When I first came to understand Unitarian
Universalism, I thought “What a great religion!” Sometimes I wonder
why more people don’t join. I mean, no matter the specifics of your
belief system, you’re always right!
Say, “I think Jesus is God!” Okay for you.
Or say, “Well, I think Jesus was just a good
teacher!” Sure, no problem.
Even say, “Well, I don’t believe in God!”
All-righty then.
You’re free to find your own truth and
meaning. I mean why is this not the state religion!
But then, I started actually attending a UU
church. Now, I’ve come to realize there’s a flip-side to all that. So
now, no matter what you say, there’s somebody out there who thinks
you’re wrong.
“Wow, it’s a nice day!” “How can you be so
oblivious to all of the oppression and suffering going on in the world
right now!”
“You’re right! We should find the oppressors
and teach them a lesson.” “But we should learn to understand and
respect other people’s points of view! We have to support peace and
harmony!”
“You’re right! We should have a world
summit! We could get everyone across the world to come together and we
could try to resolve our differences.” “What! Don’t you know how many
trees are killed and streams are polluted daily by airplanes and
cars!”
AAAAGGGGHHHHH!!! It can almost send you
running back to those churches that say, “everybody here has to agree
with what we have written down on this piece of paper.” “What ever you
say man!”
But really, I would never leave the
diversity of ideas you find in Unitarian Universalism. I love that we
look for truth wherever we find it and embrace ideas from every corner
of the world. I wish more people could be open to finding the wisdom
that’s out there right now—for the taking.
Lately I have started to see some small
changes. I think some people really are becoming more open to
exploring other cultures and ideas that they’ve never considered
before. And you know who I think had a really big hand in making it
possible—I think it’s partly due to those Meccas of world culture—HGTV
and TLC’s Trading Spaces.
I mean, think about it, thanks to all these
design shows, some people are starting to embrace ideas from so many
world religions that I’m thinking of handing out flyers about
Unitarian Universalism at Target. In fact, you should see my
fundamentalist, Southern Baptist, Pat Robertson-watching mother
explain to me how she creating a meditation garden and arrange her
house using principles of feng shui. I swear to God, she’s talking
more about peace and harmony than your average Buddhist monk.
Who knew?! Who knew that those silly TV
shows could have such an impact in expanding some people’s knowledge
and views of the world. This is a surprising legacy of home
improvement shows. If you don’t believe me, just take a look around at
the items in stores today—it’s amazing what you’ll find. In the
eighties, all you could find were ducks in straw hats, teddy bears
with quilted jackets, and bunny rabbits wearing pinafores. You
remember those don’t you? Now every store has miniature Buddhas, Zen
rock gardens, Tibetan incense, Moroccan screens, African fertility
goddess, you name, they’ve got it.
But joking aside, who can ever predict the
possible outcomes of simply sharing a different perspective with the
world—the ripple effects of small things going out into the larger
world. In fact, everything we do, the ripples of our lives, creates
the waves of the future. Well, we have a different perspective to
share and the question today is what will be the effects of our
lives? [PAUSE]
Today’s service is about Living a Legacy. I
choose the word “legacy” for the title for a specific reason. Although
the dictionary gives a number of meanings [for “legacy,”], I
mean it is as “something bequeathed, left, or established for future
generations,”—the idea is that it is a gift that will benefit, enrich,
and make better the lives of those who receive it.
So the question for today is what legacy
will we leave behind? [PAUSE] There is no doubt, we are leaving a
legacy even now as we sit here this morning. It is not a question of
“IF” we leave a legacy but rather, “WHAT KIND” of legacy we leave. A
quote I found said, “our lives are the books other people read.”
Now that’s daunting!
So what’s the legacy for our children, our
community, our world? Fortunately for us, we don’t start empty-handed.
In our responsive reading this morning we read that “we would hold
fast to all of [the] good we inherit even as we leave behind us the
outworn and the false.” Many of us easily articulate what we have left
behind—the “thou shalt not’s” and the other limitations we put on our
minds, or bodies, or genders, or experiences in the world. But what is
the good that we inherit?
Well, being a UU enables you to inherit a
considerably rich legacy of good—of every kind! I’d like to share a
few examples of the legacy that we have inherited.
We have been given a legacy of strong
moral convictions.
Josephine Shaw Lowell
was a
Progressive Reform leader in the
US in the Nineteenth century. Josephine was born in
Massachusetts into a wealthy New
England family. Her parents were both Unitarian philanthropists and
intellectuals who encouraged their children to study, learn and become
involved in their communities. Her mother considered her “the genius”
of her family. She was quick to learn and learned several languages.
She was influenced by the intellectual discourse in her household and
showed an inclination to help others by the time she was thirteen. She
assisted a poor settlement of Irish families in her neighborhood and
joined with her mother working with the Woman’s Central Relief
Association in NYC packing up useful items to soldiers. She showed an
unusual interest in the affairs of the country & was involved in many
conversations about important ideas never taking a back seat to men.
Josephine married
Charles Lowell, a businessman, in
1863 and followed him to
Virginia. They were very much in
love. However, her husband was called into service during the
Civil War and Josephine helped
sick and wounded men on the battlefield. Unfortunately, Charles died
in battle, less than a year after they were married and only one month
before their daughter was born. Being left a young widow, Josephine
moved to
Staten Island with her daughter,
Carlotta, to live with her parents.
After a respectable period of mourning,
Josephine renewed her efforts to help others, and she never stopped.
One of her first missions was with the Freedman’s Association. She and
a friend traveled to Virginia to establish schools for African
Americans in the South. This was just the beginning of her commitment
to be a force for change in society for justice, freedom, and
upholding moral values. She stayed knee deep in charity work, visiting
poorhouses and reporting on abuses. She rejected personal
extravagances and the society life, choosing instead to be a charity
worker day and night, with only Sunday as her day of reflection.
Josephine was also active in the
Anti-Imperialist League and was a
great advocate of
Philippine independence. She was
committed to social justice and reform and seized the opportunity to
become involved in Progressive reform particularly concerned about the
eradication of poverty. She once said, “If the working people had all
they ought to have, we should not have the paupers and criminals. It
is better to save them before they go under, than to spend your life
fishing them out afterward.”
In 1876, Governor of
New York appointed her to
Commissioner of the New York State Board of Charities. She was the
first woman to ever hold this position. She served in this position
until 1889, using her post to speak out, lobby, legislate, and
advocate for people who were unable to do so themselves. Throughout
her lifetime, she also founded many charitable organizations
including: the New York Charity Organization, the House of Refuge for
Women, the Woman's Municipal League, and the Civil Service Reform
Association of New York State.
Perhaps her most wide-ranging and effective
organization was the New York Consumers' League which strove to
improve the wages and the working conditions of women workers in New
York City. The League was particularly concerned with retail clerks.
Josephine published a "White List" that contained a list of stores
known to treat women workers well. Initially, the list was very short.
But the New York Consumer's League was adopted in many other cities as
chapters opened across the country and the umbrella organization, the
National Consumers League (NCL),
became a powerful lobbying group.
When she died in 1905, the Fountain Terrace
in
Bryant Park, behind the New York
Public Library, was dedicated to her. It was New York City's first
public memorial dedicated to a woman.
Josephine’s life might have turned out more
like other women’s had her husband not been killed in battle during
the Civil War. She was a life-long Unitarian in her religious beliefs.
