Category Archives: Meditations

Spring watch

Spring must be over by now. It’s halfway through June, it’s time for summer. But the cool weather we’ve had for the past few has caused spring to linger.

The last of the spring concerts in the Classical Music Series was last night, and it was cool enough inside the church that the marimba player asked me to turn on the heat because his hands and his instrument were a little too cold.

When we went to bed last night, we left the skylight wide open. About halfway through the night I realized I was feeling cold and came awake enough to pull the comforter over us.

The thickets of rosa rugosa on Pope’s Island love the cool, damp weather. You can smell their scent from a hundred feet away on a cool evening. As fast as the old blossoms fade away, new blooms take their place.

The high temperature yesterday was only 63 degrees; today was only a little warmer, up to 71 degrees; and a brisk breeze out of the northeast on both days made it seem even cooler. I don’t care what the calendar says, it’s still spring in New Bedford.

Crazy

I’ll have the minister’s Big Three this week — child dedication this morning, memorial service on Wednesday, and a wedding on Saturday. And I’m supposed to go up to the State House on Thursday to participate in a rally in support of equal marriage rights. And I leave for Portland, Oregon, a week from Wednesday to go to the annual denominational meeting. This is what can happen when you’re a minister — everything happens all at once, and you don’t have enough time. Crazy.

I don’t know how the ministers who have children manage. They must be superhuman.

Spring watch

Carol and I walked out to the end of State Pier in New Bedford Harbor yesterday, and stood there watching some fishing boats leaving port. We were chatting about something when we were surprised by a splash in the water behind us.

“What was that?”

A hundred feet out in the harbor, we could see ripples and small splashes, and then something big rolled up out of the water and splashed.

“Looks like some big predator fish chasing a school of small bait fish,” I said. I thought maybe they were bluefish, but I’m not a saltwater angler, so I wouldn’t know for sure. Bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix) winter in Florida, migrate north, and hit the Massachusetts coast sometime in June, but I think of them as arriving later than June 8.

Today when I went out for a walk, I ran into Michael, the librarian at the Whaling Museum Research Library. He was headed across the bridge to Fairhaven, as I was, so we walked along together. On the bridge between Pope’s Island and Fish Island, he stopped and pointed out at the harbor at some ripples and small splashes, and every once in a while something big rolling up out of the water.

“Bluefish,” he said. “They’re up in the harbor already.”

He’s a saltwater fisherman, so I’ll take his word that these were blues. Their arrival means that springtime is almost over.

Good metaphor

Carol has a friend whom she sometimes refers to as “Sailboat Chris” — this distinguishes from the other Chris we know. He’s Sailboat Chris because he’s a naval architect who has lived aboard his sailboat for the past fifteen or so years.

Carol and Chris were talking about the leadership of a local community group. Chris contended that there are two different ways to be a leader in such a group. You can be the biggest sheep among all the other sheep — just one of the gang, but bigger. Or you can be a sheepdog — an entirely different species whose role is to provide guidance and leadership, and care deeply about the others, but not necessarily try to be everyone’s best friend.

I like this metaphor. It does not completely describe all aspects of leadership, but it helps me to see how some leaders prefer to be part of the pack or herd (depending on which animal you use for a metaphor), while other leaders are willing to give up intimacy and friendships in order to provide a different quality of leadership.

At the risk of stereotyping, I would also say that Baby Boomers in the United States tend to prefer being big sheep, whereas leaders from the G.I. Generation tended to be sheepdogs.

Questions

This Sunday’s “sermon” will be the annual question-and-response sermon at First Unitarian in New Bedford — those who show up at the worship service will have the opportunity to write down a question on a religious topic, and I will answer as many questions as I can during the sermon time. The New Bedford congregation asks the best questions, and the questions last year gave me material for lots of sermons.

In any case, I racked my brains to day trying to come up with a good reading for this year’s question-and-response sermon. I still haven’t come up with a satisfactory reading, but I did come across this passage in Thoreau’s Walden that I like very much:

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — how — when — where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask.

No questions needed. Just look outside your door….

Parade

Around noontime, Carol went up to watch the Memorial Day parade here in New Bedford.

“How was it?” I asked when she got back.

“It was fine,” she said. “Some people walked down all the way from Buttonwood Park alongside the parade. You should have gone.”

“I suppose I should have,” I said.

She started eating watermelon. “I figured that as long as some kid from New Bedford died in Iraq, I should at least go to the Memorial Day parade,” she added. “Actually, I didn’t realize it, but four kids from New Bedford have died in the war.”

