I don’t know how often you get asked. Maybe never. But every couple of months somebody asks me if I believe in God. They might ask in exactly that way, “Do you believe in God?” Or maybe, “You do believe in God, don’t you?” Or, from a child perhaps, “Is there really a God?” Read more →

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This year what has taken hold of me about Passover is not so much the story itself, but the very fact that the story is reliably told and retold, generation after generation, at the family Seder. The story is a fundamental part of the language of a people. It provides the basis for religious identity, and helps to preserve the community, sustaining an enduring culture and tradition.

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Opening Words

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that — just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden. I don’t think it is anything you can give love is a force in you that enables you to give other things. It is the motivating power. It enables you to give strength and freedom and peace to another person. It is not a result: it is a cause. It is not a product: it produces. It is a power, like stream or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.

Hymn

No. 10 “Immortal Love”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Children’s Story

“The Reverend James Wilson Bailey and Mrs. Eliza Whitcomb Bailey: A Jaw-ful Experience”
by Denise D. Tracy, from Living in the Wind

The Reverend James Wilson Bailey hitched the horse to the buggy and drove it ’round to the front of the house. He hopped down and helped his wife, Mrs. Eliza Whitcomb Bailey, into the buggy. Then he walked back ’round, got in, took the reins in hand, snapped them against the horse’s back and clucked, “Giddy-up.”

This particular Sunday night was crystal clear. The moon shone over the New Hampshire mountains and created shadows of white and silver where the dew lay heavy against branch, leaf and flower. Rev. and Mrs. Bailey held hands as they rode along in silence.

Tonight Rev. and Mrs. Bailey were undertaking an adventure. They had been traveling each Sunday night to the towns of Hinsdale and Winchester, New Hampshire, to preach the news of the goodness of God to these two tiny churches. From 10 to 20 to 30 people, the churches had grown. In enthusiasm and joy, people were becoming members of these two tiny churches. Tonight for the first time, the two tiny congregations would meet together as a sizable group at a school house half-way between their towns. The Rev. and Mrs. Bailey were excited and nervous. These two tiny churches had grown to be one very good congregation.

About ¼ mile away from the school house, the buggy crested a hill. The smell of the spruce forest was strong. The dew had settled on the fragrant pine needles and the air was heavy with the smell of spruce.

The needles shone with dew and moonlight. Every needle glowed silver. Rev. Bailey stopped the buggy .Together the two looked at the bounty of the universe. Dew, silver, moonlight, spruce, perfume.

“God’s joy surrounds us,” said Eliza. “Yes, let us hope we can share it with the congregation tonight,” replied James. When they arrived at the little school house, its windows were brightly lit. The little building was full to overflowing with excited new Universalists. Rev. and Mrs. Bailey entered, and a tall, awkward, bashful, kindly fellow welcomed them and offered each of them a piece of spruce gum to chew. “No,” said Mrs. Bailey, “I do not chew gum, but I will happily take it home to my children who will be very glad of it.”

As Rev. Bailey began to preach, he realized that he and Mrs. Bailey were the only two people in the congregation not chewing gum. Apparently as people had walked or driven in the moonlight to the little school house, they had stopped in the spruce forest and picked the gum off the trees to chew at church. As Rev. Bailey fervently preached, the congregation’s jaws fervently worked – as excited as he became, those jaws worked in equal excitement.

The minister could not look at his wife for fear of giggling. The people who were new Universalists truly loved the sermon and at its end sang the last hymn joyfully and loudly.

On the way home, Rev. and Mrs. Bailey laughed and talked about the new church. The moon shone brightly, the scent of spruce filled the air. “Well Eliza, we had a different kind of communion tonight.” “Yes, we came to give them the joy of God and the wonders of the universe and we learned a lesson too.” “Yes, we surely did. We wanted them to have a joyful experience and they did. They are joyful, exuberant Universalists. But they are also jaw-ful! Have you ever seen so much gum in anyone place!” And the two of them laughed and laughed. Finally Eliza said, “Oh James, would that all Universalists have such a fervent response as we did tonight.”

And so it was that Rev. and Mrs. Bailey learned about being both joyful and jaw-ful.

Reading

by Anna Quindlen, New York Times columnist

I have been married almost 10 years to the same person. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe. Neither of us was sure that any human being could be expected to live over the long haul with anyone as stubborn, opinionated and difficult as the other. Somehow it has worked, and it is not a gross exaggeration to say that this is partly because I am a much better cook than he is, and he tells much better jokes than I do.

A lot of people don’t understand how important these little things are to a marriage. I realized this when I was reading a magazine article about bachelors, many of whom were participating in organized sports instead of having relationships with women, just as their football coaches told them they should do when they were 17.

Many of these bachelors seemed to think that both partners would have to compromise and change a lot to stay married. Nothing is farther from the truth. One touchstone of marriage is security, and nothing makes you feel more secure than knowing exactly what another person is going to say or do at any given time. If my husband just cut into a slightly pink pork chop and scarfed it down — instead of holding up a piece at eye level, looking at it as though it were a murder suspect and saying, “Is this cooked enough?” — I’d become pretty suspicious, I can tell you that.

I felt this sense of security just the other night. It was cold and wintry , and I was getting ready to go to sleep when my husband said, “I don’t like that nightgown.” Once again I felt that magic little thrill you always get when you realize that some things in your life are immutable.

It was a flannel nightgown, one of those little numbers that looks like a fallout shelter and is designed to reveal only that the body beneath possesses ankles. It’s warm and comfortable, but I’ve always suspected that the only person who would consider it seductive would be Buddy Ebsen. Every year my husband looks at one of these things and says, “I don’t like that nightgown.” I guess if I were what my grandmother used to call a dutiful wife, I wouldn’t wear them. But just think how out-of-kilter my husband’s whole existence would become…

It’s a little late for me to fall in love with a man who likes cotton flannel and the allure of the dowdy… Besides, I know all his little winning ways, and he knows mine. I believe this is the secret to a successful marriage…

I like a certain reliability in a man, and I’ve got it. I put a plate of radicchio salad on the table, step back and count to five. “What is this stuff?” my husband says suspiciously, poking it with his fork. It warms my heart.

Love and Marbles

in Just-

spring     when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far     and     wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan     whistles

far

and

wee

e.e. cummmgs

Sermon

Love and Marbles
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka, Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading, Massachusetts

Do you remember? Do you remember the days when you were ten or eleven or twelve or so, the days of jump ropes and marbles? Remember? You’d just gotten it together, more or less …you knew how to operate your body; you knew how to operate your parents, your younger brothers and sisters; you knew how to operate your teachers, especially your substitute teachers. And you had friends, many of you, you were bonded togeher, it was “eddieandbill,” it was “bettyandisbel.” They were the days the movies “Stand By Me” and “My Life as a Dog” remind us of, the sweet and simple days just before the guys got cute and the girls got coy and complications all too quickly set in.

Bob Doss, one of our ministers in Wilmington, Delaware, tells a story (and, by the way, on a weekend that includes both Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day, it wasn’t easy to find just the right story — but this is a love story, and it’s about a boy named George and a girl named Martha, so I think I deserve extra credit.)