She preferred their liberal faith and sincere beliefs in humanism. She
hated all forms of bigotry, and worked to right any wrongs. Josephine
became a career woman in the growing field of organized philanthropy
and government service. Her list of affiliations and accomplishments
is lengthy. The highlights of the causes for which she fought during
her lifetime include: improved care for the insane; benefits for
dependent children and widows; improved reformatories; police matrons
for women prisoners; the emancipation of labor; advocacy of settlement
houses; civil service reform; consumer's rights; and anti-imperialism.
All this she did within the established context of society. She
sometimes did become angry with others in society, but she never
stopped trying. In a letter to her sister-in-law in 1883 she wrote,
"Common charity, that is, feeding and clothing people, I am beginning
to look upon as wicked! Not in its intention, of course, but in its
carelessness and its results, which certainly are to destroy people’s
character and make them poorer and poorer. If it could only be drummed
into the rich that what the poor want is fair wages and not little
doles of food, we should not have all this suffering and misery and
vice."
Later in life she spoke out on political
matters and in a speech supporting William Jennings Bryan for
president she revealed her passion for patriotism and morality. She
argued, "When the people of the United States consent to deprive
another people of its rights and liberties, they strike a terrific
blow at the foundations upon which stand their own rights and
liberties." Josephine was opposed to both the Spanish-American and
Philippine-American wars: “We paid a bitter price to free ourselves
from the sin of slavery, and the nation will again pay a bitter price
to free itself from the sin of empire, if, driven by fear of financial
distress or lured by hope of wealth, it now deserts its ancient ideals.”
In this fight she did not prevail, but her ideas certainly made an
impact.
This is our legacy.
But we need not look solely to national
figures to see people of strong moral convictions. The members of our
own church in 1963, a mere decade after forming from 12 members, were
presented with the issue of open membership regardless of race.
Considering the happenings in the early 1960s in Jackson, the decision
would not come without consequences; however, the congregation voted
that they would open membership to persons regardless of race. This
decision was a courageous stand for the moral convictions of our faith
tradition. Later that same year, Rev. Donald A. Thompson came
to UUCJ with the aid of a grant from the UUA where he became involved
in promoting civil rights with the Mississippi Council on Human
Relations. After two years of living his faith, he was shot in the
back by a Klan member for his activities. Although he recovered and
intended to stay on, renewed threats toward his family prompted his to
immediate return to the north.
This too is our legacy.
We have been given a legacy of seeing
possibility where others see limitations.
Lydia Ann Moulton Jenkins
was a leader in the women's rights movement, a Universalist minister,
and later a homeopathic physician. It has been claimed that she was
the first woman to be granted ministerial fellowship in the United
States, and perhaps the first to be ordained with full denominational
authority. The effectiveness of her preaching helped to foster
acceptance of women ministers within the denomination. Her medical
practice and much of her ministry were carried out cooperatively with
her husband, Edmund Samuel Jenkins.
A native of Auburn, New York, Lydia lived in
or near the Finger Lakes region throughout her life. As a child she
was taught traditional Calvinist beliefs, but as a young adult she
read and thought her way to Universalism. She first expressed her
religious faith speaking out for women's rights. Her article,
“Woman-Cival Rights,” published in 1850, in an early feminist journal,
called for women's right to vote. She pointed out that women's
property is taxed without representation, that their existing rights
are only privileges conferred by men, and that the deprivation of
civil rights is an inherent source of evil. Later, speaking before a
women's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she asked, “Is there
any law to prevent women from voting in this state? The constitution
says 'white male citizens' may vote but does not say that white female
citizens may not.” [talk about seeing possibility] At that time,
although not ordained, she was referred to as “Reverend;” evidently
she had already become known for her preaching from Universalist
pulpits.
Jenkins soon came to the attention of
Thomas Whittemore, an outspoken
opponent of women's preaching and editor of the Trumpet and
Universalist Magazine, the most influential Universalist
newspaper. In 1857, having read of her "preaching to good acceptance,"
he wrote in an editorial that "[i]t were better for her to remain at
home and tend to her domestic duties," for "St. Paul very pointedly
condemned the uprising of preaching women."
That Jenkins had indeed preached "to good
acceptance" is obvious from the reports of the many who witnessed it
first hand. A reporter from the Christian Freeman concluded
after one service “that if even the editor of the Trumpet had
been present, his soul would have been moved and all opposition to
female preaching would have departed.”
Jenkins' popularity as a preacher continued
to grow. Her pulpit appearances in New York City received highly
favorable reviews by
Horace Greeley and others. In
1858 she was a principal speaker at the annual session of the New York
State Convention, preaching in a grove "to a great assemblage of
people from all the region round about." The Christian Freeman
reported that Jenkins had received fellowship "as a preacher of the
Gospel" from the Ontario Association of the New York State Convention,
pointing out that "[t]his is the first instance in our denomination,
and we think in the world, where a woman has received a formal license
of Letter of Fellowship as a minister of Christ." Some interpreted
this action as constituting ordination, with full denominational
authority.
Whittemore voiced his strong objection to
this action. Later that year when Jenkins preached in Lowell,
Massachusetts, he took pains to be present. By the time the service
was over, his mind was completely changed. "We supposed that a woman
could not do it, unless she were bold, masculine, and presuming," he
confessed. "We are now sure that a woman can preach, can pray, in the
pulpit, without throwing off her womanly dignity and modesty." Given
Whittemore's influence in the denomination, this change of heart
hastened the day when women could freely enter the Universalist
ministry.
Although there is some conflicting
information as whether Lydia Jenkins or Olympia Brown was the first
woman to be ordained to the Universalist ministry, in 1860 Jenkins and
her husband became co-ministers of the Universalist society in
Clinton, New York. Two years later the couple left Clinton to become
itinerant preachers in New York and New England. In 1866, while
remaining Universalists, they left the ministry to establish a
homeopathic medical institute in Binghamton, New York. In 1874, soon
after a fire destroyed their home and practice, Lydia Jenkins died.
Her tombstone bore the following inscription: "Rev. Lydia A. Jenkins,
M.D., wife of Rev. E. S. Jenkins, died May 7, 1874, in her 50th year.
First woman minister in fellowship with the Universalist denomination
in the United States. Preached 20 years."
This is our legacy.
We at UUCJ have also been blessed with a
woman who did not see the limitations presented. Recognizing a need
for ministry, Joan Jebsen worked with the Mid-South District to
create a chaplaincy program, setting up requirements and oversight.
She served the congregation from 1990 to 1997 as the only UU chaplain
in the U.S. and one of two UU chaplains in North America. In 1995, she
received the “Unsung Unitarian Universalist Award” from the Mid-South
District for her work which inspired and expressed Unitarian
Universalism.
This too is our legacy.
We have been given a legacy of hope
for the future—even when facing a wall of opposition.
Horace Greeley,
a Universalist journalist, reformer, and politician, is best known as
the longtime, innovative publisher and editor of the New York
Tribune. In 1872 he campaigned unsuccessfully for President as a
Liberal Republican and Democrat against incumbent Republican Ulysses
S. Grant.
Horace was born in New Hampshire, the third child of a farmer and
day-laborer. His family moved often, and he was erratically
home-schooled until the age of 14. A voracious reader, he was largely
self-educated. Although he had never heard of Universalism, through
reflection and Bible-reading, he early adopted a
Restorationist theology. "Upon
re-reading that book in the light of my new convictions, I found
therein abundant proof of their correctness," he later wrote. He saw
the scriptures as "so happily blending inexorable punishment for every
offense with unfailing pity and ultimate forgiveness for the chastened
transgressor."
