19th C., Rev. William Potter stopped communion, let the old covenant die off, and basically let the church wither away entirely; while the society remained strong.

But by the 1930s, all the other Unitarian churches that I know of had abolished or greatly restricted pew rentals and ownnership; and they combined the old functions of the church and the society, so that the business and religious aspects of the congregation were more or less integrated. But Duncan Howlett arrived at this church to find the church side of the congregation had withered away, and on top of that he wasn’t even allowed to speak in front of the annual meeting of the society.

As I have said, Howlett was a quiet revolutionary. He knew that times had changed, and were continuing to change. He got permission to address the annual meeting, and by all accounts he let them have it with both barrels. He told the members of the annual meeting that this church was more than a business venture that oversaw a historic building. He told them that it wasn’t enough to pay for a pew, and show up once a year for annual meeting. He told them that he expected every man Jack and every woman Jill of them to show up at church on a regular basis, and he told them in no uncertain terms. If you read the text of the talk he gave that annual meeting, you can see that he brought the whole of his Harvard Law training, and his Harvard Divinity School training, to bear on making his case.

Apparently, he caused quite a ruckus — I mean, a genteel sort of ruckus, for this was a genteel church back in those days. At least seventy of the lay leaders agreed with him, and they formed a “Committee of Seventy,” and they called on every one of the three hundred and fifty members of the church. These lay leaders asked people to give up their pews, and requested they come regularly to Sunday morning worship. Duncan Howlett pointed out the problem; and a group of strong, dedicated lay leaders worked with him to bring our church out of the 19th C. and into the 20th C.

Then the Second World War intervened. Howlett was in the middle of that, too — in the summer of 1939, he went to Europe to help Martha and Waitstill Sharp with their relief efforts in central Europe, and in November of 1940, he welcomed Rev. Maja Capek to New Bedford after she escaped from the Nazis, and he and this church supported her in her efforts to revive North Unitarian Church in the North End of this city. The Second World War put a temporary halt to the effort to make this church grow. And then, in 1946, the then-prestigious First Church in Boston hired Howlett away from us. (3)

So ends my first little story about Duncan Howlett. I will only remark that everything Howlett did while he was here was consistent with his theology of process, of moving continually forward in an ever-changing world.

…

Duncan Howlett stayed at First Church in Boston for a dozen years, and then All Souls Church in Washington D.C. called him. The famous A. Powell Davies had just retired as minister of All Souls. You probably haven’t heard of A. Powell Davies, but in those days he was well-known — the Washington newspapers held their Monday editions until they could get the manuscript of his Sunday sermon. All Souls was huge — something like 1500 members — and included several congressmen in its membership.

Howlett stayed at All Souls for ten years. In that decade, he was active in fighting racism. He participated in Civil Rights marches in Alabama, Mississippi, and Washington. When James Reeb, the associate minister at All Souls, was beaten to death by racist white thugs in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, Howlett took a leave of absence to write Reeb’s biography — a book which is still in print more than forty years later. In 1968, he expressed sympathy for the Black Power movement. One Washington newspaper did a poll which indicated that Howlett was one of the five most-trusted white men among the African Americans of the city.

Remember that Howlett’s religious faith was founded on his theology of process, on his belief that we must continually forward in an ever-changing world. Thus it was entirely consistent with Howlett’s religious faith when, in 1968, he resigned as minister of All Souls, saying he wanted to make way for an African American minister to take charge of that church. The Washington Post reported on Howlett’s resignation, and I’d like to read you an excerpt from the March 24, 1968, edition of that newspaper:

“The Rev. Dr. Duncan Howlett, a civil-rights leader here and a national figure in the Unitarian Universalist denomination, resigned yesterday as minister of All Souls’ Church to make way for a Negro minister.

“Unitarian Universalists, in the forefront of white liberalism, have yet to call a Negro to the pulpit of one of their churches….

“With a membership of nearly 1500, a budget of $173,000 [that’s over one million in today’s dollars], and an endowment of $1.4 million [that’s 8.2 million in today’s dollars], All Souls is one of the more vigorous churches in the denomination. Dr. Howlett has been its minister since December, 1958, when he succeeded the Rev. Dr. A. Powell Davies.

