President Obama’s August 31, 2013 speech suggests that his administration wants to attack the Assad regime for two reasons: to protect national security and to deter the future use of chemical weapons, both by the Assad regime and in future conflicts. Is United States military action an effective way to achieve the second of the Obama’s administration’s two stated goals? No, stopping the proliferation of chemical weapons requires a focus on the arms dealers who enable their use.

To prevent the use of chemical weapons, we must know who is responsible for their use. Inspired by the Nuremberg Principles, I suggest that there are three responsible groups: the people who deployed the chemical weapons (the soldiers who pulled the trigger, so to speak); the people who ordered the use of the chemical weapons (rarely members of the first party, in the Syrian case this most likely includes Assad and/or high level members of his loyal military); and the people who manufactured the chemical weapons and/or facilitated their manufacture and deployment. Without any of these groups, the use of chemical weapons is impossible.

The debate will almost certainly focus on the second group, Assad and his military commanders. There will be discussion, and eventually targeting, of the third group, but only in a limited sense. And that limit is a problem. President Obama, his political allies, war hawks and United States military commanders will focus great attention on the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons facilities but they will ignore the arms dealers and Syrian allies who made the construction of these facilities possible. It will only become possible to stop the use of chemical weapons when it becomes impossible for such people to do business.

If the goal is to deter the future use of chemical weapons it is necessary to ask questions like: Where did the Assad regime get the equipment required to manufacture and deploy its chemical weapons? Who trained the technicians who manufactured the weapons? Who profited from the creation and, ultimately, use of the weapons? It is unlikely that the Syrian regime developed its chemical weapons on its own or deployed them unassisted. Russia has been a major supplier of the regime’s weapons since the Cold War and probably supplied the regime the equipment its soliders needed to use chemical weapons. During the 1980s and 1990s German companies, along with Russia, sold Syria the equipment necessary to manufacture chemical weapons. Uncomfortably, after the start of the Syrian Civil War British firms sold the Assad regime the chemical components it needed to build chemical weapons.

The United States government is not in a position, by itself, to stop further arms sales. As a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine suggests, it is likely that elements of the United States government have, at times, encouraged such sales. During the Iran-Iraq War the CIA supported the Hussein regime’s use of chemical weapons, which required the purchase of equipment from Italy.

A military attack by the United States is unlikely to discourage the future sales of the equipment necessary to manufacture or deploy chemical weapons. What a military attack might do is temporarily halt the Syrian regime’s ability to manufacture chemical weapons or disrupt the chain of command necessary for their use. Even that is unlikely. Sarin gas is relatively easy to make and was made, and used, by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 1990s.

What airstrikes will accomplish is the further deaths of civilians. Airstrikes could be the prelude to further involvement by the United States military in Syria. They will emphasize the United States government’s willingness to use unilateral force in pursuit of its policy ends and, in turn, underscore the belief, held by the Assad regime and so many others, that violence is an appropriate way to solve political conflicts.

I do not, however, believe that the United States should do nothing. If President Obama is interested in preventing the future use of chemical weapons his administration, the United States Congress and/or the United Nations could create severe penalties for the companies that provide the materials to manufacture or deploy chemical weapons. Congress could pass a law making it impossible for such companies to do business in the United States. As a first step, President Obama could support the British Parliament’s inquiry into the licensing of firms to sell the Assad regime. Would any of these actions prevent the Assad regime from using chemical weapons again? Nothing, including airstrikes, can prevent that. However, such actions might make it difficult, if not impossible, for any regime, including Assad’s, to manufacture chemical weapons in the future.

I will be preaching at the Unitarian Church of Marlborough and Hudson on September 29th. If you’re in the area I hope you can join me.

I particularly like my prayer from yesterday’s service so I thought I would share it. 

God,
the holy,
the divine,
the spirit of life,
whirling, changing, transmuting dance
of energy and matter,
all that is,
eternal illusion,
whatever it is,
however we name it,
be it the atheist’s balancing equations
or the mystics interrupting visions,
let us be present to it,
let us feel its presence,
now,
this morning,
through our lives
and in our final breaths.