Greeley was introduced to Universalism, first by reading periodicals,
and then by hearing a sermon preached around 1830 in New York. In
1831, soon after coming to New York City, he visited, and quickly
joined,
Thomas Jefferson Sawyer's
Universalist church on Orchard Street. "Horace Greeley was generally
present [at weekly Bible class]," Sawyer recalled, "and entered with
great interest into the discussions to which our lessons gave rise. He
soon distinguished himself by the quickness of his apprehension, the
pertinence of his observations and inquiries, and by the general grasp
of his mind upon every topic that came before us."
After serving as a printer's apprentice, he went to New York City to
seek his fortune as an editor. Three years later, after working as a
printer, he had accumulated enough capital to launch a weekly literary
and news journal, the New Yorker, and the Log Cabin, a
Whig campaign weekly.
In 1841 Greeley founded the New York Tribune, which he edited
and operated the rest of his life. The New Yorker and the
Log Cabin were absorbed into the Tribune and over two
decades circulation rose to more than a quarter of a million with the
Tribune became the most influential newspaper in the country.
To customary news reports, Greeley added editorials and commentary on
social and political issues. He hired some of the best newspaper men
and a few literary luminaries like
Margaret Fuller,
George Ripley, and
Richard Hildreth.
However, Horace's home life was to prove to be comfortless. In 1836
Greeley married a school teacher with whom he shared a passion for
poetry and vegetarian dietary reforms. The Greeleys had seven
children, but only two lived to adulthood. His wife had frequent
nervous ailments and did not care for him as he had hoped. Calling
their country home outside NYC, "Castle Doleful," he slept most nights
in lodgings close to work.
He did develop great friendships over his lifetime though. Margaret
Fuller wrote featured literary reviews and commentary on social
issues, briefly lived with the Greeleys, and later acted as a European
correspondent for the Tribune. He taught her to write rapidly
and tersely; she lectured Horace on woman's rights. He was at first
skeptical about the practicality of gender equality, but eventually,
in part because of Fuller's influence, his opinion began to shift. In
1850, shortly after Fuller's death, he gave the First National Woman's
Rights Convention a moderate endorsement in the Tribune.
Although he thought the women who demanded equality were misguided,
"However unwise or mistaken the demand, it is but the assertion of a
natural right, and as such must be conceded." In 1858 he praised the
preaching of feminist
Lydia Jenkins in the Universalist
pulpit. [Everyone has some area where growth is a challenge.]
In the course of his journalistic career Greeley espoused a wide
variety of liberal causes, including the abolition of slavery and
capital punishment, communitarianism, socialism, improvement of
working conditions, and free-soil homesteading. He was well known as a
writer and in demand as a lecturer. One of his assistants, John
Russell Young, later wrote, "Greeley labored with the world to better
it, to give men moderate wages and wholesome food, and to teach women
to earn their living."
Although he may not have originated the slogan, "Go west, young man,
go west," often attributed to him, he frequently gave that advice in
person and in print. "If any young man is about to commence in the
world," he wrote, "with little in his circumstances to prepossess him
in favor of one section above another, we say to him publicly and
privately, Go to the West; there your capacities are sure to be
appreciated and your industry and energy rewarded."
Greeley became involved in the political arena by promoting candidates
and causes. He helped to organize the Republican Party and campaigned
for Abraham Lincoln. He also ran (unsuccessfully) for the Senate, the
House, and the presidency. Greeley's political and social views
reflected his strongly held religious views. His reforms aimed at
creating a society in which men and women would be less inclined
toward moral transgressions and more inclined toward actions that
"shall ultimately result in universal holiness and consequent
happiness."
Although he was pacifist, Greeley nevertheless came to believe that
the South had to be resisted with force. He applied public pressure on
Lincoln to immediately emancipate the slaves. In an 1862 editorial
addressed to the president, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," he wrote
that he was "sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you
seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of rebels." Lincoln
answered famously, "If I could save the Union without freeing any
slaves, I would do it—if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I
would do it—and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others
alone, I would also do that." When Lincoln finally published the
Emancipation Proclamation—at a time of his own choosing—Greeley
rejoiced: "it is the beginning of the new life of the nation."
During the 1863 New York draft riots, an anti-Greeley mob nearly
succeeded in storming the Tribune building. When weapons were
brought into the building to stave off attack, Greeley exclaimed,
"Take 'em away! I don't want to kill anybody!" Discouraged by the war
and conflicted about the use of deadly force, Greeley made several
attempts to bring about peace. Unfortunately, each effort resulted in
personal embarrassment when the parties with whom he had been
negotiating became known.
Despite earlier wavering, Greeley returned to Universalism in 1861 and
for the rest of his life remained an active Universalist. In 1864 he
preached a sermon in New York and in 1870 served as a delegate to the
General Convention in Gloucester. To celebrate the centennial of John
Murray's arrival in America, Greeley tried to create a Universalist
publishing house. His Universalist beliefs have been characterized as
both Transcendentalist and anti-trinitarian influenced by his friends
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry
David Thoreau. Having recorded his decided beliefs, he added
tolerantly, "I war not upon others' convictions, but rest satisfied
with a simple statement of my own."
Unfortunately Greeley's life came to a sad and bitter end. He was
mercilessly ridiculed during his campaign for the presidency and lost
in a landslide election. He described himself as the "worst beaten man
who ever ran for high office." While he was campaigning, he was
stripped him of his editorial powers and just before the election his
wife died. The combined effect of these disasters led to a complete
physical and mental breakdown and he died soon afterwards.
However, his funeral was attended by many notables, including the
president, vice president, cabinet members, mayor, and three
governors. On that occasion, and ever since, Greeley has been
remembered as his country's greatest newspaper editor, an outstanding
popular educator, and a notable champion of the downtrodden and
dispossessed.
This is our legacy.
We have been given a legacy of drive and
determination to achieve results.
Olympia Brown
(January 5, 1835-October 23, 1926) dedicated her life to opening doors
for women. Among only a handful of women to graduate from college, she
received her BA from Antioch in 1860 and three years later became the
first woman graduate of a regularly established theological school:
St. Lawrence University. She was
ordained a Universalist minister, the first woman to achieve full
ministerial standing recognized by a denomination. As a young
minister, she took an active role in the women's suffrage movement and
was one of the few original suffragists who lived to vote in the 1920
presidential election.
The first of four children, Olympia Brown was born to Vermont
Universalists who had become pioneers in Michigan. Determined to give
his children a good education, her father built a schoolhouse on his
farm. He and Olympia rode from house to house to enlist their
neighbors' donations toward hiring a teacher. The Brown children later
attended school in the nearby town of Schoolcraft. Olympia was
determined to go to college and persuaded her father to allow her and
a younger sister to enter Mary Lyons's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
in Massachusetts. After an unhappy year in the rigidly Calvinistic
atmosphere there, Olympia went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs,
Ohio, where
Horace Mann was president. Her
experience there was so positive that her family moved to Yellow
Springs for all four children to get a good education.
While at Antioch, Olympia heard Antoinette Brown (no relation) preach.
“It was the first time I had heard a woman preach,” she
remembered, “and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as
though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.” Her next step was
theological school, even though theological schools at that time did
not welcome women.