“ ‘One of the strongest motives in my stepping down,’ he said in his resignation sermon, ‘is the conviction that All Souls’ Church can and should take the lead in integrating the ministry of our Unitarian churches.’

“All Souls’ doing this, he said, ‘would be one more breakthrough for the Negro into leadership in American culture.’

“The first major church in Washington to have an integrated membership, All Souls has had a Negro director of its school of religion, and Negroes in other leadership capacities. The first integrated police boys’ club in Washington meets there.

“Dr. Howlett did not suggest a particular Negro candidate to succeed him.” (4)

Duncan Howlett saw that the world was changing, and he saw that white men like him who were in positions of leadership would have to step aside to make room for people of color to take on leadership roles. So he stepped aside. That was a quietly revolutionary act.

All Souls Church in Washington did in fact call an African American minister. It remains a big, powerful city church, with a racially integrated membership — last time I was there, it looked to me that the church was about half white, half black, and half a mix of other skin colors and racial identities. So many urban churches have seen slipping membership in the past half century, but not All Souls Church in Washington.

I like to imagine what would have happened had Howlett stayed here through the 1960s, and had resigned from this church in 1968 to make way for a person of color to become minister of this church. Would that have made an impact on the wider racial unrest that was happening in this city back then? Would this church have become even more racially integrated than it is now? I have no idea, but it’s fun to think about. (And I suspect someone else from this church has imagined the same thing, because why else would I find that Washington Post clipping about Howlett resigning upstairs in our church’s archives?)

…

Let me continue on with a third, very short story about Duncan Howlett. When he left All Souls, he retired and went on to a new project. He moved to Center Lovell, Maine, where he and his wife had purchased on old farm, and he proceeded to manage that farm as a forest. He was an early believer in the environmental movement, and he believed that a good way to maintain the natural environment was through sustainable management practices. He disapproved of the timber industry’s forestry practices, which tended to degrade the woodlands, rather than improve them; and he managed his own woodlands with sustainable management practices. Ever the organizer, in 1975 Howlett organized the Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine, to further his goal of sustainable management of forests. (5)

Moving from anti-racism to environmentalism might seem like a radical change of direction for Duncan Howlett, but I don’t see it that way. Remember that Howlett’s religious faith was founded on his theology of process, on his belief that we must continually forward in an ever-changing world. He saw that caring for the environment was going to be the next big issue that we had to face. Given his religious faith, it should be no surprise that he felt he had to address this newly emerging problem.

…

Duncan Howlett believed that the truth in religion lies in an ongoing process of inquiry. He continually tested the validity of his principles in an open process of inquiry. He saw that our church here in New Bedford had to abolish pew rentals, and he worked with lay leaders to make that happen. He saw that All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., should have an African American minister, and he provided leadership to make that happen. Then in retirement he saw that environmental problems had to be addressed, and he did what he could to promote sustainable land use practices.

He was a quiet revolutionary, someone who continually challenged the validity of his and other people’s principles. He did not run away from change, but he embraced it. He was a visionary leader who made things happen, sometimes through unorthodox means. As a quiet revolutionary, he pushed others beyond what they felt comfortable doing. And his leadership got results:

The Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine continues to promote the combined goals of protecting Maine’s woodlands resources while encouraging optimal sustainable productivity through good forestry practices. SWOAM established a public land trust in 1990, and the first girt of land they received was 300 acres of Duncan Howlett’s forest. (6)

All Souls Church remains a big, powerful, racially integrated urban church. They have continued to move forward, and they now have two ministers, one of whom is white, the other of whom is black.

And our own church thrived after Howlett left. The lay leaders modernized the way this church operated. By the early 1950s, our Sunday attendance had skyrocketed, with two worship services and a huge Sunday school. The only thing that stopped our continued growth was a systemic problem called “the pastoral to program size transition” — but that’s another story, one which I will tell in another sermon later this fall.

Even though we have not yet become a big church, we continue in the belief that we share with Duncan Howlett: that we must continually move forward in an ever-changing world. We are more racially integrated that most other Unitarian Universalist congregations — we still have a way to go before we’re fully integrated, but we are moving forward. Many of our members are involved in sustainability, and if you go to the Bioneers sustainability conference here in New Bedford October 24-26, you’ll see lots of our members there. And we have taken on issues that Howlett never dreamed of — for example, we were strong advocates for legalizing same sex marriage here in Massachusetts.

