Books read in 2012

Comment

Each year for the last four years I have kept a running tally of the books that I have read. The list has been a useful tool for understanding my own reading habits and interests. I have noticed that I tend to read little serious fiction. In contrast, the non-fiction that I read tends to be quite heavy. Poetry and plays come and go while graphic novels are a relative constant.

If a book is on the list that means that I read each and every page in it. Usually, I read parts of another dozen or so books. This year that number was probably closer to three dozen. There were lots of books for courses and papers that I read part but not all of. None of them are on this list.

The best book I read this year was probably James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” It is one of my favorite all time books and this was my second time reading it. I suspect that I will return to it again. Usually there is a clear worst book on the list. This year I am not so certain. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “The Minister’s Wooing” and Du Bois’s “John Brown” are both clunkers but both also have their merit. Du Bois’s “Dark Princess” is a crappy novel but it has some interesting political ideas and utility for understanding the mid-career Du Bois. So maybe I should be grateful that last year I didn’t read, all the way through, any truly bad books.

The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson
Jazz, Toni Morrison
On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Sardine in Outer Space Vol. 1, Emmanuel Guibert and Joann Sfar
Martin Luther King, the Inconvenient Hero, Vincent Harding
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Next, Stieg Larsson
The Prophethood of All Believers, James Luther Adams, edited by George K. Beach
Tribal Church; Ministering to the Missing Generation, Carol Howard Merritt
The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
Queen & Country Declassified, Greg Rucka
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
No Name in the Street, James Baldwin
Tyree Guyton: Come Unto Me, Keith Romaine (editor)
Sardine in Outer Space Vol. 3, Emmanuel Guibert and Joann Sfar
Sardine in Outer Space Vol. 2, Emmanuel Guibert and Joann Sfar
The Lives of Margaret Fuller, John Matteson
Saying Goodbye; A Time of Growth for Congregations and Pastors, Edited by Edward A White
Running Through the Thistles; terminating a ministerial relationship with a parish, Roy Oswald
The Importance of Being Seven, Alexander McCall Smith
House of Mystery Vol. 1; Room and Boredom, Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturgis
Freak Angels Vol. 4, Warren Ellis
Freak Angels Vol. 5, Warren Ellis
Emerson; The Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson, Jr.
Luke
Sardine in Outer Space Vol. 6, Emmanuel Guibert
Acts
Walking, Henry David Thoreau
Patterns of Preaching; A Sermon Sampler, Ronald J. Allen
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Matsuo Basho, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa
Bertie Plays the Blues, Alexander McCall Smith
Little Vampire, Joann Sfar
The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
The Devil Finds Works, James Baldwin
The Green Knight, Iris Murdoch
Why I Write, George Orwell
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
My Friend Dahmer, Derf Backderf
Sandman: the Dream Hunters, Neil Gaiman (adapted by P. Craig Russell)
Native America, Discovered and Conquered; Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny, Robert J. Miller
Henry Thoreau; A Life of the Mind, Robert Richardson, Jr.
Chantrelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares; The Love, Lore, and Mystique of Mushrooms, Greg Marley
Rumpole for the Defence, John Mortimer
Rumpole and the Golden Thread, John Mortimer
Dr. No, Ian Fleming (Audio Book)
Flight, Sherman Alexie (Audio Book)
Neonomicon, Alan Moore
Rumpole’s Last Case, John Mortimer
Thematic Preaching; An Introduction, Jane Rzepka and Ken Sawyer
Rumpole of the Bailey, John Mortimer
The Trials of Rumpole, John Mortimer
Rumpole’s Return, John Mortimer
The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, W.E.B. Du Bois
Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison
The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, Carol Karlsen
Masterless Mistresses; The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834, Emily Clark
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
Great Soul, Joseph Lelyveld
John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois
Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, edited by William L. Andrews
The Minister’s Wooing, Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Gift of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
Letters & Papers from Prison; New Greatly Enlarged Edition, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Martin & Malcolm & America; A Dream or a Nightmare, James Cone
Dark Princess, W.E.B. Du Bois
Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, Anthea Butler
Dusk of Dawn, W.E.B. Du Bois
On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, William Apess, Barry O’Connell (editor)
Hopedale; From Commune to Company Town, 1840—1920, Edward K. Spann
Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, David Wise
The World and Africa, W.E.B. Du Bois
Political Theology, Carl Schmitt
Sunshine on Scotland Street, Alexander McCall Smith
La Reine Margot (Queen Margot), Alexander Dumas

