Month: February 2014

What I did on vacation

Some people take trips when they go on vacation. Some people catch up on their sleep. I’m taking a week of vacation, and I decided to finish up the collection of Christmas carols that I’ve been working on for several years, and finally turn it into a book. Here it is:

YuletideSongAndCarolBook“The Yuletide Song and Carol Book” — This is a collection of four dozen Yuletide songs, in easy arrangements for SATB voices. Songs include familiar classics such as “Joy to the World,” lesser-known favorites like “Sussex Mummers Carol” and “Los Posadas,” familiar songs such as “Go Tell It on the Mountains” that are hard to find in SATB arrangements, and a few little-known gems such as William Billings’ “Shiloh.” The texts mostly come from older Unitarian, Universalist, American Ethical Union, and Quaker hymnals and songbooks, and will appeal to most religious liberals. Suitable for carolers, choirs, and informal groups that enjoy singing four-part harmony. 8-1/2×11, 100 pp., $9.99.

Now available through Lulu.com

(Soon to be available for distribution through Ingram, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.)

One definition

This is from Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education:

“A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.”

This strikes me as a pretty good definition of at least part of religious education.

We Unitarian Universalists are most likely to speak about duty in connection with our social justice work. However, we are also concerned about duty in terms of personal morality: whenever possible we aim to recognize that other beings are not mere means to our ends, but are ends in and of themselves. This means that we try to get beyond exploitation in our personal relationships; and beyond sexism, racism, and other destructive “isms”; and we try to honor and respect those who can’t stick up for themselves because they’re weaker than we are (e.g., children).

Many of us Unitarian Universalists have a hard time with the word “reverence.” But read over Whitehead’s definition carefully: the present moment holds within in itself eternity, and once we perceive this, we have the foundation of reverence. Notice that Whitehead is not making any claims about divinity, nor is he defining what existence he; he is talking about a kind of knowing. That’s the foundation of reverence: that you can know in the present moment in ways that open up all of time and space to you. Mathematicians and theologians would likely agree.

Going back to the original

In tomorrow’s service, we’re thinking about using a brief reading from Singing the Living Tradition, the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, that goes like this: “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

In the hymnal, this quotation is attributed to Albert Schweitzer. So I decided to look it up: which of Schweitzer’s works did it come from? I found that this quotation sometimes appears online in a different form — which you would expect, since Schweitzer was not a native speaker of English and the quotation would have been translated from his German original — and the alternative version goes like this: “Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.”

It turns out the quotation comes from Schweitzer’s Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1924). It is from a short essay titled “Influence” found in chapter five of the memoir. The complete short essay is richer and more interesting than the short quotation in the hymnal, and for the sake of reference I have included C. T. Campion’s standard 1924 translation of the passage at the end of this post.

I still don’t know who did the translation of the quotation that’s in the hymnal; it’s not from Campion’s translation; but at least I can confirm that Schweitzer wrote a German original of this quotation. And I can also say that I wish the compilers of the hymnal had included the next sentence from Schweitzer’s essay:— “If we had before us those who have thus been a blessing to us, and could tell them how it came about, they would be amazed to learn what passed over from their life into ours.”

Continue reading “Going back to the original”