May we continue to be influenced by Duncan Howlett’s theology of process. May we continue to move ever forward in an ever-changing world.

Notes

(1) Biographical information from a typescript written by Howlett in the First Unitarian archives.
(2) Information from the second half of this paragraph from Howlett’s 1941 sermon.
(3) Information in this paragraph from documents and newspaper clippings in the church archives.
(4) “Pastor quits, opens way for Negro” by Kenneth Dole, Washington Post, 24 March, 1968, pp. A1 and A5.
(5) From a 1983 clipping in the church archive from the Washington Post.
(6) According to the SWOAM Web site, accessed 2 October 2008.

Singing for Freedom

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is by Bernice Johnson Reagon, scholar, composer, and singer in the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock:

“I have had singing in my life since I was a young child. However, my experience with the performance of music form a formal concert stage came by way of the Civil Rights Movement and a group called the SNCC Freedom Singers. We were a group of a capella singers, but we were first field secretaries for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the organization of the Movement formed by student leaders who left their campuses to work full-time against racial injustice in the United States. The Freedom Singers… began to travel throughout the country singing freedom songs to anybody who would listen. Being a fighter for freedom in the Movement meant that our stages were wherever we were, and the songs were a way of coming together, holding each other and proclaiming our determination as citizens to fight racism in this land of our birth. The Freedom Singers sang in concert halls, schools, living rooms, clubs, folk festivals, in elementary, junior, and senior high schools, in colleges and universities. As a group, our concerts were often a way of introducing and connecting people who wanted to find ways to be a part of the Movement, to the culture and energy of activism taking place….

“As a singing participant in the Movement, I began to notice how well the old songs we knew fit our current situation. Many of the freedom songs we sang we had learned as spirituals, sacred songs created by slaves. Our struggle against racism often found us reaching for connections with those who had during the nineteenth century fought to end slavery in this country….”

[If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song TraditionUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 100, 104]

The second reading is from the book Sing and Shine On: A Teacher’s Guide to Multicultural Song-leading by Nick Page. Nick is a composer, conductor, and teacher who is a Unitarian Universalist who grew up in our church in Lexington, Massachuestts. Nick writes:

“An interdependent system is one in which every action affects every other action. A forest fire in Brazil affects the weather in Moscow by creating huge dust clouds that eventually float over Russia. Every element in an ecosystem depends on every other element, even the so-called nonliving elements such as minerals, oxygen, and sunlight. Yes, light is an integral element of all life. The sun is food for many of earth’s life forms. Physicists speak of photons of light as being interchangeable. When the light from an object hits a person, only some of it bounces off. Most of the photons are absorbed in the person. Its energy becomes that person’s energy. This is how incredible interdependence is — everything is constantly becoming everything else — as when you spend a lot of time in a forest or at a beach. More than memory remains with you after you have left.

“After a powerful singing celebration, I leave with the power of the event still with me. The sense of harmony and connectedness remains. This feeling of being connected to everything is an incredible feeling — truly transcending. We walk in beauty, in harmony with the world around us.

“The meanings of the survival of the fittest do not work in the context of an interdependent system. A herd of caribou, for example, survive by caring for each other, protecting each other from harm. And yes, the wolf survives by attacking the caribou, but the wolf attacks the weakest member of the herd, thus enduring the strength of the herd as a whole. The survival instinct is universal. Competition and cooperation are both parts of this instinct.

“When we sing together, our cooperation and interdependence become the perfect analogy for the interdependence and cooperation within nature….

“Although we humans claim that it is independence from each other that we crave, we truly cannot live without each other or other forms of living things. All life is interdependent with all other life. We have many kinds of bacteria that live inside our bodies. Without them, we could not digest our food. The bacteria are not separate guests inside us — they are part of us, what biologists call host/parasite relationships. We aren’t as independent as we think. This also applies to our place in both our cultures and the natural world. We are very interdependent creatures.”