The boys, all about ten years old, says Bob Doss, were the marble shooters. The girls had more important things to do then, one imagines. But the boys seemed to play marbles all the time when the weather was dry and not too hot, but not too cold… marble season — in a place where the earth was packed hard and flat and a good ring could be drawn in the black dirt. Sometimes, the girls would deign to watch. And the boys, in training for free enterprise, accumulated great numbers of marbles — both by playing to win, sometimes by trading them for picture cards that came with flat, red pieces of bubble-gum, and sometimes by saving their pennies for more marbles.

George Markovitz was the best marble player. The others used to think it had something to do with his shooter. For, you see, George had a “moonie.” It seemed a little heavier than other marbles — the moonie. It was very smooth, but not glassie; pearlie looking and translucent… You could not see through it. They said it was made from moonstone and it did look like that — white, or pearl-like with a blue tinge, cool but not cold. A beautiful moonstone — a perfect sphere.

Everybody wanted one. But they did not sell “moonies” at the store where the marbles usually came from. George had the only one around. And what a shooter it did make. It was just about perfect.

Martha Bell, it so happened, had a birthday party. Her eleventh. And after the indoor games, and the cake, came the gift opening. And at the end of the gift opening, a small package was left, the smallest of the packages, a present from George Markovitz, and as Martha opened it, he started to blush.

She unwrapped the tissue inside the little box, and there was the moonie. just quietly glowing there, pearlie and bluish, cool and beautiful . . . George had given his moonie to Martha. Martha became very quiet, and sort of warm and smiling-like. And she looked into his eyes – eyes so deep she was afraid she was going to fall into them. And George sat there, melting in the presence of the great thaw. For a moment, everyone hushed. What was happening?

We know what was happening. We were there. We remember how it was when the little goat-footed balloonman came whistling into our lives and changed them forever. e.e. cummings’ poem is about just that, of course, about the Greek god Pan, playing a reed in the distance — Pan, the god of fertility, god of lust, — Pan, the root of our word “panic,” Pan, who did his best to rearrange eddieandbill in favor of eddieandbetty, and bettyandisbel into isbelandbill. When that moonie was passed from George to Martha, romance was born.

Romance. You know the kind of romance I mean. The “flames of love.” “Waves of passion.” “Wounded by Cupid’s arrow.” Valentines. Suffering. Queasy stomachs, weak knees, dry mouths; broken hearts, bursting hearts, aching hearts, lonely hearts, pounding hearts. Noble love, love between any two people, gay or lesbian or straight; love, which we consider the most enriching of human experiences; love, which at the age of twelve and probably a time or two subsequently, takes the form of moping and giggling and gazing. It is the “love and marbles” stage, when, as one wise Greek named Affines said, “the rocks in her head seem to fit the holes in his.”

Judy Blume, the popular author of novels designed to appeal to children of just this age, received the following letter: “Dear Judy, I first started a kind of relationship with a girl in a movie. We just saw each other there by coincidence so we sat together. The next thing you know we were holding hands. Before we left the theater she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me. I’d never been so red at the face in my life. But if that’s what falling in love feels like I hope it happens to everybody! Greg, aged 12.”

Early love, new love, young love, it seems to me, literally takes a medieval form. In the Middle Ages, the height of romance was its impossibility. Romantic love was unconsummated love. The more hardships endured, the more romantic it was. Unrequited love, or insurmountable obstacles were terrific. The only thing even more romantic was a situation where the lovers could no longer stand to live without each other and they killed themselves. Now that’s romance! Those of you with good memories or who have watched your children go through episodes of first true loves may recognize the melodrama of the love and marbles stage.

It is, first of all, the stage not of the “long run,” but the “short run,” the time of life when infatuation is mistaken for enduring love, and new true loves blossom with dizzying rapidity.

Remember Romeo? One day in love with Rosalind. The next day, talking now about Juliet, he goes on and on, “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!” The pattern is no different from the one we hear about in another letter to Judy Blume: “Dear Judy, I’ve liked this guy, Jeff, since the beginning of the year. He used to like me but he’s not allowed to like girls anymore. Now, even though I still like him, I am going with Bill. But I kind of like this other Bill, too, and also Kevin. The Bill I’m going with is thirteen, the other Bill is fourteen and Kevin is sixteen. Still, I like Jeff the best, even though he can’t like me. I feel that I’ll always like him a lot. I think about him all the time. I’m all confused. I don’t know what to do anymore. Do you have any advice for me? Morgan, age 13″

You may remember that this aspect of the love and marbles stage is torture. While it may be exciting, romance begins to eat away at life, and before long, it is life, having devoured the jump ropes and marbles and every kind of childhood normalcy. Breathing itself seems to hinge on a smile from Martha at the lockers or an affectionate punch on the arm from George, and nothing else matters, not the history quiz, not the baby-sitting commitment, nothing else matters. And then, a month later, the existence of the world as we know it rests on a smile from Bill or a punch from Betty. The enduring love of pinkish pork chops and flannel is completely unknown.

In our society, the stereotype is that over the years, we move from the pattern of constantly changing partners to a settled pattern of happy monogamous love. Of course this is only a stereotype, sometimes it happens, often it doesn’t. Our happiness might just as well be found in singleness, or in a series of partners, or any number of varying lifestyles. Or, through no fault of our own, we sometimes face an unfulfilling marriage, or the death of a partner, or divorce, or no marriage. But this morning I’m going to go with the stereotype — the map most of us were given as children, the progression from young love to enduring love.

No contemporary writer that I’ve read talks about “happily ever after.” Actually, I don’t know why that is — I think, with luck, a lot of people really do get to live happily ever after, without having to put up with too much, without having to work at it too hard, without having a lot of difficult circumstances intervene, enjoying one another’s mind, body, and soul over the long haul. And that’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.

But, one gathers from reading popular columnists, a number of couples appreciate being reminded why it is they’re still married after all those years; they want someone to recall for them what it was about the love and marbles stage, the romance and excitement and variety, that they aren’t supposed to want anymore.

Ellen Goodman, the Globe columnist, confesses to a passion for romantic movies. She loved, for example, the movie Falling in Love, where Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro ride off into the “happily ever after” on a commuter train. But at this stage of her life, Ms Goodman can’t seem to help but ask herself what happens after Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro stop “falling in love” and actually “land.” She imagines them when money is tight, when the refrigerator needs cleaning, and finally asks herself if she was just losing her taste for romance the way she once lost her taste for Sugar Smacks. Had she lost her interest in stories of quick romance in favor of the epic tale? Was she now more interested in how people stay together than how they get together, in “being in love,” rather than “falling in love?” She concludes that romantic movies “miss the kind of love that’s been around long enough to include friendship and trust and a whole lot of gratitude.” “As a love-story buff,” she says, “I know this is not what people write scripts about. It’s not on valentines. But it’s the surprise in the chocolate box, the happy non-ending, the stuff on which you build a life.”