I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t gone. “Four from New Bedford?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “One of their fathers was there. He stood up next to the mayor. He didn’t speak, but it looked like he was maybe crying a little.”

I guess I really should have gone to the Memorial Day parade. Sadly, because this war shows no signs of ending, when I do go to the parade next year there will probably be some more New Bedford kids who have died in Iraq.

Memorial Day meditation

While researching my Memorial Day sermon today, I happened across the following sermon excerpt by Dana Greeley, who was my Unitarian Universalist minister when I was in my teens in First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts. His pragmatic pacifism had at least some influence on me; I doubt I heard this particular sermon, but it sounds familiar nonetheless:

War is insanity in this day and age. It is total destructiveness; it is total immorality; it is total waste. The end of war should be our goal today. Negotiation should be our commitment. We ourselves ought to be both wiser and more ethical than our fathers, but we are not….

I covet for America not the fear of the nations but a stronger moral leadership, and not the hatred but the respect of humanity. You may disagree with me, of course; but I make a plea, as strongly as I can, both for the strengthening of the United Nations and for the abolition of war.

How can we broaden and deepen our own lives? How can we make ourselves more world-oriented, and make the life of our church and our community broader and deeper and more world-oriented? We are the citizens of America! We are America itself, and if we are giving and forgiving and magnanimous and resolute and peaceful, America will be giving and forgiving and magnanimous and resolute and peaceful.

If we can overcome anger and violence, America will overcome anger and violence. If we can believe and demonstrate that love is better than hate, America will do away with hatred and with arrogance and fear. If we can be persuaded that right makes might more than might makes right, then America will rely less on its… weapons, and even alter its policies. Do we believe in truth and goodwill and the oneness of humanity more than we believe in falsehood and retaliation and war?… [Forward through the Ages, p. 78.]

Greeley wrote this thirty-two years ago, five months after the United States finally pulled its last troops out of Vietnam. It sounds just a relevant today as it did back then, and could serve as a good meditation on this upcoming Memorial Day weekend — a good way to honor our dead, those who have died in military service, by meditating on how to end all wars.

Chronology corrected thanks to Scott.

Jaeger

The youth group from First Unitarian spent Friday night visiting the youth group at the Nantucket Unitarian Universalist church. It’s a two-hour ferry ride out to Nantucket Island, and I spent most of the time on the upper deck, binoculars glued to my eyes, looking for birds. I saw dozens of Common Loons spread out over Nantucket Sound, looking very beautiful in their summer plumage; the ferry passed close enough to three of them that I could hear them calling to one another with that weird ululating sound they make. I watched Common Terns catching fish: cruising along until they spotted something; hovering for a moment; then plunging suddenly into the water, thrashing around, and more often than not flying up again with something clamped in their bill.

Then out of nowhere, a fast, dark bird flew at one of the terns, swooping up on the tern from underneath. It was a Parasitic Jaeger (Stercorarius parasiticus), a bird that eats fish it can steal from terns and gulls. The jaeger attacked the tern again; I didn’t see what happened, but there was another birder on the boat who said that it looked like the tern gave up, dropped the fish so the jaeger couldn’t get it, and thus avoided being harassed any further.

I was tempted to think ill of the Parasitic Jaeger for being parasitic. From my moral frame of reference, I didn’t like the fact that one bird was stealing food from another bird. Yet when I thought a little more, I realized that I am quite happy to eat other mammals, and I don’t worry too much about the way my human needs destroy the habitat of other mammals — surely what I do to other mammals is more reprehensible, morally speaking, than the jaeger stealing an occasional meal from another bird. Nor am I entirely sure how to apply moral judgements across species boundaries — is swatting a mosquito the same, morally speaking, as killing another human being?

Even after thinking about it in this way, I still didn’t much like the Parasitic Jaeger; clearly my human morality lacks logical consistency. Whatever my moral feelings, it was quite something to watch the jaeger swoop up and harass the tern; it was, in its own way, spectacular and even beautiful.

Not watching spring…

Every May for the past five years, it has happened.

The spring migration of birds is one of the most spectacular events in the natural world, and the peak of the spring migration occurs in May. If you’re good (and a little bit lucky), you can see a hundred different bird species in one day, including birds that have flown thousands of miles to get this far, with hundreds of miles yet to go before they reach their summer breeding grounds. It is one of the wonders of the natural world.

Every May for the past five years, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to spend a day in the field looking for birds. And it’s happening again this year.

Sigh.