Sermon

Why is singing so important to our religion? In a one hour worship service, we sing together four times, totaling perhaps ten minutes of singing; in other words, approximately one sixth of each worship service is devoted to singing together. Why do we devote so much of our worship service to singing? In a traditionally Christian church, we would sing together in order to glorify God; however, in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, some of us do not believe in God, others of us may believe in some form of God or divinity but don’t see that singing to that God or divinity is necessary, and of course there are those who do sing hymns in order to glorify God or the divine; but we have no consensus, so we can’t say that we all sing to glorify God because that would not be a true statement for all of us. So why do we Unitarian Universalists sing in church? It seems to me that we sing together for the purpose of transforming ourselves and transforming the world.

About a year ago, I read Bernice Johnson Reagon’s book, If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me. Now Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon is someone for whom I have the deepest respect. I first came to know her as a singer and the founder of the a capella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and I have respect for her fantastic voice and musicianship. But Dr. Reagon is also a scholar, and I respect her scholarship into African American music and folk traditions, and her work in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, and the fact that she has been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. She is also a social activist, who first became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and has never stopped fighting for social and racial justice — I believe I first heard her singing live at a 1978 rally in Washington, D.C., for the ill-fated effort of putting women’s rights in the U.S. constitution. So anyway, Bernice Johnson Reagon is one of my heroines.

Thus I was particularly struck by one thing in particular that she wrote in her book If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me. She said: “As a singing participant in the [Civil Rights] Movement, I began to notice how well the old songs we knew fit our current situation. Many of the freedom songs we sang we had learned as spirituals, sacred songs created by slaves. Our struggle against racism often found us reaching for connections with those who had during the nineteenth century fought to end slavery in this country.” When Bernice Johnson Reagon and other members of the Civil Rights Movement needed songs to lift them up during the long hard fight for civil rights, they were able to draw on their vast repertoire of spirituals, that is of sacred music that they learned in church.

Although I have been hanging around Unitarian Universalist churches all my life, I can’t say that I have such a vast repertoire of sacred songs to draw upon; but then, I don’t have a particularly good memory for music; I’d say I know less than a dozen songs from our hymnal by heart all the way through, if you don’t count the Christmas carols. However, most of the hymns that I do know all the way through tend to be the songs that are related to social justice and transforming the world. I know Holly Near’s “We Are a Gentle Angry People” by heart because years ago I sang it at pro-choice rallies. I know “We Shall Overcome” because when I was a child we had that song on Pete Seeger’s album of songs from the Civil Rights Movement, which we played over and over and over again. Of course I know “This Little Light of Mine,” which I probably learned in my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school, but which I know by heart because I have sung it at events like last year’s Christian Peace Witness for Iraq.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is true of many of you. Unitarian Universalists tend to be politically active, so even if you are new to Unitarian Universalism, chances are pretty good that you have run into such songs as “Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield,” a staple in the American peace movement, or “We Are a Gentle Angry People,” well-known at gay pride events, or “Lift Up Every Voice and Sing,” the African American national anthem, or “Step By Step the Longest March,” an old union song — and each of these songs is also in our gray hymnal. Singing songs like these is inherently a religious act, because it can help us to transcend our narrow selves and experience deep interconnection with other people and the entire universe. And singing has the power to help transform the world for the better, which is also an essentially religious act — at least, in my understanding of what religion is, or should be.

But this may not be entirely obvious as yet. So let me give you three examples of how singing can be transformative.

Let us begin with the most dramatic example of all: the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which has been called the “singingest movement ever.” And I’d like to give you a very specific example of how singing empowered people, how singing allowed people to draw strength from one another.

Candie Anderson was one of the people who got arrested during the sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee, in February of 1960 — forty-eight years ago this month. She was an exchange student at Fisk University, a white student at a black university. The African Americans of Nashville had already begun to push at the segregationist policies and laws, and by the end of 1959, students were being trained in how to do direct non-violent protest. Then on February 1, 1960, off in Greensboro, North Carolina, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at that segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter, asked to be served, and got national press coverage. Their action galvanized the students in Nashville. On February 13, the Nashville students staged their first large-scale sit-ins, and they kept at it all month long.

Candie Anderson, that young white exchange student at Fisk University, wasn’t sure at first what she should do. She asked herself: “The biggest question for me was the rather lonely one of what can a white student do? What would my presence at the lunch-counter mean? Would I alienate and enrage the community to a greater extent than the Negro students? Or would it whos that this is more than a Negro problem? I didn’t know….” She decided that she was going to stand in solidarity with her black friends and fellow students, and she, too, participated in the sit-ins.