“The ministry was the first objective of her life,” wrote
Gwendolen Brown Willis, “since in her youthful enthusiasm she
believed that freedom of religious thought and a liberal church would
supply the groundwork for all other freedoms. Her difficulties and
disillusionments in this field were numerous. That she could rise
superior to such difficulties and disillusionments was the consequence
of the hopefulness and courage with which she was richly endowed.”
The Unitarian School of Meadville replied to her request for admission
saying that “the trustees thought it would be too great an
experiment” to admit a woman. Oberlin replied that she could be
admitted but could not participate in public exercises. Finally,
Ebenezer Fisher, President of the
Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University, offered her
admission but added that he “did not think women were called to the
ministry. But I leave that between you and the Great Head of the
Church.” This, Olympia thought, “was exactly where it should be
left. But when I arrived, I was told I had not been expected and that
Mr. Fisher had said I would not come as he had written so
discouragingly to me. I had supposed his discouragement was my
encouragement.”
She entered divinity school in 1861 and completed her course of study
in 1863. She had to convince those opposed to women in the ministry
that they could complete the required course of study as commendably
as she had. Then she had to convince the reluctant ministers to ordain
her and allow her to be called to the parish ministry. Despite
considerable opposition, Brown prevailed in both goals. This
determination characterized her throughout her long and fruitful life.
In 1864 she was called to her first full-time parish ministry in
Massachusetts. At this time Olympia Brown became active in the women's
rights movement, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and other
leaders. In the summer of 1867, at the urging of Lucy Stone and her
husband, Henry Blackwell, she agreed to take on a rigorous campaign in
Kansas to urge passage of a woman suffrage amendment. Her parish
generously gave their minister a four-month leave of absence to
fulfill this commitment.
Although Henry Blackwell assured Brown that he had made all the
arrangements for her campaign, she arrived in Kansas to find that
little if anything had been done in her behalf. She would have to make
her own travel arrangements, find lodgings in each town, advertise her
speaking engagements, secure halls in which to speak and deal with
those determined to disrupt her speeches. Often she had to face down
hostile townspeople who wanted to discredit her and the cause of woman
suffrage. Brown took such obstacles as challenges to be surmounted and
kept her eyes firmly on her goal. In spite of unbearable heat and
brutal winds, she persevered and mounted a spirited campaign,
delivering more than 300 speeches. She was not discouraged when only
one-third of the voting population (all male, of course) approved the
amendment. In spite of the final vote Susan B. Anthony considered
Olympia Brown's work a glorious triumph.
By 1870 Brown was ready for another challenge and accepted a call to a
Universalist Church in Connecticut, “thinking it a larger field of
usefulness.” Even though the church had many members, “some had
lost interest and there had even been an inclination to close the
church.” She also found that unlike her first parish, “they had
no such breadth of vision."
Although her mother and her friends advised her against marriage
because they thought it would interfere with her career as a minister,
she married John Henry Willis in 1873. She “thought that with a
husband so entirely in sympathy with my work, marriage could not
interfere, but rather assist. And so it proved, for I could have
married no better man. He shared in all my undertakings.” As did
Lucy Stone, Olympia Brown kept her maiden name, with Willis's
agreement. It was a most felicitous marriage and they had two
children, a son and a daughter. When her husband died, unexpectedly in
1893, she wrote: “Endless sorrow has fallen upon my heart. He was
one of the truest and best men that ever lived, firm in his religious
convictions, loyal to every right principle, strictly honest and
upright in his life,....with an absolute sincerity of character such
as I have never seen in any other person.”
During her maternity leave for her first child, a faction at the
Bridgeport church started agitating to terminate her ministry calling
in ministers from neighboring churches...promulgating the doctrine, “what
you need here is a good man.” So at the end of 1874, Brown decided
to resign her ministry. She and her husband stayed in Bridgeport for
two more years, during which time her daughter was born. With
characteristic spirit, Olympia recounts “after this tempestuous
time at Bridgeport, I considered where I should go to continue the
work of preaching, to which I had, as I thought, a distinct calling.”
Discovering that a Universalist church in Racine, Wisconsin, was in
need of a minister, she wrote to offer her services. They wrote back
that the parish was in an unfortunate condition, thanks to “a
series of pastors easy-going, unpractical and some even spiritually
unworthy, who had left the church adrift, in debt, hopeless and
doubtful whether any pastor could again rouse them.” This was
precisely the kind of challenge that Olympia welcomed. Of her career
as a parish minister she writes: “Those who may read this will
think it strange that I could only find a field in run-down or
comatose churches, but they must remember that the pulpits of all the
prosperous churches were already occupied by men, and were looked
forward to as the goal of all the young men coming into the ministry
with whom I, at first the only woman preacher in the denomination, had
to compete. All I could do was to take some place that had been
abandoned by others and make something of it, and this I was only too
glad to do.”
Her husband, ever supportive of his wife’s endeavors, went ahead to
find a house and employment. He became one of the owners of The
Racine Times-Call newspaper and worked actively to support his
wife's ministry.
Rejuvenating the Universalist society in Racine was not a task for the
faint of heart, but Brown set about it with her usual competence,
dedication and practical skill. Not only did she breathe new life into
the society, but she also established it as a center of learning and
cultural activities. Bringing famous speakers like Elizabeth Cady
Stanton,
Julia Ward Howe, and Susan B.
Anthony, she added immeasurably to the life of the surrounding
community.
After nine years of rebuilding, she felt that her parish was able to
sustain itself, and she made a momentous decision. At the age of 53
she decided to make a career change. Though she would continue to work
as a part-time minister in smaller Wisconsin congregations, Brown left
full-time ministry to become an activist for women's rights. Because
her new role necessitated a great deal of travel, she was fortunate to
have both a supportive husband and a capable mother at home to help
care for the family.
Olympia Brown was a tireless and effective organizer for suffrage
initiatives at the state and national level, leading the Wisconsin
Suffrage Association for many years and serving as Vice-president of
the National Woman Suffrage Association. Like Matilda Joslyn Gage and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she promoted a broad range of reforms aimed at
women. Believing that education was the key to women's advancement,
she worked tirelessly to have women admitted to colleges and
professional schools.
By the 1890s Brown was convinced that the suffrage movement was
languishing under what she considered lackluster leadership. Little
progress was being made toward a suffrage amendment, the older
suffragists had either died or were being ignored, and in her opinion
the fire seemed to have gone out of the movement. Not until Alice Paul
and Lucy Barnes started the Woman's Party in 1913 did Brown feel
optimistic about the suffrage cause. She welcomed the more
confrontational and street-wise tactics of the Woman's Party and was
elated with their strategy of mounting large vigils and demonstrations
to mobilize support. When she was asked to be a charter member of this
more militant and energetic group, she stated “I belonged to this
party before I was born.”
Brown joined in many of the demonstrations organized by the Woman's
Party. In freezing rain, in bitter cold, in spite of dangerous
confrontations and little police protection from hecklers, the
octogenarian minister from Wisconsin was there. During one memorable
demonstration, protesting Woodrow Wilson's turning his back on the
suffrage amendment, she publicly burned his speeches in front of the
White House. When the suffrage amendment was finally passed in 1919,
Brown was one of the few original suffragists who was still alive to
savor the triumph. She voted in her first presidential election at the
age of 85.