If you have moved from the frantic pace of pre-teen romance to the stability of longer loving, you are aware of another change in your life. You no longer have to worry about “how to kiss.” Hours of agony, you may recall, can be spent on that one — here’s another letter to Judy Blume: “Dear Judy, I need some advice. I’m a big romantic but so far I’m convinced that there is no such thing as ‘true love.’ I’ve gone with a lot of boys over the last two years and I’m really confused. For one thing, in movies they make kissing look so perfect, but it’s not for me. In fact, we slobber all over each other and we always end up getting the flu… I wish I could have true love… I am fourteen years old. I want you to help me. Krista, age 14 “

For “Krista, age 14,” true love, as they say, is “in the kiss.” But Krista will no doubt get kissed a lot over the next few years, she’ll get the slobbering under control, if not the flu, she’ll probably run into boys who in her judgment are very good kissers — and even so, it’s doubtful that she’ll find her true love anytime soon.

It will be a long time before Krista changes her focus from kissing, from sex, to the intimacy required of the true love she’s after. Post- marble-stage seekers of love want to listen to the other and be heard, they want to tend each other and be tended, they want to relax in each other’s presence and be wholly themselves, they want to be loving and loved, and yes, they want good kissing too. When Krista finds all that, she can bet that the kissing will work out fine.

One last aspect of pre- teen love that is soon dispelled is the desperate search for the perfect girl or boy, the person who will make you happy your whole life long. “Dear Judy, I am thirteen-and-a-half years old and my problem is, I can’t seem to find the right boy for me… The right boy for me would have pretty eyes, dark hair, a nice build and soft skin. He would show me love and he would respect me, himself and others. He would have his license. But boys like this don’t come around here. I really need help… Sasha, age 13.” (p. 193)

Sasha has an appealing thought: that somebody has been placed on earth, custom made to her order, essentially to make her happy. Sasha will probably spend a long time searching for this perfect creature who’s devoted entirely to her happiness, and then she will grow up. She will, like most people, grow up and get married. She will have her ups and downs. She may admit, as the columnist Linda Weltner did, that “at times I’ve hated this man, blamed him for my unhappiness, been convinced that sticking with so much pain was a mistake, and wanted out. Yet every morning of our lives, both of us made the choice to stay married to one another, and most of the time we’re glad we did… Marriage is no safe harbor. Over the years, I’ve contemplated murder and known true contentment. I’ve felt trapped and liberated, challenged and defeated, in despair, yet determined to keep this love alive… The decision to marry means having faith in your own power to create the life you want with the person you have chosen…”

I’m not sure how much happiness has to do with one’s marriage partner. I know that people can be happy with their spouses, but are they happy because of them? If Sasha gets married, a marriage I suppose of the 1990s, I hope that she has first learned how to be happy on her own. She will need to know herself pretty well. She’ll need to know what accomplishments will make her happy, what, at the end of her life, she herself will enjoy pointing to with pride. She’ll need to know what kinds of friendships she’ll need to maintain, and how it feels to stand on her own. Before she gets married, Sasha will need to know who she is at her most self-centered just to be sure she has a self. Without that, no lover, perfect or not, can make her truly happy.

In the journal Christianity and Crisis, Will Campbell relates this conversation: “‘Would you say you’re happily married?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t say that,’ he answered. ‘Happiness is an elusive and illusive thing, generally not provided for one spouse by the other.’ He said he had never understood what happily married meant. ‘I suppose if I am happy and I am married one could say that I am happily married,’ he went on. ‘But I haven’t been happy every day for 40 years running. Sometimes I have been happy. And sometimes I have been sad, mad, depressed, and a time or two almost crazy. Was I sadly married, madly married, almost crazily married? Or just married all that time?’ As we talked I estimated that I had performed 500 marriage ceremonies. I recalled that I had never asked the parties to make one another happy. Nor did my friends promise each other that. [They only] promised to love each other”

We are, all of us, past the marbles stage, past the medieval stage, though there are days when, no matter how old we are, we seem to be thirteen. We have made progress. We’re better off. No matter how lonely we may be, it’s better than the desperate isolation felt by the child left out at the dance. No matter how bored we may be, it’s better than passions pounding us north and south and east and west. No matter how insecure we may be, it’s got to be better than the agonizing logistics of kissing with braces on your teeth. We have grown up, and it’s a blessing.

My oldest child is eleven. I would like to spare him the marbles stage of love. I would love to tell him that he could freeze the moment, that he and his buddies will talk with happy excitement of computer game cartridges forever and ever; that passion and uncertainty will never enter that world. I would love to tell him that he will never suffer over love, that pain will not consume him, that the hormones in his body will not command his every thought and move for the next decade. I would love to tell my son that for him, there will be no cause for moping, or wandering, or staring; that he’ll be spared the falling in love and breaking up and falling in love and being ignored and falling in love and being trapped and falling in love and being dumped. If only I could tell him that everyone will see what a wonder he is, that he’ll know he looks good, that everyone will treat him fairly and with kindness, that he will always know what to do, that he will never feel like an idiot, never feel unloved. But I can’t.

But I can say this: Someday, you will grow up. And your life will be filled with good things. Count on it. On some days, the sun will shine, and you’ll feel warm. Sometimes you will do an honorable day’s work, and you’ll feel proud. You will hear music now and then that grabs you and makes you dance or touches you and makes you cry with the tears of all people. In the woods you’ll find a tree you like to sit with. You’ll talk someday to a friend and feel a bond forever. You will wonder at the mountains, you will laugh at the silliest things, you will figure something out and be pleased with yourself. Your life will be filled with good things, and one of them, one of those things I think will be love. And this love, this grown-up love, will be easier, and nicer, and you won’t have to worry about doing it wrong, and you will talk together when you feel like talking, and sit quietly when that’s what you want. And you’ll be over- come with passion and overcome with tenderness and overcome with steady joy, and you will love. You will love.

But for now — but for now

in Just-

spring     when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far     and     wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan     whistles

far

and

wee

 

Amen

Meditation

by Kenneth Sawyer

And the most embarrassing statement,
the hardest thing to say, is this:
I love you.

I love you for who you are.

Perhaps you worry in the night because
it comes to you that you are different:
I love you because you are different,
and I love your differences.

Perhaps you have known yourself unworthy of love,
a spotted, flawed creature;
I have, too, and yet have been loved.
And I love you, spotted and flawed.

Perhaps there come voices, the callings of evil, the knowledge of an
inner nature less noble than we would proclaim;
Yet I proclaim you, waverings and all;
I know them, too,
and I love you.

A noble race, God’s very chosen,
Or pathetic, cruel, destructive, and hopeless?
Yes, you are both.
Yes, I am both.
Yes we are both.
and I love you.

Perhaps you are less than you would have yourself.
Perhaps the glory ends up inevitably mixed with shame
and the greatness with pettiness.
Perhaps you feel at times unworthy of the blessing that is life.
Yes, so do I.
In the end it comes to this: you are human.
Yes, so am I.
And I love you for it.
And I love you for yourself

Hymn

No. 18 “What Wondrous Love”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Unison Benediction

by May Sarton

Return to the most human,
Nothing less will nourish the torn spirit,
the bewildered heart,
the angry mind:
and from the ultimate duress,
Pierced with the breath of anguish,
speak of love.

