Monthly Archives: May 2008

Pollen

This afternoon, when I walked out to my car, it was covered in pollen: spots of yellow about an eighth of an inch or less in diameter all over the burgundy paint of the car. It looked as though the tree under which it had been parked had dropped little pollen bombs all over it.

When Bill and I were setting up for tonight’s concert at the church, he heard me coughing. “New Bedford is number three in the state for high pollen count,” he said.

No wonder I felt slow and out-of-it all day. I’ve been breathing pollen soup, not air.

Getting mad, Perry Mason style

A discussion of tactics between the lawyer Perry Mason and the private detective Paul Drake that occurs on page 128 of The Case of the Amorous Aunt by Erle Stanley Gardner:

“ ‘Tomorrow I’m going to be dignified, injured, and perhaps just a little dazed by the rapidity of developments.’

“ ‘Are you going to be an injured martyr or are you going to get mad?’ Drake asked.

“ ‘It depends on which way will do my client the most good,’ Mason told him.

“ ‘My best hunch is that you should get mad,’ Drake said.

“ ‘We’ll think it over,’ Mason said.

“ ‘Won’t you get mad anyway?’ Drake said.

“ ‘A good lawyer can always get mad if somebody pays him for it, but after you’ve been paid a few times for getting good and mad, you hate like the deuce to get mad on your own when nobody’s paying you for it.’

“Drake grinned. ‘You lawyers,’ he said.”

Well. I feel a little odd agreeing with a fictional lawyer, but it occurs to me that that religious professionals are wasting their time if they get mad while at church, unless they’re getting paid to get mad. I guess what I mean to say is this: while getting mad is a natural reaction to many things that happen in church life, you rarely get anything out of getting mad, except getting mad.

Not that I think we should draw life lessons from a pulp fiction hero.

Universalist composer

I’ve been looking through some shape-note hymnals, and came across this interesting tidbit in The Norumbega Harmony, in the introductory essay by Stephen Marini*:

“The greatest musical influence in Maine… was Supply Belcher…. Belcher’s primary successor was Abraham Maxim, a native of Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who settled during the 17090s in Turner [Maine], where he taught singing schools and converted to Universalism. Maxim’s Oriental Harmony (1802) and Northern Harmony (1805) reflect the [William] Billings-Belcher influence that thoroughly dominated Maine’s singing school tradition.”

Although he is little more than a footnote today, Maxim (b. 1773 – d. 1829 Palmyra, Somerset County, Maine) must be the earliest North American Universalist composer whose works survive today. The Norumbega Harmony contains two compositions by Maxim, settings of hymns by Isaac Watts. Both compositions are fuguing tunes (for the record, Buckfield, p. 166 is an L.M. tune; Machais, p. 169, is a P.M. tune), and a quick look reveals that both seem musically interesting. Universalist hymnodists and choirs, take note!

* Stephen Marini is the historian who wrote the ground-breaking Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England, a third of which book covered the indigenous Universalism of central New England; thus Marini knows his early New England Universalism. Marini’s other major scholarly publication is Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture.

Martin Marty nails it

Martin Marty writes about the Barack Obama / Jeremiah Wright ruckus in the most recent issue of Christian Century magazine. Marty begins by saying: “This spring a certain Christian layperson has been criticized for not exiting his local church when he disagreed with something his pastor preached.” Just framing the Obama/Wright ruckus in this way shows how silly the whole thing is. Good grief, if everyone who disagreed with something I’ve preached left First Unitarian in New Bedford, the pews would be empty.

Perhaps Obama is just showing what is probably true of every American politician — that he values his political ambitions more than he values a religious community that has nurtured him and his family. Maybe that’s just the price you have to pay to become president of the United States, and maybe if you’re a black man playing politics in the United States the price is a lot higher — after all, we have heard nothing about McCain’s minister, or Clinton’s minister, yet surely they have each said things that would be politically embarrassing. And none of this reflects well on the American political process.