Woman (text from the 19th century socialist Abby H. Price)

Comment

I am in currently finishing up a paper on Abby H. Price, a mid-19th Universalist socialist, anti-slavery and women’s rights activist who was part of the utopian community Hopedale. While digging through the Practical Christian, Hopedale’s newspaper, I found this gem by Price awhile back. I feel inspired to share it this afternoon:

The masculine and feminine characteristics were beautifully blended in Christ, an should they blend in harmonious action in the church. The world needs a varied ministry. Minds are so constituted as to need not merely intellectual instruction, but the strength imparted by an earnest sympathy, born of a like experience. No one can demonstrate by college lore the weight of a mother’s responsibility. No man, not even the kindest father, can fully apprehend the wearisome cares, and the anxious tremblings of a mother’s souls. The scholar can prepare sound and logical discourses. He may talk eloquently about a mother’s responsibility. He can urged upon her the strong motive to faithfulness, and tell her what her children should be in all life’s aspects. She hears the good counsel with more or less of the feeling and thought “You cannot know of what you are talking.” The weakness physical and mental induced by maternity in present organization of society, he cannot fully appreciate. Let then, every relation and each sex have its representative teacher.

from “Woman,” by Abby Price in The Practical Christian, October 23, 1852

Three New Preaching Dates

Comment

I have three new preaching dates. I will be preaching on January 6 at the First Church in Salem, MA, on February 3, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, NH and, on February 8, at the Harvard Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Students at Harvard Divinity School.

Responding to a Sermon

Comment

Yesterday I preached my sermon “Unknown Visions of Love” at the Universalist Church of West Hartford, Connecticut. My experience there has me thinking about the nature of preaching. The sermon is one that I have given on three other occasions. A version of it won this year’s Universalist Heritage Sermon Award. The sermon’s previous reception is such that I am confident that it is both a pretty good sermon and one of my better sermons.

West Hartford has two services on Sunday and about 600 members. I would estimate that there were probably about 100 people present at the first service and 150 at the second. The way the liturgy is structured there doesn’t seem to be a receiving line after the service. The congregation did not wait to disburse until after the postlude. They disbursed during the postlude. I choose to remain seated. When the music ended I got down from the chancel.

After both the services there were a few people waiting to talk to me. The first person who spoke with me after the first service gave me the strongest criticism I have ever received about my preaching. She told, “that stunk” and complained that the sermon did not make any sense. What was worse, in her mind, was that it wasn’t a sermon at all. It was a lecture. It didn’t make her feel. It just made her think. And she didn’t like that at all. She said that if she had been visiting the congregation she would not have come back. Fortunately, she said, she had been a member of the congregation for 27 years and she knew that the regular preachers and the other preachers that the congregation brought were all much better than me.

I did my best to nod sympathetically. I told her that I was sorry she didn’t like my sermon or get what she needed from it. Mostly, I just listened patiently as she went on. In sum her critique lasted almost five minutes.

After the second service someone came up with an opposite and equally strong reaction. An elderly woman, somewhere between her mid-80s and mid-90s, she identified herself as “Conrad Wright’s sister-in-law.”* She told me that my sermon was “the best sermon I have heard in four or five years.” And asked if she could have a copy to send to Conrad Wright’s son.

What am I to make of these polar opposites? Mostly, they seem a reminder that the most important elements of preaching rarely have to do with the preacher. How a sermon is received, what someone gets out of it, has more to do with the listener than the preacher. Two people heard essentially the same sermon. Two people had opposite reactions. One was inspired. The other was alienated.

An additionally lesson is that no minister can minister to all people. We reach who can. We have to know that no matter who are reaching there are people we cannot reach.

There is also a question here about the difficulty of evaluating the success of a sermon. The different reactions I got suggest that there are probably not objective criteria with which to evaluate a sermon. Perhaps, though, it is possible to evaluate a sermon by the sum of people’s subjective responses to it. I would argue that “Unknown Visions of Love” is a successful sermon because I have repeatedly received positive feedback about it. I might also argue that it is successful because it managed to provoke strong reactions. The goal of every sermon is not necessarily to have people like the sermon. Sometimes the goal of a sermon can be to stir them up and provoke them.