Return, return to the deep sources,
nothing less will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,
to carve into our lives the forms of tenderness
and still that ancient necessary pain preserve.

Return to the most human,
nothing less will teach the angry spirit,
the bewildered heart;
the torn mind,
to accept the whole of its duress,
and pierced with anguish
at last, act for love.

Questions for Discussion

1. What are your memories of the eddieandbill or the bettyandisbel
   time of your life? Can you recall the dawning of what Jane Rzepka
   calls the medieval love stage as it happened to you?
2. As you watch the young people today, how do they seem different from yourself at their age? How do they seem similar to the
   way you were at their age?
3. What in your opinion would constitute an ideal long-term relationship?

Opening Words

“Come as You Are”
by the Rev. Roy Phillips

Can there be a supportive religious community in which people grow spiritually and become more fully their own best selves without prior agreement on theological or philosophical first principles?

Can there be vital religious community without the personal and institutional style of authoritarianism, of certainty and of ecclesiastical directiveness?

These are the questions which our experiment in religious community seeks to answer in the affirmative.

We Unitarian Universalists say: Come as you are. You don’t need to bother to get your beliefs on straight first, before you come. Come as you are. Come with your doubts, your hunches, your convictions, your ambiguities.

Come and be welcome. Come here as you are; let us be together, let all of us grow in open religious community.

Religious community is concerned with truth and love and personal growth. We say that to begin with “truth” may be to preclude ever getting beyond concern with “truth” to establish acceptance and love and personal growth.

In our experiment in religious community we are saying: begin with acceptance, begin with the openness which is a form of love, begin with the love that lets others be who they are – then personal growth is more likely to follow and truth – living, relevant personal truth – is likely to follow, too.

Marcus Aurelius said, “People are made for one another; teach them then, or bear with them.” People are made for one another – bear with them, learn to appreciate their differences and encourage them to speak honestly out of who they really are, and we will all be teaching one another, and all be growing religiously in the process.

Hymn

No. 188 “Come, Come Whoever You Are”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Children’s Story

“The Infidel’s Picnic – Jenkin Lloyd
by Denise D. Tracy, from Living in the Wind

Jenkin Lloyd Jones rode horseback with his Bible in his pack traveling to preach to those in the western wilderness. He traveled thousands of miles as a Unitarian Missionary in the west. Wherever people would listen, he would speak.

Today he was traveling to Wisconsin to see a man known as an infidel. He was curious, because in some towns, after he began to preach the Unitarian gospel of the oneness of God, he, too, was called an infidel.

“Infidel,” he said to himself. “An unfaithful person. But I have very great faith. It is not the faith of those who search for dogma, but rather it is the faith of the free thinker.”

The infidel he was visiting was known for gathering his congregation on the Fourth of July for an infidels’ picnic. Jenkin had heard far and wide of this event and had come to see what infidels did at a picnic.

When he arrived at the town, three people directed him to the infidel’s home. There was a man with his shirt sleeves rolled up standing amidst a herd of cows. He was touching them, patting them. He had white hair and was over 80 years old.

The night before the infidels’ picnic, Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the stranger talked late into the night. They talked of religious freedom, of their love of humanity. of their defiance to being like everyone else. The infidel was intolerant only of the intolerant, and he did not like pretense or lies.

Jenkin and the man did not quarrel once. They agreed on every- thing. Finally the infidel said, “We must get some sleep. Tomorrow we will celebrate my favorite holiday of the year.” So they slept.

The next morning the townspeople set out tables and benches for the infidels’ picnic. They set out platters of food and drink and then gathered in a circle – men and women together to celebrate the Fourth of July. Rumor had it that infidels danced in the street, drank too much and created a rowdy party for their most holy day. Jenkin was curious to see if that matter of celebration would occur.

This is what happened next: All of the citizens sitting in the circle took from their pockets and purses small, thin volumes. One by one the people read paragraphs, listened and responded to each other. The infidels on the Fourth of July read and studied the words of Thomas Paine –whose ideas helped shape the freedom and liberty which gave birth to our great nation.

At lunch time people ate and drank. Afterwards they discussed and celebrated Paine’s philosophy again, through sincere and thought- ful discussion.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones smiled to himself. Others have created a lie of the infidels’ picnic. It is a celebration of freedom, nothing more.

At the end of the day, Jenkin saddled his horse and bid farewell to the infidel. As he rode away, he said to himself, “I, too, am an infidel. I love liberty. Perhaps next year I will call my friends together for an infidels’ picnic, to celebrate freedom.”

Meditation

from the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association Section C-2.1 Principles

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

The living tradition which we share draws from many sources:

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to the renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
• Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love;
• Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
• Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
• Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision. As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.

Sermon

Sermon: “Hold On to Your Hats: All of Unitarian Universalist History in Sixteen Minutes”
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka, Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading, Massachusetts

I have a confession to make. In the title of this sermon I say some- thing about “all of Unitarian Universalist history in 16 minutes.” The “sixteen minutes” part sounds precise. It sounds as if I really mean it. One would think that the “sixteen minutes” part could be counted on – it has the tone almost of a promise. But no. Don’t be fooled. It was a trap, a ploy, nothing more, and if at the end of six- teen minutes I hear your watches beeping or playing a tune, I plan to keep right on going, having made this confession in advance.

Now. A word about the part of the sermon title that reads “all of Unitarian Universalist history.” To take not one denomination but two, having origins in ancient Alexandria, 16th Century Transylvania, 18th Century England, and 19th Century America, two denominations whose theological identities have always grown and changed, to do justice to our rich heritage in one Sunday sermon- is of course no problem at all.

I’ll begin with a story , a story from the Jewish tradition, a story not at all connected with our history on the face of it, yet a story that tells it all.

“A young man went to seminary to study for the rabbinate. In the middle of the year he became discouraged and lost his faith. He went to his own rabbi and said, ‘I must leave the seminary. I lost my faith in God and do not believe in the Bible and the Jewish laws.’ The rabbi listened and then said, ‘Let me tell you a story.’ He went on, ‘About twenty years ago when I was a student at the semi- nary, I lost my faith and I went to one of my professors and said to him, ‘Professor. I must leave the seminary for I have lost my faith in God and I no longer believe in the Bible, and the Jewish laws.’ He said, ‘Let me tell you a story. About twenty years ago I studied to be a rabbi and I lost my faith in God and the Bible and the Talmud. I did not know what to do. I finally went to the head of the semi- nary, a tall saintly man with a white flowing beard and piercing black eyes. I said to him, ‘Father, Rabbi, teacher, I am ashamed to come to you for the purpose I have in mind. But I must leave the seminary. I have lost my faith in God and no longer believe in the Jewish laws. I must leave the seminary.’ The kindly man put his arm around me and said, ‘Sit down, I must tell you a story.’”, (East Shore [Ohio] newsletter)

Our own history shows generations and generations of people who seem first to lose their religion, and then by means of private struggle and personal risk, find new ways of being religious. Our founders were doubters, thinkers, people for whom integrity counted for something. In the language of the story , they too wanted to ‘leave the seminary’ but they too, through processes of theological reinterpretation and revolution, found ways to continue their religious lives.