Speaking in the Racine church in the fall of 1920, she said, "the
grandest thing has been the lifting up of the gates and the opening of
the doors to the women of America, giving liberty to twenty-seven
million women, thus opening to them a new and larger life and a higher
ideal." In this sermon, she also testified to the importance in
her life of Universalism, "the faith in which we have lived, for
which we have worked, and which has bound us together as a church. . .
. Dear Friends, stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it.
There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal
to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideal, which
has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for the noble duty and
made the world beautiful for you."
The church Brown helped to vitalize in Racine was re-named the Olympia
Brown Unitarian Universalist Church and in 1975 a group of
parishioners mounted a successful campaign to have an elementary
school in Racine named in her honor. Nothing would have made this
proponent of education, especially for women, prouder. To honor the
centennial of her ordination in 1963, the Theological School at St.
Lawrence University unveiled a plaque which reads in part: Preacher
of Universalism, Pioneer and Champion of Women's Citizenship Rights,
Forerunner of the New Era, The flame of her spirit still burns today.
This is our legacy.
We have also hosted advocates for education. In 1965, through the
efforts of Florence Newman, one of our founding members, the
church participated in one of the most successful and important public
welfare initiatives—helping to establish a Head Start program in
Mississippi. Not only was the program part of the introduction of Head
Start to the state, but it was also the first racially integrated
program in the state. The program was housed at the church facilities
which were located on Lynch and Ellis. After our church moved to our
present location and purchased the adjoining property, the members
honored Florence Newman along with her husband for their support of
children by naming our religious education building after them—the
Newman building where children still meet today to learn about the
principles of Unitarian Universalism.
This is also our legacy.
We have been given a legacy of
generosity of spirit that enabled the building up of our world.
Anna Shaw Curtis
was born into a family of wealth and privilege. Her father was a
Unitarian businessman turned philosopher and philanthropist. Although
he was born rich, he used his money to benefit mankind and his own
family. Her parents were devoted to their children and their influence
on Anna continued throughout her life. They traveled abroad for five
years and instilled in their children love, attention, religious
tolerance, and culture. In 1855 the family settled in Staten Island
due to Mrs. Shaw’s needed medical attention. Anna was married at the
age of 20 to George William Curtis in 1856. George was an
intellectual, an orator, an author, and their marriage was considered
to be a splendid match. Curtis was very much in love with Anna. He
said, “she is thoroughly feminine yet conscious of social evils and
eager to remedy them....thoroughly domestic, yet intelligent and
widely read and able to charm the distinguished visitors.” [How
quaint!]
Early in their marriage, Anna's father made George a loan, and for the
next ten years George traveled far and wide and lectured frequently to
reduce his business debt to his father-in-law. Anna and George lived
with her parents after they were married and eventually they settled
near them in a big house where they lived there for the rest of their
lives. Anna Curtis helped her famous husband by typing all of his
essays and articles, talking over difficult situations frankly and
honestly, and showing clear judgment. She was not a social butterfly
and avoided public functions. But she took full charge of their home,
stables, and grounds with very little assistance from her busy
husband. According to her husband's biographer, Anna loved her own
extended family above all. Her children -- Frank, Sally, and Elizabeth
-- kept her busy especially Sally, her middle child, who was
classified as "slow." Anna was very attentive to her needs. She spent
much of her adult life devoted to raising her children and helping
those in her immediate neighborhood who were in need.
George Curtis was a spokesman for women's rights. On the tenth
anniversary of the Declaration of Sentiments he said, "Good wifehood
does not consist exclusively of skillful baking and boiling, neat
darning and patching but in intellectual and public interests as well.
The higher the estimate of women, the better the civilization...in a
truly civilized society she should be given the right to vote and the
opportunity for higher education." He must have had his wife in mind,
and she met his definition of womanhood her entire life.
During the Civil War, Anna and her sisters and mother spearheaded
local efforts to help the war effort. Although her whole family was
abolitionist, there is no record of her ideas or actions in this
regard. There is mention, however, of her knitting socks and sewing
garments to be sent to the front. The Underground Railroad was in use
during this time to help runaway slaves, and it is believed that the
Curtises and the Shaws were very involved in this effort. George
Curtis was targeted by Southern sympathizers and during the draft
riots in NYC during 1863, Anna and her three children left Staten
Island to stay with her grandparents in Massachusetts.
After the war -- and the deaths of her brother, Robert Gould Shaw, and
her brother-in-law, Charles Russell Lowell -- Anna and her immediate
family spent long summers in Massachusetts where her children thrived.
Frank entered Harvard and became a medical doctor. Elizabeth Curtis
was well educated, musical, and eventually grew up to found the
Political Equality Club for Women, which evolved into the League of
Women Voters.
After George Curtis died in 1892, Anna became even more active in her
church, taking on leadership and administrative assignments. She
served as President of the Board of Trustees for sixteen years and was
still active in the church up until 1923 as an active Board member.
During her tenure she undertook many substantial and important
projects. She instigated the building of a parish hall and a
parsonage. She worked closely with several ministers to accomplish
much good. One of the ways in which the small church raised over
$5,000.00 for these projects was to hold a Dickens festival in 1910.
Both buildings are still in use today and are a testament to her
efforts. Anna was a successful daughter, wife, mother, and capable
efficient and selfless church leader. Although she is rarely mentioned
in history books, she gave much to her family, her church, and her
country.
This is our legacy.
We also have a history of ordinary lives punctuated with selfless
giving to build a future for Unitarian Universalism in Mississippi. In
1955, a mere four years after founding, the members of our church
began a building fund to lay the groundwork for a permanent home for
our faith tradition in Jackson. By 1958 a new building was completed
at our original location on Lynch and Ellis Ave. During the late 1960s
the congregation sold the original property and began efforts to
rebuild in a new location. They also were undertaking efforts to hire
a minister. Eventually the buildings we currently reside in were built
and dedicated in 1973 in this location to reflect our desire to serve
both suburban and urban populations.
This too is our legacy.
We have been given a legacy of
self-examination and envisioning new roles in the world.
James Luther Adams
(November 12, 1901-July 26, 1994) was a Unitarian parish minister,
social activist, journal editor, distinguished scholar, prolific
author, and divinity school professor for more than forty years. Adams
decisively shaped the minds of hundreds of students in preparation for
the liberal ministry, and other scholarly professions as well. Adams
was the most influential theologian among American Unitarian
Universalists of the 20th century, and one of the finest 20th-century
American liberal Christian theologians generally.
Adams's path to Unitarianism was similar to
that of many members of Unitarian Universalist congregations. He grew
up in a fundamentalist Christian family in eastern Washington. At home
and at church, the Day of Judgment heralding the end of time was
constantly held up as a real possibility, perhaps coming very soon. As
a college student, Adams was, "on the rebound from fundamentalism." He
railed against organized religion and briefly embraced an atheism.
Eventually, however, he began to attending the Unitarian church, and
was soon listening to the preaching of the Rev.
John Dietrich, a leading
proponent of a scientific yet religious humanism. One of his
professors, also a Unitarian, saw that Adams's outbursts against
religion came from a passionately religious impulse. So, in a career
counseling session, Rarig calmly told Adams, much to his
consternation, that he would make a good minister. The "raving
humanist" astonished his friends when, upon completion of his
undergraduate work, he left for Harvard Divinity School to begin
preparation for the Unitarian ministry.
