Randy reminds me that this is the year of the Elliot Carter centennial. Randy went to one of the concerts at Symphony Hall in Boston this week, and wound up witting behind Gunther Schuller (who told Randy about playing Harry Partch’s big marimba, but that’s another story). Anyway, if you’re like me and can’t make it to one of the concerts, there’s still the Elliot Carter centennial Web site.
Category Archives: Liberal religion
Folkish songs for Christmas
A bunch of us from the Folk Choir of First Unitarian in New Bedford will be singing Christmas carols and other seasonal songs (along with some other people) in downtown New Bedford tomorrow evening as part of the city’s annual Holiday Stroll. I put together some Christmas/solstice songs which meet the following criteria: (1) playable by folk instruments like guitar, soprano recorder, mandolin; (2) words which won’t stick in the throats of Unitarian Universalists (in several cases, words are taken from the 1937 Unitarian Universalist hymnal, Hymns of the Spirit); (3) guitar chords that actually work (we have actually played through all these songs); (4) songs pitched for medium-to-low voices (too many Christmas songs are pitched for sopranos and high tenors). We’re not going to be singing all of these, but I thought others might be interested in this collection.
Now up on my main Web site here: Folkish songs for Christmas.
Songs/carols include the following: Continue reading
Miracle birth of Confucius
Below you’ll find the miraculous birth story of Confucius, abridged from the version told by Sophia Fahs in her book From Long Ago and Many Lands (Boston: Beacon, 1948), pp. 193-197.
I changed some minor aspects of Fahs’s story. For example, Fahs calls Confucius’ mother the “wife” of Kung, his father — but it’s pretty clear that this young woman was a concubine at best, certainly not a wife of Kung, so I do not use the word wife. Also, I’m not very happy with this story because I don’t think Fahs used the best sources — some day I hope to do some more research and come up with a more accurate telling of the myths surrounding Confucius’s birth. But in the mean time, here’s a story that’s a little long but suitable for use in UU worship services… Continue reading
Autumn watch
This morning when I got to the office, we all complained about our allergies.
“I’m getting these headaches here [pointing to sinuses in forehead] and here [pointing to ears],” said Claudette.
“I wake up in the morning and my eyes are all itchy,” said Linda, pointing to her slightly reddened eyes.
“I can’t breathe today,” I said, coughing.
We compared the benefits of Sudafed (I don’t like the way it makes me feel) and Claritin (it makes Linda drowsy), and talked about eye drops (Claudette said you shouldn’t use them more than three or four times a week).
“I just want a good cold snap,” I said. “Then I’ll be able to breathe again.”
“It’s all these rotting leaves on the ground,” said Linda.
This is the downside to global climate change. Warm autumns mean much worse allergies.
North Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Mass. (part one)
North Unitarian Church was established in 1894 by First Unitarian Church as a Unitarian mission, or settlement house, in the North end of New Bedford. Operating in rented space at first, First Unitariana built a building to house this mission in 1903. Beginning in 1920, it became a separate and legally incorporated institution under the name “The Unity Home Church,” although First Unitarian continued to own the building. The Unity Home Church included large numbers of immigrants and children of immigrants in its membership. North Unitarian Church merged back into First Unitarian c. 1971.
I’ve been doing some research into this small Unitarian church of immigrants, and I’m going to include some of the results of my research here in a series of posts. This first installment is an incomplete list of ministers who served the church…. Continue reading
Miracle birth of Buddha
In an old Unitarian Universalist Sunday school curriculum called From Long Ago and Many Lands, religious educator Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote out three miracle birth stories for upper elementary children: the wonder stories of the birth of Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. I like to present these stories during the worship services leading up to Christmas, during the “story for all ages” (or “children’s sermon” or whatever your church calls it). Each of these stories tells of miraculous events that happen before the birth of these three great religious teachers. Children pick up on the parallels between the stories — angels and prophecies and miraculous animals — and it helps them to better understand the wondrous aspects of the two familiar birth stories of Jesus from the books of Matthew and Luke.
Problem is that Sophia Fahs’s stories are really too long to tell in a worship service — as written, they can last a good ten minutes. Each year, I edit them down by sticking little bits of Post-It notes over the parts I don’t want to read, and then I take the bits of Post-It notes out and forget about it until next Advent season, until I have to do it all over again. This year, I got smart and decided to write out a condensed version of Fahs’s “Birth of Buddha” story and keep it in my files. Then I also took out my copy of The Story of Gotama Buddha: Jataka-nidana, and from that I pieced together a short and fairly coherent narrative of Buddha’s birth.