We have countless founders – courageous, great minds, but many are lost to us. I will tell you our history, but with sadness, because we don’t know what we should about the contributions of blacks, of women, of Canadians, for example. I wish it were different, and we are trying to learn more.

Our first notable ancestor was an Alexandrian named Origen. It was the second century, when Christians were persecuted. Origen, at age 17, his father imprisoned and then killed as a Christian, was willing to martyr himself for his religious faith. But his mother kept hiding all of his clothes, preventing him from leaving home, thus saving his life. Origen went on to become a dedicated scholar , devoting himself single- mindedly to the pursuit of Christian truth through the use of reason, instead of faith. The more he studied the Bible, the more he began to doubt the usual notion of the existence of heaven and hell. Origen believed that everyone, not just Christians, not just good people, would find redemption. It was the “ultimate reconciliation of all souls with God,” it was “universal salvation,” it was “universalism.” Origen was condemned as a heretic, but Universalism lived on as a thread in our liberal history.

And then there was Pelagius, the fourth century English monk, another of my favorites. At a time when Augustine insisted on the total depravity of human nature, Pelagius, bless him, courageously advocated moral free will and spiritual liberty. Pelagius was well- respected at the time, and while Augustine clearly had the upper hand, Pelagius posed a real threat to the church’s doctrine of natural corruption. There is no doubt that Augustine won the debate. But again, a thread of faith has persisted: we have an ability to choose good over evil. We have Pelagius to thank for that.

A big jump now to the Reformation, where our hero is Michael Servetus, a Spaniard. I have mixed feelings about Servetus. Here we have a 19 year old kid who takes on both the Catholic and Protestant authorities. They believe in the Trinity; and Servetus says, and I quote, “Your Trinity is a product of subtlety and madness. The Gospel knows nothing of it.” He was brilliant and intemperate. He infuriated the Inquisitors as well as Calvin, they gave him chance after chance to moderate his views, he insulted them repeatedly, and finally, Calvin had Servetus burned at the stake. Personally, I wish Servetus had seen fit to proceed with a little more caution and save himself. He did leave us with the idea that God is indivisible, and the observation that there is no Trinity taught in the Bible, and those were important beginnings for a new theology. But I wonder, had he lived, where his theology would have taken him – and us.

Now to Poland and Transylvania, the cradle of European Unitarianism. Sixteenth century. Faustus Socinus. Socinus organized non-Trinitarian liberal congregations devoted to religious liberty, reason, and tolerance. The movement spread rapidly, attracting many of the most enlightened and gifted minds. But they were persecuted – the “Socinian heresy” was stomped on, and Socinus himself was attacked in the streets of Krakow – his face was smeared and his mouth filled with mud. Eventually, broken by the attacks, he died. A few Socinian exiles made their way to Transylvania (now part of Romania), where the liberal congregations survived and continue to survive 400 years later as Unitarian churches.

England. Eighteenth century. Religious liberals here knew about Socinianism: they advocated Socinian tolerance of differences in belief, they applied the Socinian test of reason to religious doctrines, and preached the Socinian concepts of God and Jesus. We come upon Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, Unitarian minister, and espouser of a number of liberal and unpopular causes, including the French Revolution. Priestley gave intellectual brilliance to the development of Unitarian religion and stimulated a mushrooming of Unitarian institutions. But established church leaders became exasperated, inflamed a mob, and Priestley’s home, laboratory, library, and Unitarian chapel were attacked and burned. He escaped by the skin of his teeth and, tempted by an invitation from his friend Thomas Jefferson, sailed to the United States in 1794, bringing Unitarianism with him.

John Murray, the late 1700s, another Englishman, a Universalist. Murray’s life in England was suddenly falling apart. His only child died, and then his wife, followed by his three sisters and his mother. He lost his job and landed in debtors’ prison. When he got out, he resolved to go to America to seek a new life. John Murray did just that, and wound up on a ship that was eventually grounded on a sandbar off the coast of New Jersey. While the ship’s crew waited for a fair wind and a high tide to move them along, Murray went ashore, where he met a farmer named Thomas Potter. Now it seems that this Thomas Potter had built a chapel nearby, and had just been waiting for a preacher who believed in universal salvation to happen by. Potter became convinced that God had sent John Murray to preach in his chapel. John Murray was not at all convinced. Potter said, “The wind will never change, sir, until you preach for us.” And Murray’s ship remained stuck until Sunday, when Murray began his preaching career, bringing Universalism to the colonies. It was largely through his efforts, beginning in Gloucester, spreading through small-town New England and heading westward into rural New York, the Western Reserve, Indiana and Illinois, that Universalism took hold in this country. It was a religion that praised God, and preached a loving theology of inclusivism in heaven and also here on earth. Universalism devoted itself to prison reform, schools, temperance, pacifism, and women’s rights.

Well. We’ve made progress. We now have Unitarianism and Universalism on the American continent. It is the early nineteenth century, and Calvinist orthodoxy, straight from the Puritans, is the status quo. Universalists, in their universal salvation, offered relief from the likeliness of Calvinist damnation. Unitarian-oriented clergy began more and more to sit up and take notice of Calvinist pessimism about human nature. The prevailing Calvinist theology in the culture forced them to come to grips with their own liberal theologies of human free will, dignity, and rationality. William Ellery Channing confirmed the presence of the new theological movement, and rallied the liberals together as a theological group. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, many of the Puritan Congregational churches began to call themselves Unitarian.

Every generation of American Unitarians, like the rabbinical students in the story with which I began, has questioned the faith. Almost as soon as American Unitarianism was established, a young generation of Transcendentalists – Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker among them – changed the religious orientation from one of empiricism and historicism to a religion of direct intuition of God (or the universe). Unitarianism drifted away from belief in the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. The Universalists had fewer theological disputes and did retain the Christian basis of their faith more completely. But they, too, changed over the years, and by the early decades of the twentieth century, Universalism emphasized the notion that evil is the result of “unjust social and economic conditions.” Universalism, in the words of Clarence Skinner, was economic and social as well as spiritual.

The generations continued, and our denominations continued to evolve. The rise of the Humanist movement among the Unitarians has been an attempt to reformulate liberal theology on completely non-theistic grounds. The Universalists moved from their long- standing emphasis on universal salvation to an understanding of universalism as universal religion – “boundless in scope, as broad as humanity, as infinite as the universe.”

By mid-century, leadership in both denominations recognized the advantages of combining efforts through merger. The proposed merger was controversial for both Unitarians and Universalists, each quite naturally fearing a loss of tradition and identity. But finally, in 1961, the merger plan was overwhelmingly ratified by the individual churches and then by the American Unitarian Association Annual Meeting and the Universalist General Assembly. My description of the process of merger is history book-ish, and that’s too bad, because we lose the power and the color of the experience that so many of us lived through. A number of people in this church grew up Universalist, or Unitarian, and were for or against merger, and have thought it successful or tragic. We knew our neighbor, the minister in Concord, Dana Greeley, the first president of the merged denominations. We fought the fights and drank the champagne and changed the letterhead, and I, for one, am proud to be called a Unitarian Universalist.