More than twenty years ago, I snuck out of my parents house and went to my first rave in Detroit. The venue was an abandoned school on Woodward. DWynn was spinning and I was hooked as soon as I heard Cajmere’s track “Percolator.” A couple of years later, in the autumn of my freshman year of college, I met up with ed luna and, shortly thereafter, the rest of ele_mental (Titonton Duvante, Todd Sines and Charles Noel). Tonight I am heading to New York City to celebrate twenty years of ele_mental and, by extension, more than twenty years of listening, and dancing, to techno music. 

preached at First Parish in Milton, Unitarian Universalist, July 7, 2013

This past week has been, more than anything, devoted to picking wild black raspberries. There are two large patches of them near my apartment. Each day I spend at least an hour filling a quart sized plastic yogurt container with the dark purple seedy fruit. It is a laborious process. It requires careful attention. I wear long pants and short sleeves. The pants protect my legs and allow me to step into the middle of a bramble. The short sleeves let me maneuver my arms without getting caught by thorns. Unfortunately, short sleeves offer little protection and this morning I am something of a mess of abrasions.
The effort is worthwhile. When else but during wild berry season can I eat, and feed my family, whole greedy fistfuls of delicate fruit? My mother has a delightful raspberry sauce recipe. I have made and frozen as much of it as possible. When winter comes there will be a sweet tart taste of wild summer waiting.

I am not telling you this to make you jealous. I imagine that there are brambles in abundance here in Milton. I realize that picking wild berries is not everyone’s idea of fun. You have to be seriously dedicated to gathering your own food to brave a maze of thorn induced hash marks on your skin. I am talking about picking wild black raspberries because gathering them is an activity that requires absolute presence of mind. There, through that shaded twist of primrose lie four dozen perfect fruits. How to get to them? How to navigate the rose and then the bramble? Where to put my feet? Where to move my arms? How many to pull from the stem? Is this one ripe? Does that one have mold?

Be present to the moment. It is a cliche. But like most cliches it contains more than a kernel of truth. As the neuroscientist, race car driver, particle physicist, rock star and Buddhist Buckaroo Banzai says in the cult movie of the same name, “Wherever you go, there you are.” This present moment is the only one that we have.

As you may know, I am serving as your summer minister for the next month, leading Sunday services and providing pastoral care coverage. During our time together I am going to explore the idea of Unitarian Universalism as a religion of presence. By that I mean, Unitarian Universalism is a religion that calls us to be present to the moment, to each other, to justice and to the holy. Each week the service will be organized around a question relating to one of these four kinds of presence. This week I ask: What does it mean to be present to the moment?
I do not intend to fully answer my questions. Instead, I hope to provoke you to think about them. Religious questions are not easy and in the end we must each find our own answers. What it means for me to be present to the moment will be different than what it means for you for the simply reason that we are different people. This is one of the great claims of Unitarian Universalism, that theological reflection begins with personal experience. Since each of our sets of personal experience are different the theologies that we construct out of them are different as well. How we wrestle with this relativist angel and understand that the truth we find is, at least somewhat, subjective without devolving into moral relativism is something I will attend to later in this sermon series. In the meantime I ask that you suspend whatever disbelief you may have and imagine that it is possible.

To aid in this suspension of disbelief, much of my preaching over the next month will take the form of parables. There are two reasons for this. First, people respond better to stories, and parables are a form of story, than they do to more abstract discourse. Second, I think that theology takes place at three levels. The first level is that of personal experience. We have an experience that we need to make sense of; I am confronted with an abundance of wild black raspberries. The second level is that of the parable, the stories we tell each other, and our selves, about our experiences; I describe to you my berry picking activity. The third level is that which theologians call systematics or dogmatics; I compare my narrative and experience of berry picking with the narratives of others and try to distill some religious truth from the resulting mess.

Parables are often more provocative than the systematic theology that they inspire. Parables can be interrupted variously, systematics have a tendency to appear more fixed. There is a Buddhist story that you may know that I find helpful when thinking through the relationship between experience, parable and systematic theology. Many years ago, in some distant land, a young woman came across a group of monks standing on top of a hill. They were all standing with their arms outstretched and their index fingers pointing at the sky. The moon was crystalline; the stars softly brilliant. The woman stared at the monks’ arms for a long time until one of them finally turned to her and said, “Never mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.”

The sight of the moon was the experience. Whatever words the monks might have shared amongst each other or used in their minds to describe it were parables. The finger is like the refined world of systematic theology. It can only point the way to the moon. It must never be mistaken for the moon itself. Words are symbols, they represent something, rather are something. The further we move toward pure language and away from experience itself the easier it becomes to stray from whatever religious truth we seek. This is undoubtedly why so many religious communities spend so much time arguing over the finer points of theological doctrine.