At Harvard, Adams found the divinity school
curriculum stale and lacking adequate intellectual grounds for a
modern faith. Growing up, he had learned firsthand the warping effects
upon institutions and individuals of an ungrounded mysticism, which,
he often said, "begins in mist and ends in schism." Having overcome
these effects, he found an ungrounded confidence in modernism, based
on nothing more substantive than "the spirit of the age," to be
equally unacceptable. Adams would settle for nothing less than a faith
which could be held intellectually accountable.
After serving as a minister of two Unitarian
congregations in Massachusetts, and discovering the freedom of the
pulpit while speaking out about a labor strike at the textile mills
despite the mill's owners, managers, and workers who were members of
the church he moved toward an academic life.
His early experiences strengthened Adams's
conviction that a liberal church can and should make itself a faithful
voice for the voiceless oppressed. He was sharply critical of the
prevailing liberalism which, because of its excessive individualism,
barely noticed and never decisively addressed issues of social
justice. A weak liberal religion bestows a spurious blessing on the
status quo. This point never ceased to be a major theme of his
classes.
In 1935, Adams joined the Unitarian and
Universalist Meadville/ Lombard Theological School in Chicago because
they believed the Unitarian movement urgently needed him to help raise
the intellectual standards of theological education, lest the churches
be unequipped to meet the challenges of the modern world. He accepted
on the condition that he might study for a year in Europe beforehand.
There he watched as the Nazi government of Hitler ruthlessly crushed
any and all dissent as it marshaled forces for its coming march across
the continent. Interrogated by the Gestapo, he narrowly avoided
imprisonment as a result of his engagement with the Underground Church
movement. Using a home movie camera, he filmed Karl Barth, Albert
Schweitzer and others, including those who were involved in
clandestine, church-related resistance groups, as well as pro-Nazi
leaders of the so-called German Christian Church. Adams returned to
the U.S. more convinced than ever that the tendency of religious
liberals to be theologically content with vague slogans and platitudes
about open-mindedness could only render liberal churches irrelevant
and impotent in face of the world's evils, and he stated his
convictions loudly and frequently.
While teaching, he worked vigorously with an independent, grassroots
political organization whose goal was open and honest government. This
work brought him friendship with liberal politicians.
In 1957 Adams went to Harvard Divinity School where he faced an
age-mandated retirement in 1968. He continued to teach at Andover
Newton Theological Seminary and Meadville/Lombard. His essays and
articles focused largely on the theology of social ethics, addressing
an exceedingly broad range of topics, from politics to the grotesque
in the arts, from the significance of angels to AIDS. Especially
notable was his work on the history and theory of voluntary
associations in a democratic culture.
Adams's conception of the meaning and importance of voluntary
associations grew from his understanding of authentically free spirit
in the free church. He described the free church as a body of
believers freely joined in a covenant of loyalty to the holy spirit of
love, intentionally inclusive of dissent, governed by its own members
and fiercely independent from government control, with the reign of
the spirit of love among members to be seen in their voluntary
assumption of responsibility for the just character of their whole
society. He came to see the free church as the root idea of the
Judeo-Christian tradition of which Western civilization is the fruit,
as it is manifest in the deliberate and carefully preserved limitation
of the government's power to control thriving, independent voluntary
associations in a democratic society. He interpreted participation in
voluntary associations, whatever the character of the government, as
the chief means by which beneficial social change has been effected
throughout history, and as key to the meaning of human history. To
Adams, the notion that any group might hold a monopoly on the spirit
of love was preposterous and idolatrous. In the Western world, the
free church provides the historical model for many other voluntary
associations, whose purpose is to maintain high standards or to
promote constructive change. As a theologian, Adams was interested in
voluntary associations because his experience and his studies had
brought him to the belief that through voluntary participation in
groups humanity may respond in all times to "the community-forming
power" of God's love, present in and available to every human heart
and mind.
Paraphrasing Jesus, Adams said, "By their groups ye shall know them."
He also summarized his point in the short piece in your hymnal "I Call
That Church Free." For Adams, the free church has special value only
insofar as it has varied membership (including people of all ages,
social ranks, occupations, various types & levels of ability, degrees
of wealth, etc.,) then the church will address a much broader range of
human concerns than do other more narrow groups.
Adams believed that all organizations embody a theology, implicit in
their assessments of legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. Adams
insisted that the language of the liberal free church must be richly
flexible, not doctrinaire. "People can die," he often said, "from
hardening of the categories." He mourned the confused weakness of
liberal churches whose members will not strive, in the ongoing mutual
dialogue of their church, to examine and explain their own personal,
central, essential loyalties. Said Adams, paraphrasing Socrates,"An
unexamined faith is not worth having."
Busy as he was in his profession and many other associations, Adams
was ever an active participant in his own church and always present at
Sunday services. He was active, too, in the Unitarian Universalist
Association, serving on numerous UUA committees.
Adams was a brilliant teacher, so much so that his classes always drew
students from many faith traditions. Through them, his influence
extends to the many institutions his former students now serve, not a
few with high distinction. He had a capacity to expand the horizons of
his students' minds and fire them with his own enthusiasm for the
life-giving spirit of ideas, especially ideas of freedom and justice.
He was impatient with lifeless abstraction. He wanted to know and be
able to document the dramatic stories of ideas, the situation of their
origin, the struggle for their acceptance, whose interest their
suppression served, and how they worked out in ongoing, daily human
lives. And that is what he required that his students learn and
scrupulously document in their assigned coursework.
In his early days, Adams's criticism of liberal religion rankled his
more established colleagues. He was occasionally told that if he found
so much wrong with the Unitarian church he was welcome to leave the
Unitarian fellowship, but over the years he came to be respected by a
great many Unitarians as a constructive reformer, worth listening to
for the depth and breadth of his concerns.
This too is our legacy.
Now why recount these lives? Are they the
most prominent or best examples? No. But they are some examples of the
people who have come before us, and their lives are instructional
about the ability of people to make extraordinary change armed with a
strong will to do so and in league with a community of support.
We are the inheritors of this legacy and we
are part of the chain that passes it on. But we cannot rest on our
laurels—and even more to the point, we cannot rest on the laurels of
others. We must earn laurels of our own. We must make the future we
long to enter and ensure that our stories will be added to those from
which we have read.
No matter your course of action, you are
leaving a legacy now. That is not a question. There is only question
that remains: Is the legacy we are leaving, the one we want to leave?
I would charge you with the words of Horace Mann, perhaps his most
famous words, he gave to Antioch's graduating class of 1859, two
months before his own death: “Be ashamed to die until you have won
some victory for humanity.” How’s that for encouragement?!
Well I’ve had some interesting conversations
with some of you, and hope to have additional conversations with the
rest of you about that. Not surprisingly we also have a desire to
leave a legacy of strong moral convictions, of seeing the
possibility, of hope for our future, of drive and
determination to achieve, of generosity of spirit that enables
the building up of our world, and of self-examination and
envisioning new roles in the world.
Many of you expressed desire for growth, but not just in the numbers
game of more people and more stuff. I heard voices asking for support
in their personal growth and development –the maturation of their
beliefs and challenges to put them in action. Many of you expressed
some of your moral convictions and wanted ways to live them out
together. I heard many voices lifted by hope, amazed at the
possibility within our own realm, and backed by a drive and
determination to get there. Many of you have expressed your desire for
outreach to others and outreach for others. Thoughts of caring for
those who struggle and are downtrodden are never far from our minds.