I think once more of the story of the rabbinical students, and how generation after generation of good, earnest souls still examine the faith, reshape it, and persist in it. Frederick May Eliot, president of the American Unitarian Association from 1937-1958, once said, “one of the most interesting aspects of our history is the process by which the radicals of one generation have come to be regarded as ‘100% Unitarians’ by succeeding generations. The truth of the mat- ter is that we are a church in which growth is not only permitted But encouraged – growth in thought, growth in sensitiveness (sic) to moral values, growth in courage to put religion to work in the world.”

Jack Mendelsohn, a distinguished UU minister, wrote (adapted),

“We have inherited quite a religion. It is honest; of one piece. It does not indulge in self-deceit.

It is lived. It is not just a set of bromides and pietisms. It is a serious effort to conduct life according to principles and ideals.

It is emotional; heart-swelling. It is even naive. In spite of uncertainty, it does not rule out leaps of faith.

It is free, not bound by tradition, inheritance, geography, or the passing parade.

It is first-hand; a personal experience.

It is responsible. It does not try to escape the consequences of decision.

It is growing. It never thinks of itself as perfected and final.

It embraces humility, recognizing that faith is not certainty where there is in fact mystery.

It is compassionate. It understands that religions universally wrap their essence in myth. It reaches to grasp and appreciate the truths bound up in the myths of other believers.

It is tough on its possessors, committing them to sacrifice, but it is tender toward those who disagree.

It is social, struggling to realize its own vision at community, national and world levels.

It radiant, blessing its possessor with courage, serenity and zest.

This is our history, and also our hope.”

So may it be.

Meditation

The Liberal Church

This is the liberal church:

A place to go where you know you belong –

Where the mind is free to soar beyond the coercions and crudities that inevitably beset all orthodoxies;

Where the heart is free to extend that large love to all, unencumbered by dogma, tradition, race, country or class;

Where the hands are free to work for the cause and the hope of peace;

Where the soul is free to open, stretch, discover, develop, deepen, change and grow, always and continuously and progressively;

Where the rights of individual conscience and action are guarded with vigilance, out of belief in the fitness of diversity, the liberty to be different, out of eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the human mind;

Where the glory resident and potential on our planet earth is enjoyed and celebrated, not denied or blasphemed in the name of sin or spurious escapes to another world;

Where the promise of humankind is nurtured, supported and blessed, and never cursed, degraded or despaired of;

Where the faiths by which we live are regarded as important enough to be examined and checked against the tests of experience, the cannons of logic, the methods of science;

Where the church is committed to speak and act on the great moral issues of the day not denying or hiding or ignoring its prophetic role as an agent for the transformation of society into a kingdom of righteousness;

Where the whole person can enter fully into the religious mood without insult to reason or irrelevance to daily life;

Where the whole person can utilize, without reservation, the resources of one’s own tradition, whatever that particular religious heritage is;

Where people are invited to be themselves – in joy, in sorrow, in the struggle of the deeper self to be born, in the resolution of some great issue, in the witnessing to high ideals, in living and dying, seeking and finding and serving;

A place to learn, to grow, to sing, to stand;

A place to be a more authentic self;

A place to encounter, reckon, judge, accept, and be accepted;

A place to be challenged by new insight and be reminded of what one already knows;

A place to respond to a vision of holiness, all arts, and other depths;

A place to be with others in co-creating with God;

A place to provide conditions for the coursing of the Creativity which vivifies, heals and makes all things new;

A place to go where you know you belong – this is the liberal church

Hymn

No. 2 “Down the Ages We Have Trod”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Benediction

by Unitarians in Edinburgh, Communications Committee, 1985

Our faith is personal

because it begins where people are.

Our faith is reasonable

because it respects the place of human thought.

Our faith is free

because it provides space for individual growth and development.

Our faith is developing

because it grows with our greater understanding of how things are.

Our faith is supportive

because we share it with others in a mutually creative, tolerant and compassionate community.

Our faith is responsible

because we cannot separate it from the local, global and ecological communities of which we are part.

Our faith is diverse

because it draws not only on Jewish and Christian teachings about responding to God’s love by loving our neighbours as ourselves; but also on wisdom from the world’s religions, insights from science and humanism, and on personal experience.

Our faith is Unitarian

because it acknowledges the unity of the cosmos, the oneness of God, and the humanity of Jesus and other religious pioneers.

Our faith is Universalist

because it draws upon traditions which will not limit the love of God but affirm the dignity of every person.

Questions for Discussion

1. Does a quick review of the history of Unitarianism and Universalism help you to understand Unitarian Universalism as it exists today? If so, in what ways?
2. Do you have a particular hero or heroine from UU history? What is it about that person that particularly appeals to you?
3. Jane Rzepka makes the observation that “the radicals of one generation have come to be regarded as 100% Unitarians by succeeding generations.” What radical ideas of today can you imagine becoming accepted or even conservative ideas in the future?
4. The sermon ends with several statements by Jack Mendelsohn in praise of Unitarian Universalism. Can you add to his list with statements of your own about the aspects of UUism that you find especially praiseworthy?

Opening Words

No. 426, “The wilderness and dry land shall be glad”
From Singing the Living Tradition

Hymn

No. 105 “From Age to Age”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Children’s Story

Damon And Pythias by Sophia L. Fahs

Many years ago there lived in Greece two young men whose names were Damon and Pythias. They were good friends, and loved and trusted each other like brothers.

At that time, the city of Syracuse in Sicily was ruled by a tyrant, King Dionysius. Today we would call him a dictator for he had forced the people to make him King and he ruled with a cruel hand. Dictators fear and punish people who tell them unpleasant truths. Therefore, when Pythias dared to oppose Dionysius he was condemned to death.

Brave Pythias was willing to die for the sake of what he believed to be right, but he was eager first to say good-bye to his parents who lived in another part of the country. He looked King Dionysius in the eye and said:

“Your Highness, you have the power to take my life. But I beg you to grant me one request. Before I die, give me one week to go home to say good-bye to my parents, and to arrange for their comfort and safety. I promise I will return by the end of the week.”

“Pythias, do you take me for a fool? If I let you go, you will never come back.” Proudly Pythias tossed back his head:

“You have my promise. I do not break a promise.”

“Fine words! Fine words! But life is sweet. Once out of Syracuse, you will never return!” At this Damon interrupted. He had listened quietly but now could no longer keep silent:

“King Dionysius, Pythias has never broken his word. He will come back. To prove my faith, I will go to prison in his place, and die for him if he does not return.” An ugly smile lit the face of the tyrant.

“So be it!” You may take his place. But expect no mercy. If he is not back by sundown on the seventh day from now, you die.” Damon cast a loving look at Pythias and said:

“I am not afraid. He will return.”

Damon was led away to prison and Pythias hastened to his parents to plan for their well-being and to say a sad good-bye.