Parables, of course, are not immune to a diversity of interpretations. But because they are stories about experiences they can point us in a direction that more abstract theology cannot. The theologian Sallie McFague suggests that the “parabolic… possibility… is, not ‘do as I do,’ but ‘see what I am’ and then enter into your own soul and discover your prime direction, your master form, your center and focus.” This is undoubtedly why so much of the world’s great religious literature takes the form of parables. Great religious leaders too have long been fond of parables. Jesus was a master parable maker and the gospels—whether canonical or non-canonical—present his life as a form of parable.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is probably one of the most well known of Jesus’s parables. Here it is as found in the Gospel of Luke: “A man was on his way from Jerusalem down to Jericho when he was set upon by robbers, who stripped and beat him, and went off leaving him half dead. It so happened that a priest was going down by the same road, and when he saw him he went past on the other side. So, too a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him went past on the other side. But a Samaritan who was going that way came upon him, and when he saw him he was moved to pity. He went up and bandaged his wounds, bathing them with oil and wine. Then he lifted him on to his own beast, brought him to an inn, and looked after him. Next day he produced two silver pieces and gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Look after him; and if you spend more, I will repay you on my way back.’”

All of Jesus’s parables, this one included, have been variously interpreted. The author of Luke suggests an interpretation of it by having Jesus tell it in response to the question, “But who is my neighbor?” Whoever wrote Luke closes the parable with another rhetorical question, “Which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Jesus’s questioner answered “The one who showed him kindness.” To which Jesus replied, “Go and do as he did.”

While the parable is clearly about compassion for the stranger, I suggest that it also contains another layer. It challenges us to be present to the pain of the world that surrounds us. The Samaritan is present to the pain of the world. The priest and the Levite both try to avoid. When they see the man lying on the side of the road they cross over to the other side. The Samaritan chooses not to the ignore the pain. Rather than avoiding it he engages with it. To be present to the moment does not mean only be present to the moments of pleasure in our lives. It means to be present to all of it, the pain, the sorrow, the suffering and the joy and delight.

I would be a liar if I said that I always succeed in being present to pain. I follow the example of the priest and the Levite on an almost daily basis. Harvard Square is filled with people asking for money and other forms of assistance. I rarely engage them. It almost always seems inconvenient to do so. I am in a hurry. I have to get to class. I do not want to give someone money. The parable of the Good Samaritan stands as a rebuke to my own behavior. It reminds me that if I want to be present to the moment then I must be present to the suffering of others. And I must learn to be present even at those times when it is inconvenient.

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han is one of the best known contemporary teachers of the practice of being present to the moment. Buddhists in his tradition call the practice mindfulness. Nhat Han encourages us to be mindful not only when confronted with suffering or with joy but when moving through the banal routines of life. He offers this advice about washing dishes: “If while we are washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash to wash the dishes.’ What’s more we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes….If we can’t washes the dishes, chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either.”

Occupying a mid-point between Nhat Han’s dish washing advice and the parable of the Good Samaritan, Louis Gluck’s poem “Celestial Music” is about the challenge of recognizing the ordinary suffering of nature, the truth that death and pain are all around us, and then remaining present to beauty. In her poem neither Gluck nor anyone she cares about suffers. She and her friend “sit by the side of the road” and open themselves to the world that surrounds them. Gluck admits that when faced with “a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it” she is “quick to shut my eyes.” Opening her eyes she is rewarded with “watching the sun set; from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.” Being present brings with it the risk of suffering but it also contains the possibility of “clouds, snow, a white business in the trees like brides leaping to a great height.”

Unitarian Universalism as a religious tradition encourages us not to shut our eyes. For generations our focus has been on this world rather than on whatever may come next. Our Universalist ancestors, as you might recall, believed that everyone in the end would be reconciled with God. This led them to think, as Gordon McKeeman has put it, “We are all going to end up together in heaven, so we might as well start learning to get along now.” For our Unitarian ancestors the emphasis was slightly different. William Ellery Channing claimed that purpose of religion was to help people grow in what he called the “likeness to God.” He believed that each person is born with that likeness within and the goal of life is not to be found in the afterlife. It is to be found in this life when we come to know “the bright image of God” inside us. Channing thought that one way which we discover that bright image is by learning to be present to what surrounds us. As he put beautiful in his famous sermon “Likeness to God:” “How much of God may be seen in the structure of single leaf, which, though so frail as to tremble in every wind, yet holds connections and living communications with the earth, the air, the clouds, and the distant sun, and through these sympathies with the universe, is itself a revelation of an omnipotent mind.”