By February 27, the white segregationists started to fight back. When the students from Fisk and other area colleges staged a sit-in, this time they were met with violence, and more than eighty students were arrested. Candie Anderson and a few of the other white students who were participating in the sit-ins also were arrested — but when they got to the prison, she had a shock awaiting her. Here’s what she wrote about it:

“We were crammed into a narrow hallway to await booking and I studied the faces around me. Many were calm and serious, some were relaxed… a few were really frightened. But there was a unity — a closeness beyond proximity. It was a shock then to be suddenly removed from this large coherent group and thrust into a lonely cell with only one other girl, the only other white female. We protested and inquired why we could not join the large group of Negro girls across the hall. The entire jail was segregated…. The contact which became more real then was vocal. Never have I heard such singing. Spirituals, pop tunes, hymns, and even old slurpy love songs all became so powerful. The men sang to the women and the girls and the girls down the hall answered them. They shouted over to us to make sure we were joining in…. We sang a good part of our eight hour confinement that first time. The city policemen seemed to enjoy the singing….” [Sing for Freedom, Guy and Candie Carawan, p. 22.]

This is part of what Bernice Johnson Reagon means when she says, “the songs were a way of coming together, holding each other and proclaiming our determination as citizens to fight racism in this land of our birth.” Songs have the power to draw people together, to unify them in an expression of truth and beauty. Songs help us express our deepest commitments in a way that can make them understandable even by those who oppose us: Candie Anderson wrote that on the date of the first trials in Nashville, as the students were going into the courthouse, she saw something remarkable. She wrote: “I looked out at the curb where the police were patrolling, and caught one big burly cop leaning back against his car, singing away [about] “Civil Rights”… He saw me watching him, stopped abruptly, turned, and walked to the other side of the car.” [Ibid., p. 24] So wrote Candie Anderson. And this is precisely what the poet William Congreave meant when he said, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast,/ To soften rocks, or to bend a Knotted Oak.”

Let me give you another example of how songs transformed the world. This story takes place in central Europe after the First World War, when the Czech and Slovak people were finally allowed to form the new country of Czechoslovakia, after having been dominated by the Austrian Empire for centuries. The Austrians had imposed Roman Catholicism on the Czechs and the Slovaks, but as soon as Czechoslovakia was liberated from Austrian domination, the citizens of this new country began to form their own churches.

Norbert and Maja Capek were two Czech people who had fled their homeland because of the Austrians. They had both become Unitarians while in the United States. When Czechoslovakina independence came, Norbert and Maja Capek returned to their new country, and they started a Unitarian church, because they felt that the principles of religious freedom inherent in Unitarianism were perfect for their new country. So they started a Unitarian church in Prague, and in fifteen years it became the largest Unitarian church in the world.

One of the difficulties they faced in starting their own church was what songs they should sing. The old songs from the Catholic tradition came with memories of political domination; they needed new songs for their new religion. So Norbert began writing songs for his church; he wrote hundreds of songs; and some of his songs became so popular that they entered into the folk music of the land, and they are still sung today in the Czech Republic.

When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Capeks decided that Maja would leave for the United States, where she could raise money for relief efforts; so she came here, and as it happens she wound up living the New Bedford, and became the minister of the old North Unitarian church in our city. Norbert stayed in Czechoslovakia, and he was quickly imprisoned by the Nazis. At first, he was held in Dresden prison; and while he was there, to keep up his spirits, and the spirits of the others whom the Nazis had imprisoned, he wrote songs. Let me read you an English translation of one of the songs he wrote in Dresden prison:

“In the depth of my soul
There where lies the source of strength
Where the divine and the human meet,
There, quiet your mind, quiet, quiet.
Outside let lightning reign,
Horrible darkness frighten the world.
But from the depths of your own soul
From that silence will rise again
God’s flower.
Return to your self,
Rest in your self,
Live in the depths of your soul
Where the divine and the human meet….
There is your refuge.”