I also think I learned a little more about the difference between pulpit supply and being a settled minister. If I had been the settled minister of the congregation I would tried to make pastoral care appointments with both women. For a parish minister preaching and worship extend past the liturgical act of Sunday morning and into the ongoing dynamic of minister and parishioner.

I imagine that I will continue to think about Sunday’s experience for sometime to come. Within it is the seed of another sermon is waiting.

*Conrad Wright was one of the most important Unitarian theologians of the second half of the twentieth century. His work, particularly his collection of essays “Walking Together,” has been a major influence on how I think about Unitarian Universalism, worship and religious community.

The Infinite and the Finite

Comment

as preached at Goddard Chapel, Tufts University, Protestant Student Worship, November 18, 2012

Several years ago, when I lived in Southern California, I went to visit my great aunt Dorothy. Along the way I managed to get lost in Rancho Palos Verdes, a small town perched in the verdant mountains on the edge of the ocean. I zigged when I should have zagged and found myself driving along the coast. It was there that I saw a sign: “Whale Watching Site, Next Right.” I had never seen whales before. So I pulled over, parked and walked to the cliff’s edge.

And there they were, in the distance, tiny black specks cresting above the waves. I was so excited about seeing the whales that it took me a moment to notice an older man next to me. He was quiet and like me distracted by the whales. After a few moments of shared silence he started to talk. He told me about whales, their migratory patterns and the sixty some years of his life along the coast.

It was a strange moment. We were both caught in the glory of the ocean, its bounty and the wonder that is nature. And then, after the whales had moved on, we parted company without exchanging names.

The best moments of life are often like that interchange. They are moments of wonder in front of those things greater than ourselves–oceans, stars, the twin mysteries of birth and death–shared with loved ones and strangers. We never quite know what they will consist of–a conversation in the grocery store, a hike along a trail, a hand held in the hospital–or when they will happen. But when such moments come they leave us altered, our views of the world changed from what they were before.

Such experiences often leave me aware of my reality as a finite creature in a limitless universe. The ocean that I gazed upon, the mountain that I sat on, the sky that was filled with undulating clouds above me, are all more vast and more ancient than I. The spans of time they encapsulate–the ocean’s billion years, the mountains millions–are beyond even the wildest reckoning of my mind’s calculations. Such large numbers of years at first mean a lot, then even more than a lot and finally they are but symbols for lengths of time longer than I can comprehend.

It is the human task to make meaning from all of this mess, this richness. We are infinitesimal specks cursed and blessed with an awareness of limited our place in the cosmos. So much happened before we were born. So much will happen after we die. During our brief spans we glimpse but a fragment of what is. As the great American essayist and Unitarian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, “We wake and we find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us which we seem to have ascended, there are stairs above us… which go out of sight.”

The contemporary folksinger Ani Difranco puts it slightly differently in one of her early songs, “i was a long time coming / i’ll be a long time gone,” she sings. After this stark observation, Difranco’s verse continues with another, “you’ve got your whole life to do something / and that’s not very long.”

The questions become: What, precisely, are we to do? If we are to make meaning, what meaning are we to make? How shall we live? What is our place in the world? These are major religious questions. They are asked upon the brink of the void, when we become aware of our limited place in the great order of things. We gaze into the heart of life and see it measured, as T. S. Eliot would have it, in coffee spoons–filled with trivia, slipping away even it as comes.

There are, broadly speaking, three tacks to be taken when searching for the answers to religious questions. The first tack is to embrace some overarching meta-narrative. The second is to find meta-narratives as insufficient and retreat into either nihilism or hedonism. The third is to seek a mid-point between the other two, rejecting the validity of meta-narratives while, at the same time, acknowledging the importance and power of the narrative in life. Let’s briefly consider the efficacy of each tack.

A meta-narrative is a grand narrative that describes the structure, purpose and content of reality. Such narratives provide answers when answers are hard to find. They help the individual to understand their place in the world. The meta-narrative provides it adherents an overarching story and a role to play in that overarching story.

A common meta-narrative in our society, and one what that is familiar to most of us, is found in the basic outlines of orthodox Christian theology. God created the world. God created humanity. Humanity turned away from God and fell into sin. God then sent Jesus, his son, to redeem humanity from sin. Through his crucifixion and resurrection Jesus triumphed over both sin and death, the fruit of sin. By accepting Jesus salvation eternal life can be obtained.