The this worldly focus of Unitarian Universalism means that one of the most important roles for Unitarian Universalist clergy like myself, and Unitarian Universalist congregations like this one, is to help people be present to this world. This means encouraging people to unplug from the distractions of the digital world, to revel in each other, to savor what the world offers and to be open to suffering. Many times I have been told by non-Unitarian Universalists that we do funerals and memorial services exceptional well. There is a reason for this. Rather than focusing on the deceased’s journey after life we direct our attention to the pain and the loss of the living.

The call to presence and the present moment is not exclusively, or even primarily, about pain. Nor is it about joy. It is rather to recognize that only moment we have is now and that we must make the most of it whatever it is. In that spirit, as we prepare to close, I invite you to think of a time when you were truly present. What was it like? What did it feel like in your body? Is that moment now? Are you recalling some other moment, some distant moment, brought forth into your consciousness through the fog of memory? How do you know when you are alive to the present? Are your senses more alive? Is your mind still? What do you need to do to be present? To pay attention to your breathing? To feel the air come in? To sense it flowing out?

I know that I am present when I concerned with only what is happening now. When I have been picking raspberries I have only been picking raspberries. I have not worried about what comes next, what I will be doing later in the day or even the topic of my sermon for Sunday. Black raspberry brambles have a delightful trick for helping me stay present. When I slip from the present to the haze of the past or illusion of the future I am rewarded with a small laceration that draws me back into the present. It is a helpful reminder that wherever my mind may wish to be there is only the now.

There is only the now. As Gluck writes, “It’s this moment we’re both trying to explain.” All we really have is this moment. May we each learn to be present to it, whatever it brings: black raspberry brambles, dishes, the suffering of strangers, our own pain, the universe’s reflection in a trembling leaf, ecstasy and joy… So may it be, Amen and Blessed Be.

This summer I am leading worship and providing pastoral care for the First Parish in Milton, Unitarian Universalist, for the month of July. In my sermons I will explore Unitarian Universalism as a religion of presence. Over the next four weeks each of the services will touch on a different question. This week I will ask: What does it mean to be present to the moment? Next week: How can we be present to each other? The following week, on July 21, I will ask: How can we be present to justice? And for my last sermon: How are we present to the holy?

Each week in advance of the service I will be posting on my blog, and sending out through the congregation’s e-newsletter, a common meditation that will anchor the service. If you plan to attend I encourage you to read the piece beforehand and take some time to mediate upon it during the week. This week I have selected Louis Gluck’s magnificent poem “Celestial Music” found on-line on poemhunter.com. 

I spent the end of May and the first week of June in Spain walking the Camino de Santiago and then travelling through Catalonia with my wife. I hope to take time to write up some reflections about my trip, particularly my time on the Camino and my visits with the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union the Confederación General del Trabajo, next month. In the meantime, here’s a poem that I wrote while hiking up a mountain outside of the seaside town of Cadaqués.

Cadaqués

The sky is rich
with animal sounds.
Frogs, seabirds cackle.
Is that a locust?
Sun comes.

I am preaching six times this summer. If you are in the area consider stopping by and coming up and saying hi. Here’s my schedule:

June 30, Preaching at First Parish in Concord, MA
July 7, Preaching at First Parish Milton, Unitarian Universalist, in Milton, MA
July 14, Preaching at First Parish Milton, Unitarian Universalist, in Milton, MA
July 21, Preaching at First Parish Milton, Unitarian Universalist, in Milton, MA
July 28, Preaching at First Parish Milton, Unitarian Universalist, in Milton, MA
August 18, Preaching at the First Church in Salem, Unitarian in Salem, MA

The May 2013 Workers Power column, “Expanding Your Congregation of Fellow Workers,” is now on-line. Since I actually wrote it myself, I have included the full text below.