I would like to tell you that Norbert Capek’s songs gained his release from prison, but such is not the case: he died in Dachau prison camp in 1942. This is a story that does not have a happy ending. But while his songs did not gain his release from prison, I feel sure that they did gain him some measure of inner freedom, inner comfort and peace. And the songs that he wrote over the course of his life did leave a lasting legacy: his songs transformed individuals, and his songs helped to transform a national culture.

This is a remarkable thing: that a song, something completely insubstantial and evanescent, can change people

In the second reading this morning, we heard one possible explanation of why this is so. In the second reading, Nick Page, a singer, choral director, and composer, tells us that we are all interconnected, and we are interconnected with the entire earth. Nick tells us that while he is singing with other people, he gets a deep feeling of that interconnectedness, and that even afterwards (he says): “The sense of harmony and connectedness remains. This feeling of being connected to everything is an incredible feeling — truly transcending. We walk in beauty, in harmony with the world around us.”

So says Nick Page, and I think he’s right. Nick talks about how singing can literally transform us at a biological level. For a very crude example, I would point out that one reason we sing a song right before the sermon is so that we can all stand up and get some oxygen into our lungs, which means it is less likely that any of us will fall asleep during the sermon. There are also physical phenomena in singing that physically affect our biological beings. Additionally, songs help us to encounter the beauty and mystery of this world, songs can open to us the wonder of the universe. The act of singing transforms us physically, biologically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Singing transforms us, but singing may be an endangered species. Rather than sing yourself, it’s so much easier to sit back and check out music videos on YouTube, or plug into your iPod’s earphones. And if you do sing yourself, you don’t have to sing directly to other people: you can go off by yourself and record your singing, or you can sing through a microphone; both of which are fine things to do, but what is lost in those cases is the direct contact between singers, or between a singer and an audience. Part of the sacred beauty of singing arises when you hear it directly, unmediated by any electronics; because even the best electronics attenuate the highest overtones, even the best electronics change the music subtly so that it doesn’t have the same physical and emotional effect on us. If you’re a listener, much of music’s power comes from being face-to-face with the musician, and a live performance that is technically flawed but where you connect directly with another person is far more powerful than any recording, or any amplification can be.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean: Sometimes when I stand here and sing a hymn while Randy is playing the organ, I suddenly find myself literally resonating with the notes of our organ. The organ and the human body produce sound in very similar ways, similar enough that you can find your lungs and throat vibrating in sympathetic vibration to the organ. And when you are singing with other people, when you really get in tune with the other people, if you listen carefully you will hear a whole world of overtones opening up in the music. And when we are singing with the marimba, as we are doing today, the sound of the marimba fills this room, and when we sing along, we are drawn up into the sound.

What I am describing of course are moments of transcendence: when we transcend ordinary experience and become aware of how we are interconnected with the universe. When I go to church, I hope for those moments of transcendence; I don’t always get them, but I hope for them. There are moments of passive transcendence, as when we sit and listen to transcendently beautiful music; but what I value most are the moments of active transcendence, when I am an active participant in transcending.

This is why I think we sing in church: to experience little moments of transcendence. This does not imply that we must sing as well as Billie Holliday or Placido Domingo or Paul McCartney. The students from Fisk University who sang in the Nashville jail weren’t professional singers, but their singing helped them to transcend their situation. Norbert Capek was not a great singer, but his songs helped him and others to transcend Dresden prison.

And this is equally true of ordinary people in ordinary life today. Perhaps you read the article in last week’s Sunday New York Times, describing song circles or community singalongs — many of which happen to meet in Unitarian Universalist churches — these are groups of ordinary people who come together to sing, and when these ordinary people sing together, so the article said, something extraordinary can happen. In our culture today, we are taught to be passive consumers of music; but when we sing together, we are no longer mere passive consumer: we are creating something ourselves. That means we are resisting the forces that seek to make us less than human and oppress us by turning us into mere consumers; but when we sing together, we find that we are fully human and spiritual beings who transcend mere consumerism.

Singing is an ordinary act, it is something babies do without thinking about it. But singing together is also transcendent. By transcending the ordinary, we wing as a path to liberation:– both spiritual liberation, and literal liberation from the oppressive forces that seek to dominate us. We sing to know our interconnectedness:– in a world where there is so little community, where we are fragmented by race, age, class, singing can serve to build connections between us. The singer Holly Near says: We are singing for our lives. We are indeed.