And as long as I had done all this work, I figured I’d post both stories here, in case someone else might find them useful. Both stories should last a little over five minutes when read aloud. You’ll find the condensed Fahs story at the very end of this post, and my own version immediately below…. Continue reading
Department of Cool UU Kids
Saba, my first-cousin-once-removed, goes to Sunday school at Unviersity Unitarian Church in Seattle. Except not this year, because her mom, Nancy (my cousin) is a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya. After the U.S. presidential elections, we got an email message from nancy which read in part: “Dr. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, invited Saba to plan a tree with her, for President-elect Obama!”
How cool is that?
Hymn by Hosea Ballou
Hosea Ballou is one of the theological giants of my religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism. Back in 1805, Ballou wrote A Treatise on Atonement, still the major exposition of North American Universalism (you can read it online here). Unfortunately, Ballou was not what you’d call a great writer. When trying to describe his writing style, the adjective “clunky” comes immediately to mind.
Because he was a mediocre writer, hardly anyone reads his Treatise any more, and hardly anyone bothers to sing any of the hundreds of hymns he wrote. This is unfortunate, because buried in Ballou’s clunky prose is a vision of a universe run by Love, where someday the power of Love is going to make everything turn out well.
I recently discovered that one of Ballou’s hymns is still in print — not in the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, but in The Sacred Harp, a songbook widely used by shape-note singers. It’s number 411 in The Sacred Harp, and it goes like this:
1. Come, let us raise our voices high,
And from a sacred song,
To him who rules the earth and sky,
And does our days prolong.
Who through the night gave us to rest,
This morning cheered our eyes;
And with the thousands of the blest,
In health made us to rise.2. Early to God we’ll send our prayer,
Make hast to pray and praise,
That he may make our good his care,
And guide us all our days.
And when the night of death comes on,
And we shall end our days,
May his rich grace the theme prolong,
Of his eternal praise.Hosea Ballou, 1808 (C.M.D.)
No, I’m not proposing that we include this hymn in the next edition of the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. In The Sacred Harp book, Ballou’s hymn is set to a fuguing tune, fairly complex music that is far beyond the singing ability of the average American congregation (though it might be fun for a church choir), and the hymn itself is not quite good enough for me to want to go to the trouble of finding another, easier, tune for it. But it’s nice to know that people still do sing this old Universalist hymn, even though most of those who sing it probably have no idea who Hosea Ballou was, or what Universalism might be.
Morality and the color orange
Mr. Crankypants here, with some moral commentary about the political scene. Yes, campers, Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska for some 40 years lost his re-election bid and finally conceded defeat. This means we avoid the specter of an 85 year old convicted felon serving in the Senate. Which is probably a relief for Ted Stevens. What would he do, show up on the Senate floor in his orange jumpsuit, with officers from the Anchorage Correctional Complex standing guard over him? After all, he knows perfectly well orange is not a color that does anything for him. (And no snarky comments about how the only difference between Ted Stevens and some other U.S. Senators is merely that he’s a convicted felon.)
Did you notice that Ted Stevens almost won the election? No, that wasn’t one of Mr. Crankypants’s jokes — Mark Begich, the winner, beat Stevens by only about 4,000 votes. This means there are lots of voters in Alaska who think it’s OK to have a man convicted of corruption and crimes of moral turpitude representing them in Congress, a man who had to vote for himself (assuming he was stupid enough to vote for himself) on a “questioned ballot” because his legal voting status was in question. Either the brains of those Alaskan voters froze from the long winters up there, or they somehow think Ted Stevens would look good wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Humanity is notorious for putting foxes back into henhouses. We catch ’em with their hand in the cookie jar and we say, Hey guess you like cookies, well I’ll just leave that cookie jar right there on the counter for you. So what if all the hens are dead and the fox is picking chicken meat out of his teeth? –such a nice fox, and only doing what comes natural. We get all cranky an hour later when we find that the cookie jar is empty and there aren’t any eggs for breakfast.
Mr. Crankypants only wishes that he had been an Alaskan voter, so he could have voted for Ted Stevens. That’s right, campers, voted for Teddy Stevens. That way Mr. C. could have proved to everyone that Ted Stevens would not look good in an orange jumpsuit, because his skin tone is so wrong for orange. And this, dear friends, is the real moral issue to be addressed — as long as you look good, then all your moral turpitude should be forgiven.