However, our actions have often fallen short and I heard that
acknowledged by the group. But this month people expressed renewed
vigor at engaging and affecting those in hardship among us in more
meaningful ways. And I have been inspired by those of you who dug deep
to find the generosity to make the dreams a reality. We are not there
yet. There is still a long arduous journey ahead, but together, I
heard people will to make an investment in their lives in the honor of
this faith tradition, to live out their legacy right now. This year
pages are being added to the history of UUCJ. And decisions will be
made that affect the future of this church, its congregants, their
families, and the community at large.
In Jack Mendelsohn’s book Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age,
which a small group is currently studying, he reminds us that we are
part of a church that is not merely a structure but a center of sanity
and inspiration in a deranged world; it is not merely a place of
private cultivation and retreat, but a temple for revitalizing our
beleaguered values; a place that stands as a symbol of humans aspiring
together, tracking truth together, and demanding social justice
together; a place that has within it the exuberance of play, the
blessings of shared celebration, and a symmetry with life’s rhythms.
And boy do we need that. I know I could not make it week after week,
if I didn’t come here and get filled with love, and care, and
encouragement. And you must know it too, because that was the most
consistently stated comment about UUCJ, the importance of the people,
the community, the relationships formed here. Especially gripping are
the words about how being cast out by their family, rejected for their
non-conformance or unwillingness to ignore their own mind and heart,
people come here and find the family that they lost. They find
acceptance and the ability to face the world for one more week. What a
sacred and special part we have in healing each other and our
community through our stubborn determination to exist.
Here is something I
have never said in front of a large group of people, and not to very
many people in private: I am an atheist. It’s not that I am ashamed of
my beliefs; in fact, I’m really quite comfortable with them. I think
it’s more that I don’t like the word: atheist. Would it be better if I
described myself as a humanist? As a Unitarian Universalist? As a
wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend? A teacher, a student, a
listener, an observer? A reader, a thinker? I think all of those tell
you more about who I am than atheist. The word atheist tells you what
I don’t believe. And there are so many wonderful things that I do
believe in.
I believe an act of
kindness can change the course of someone’s life forever. I believe
walking in the rain can cleanse the spirit. I believe the universe
holds truths we will never know. I believe in the Scientific Method,
alternative medicine, and thinking outside the box. I believe I was
born with more than most people will ever have. I believe it is my
responsibility to make the world a better place.
A few years ago, the
Denton UUF which I was attending did a series on Personal Spiritual
Journeys, where congregants would take turns sharing the paths their
lives had taken. At the time, I declined, worried that I was
overextending myself with work, school, and personal responsibilities.
Now seems a good time to return to this charge. I would like to share
with you my journey, thus far.
I have been told that
the world-view of an atheist must be dim, drab, dark, but nothing
could be further from the truth. I make my own meaning as I go, and
the sun shines just as brightly for me without a chariot pulling it
across the sky. I try my best to keep my eyes wide open and I am eager
to discover new truths that will come my way from philosophy, from
science. From thinkers I will only read about, from neighbors I meet
in line at Wal-mart. From those whose beliefs are different from mine
(I guess that includes just about everybody), from soul mates and
strangers, friends and enemies. I’d like to read to you a brief
passage from the introduction of a Brief History of Time by Stephen
Hawking about the freedom of inquiry that comes from not tying oneself
to organized religion.
We go about our daily
lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little
thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life
possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would
otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we
are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Except for
children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions),
few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where
the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one
day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are
ultimate limits to what humans can know. There are even children, and
I have met some of them, who want to know what a black hole looks
like; what is the smallest piece of matter; why we remember the past
and not the future; now it is, if there was chaos early, that there
is, apparently, order today; and why there is a universe.
In our society it is
still customary for parents and teachers to answer most of these
questions with a shrug, or with an appeal to vaguely recalled
religious precepts. Some are uncomfortable with issues like these,
because they so vividly expose the limitations of human understanding.
But much of philosophy
and science has been driven by such inquiries. An increasing number of
adults are willing to ask questions of this sort, and occasionally
they get some astonishing answers. Equidistant from the atoms and
stars, we are expanding our exploratory horizons to embrace both the
very small and the very large.
I was raised unchurched,
but my earliest memories of religious fanfare were of attending Easter
service with my paternal grandparents. I was about 4, I think. I had
been dressed up in a green dress with white gloves, my hair pinned up
on top of my head. I understood I was to be shown off, to be on my
best behavior. My grandparents were members of a Disciples of Christ
church. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that my
grandparents, both divorcees before they married each other and
produced my father, had both been raised Southern Baptists but were
unwelcome in the Church following the failure of their first
marriages.
Going to church, I
found out, was like going to a play, only you didn’t clap. I asked
why, and Memaw told me that it was because the music was for God, not
for us, but He didn’t mind if we enjoyed it. Later, stuffed with
Easter candy, with chocolate smeared on my new dress, I looked back on
the day feeling special, as if something beautiful had been shared
with me. Sitting in the pews with joyful, friendly people is what I
remember. Sacred space.
Memaw may have been a
regular church-goer, but her personal ideas about religion tended
towards the unorthodox. Sitting in her living room, she could talk for
hours about her hometown up on top of a mountain in Alabama, about her
travels as a military wife, and about her belief that she was an
Indian Princess in a former life. I loved to listen to her talk. And
her stories, though often repeated, taught me as much about life as
any church service.
There were stories
about the winning high school girls’ basketball team, about being
Rosie the Riveter, about riding a donkey at the Officer’s Club. About
sewing lace on the bottom of my father’s shirt tails so he’d tuck them
in. My favorites, though, were about growing up on a farm with her
sisters: Sula, Beuhla, Ula and Brownie. The best was about the day she
wore pants to school. It was cold, she explained. The teacher sent her
home from school, and her father marched her right back and said that
the school was built on his land and if his daughter wanted to wear
pants to school she damn well could. The next day, all the girls on
the basketball team and a few daring stragglers came to school wearing
pants and continued to do so for the rest of the winter. That story
told me a lot about who I wanted to be, and now that I’m a parent, it
tells me what kind of parent I want to be, too.
Growing up in South
Florida in a happily integrated neighborhood is an experience I try
hard not to take for granted. Though not unique, our neighborhood with
black, white, and Hispanic families was not the norm in the 1970’s. I
didn’t know that of course. I just knew that our house was open to any
friend I brought home. We’d spend hours “playing pretend.” Mom made us
elaborate birthday cakes and funny hats to celebrate our
birthdays. One neighbor had a pool, and that’s where I learned to love
the water. Another neighbor would feed us fresh tortillas with butter
while we waited for the school bus. I knew we were all different. And
all the same.
Dinner time was always
filled with laughter and intellectual debates, as far back as I can
remember. I still feel sorry for people who come to the Craig house
for dinner. I think you have to be raised that way in order to keep up
with the conversation. It was with some forethought that I decided to
ask my Dad about religion because I knew the answer was going to be
long, and once Dad hit professor mode, you may be sitting there
playing with the last of the green beans for quite a while.
“What religion are
we?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?”
replied my Dad.
“Well,” I do. I said.
“We’re WASPS.” I
considered this. I had never heard of a WASP. Further explanation was
cut short by my brother announcing that he had learned to drink
chocolate milk with a straw through his nose at lunch that day.
The unexpectedly brief
explanation left me wondering…what am I? It was about this same time,
in fourth grade, that we started learning Greek and Roman mythology. I
loved it. The wonderful stories about Gods and Goddesses with
difficult names caught my imagination. I could imagine living there,
in Greece, with a toga and curls in my hair, worshipping the mighty
Aphrodite. I believe the teacher purposefully tried to slip by us one
little detail that I caught during my own extracurricular
reading: People who lived at the time these stories were told believed
they were true.