Expanding Your Congregation of Fellow Workers

If you have been active in the IWW for a while, you have probably come across a pamphlet called “Rusty’s Rules of Order”— the pamphlet that serves as a guide to running effective union meetings. It attributes the following pearl of wisdom to Rusty, “an old Wobbly,” who served as a mentor to many younger Wobblies in the 1970s and 1980s: “Always conduct your meeting as if there were 100 people there, to be ready when the time comes when there are 100 people there.”

The IWW’s growth over the last decade has caused me to think a bit more about these words. The union now has more than twice the membership it had 10 years ago. More importantly, the union’s level of labor organizing has increased dramatically. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen pickets and a strike in the Twin Cities, a successful union election in Grand Rapids, Mich., a victory in a struggle for back wages in Portland, Ore., and a wage increase for cleaners in London. What’s more, all of this growth has been matched, or maybe fueled, by the creation of new IWW infrastructure. Since 2000, we have created the Organizer Training Committee and the Organizing Department and revamped the Work People’s College. In addition, the Industrial Worker has become an important place to reflect on organizing theory and methodology.

All of this is great, but it still has me thinking about Rusty’s advice. Why? Because in my time with the union, only rarely have I attended any sort of meeting that was designed for 100 people. Most meetings I have attended are exactly the opposite. They are run like discussion groups between friends. The rules of debate are frequently opaque and difficult for newcomers to follow. New members are seldom instructed on how to participate. Long-time members often dominate the debate.

If the IWW is going to continue to grow, our meetings will not only have to be designed to accommodate 100 people but hopefully 1,000 someday. Maybe that is optimistic thinking. Or maybe it is good planning. The Occupy movement attracted thousands to democratically-run encampments in New York, Oakland and other major cities. I meet more politicized and militant workers in their teens and 20s now than I ever did when I was that age or even in my early 30s. Recent upsurges of organizing by fast food workers and others who have long been considered unorganizable by business unions suggests that the possibility of a revitalized labor movement is on the horizon.

I hope that the IWW will take a major role in this revitalization. In order for that to happen, we will need to think seriously about how we behave organizationally. We will need to ask questions like: What does an IWW branch with 500 members look like? What does one with 2,000 members look like? How are branches of this size different from branches of 10, 20 or even 50 members? How can a branch with 10 members grow from 10 to 50 to 500 members? It might seem strange, but one place I suggest we look to for answers to these questions is the religious community. Organizations like the Alban Institute focus much of their energy on helping congregations address the organizational challenges they face at different sizes and figuring out how to transition between sizes.

There are two things that the institute has observed that might be particularly useful for members of the IWW when thinking about the culture and growth trajectory of branches. First, folks at Alban have noted that different size congregations have different kinds of cultures. Broadly speaking, they have identified five types of size-based congregational cultures: family, pastoral, program, corporate and mega. Each of these cultures has their own characteristics. The description of the family sized one might sound familiar to some Wobs because it “functions like a family, with appropriate family figures… matriarchs and patriarchs [who] control the church’s leadership needs.” While the fit isn’t exact, this might describe many smaller branches where long-time or founding members set much of the agenda and make it difficult for new members to integrate or develop in leadership roles.

The second thing that the people at Alban have observed is that organizational culture is generally stable. Religious communities face developmental tasks if they are going to grow from family to pastoral size for example. Most of these tasks are centered on creating new leaders, increasing programming and developing infrastructure for integrating new members. They are also usually accompanied by conflict. People who had power in the smaller congregation are asked to share it with the new members of the now larger congregation. The details are probably irrelevant for the IWW’s purposes, but the point is crucial: for a branch to grow, intentional changes in culture and infrastructure are almost certainly necessary. And those changes are usually accompanied by conflict. If those intentional changes are not made, or if conflict is avoided, then growth will almost always be temporary, and the organization will revert to its stable, smaller norm.

If we were to apply these observations to the IWW, we could study the different size branches that exist in the union and look at how their cultures differ. We could try to figure out if there were particular patterns of conflict, cultural or organizational change that occurred when branches moved from 10 to 50 or 100 members. And we could begin the process of imagining the kinds of conflict and culture change necessary to grow a branch from 100 to 500 members.

So maybe Rusty’s advice shouldn’t be taken quite so literally. Instead of thinking about how a meeting with 10 people should be run as if it were a meeting with 100 people, maybe we should be thinking about how to grow a branch with 10 people to a branch with 100 people. That might mean we are intentional about how we function within branches of both sizes.

The April 2013 Workers Power column, “Taking Creative Action,” is available on-line here.