Well, you should go read Marty’s column (Link) — it’s funny and made me laugh. Given the sorry state of this presidential election, I needed a good laugh.

Universalist miracle story

This afternoon, the First Universalist Society in Franklin, Mass., installed Rev. Ann Willever as their Family Minister. I’ve know Ann since both of us were non-ordained Directors of Religious Education, so of course I went to this installation (Ann even asked me to give the opening words!). This is a big step for First Universalist — they had dwindled away to almost nothing by the early 1970s, and sold their old church building. But unlike the many churches that closed down during that decade of economic downturn and social turmoil, First Universalist managed to hold on. They met in rented space, and persevered, and grew big enough to afford one full-time minister, and grew some more and added a very part-time Director of Religious Education, and then a few years ago they got big enough and bold enough to build a new church building, and then they needed space for Sunday school and weekday meetings so they held a “Miracle Sunday” and raised enough money on one Sunday to pay for the new building, and now they have added a second called minister to their staff.

You may say, This is no miracle, this is simply an example of perseverance and hard work. That is true. But one thing I noticed this afternoon at the installation service: everyone in that church was pleasant, and kind, and they obviously cared for one another, and the children and teenagers were obviously loved and cared for by the adults. It was just a lovely community to be a part of, even for just a couple of hours on one Sunday afternoon. It is a loving community, not in the sappy sense, but in the real honest sense of a community that loves one another through respect and care. That’s the real miracle: the means by which this was all accomplished was actually not hard work (though hard work was required) nor perseverance (though that too was required); the means by which all this was accomplished was love. Call me maudlin, but that’s what I call a Universalist miracle.

Glad to be a Universalist

Recently, Carol and I have been coming face to face with the machinations of manipulative, amoral people — different people for each of us. No, they’re not church people. No, I’m not going to go into details — there’s no need, anyway, because no doubt you’ve had your own experiences with such people, and you know what goes along with those experiences: frustration, sense of betrayal, hurt, sometimes even despair. Suffice it to say that it can be discouraging.

It’s times like these when I’m glad I’m a Universalist. People are the way they are, a mixture of good and evil. But in the end, the most powerful force in the universe is Love. Some of the old Universalists used to say that God is love; which sounds like a theistic formulation, though if you’re a humanist you can also take it to mean something like “what we used to call ‘God’ is now better understood as ‘love’.” Whatever works for you; metaphysical speculations don’t particularly interest me. The point is that manipulative, amoral people can fight against the power of love for a time (sometimes for their whole lives), but it takes lots of energy, and it diminishes their lives. And the point is that I don’t need to exhaust myself wishing for revenge upon them in the form of sending them to some eternal torment; for in wishing such a thing, I would be as manipulative and as amoral as are they.

Nope, it’s good being a Universalist, because I have the ultimate comfort of knowing that even if manipulative amoral people happen to be causing harm in my life, their influence can only be transient — because the permanent truth of the universe is love.

As always, your mileage may vary….

Spring watch

When I came down and looked at my car this morning, it was covered with a faint yellow haze of pollen.

The Herring Gulls that live on our rooftop are noisily amorous most of the day. I stuck my head up out of the skylight once and surprised them in the act. I was embarrassed, they were just pissed off.

One of the realities of living in a sea-side city is that when you walk down the streets on a damp spring day like today, every building seems to exude a faint moldy smell.

The sea ducks and loons have mostly headed north to breed. The seals have swum off to wherever it is that they breed. Now when I stand on the end of State Pier and look out, the surface of the harbor is empty, except for a few gulls.

I came around a corner and looked up at a tree covered in white blossoms. Right in the middle of the city, surrounded by drab stone buildings. It took my breath away.

Wright & Douglass

Ari, over at the American history blog Edge of the American West, gives a nice historical perspective on the Jeremiah Wright / Barack Obama mess. Ari asserts that what Obama is really trying to do, by distancing himself from Wright, is to avoid being labeled a “neo-Douglassian” — good old Frederick Douglass from the 19th C. is apparently still too scary for much of white America. Read it here.