“Well no one alive
today believes they are true,” stammered my teacher when I pointed out
her omission in front of the class. “So you mean all those people were
just wrong?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.
I couldn’t believe my
toga-ed alter-ego could be so easily duped. “So all those people, the
people who believed these stories, they’re all in hell now?” Wisely,
my teacher told me I should ask my parents that question. I did of
course, and that’s when my parents’ reluctant agnosticism became
clear. I found this comforting. I had been really worried about all
those Appolonians rotting in hell.
Still, at one point, I
decided I should try being a Christian. I wasn’t particularly worried
about my soul, mind you, but all the other kids were doing it. So, how
is it that you become a Christian? As far as I could tell, all you
have to do is believe just like in Peter Pan. If you believe you can
fly, and you have some pixie dust, you can fly.
But can you choose what
you believe? Can you will yourself to hear angels? I closed my eyes
and concentrated. And I waited for God to speak to me. I got bored
after a while and concentrated on trying to get my clothes to pick
themselves off of the floor and put themselves in the laundry basket
like in Mary Poppins. That didn’t work either. Maybe I just didn’t
have any pixie dust. So I went and played Ms. pac-man instead. And
then I got in trouble for not cleaning my room.
As I got older, I
occasionally attended services with my best friend, Katie, at the
Methodist Church. Sometimes, I actually listened. It was just more
stories, really, only these were from the Bible rather than Ovid. I
would like to tell you I went to church in search of spiritual
enlightenment, not just because I had to go if I wanted to sleep over
at Katie’s on Saturday nights. Actually, there was one other reason.
His name was Shawn
Andre. He had a beautiful name and a beautiful soul and I loved
him. He sang in the choir, and he looked just like George Michael. I
went to youth group meetings to catch a glimpse of his red hair and
green eyes, and we even danced once at the Halloween Ball. He was a
pirate. I was a bunny rabbit. Sadly, our romance never really made it
off the ground. After my freshman year of high school, we moved. I
didn’t keep in touch with Shawn, but I heard that towards the end of
high school he announced that he was gay, and he no longer felt
comfortable attending that church.
High School was a
whirlwind of learning to fit in, and I was lucky enough to find places
where I did fit in. Church was not one of them. I had learned to see
Church as a place where differences were not welcomed, and my ideas
and beliefs were different every day. High School was too small a
place to explore all the possibilities, so when it finally came time
for college, I chose one of the largest Universities in the country.
Here are the most
important things I learned in College: (1) If you need change for
laundry, put a dollar bill in the coke machine and hit coin return;
(2) Olive Garden serves lunch until 4:00, and if you eat plenty of
salad and bread sticks, you can take the entrée home for dinner; and
(3) Anthropology explains everything.
I loved Anthropology
and quickly abandoned journalism, my intended major. Here was my world
view with an entire scientific discipline to back it up. I now had a
framework that explained how millions of people can worship different
deities and all think they’re right. I learned the term “cultural
relativism” which I had always believed in but needed a word for. This
means that things that are perfectly acceptable in one culture may not
be in another culture, and there are no right or wrong values systems,
just cultural conflict. That if you worship Athena, or are divorced,
or gay, you are no better or worse than anyone else. I learned that
groups of people are different biologically, but they are more the
same. That taboos can be explained by environmental and socioeconomic
factors. That the story of the resurrection of Jesus is no more or
less weird than cargo cults or trance states.
I quickly found a group
of friends who would have felt very comfortable at the family dinner
table. My social life became a series of debates, intellectual
challenges, and new ideas. I was asked, for the first time, to define
myself. What did I believe?
Thanks for asking.
I believe the universe
is governed by natural laws.
It’s really that
simple.
I also met my first UU. Christy
had actually been raised a UU and I was impressed by her knowledge of
world religions. She offered to take me one Sunday, and I really meant
to go, but Sunday mornings really didn’t exist for us in college. It
took quite a bit to get me out of bed on a Sunday morning.
One semester, though, I
took a class in Anthropology of Religion. We spent Sunday mornings all
semester attending services at different churches. By far, my favorite
of these was the Methodist AME church. I had never felt so welcomed.
The service was upbeat and joyous. Nobody threatened me with
hell. The children wandered happily up and down the aisles singing
along to the proud gospels. The preacher even introduced me at the end
of the service. But at the last second, he couldn’t come up with my
last name. So he introduced me as Amy Carter. I was mobbed by
hugging. Your father has done so much for our people, they said. I
didn’t have the heart to tell them that my father researched the
history of radio, but I was pretty sure he’d voted for Carter.
Jason and I joined the
UU church in 1999. We went rather nervously to our very first service
at DUUF, not sure what to expect. The sermon that day was called,
“More on Trees,” and was followed by a heated debate about the best
time for planting. They told us to come back even if we didn’t really
like the topic of the day, so we did, and we kept going. I was looking
for a place that my children could learn about religion—all religions,
and a place where I could make friends who were open-minded. I’ve
gotten so much more out of being a UU. I’ve learned to be much more
tolerant of other people’s beliefs, and I’ve learned that my own
beliefs are still growing and changing.
And now, at 37, here in
Mississippi, I am facing new spiritual challenges. I can handle an
intellectual debate about the origins of morality. My grasp of
evolutionary theory is pretty good, so if you want to discuss
Intelligent Design, bring it on. But how do I live my life as part of
an invisible minority? When do I stick up for what I believe in? How
do I choose my battles? How do I exercise my rights? Is enough that I
skip over the Under God part of Pledge of Allegiance? Or should I be
writing angry letters to the paper about how atheists are Americans
too? When the topic for the PTO meeting is on child discipline for
Christian parents conducted by a local minister at my children’s
public school, do I quit the PTO or complain to the same people I’m
going to need on my side the next time one of my kids does something
crazy?
And I’ve had some
personal conflicts in the last year or so with people I like and
admire. Cultural relativism is all fine and dandy, but when people I
love have spiritual beliefs directly in conflict with my own, can I
forgive them? Can they forgive me? Can true friendship survive when
one believes the other is damned to hell? When one believes the other
is misled at best and brainwashed at worst?
And I’m still finding
my place in this community, both in Jackson and the world at large. I
believe deeply that this year’s election affects all of us and every
voice must be heard. I want to make sure that my children and their
friends are free to ask questions about subjects some people may find
uncomfortable and free to have unpopular opinions. I’m thinking about
my global footprint and my lust for long hot showers and
transportation on demand. I’m exploring vegetarianism, knowing the
world will be a better place if I choose to consume fewer animal
products in a society where meat is optional for good health.
There are 2.1 billion
Christians today, 1.3 billion Muslims, 900 million Hindus, 276 million
Buddhists, 23 million Sihks, and 14 million Jews. There is at least
one guy who worships Thor. I met him at a really great party in
college. I had trouble coming up with a number for atheists, but we
rank somewhere below Muslims and above Roman Catholics as far as I can
tell. It would be so terribly conceited of me to stand here and tell
you that we’re the ones who’ve got it right. I can only tell you what
I believe in my heart, what I’ve discovered on my own spiritual
journey. I know I still have a long way to go. Thank God for that.
Isn’t it enough to
see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there
are fairies at the bottom of it too? ---Douglas Adams