The trip home went smoothly. The skies were sunny and the streams easy to ford. Pythias was a good runner. In two days he reached home.

With breaking hearts his parents heard the reason for his visit. They did not try to hold him. He had learned his high sense of honor from them. After a few hours of planning and weeping, his mother said:

“Now you must go. Damon lingers in prison until you get back.” The parents both gave him their blessing and he was speedily on his way.

Suddenly the weather changed. Storm clouds gathered. An inky darkness covered the sky. Soon lightening zigzagged and thunder clapped and roared. Then a torrent of rain descended and drenched Pythias to the skin. His garments clung about his legs. It was difficult to run. The streams turned into rivers and these rivers soon overflowed their banks and washed away the bridges. Where Pythias had walked through fords, he now had to swim against a rushing current. Precious time slipped by and Syracuse was still far away. A horrible fear gripped him. Would he get back in time?

The morning of the last day came. King Dionysius went early to the prison and entered the cell where Damon lay upon a bed of straw. A smile of evil triumph distorted his lips:

“It is still but morning. Sundown is the appointed time.”

“You do not mean that you still expect Pythias?”

“Indeed I do! He will be here by sundown!”

“Amuse yourself with your fairy tale a few hours more. It may help you to forget that when the sun sinks behind the clouds today you die!”

The hours passed. A crowd began to gather to watch the execution. “Too bad,” they said, “an innocent man is to die. Of course he was a fool to expect that his friend would return — yet he was a noble fool. Too bad! Too bad! Will his courage hold out to the end?”

Now the guards were leading Damon from the prison. They paused before the special seat prepared so that King Dionysius could watch the execution in comfort.

“Pythias has not returned, Damon.” In a clear voice that rang through the court Damon answered:

“He will still come or else you will soon learn that he has died on the way. Tell him that I went to my death in the sure knowledge that he had not betrayed me.” The light of faith that glorified Damon’s face caused Dionysius to lower his eyes. Suddenly a guard shouted:

“A man comes running — he seems exhausted! He stumbles! He falls! He rises again!” All waited in hushed silence. Then, with a last great burst of effort, Pythias entered the gate, and dropped before the throne of Dionysius. As he panted the words, “Your Highness, I am back!” a mighty shout of joy rose from the throng.

With amazement and awe King Dionysius gazed on the fallen man. A new belief crept into his heart. He had seen a love and a loyalty that were stronger than the fear of death. He rose from his chair. Above the shouts of the tumult his voice rang out:

“Pythias, you have come back to live, not to die. Two such true friends must not be parted.”

Meditation

No. 493, “Fire of the Spirit”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Sermon

The Best of the Oldest Dead White Males
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka

When I was little, I believed that Socrates was a big deal. In Sunday School we had a whole curriculum about him – how he asked questions, how he pursued wisdom, how he shook things up, how he stood by his principles even to his death. The Socrates curriculum came alongside other curricula that exposed us to our heritage: Jesus the Carpenter’s Son was one year, and there was Achnaten the (Egyptian) Sun God, and the one about Moses, that linked us to our Jewish heritage. I believed that these people were my heritage as a Unitarian: men who came from humble beginnings and grew to be great leaders, or men who dared to think for themselves and establish wholly new and courageous patterns of religious thought, men who were willing to die for the good and the right and the true. I internalized these men, I claimed them, I knew these guys – they were my people, and they made me proud.

Current thought in educational circles tells me that my Sunday School relationship with these fellows of antiquity is either impossible or bad. Today we believe that in order for me to identify with a role model, that role model must be more or less like me to begin with. But Socrates, for one, was a seventy-year-old man, and I was a ten-year-old girl. Socrates lived several hundred years before the Christian era, and I was Twentieth Century. Socrates, like all ancient Greeks, had black hair and olive skin; I was blond and pale. Socrates lived across the ocean in a thriving metropolis and intellectual center; I lived in rural Ohio in a vast intellectual wasteland. Nobody ever told me that because Socrates was different from me, that because he was a “dead white male,” he could not be my inspiration.

I am a champion of multi-culturalism. Nearly a year ago, now, when the Times columnist Anna Quindlen wrote a column (1/27/93) about Clinton’s choice for his inauguration poet, Maya Angelou, I clipped it. Anna Quindlen makes the case that because Maya Angelou, an African American woman, was chosen for this prestigious occasion, little Black girls everywhere would be empowered to imagine themselves as great poets. She includes a quote that says, “If there’s nobody who looks like you, you have the sense that you can’t do it. If there’s somebody who’s something like you, it seems possible.”

Personally, I was raised to believe that people are people, and if I wanted to, I could dream about being like Louis Armstrong, or Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Harriet Tubman, or… Socrates. For me the point of multi-culturalism is that we all do have humanity in common, the point is that the range of human accomplishment is wide, the menu is incredible, the opportunity for inspiration is so vast, the gifts so great from all quarters of the globe and from all points along the time line, that we need to open ourselves to all that we can, no matter who looks like what. Yes, I believe in multiculturalism because I want to hear Maya Angelou and I want to hear Socrates.

But the thing is, we are told these days that dead white males are dead! And not only are they dead, we are told that their death is a blessing, that the dead white males are the bad guys, that, Socrates, a part of the prevailing culture of ancient Greece, was a bad guy.

Well he was a bad guy. And he was a part of a bad culture. Bad at least if we get to superimpose our 1990’s notions of good and bad onto a completely foreign culture in a completely different time. Socrates was part of a culture that, for example, favored sacrifice – not metaphorical sacrifice – not like a “sacrifice play” in team sports, or a symbolic sacrifice as we see in Christian communions, but actual animal sacrifices. Animal sacrifices, done according to elaborate ritual that to our sensibilities are among the most gory and barbaric imaginable. The hot Agean sun, the odors of sweat, blood, burning fat, rotting flesh, the swarming flies, this is not what we want to teach our children. The Greeks had their reasons, as do all cultures that practice animal sacrifice, but for most of us the custom seems simply a bad custom, and I would not defend it.

Ancient Greek culture has gone out of favor for three more reasons, and the first of those is the issue of slavery. The Greeks held slaves. We believe slavery is wrong, we believe fundamentally that people should be equal and free. That equality would have been an utterly foreign concept to the ancient Greeks. We don’t want to honor a slave-holding society, and again, of course I would not defend them.

Furthermore, Greek society was very rough on women. Women had no rights, no vote, no identities, and their roles were clear: Her duty was to order the house, to look after the property inside, and obey her husband. She had to train and supervise the slaves, if she had them; to store and manage the distribution of grain, wine, and oil; make and meet the annual budget; and see to the manufacture of household clothes from the raw fleece. She was not to sit by the fire but rather she should be constantly on the move, checking, inspecting, helping. She would rarely emerge from the house. (The Oldest Dead White European Males, Bernard Knox, pp. 49-52) These expectations would not go over well in most of our households, and once again, clearly, I would not defend them.

Finally, the ancient Greeks were racists. At least I think that’s what we’d call them. At all levels of society, from slaves to aristocrats, Greeks believed in a qualitative gulf between themselves and all other people, all of whom they labeled “barbarians.” Up until the time of Plato, Greeks believed that only they, the Greeks, among all people had the capacity for rational thought (The Legacy of Greece, M.I. Finley, pp. 8,9). You wouldn’t want to defend a culture like that.

The question is, were my Sunday School teachers wrong to have taught me about Socrates? Should we drop the ancient Greeks as a part of our heritage? Is a Sunday sermon about our classical heritage a waste of your time?

In 1671, John Milton wrote his long poem “Paradise Regained,” where we are reminded of the substantial list of splendors of ancient Greece by virtue of a little tour of Athens:

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
See there the olive-grove of Academe,
Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long,…
The schools of ancient sages;…
There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power
Of harmony in tones and numbers hit
By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,..
Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
High actions and high passions best describing.
Thence to the famous orators repair,
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce democracy,…
To sage philosophy next lend thine ear,
From heaven descended to the low-roofed house
Of Socrates – see there is tenement –
Whom well inspired the oracle pronounced
Wisest of men….

(Paradise Regained, lines 240-279)

That’s the kind of list of credentials my grandmother would have given me as an argument for studying the ancient Greeks. My grandmother was, I think, the last living example of those people who for the last four hundred years believed that all that is good in civilization originated with the Greeks. She assumed that not only would you know how to pronounce all the names found in antiquity, you would study Greek and read the fellows in the original. She assumed that if you traveled at all, you’d travel there, to Greece. And be on a first name basis with the vases and the columns and the poets and the philosophers. She said the word “Acropolis” quite a bit in her everyday speech.

Well, I’m sorry, I never did any of that. In fact as a rebellious teenager I was real happy to find the poem by e.e. cummings that begins, “(ponder, darling, these busted statues! of yon motheaten forum be aware! notice what hath remained/ – the stone cringes! clinging to the stone, how obsolete….”

But as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I must admit that time and again I do stumble upon the precepts of the Greeks – four that I’ll mention this morning. And by now they are close to my heart, and maybe yours too.

The Greeks cared about intellectual knowledge. In our culture just now, and even within Unitarian Universalism, you don’t hear much about the value of cold, hard knowledge. Because we have short-changed other categories in the recent past, categories like ritual, emotional connection, spirituality, mythology – and because we want to give those areas the attention they deserve, we have sometimes left the life of the mind behind. I would hate to see us lose sight of the value of “thinking.”

Socrates believed that if you couldn’t define something with absolute clarity, then you didn’t really know what it was and you didn’t know what you were talking about. He used to say that you can’t make a shoe without knowing what a shoe is. (The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone, pp. 68-72) He cared about definition; he cared about truth, and he asked questions and struggled intellectually until he got as close as he could to an answer. Because I don’t want to forget the intellect, I don’t want to forget the Greeks.

A second aspect of ancient Greek culture that has made all the difference for Unitarian Universalists and a few other Protestant branches is the concept of democracy. The citizens of Athens themselves were the sovereign authority, just as in this church you, the members, are the final authority. In Athens, citizens gathered in an Assembly every eight or nine days, and they maintained an almost day-to-day control over their local government. As a congregation, members here gather twice a year as a pure democracy for our annual meeting, and as Unitarian Universalists continentally, we gather annually in June, as a denominational exercise in democracy. We have the Greeks to thank for the lack of authoritarianism in our religion.

For the Greeks, the fact of this new democratic form of government meant that a third aspect of society developed, and that was essentially a liberal arts education. Citizens needed to be educated in order to participate in their democracy: they needed to know how to think, to persuade, and to speak well in public, when up until then what the average man needed was physical strength and technical skills. The notion of wholeness, of a well-balanced and well-rounded education was born: in Athens it was said that a well-educated man was one who could play the flute, but not too well (The Greek Realities, Finley Hooper, p.1 79).

Now I don’t want to leave you with the impression that with their fancy liberal arts education the Greeks were necessarily stuffy – these three poems will put your mind at rest I’m sure. The first, entitled “Winter Scene”:

Zeus rains upon us, and from the sky comes down enormous winter. Rivers have turned to ice…
Dash down the winter. Throw a log on the fire
and mix the flattering wine (do not water it
too much) and bind on round our foreheads
soft ceremonial wreaths of spun fleece.
We must not let our spirits give way to grief.
By being sorry we get no further on,
my Bukchis. Best of all defenses
is to mix plenty of wine, and drink it.

(Alcaeus of Mytilene, Greek Lyrics, R. Lattimore, p. 44)

And another:

Keep traveling, you swine, the whole way toward Smyrna.
Go through the Lydian land, past the tomb of Alyattes,…
big chief and point your paunch against the sun’s setting.

(Hipponax of Ephesos, in Lattimore, p. 13)

(That’s it.) The next…

Hold my jacket, somebody, while I hit Boupalos in the eye.
I can hit with both hands, and I never miss punches.

Finally, what I like about the ancient Greeks, the oldest European Dead White Males, is that they were such radicals. I know that these days they are cast as the old-fashioned conservatives to be left behind, but the fact is, what they stand for is revolutionary, especially when applied to religion. They asked questions. And they questioned their religion. And as soon as that process began, the established order of Greek gods and religious ritual began to collapse. Protagorus, for example said, “About the gods I cannot know, whether they exist or not, nor what kind of beings they might be; there are many obstacles to knowledge, both the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of our lives” (Finley, p. 216). I like a little irreverence and skepticism in a culture.

At the local Unitarian Universalist ministers meeting on Wednesday I was talking with a colleague about the question of the ancient Greeks. I said, “When I was a kid, we always learned that we came from the Greeks and the Jews and the Christians – where did the Greeks go?” He said, “You know, when I was in theological school in the Sixties, we had to take a course on our Christian, Jewish, and Greek heritage. Where did the Greeks go?” Later, I checked the hymnbook for reading and hymn possibilities, and while there are entries for Buddhists, and Goddesses, and Hiroshima Day, and Kwanzaa, and Martin Luther King Day and Native American Spirituality and Pagans and Rosh Hashanah and the solstice, I had to wonder, “Where did the Greeks go?”

So here we are, in December, the month most designated for song and candles and story and glory and tears in the face of darkness and joy in the glimmers of light. We will celebrate it all: Hanukkah, the solstice, Christmas. But this year let us begin with the oldest of the dead white males, that all of us, whoever we are, whatever we look like, can celebrate their radical nature, their sheer brain power, and the best of their human spirit. May the holiday season begin.

Hymn

No. 102 “We The Heirs of Many Ages”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Closing Words

No. 709, “Be doers of the word”
from Singing the Living Tradition

Questions for Discussion

by Amy L. Fisher

1. What is Rzepka’s position on “dead white males”? On Socrates? Do you think her position would be different if she were not white?
2. Who are some other “dead white males”? Do agree with Rzepka that we should reclaim them? Is the tradition of Socrates worth perpetuating? What other “dead white male” traditions are worth keeping?
3. Do you agree that the Greeks have gone? What are some of the traditions which keep them alive? If any?