The convenient thing about such a meta-narrative is that it provides all of the answers that one could seek in life. The structure, the purpose and the content of reality are all neatly defined. There is no need to look elsewhere. In moments of doubt assurance can be found by referring back to the meta-narrative.

For most of human history meta-narratives have held sway. They are present in all of the great religions of the world and have ordered most of the world’s societies. In the 19th century the scientific discoveries of Charles Darwin and others began to call into question the traditional meta-narrative. The theory of evolution and the geological sciences challenged the idea that God created the world. More recently post-modernist philosophers have rejected meta-narratives as unsatisfactory because they oversimplify life and make claims of universal truth that, upon closer examination, are only the truths of particular communities.

This realization has left some to conclude that life has no meaning. Meta-narratives are found to be unsatisfactory but replaced with nothing. This can lead to our second tack, a sort of nihilism where people either give their lives over to hedonism, seeking pleasure, for example, in consumer goods, or despair. Gazing at the night sky, with its innumerable stars, they feel impossibly small and inadequate.

The third tack that people take when confronted with the reality of finite existence is to seek to make their own meaning. Meta-narratives may be acknowledged to be insufficient but narratives do not need to be. The meaning of life comes from what we either construct individually or construct together.

The essayist Loren Eisley writes eloquently about this in his well known piece “The Star Thrower.” Eisley’s essay takes place, like my story of the whales, on the ocean’s edge. As he walked the “beaches of Costabel” Eisley contemplated the struggle for life and death as it is to be found in the wake of the ocean’s tide. “Along the strip of wet sand that marks the ebbing and flowing of the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms,” he wrote.

A scientist and advocate for Darwin’s theories, Eisley found life to be a brutal struggle for existence that ended inevitably in death. The great forces of nature give life, the ocean nurtures it, but, ultimately, he wrote, “the sea rejects its offspring.” Describing the strength of the waves as they push living matter at the water’s edge onto the sand, Eisley wrote that the animals cast out “cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them… upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels the… bodies of the unprotected.” Tiny creatures, caught by powers greater than themselves are rendered helpless and doomed.

This futile struggle against the brutal onslaught of death is, in Eisley’s view, the natural order of things. There’s no intrinsic meaning to be found here, just the incessant beat of the cresting water.

Amid this background Eisley found another drama playing out, what he called, the “vulturine activity…of the professional shellers.” These are those who scamper the coast line in search of exposed shells and starfish to render into trinkets for tourists. Not content with merely witnessing the death and desolation of the beach’s inhabitants the shellers further it through their commercial activity.

Walking the beach at the precipice of dawn, flashlight in his hand, Eisley encountered someone who rebelled against both these tidal dramas. Instead of preying off the dying, collecting them only to preserve their corpses, this man, who Eisley called “the star thrower” sought to prolong the lives of the living. Night after night he flung starfish back into the briny water, helping them to reach such depths and distances from the shore that they might survive.

To Eisley, the naturalist, such actions made no sense. They ran counter to what he described as the “tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death” that comprises life. After meeting the star thrower Eisley spent a sleepless night contemplating, in his words, “in all its overbearing weight, the universe itself.” The selflessness of the star thrower should not have existed in the natural order of things. And yet it did.

In the curved arcs of the thrown stars Eisley saw meaning being made. Value was placed on the continuation of the lives of the starfish. This value was not intrinsic to the starfish from the naturalist’s perspective. It was created by the star thrower himself. “The act was…an assertion of value arisen from the domain of absolute zero. A little whirlwind of commingling molecules had succeeded in confronting its own universe,” Eisley wrote. No inherent narrative existed. The star thrower and Eisley created one that offered a modicum of meaning, of purpose, the continuation of life for life’s sake against “the insatiable waters of death.” This narrative and these needless acts of compassion left them tinged with joy.

Like many of you, I imagine, I am like Eisley and the star thrower. Confronted with the gaping maw of the infinite I do not seek comfort in an all encompassing cosmic meta-narrative. Instead I look for meaning where I think it can be more honestly found, in the moment to moment, in the experience of connection that occurs when the finite brushes the infinite.

I had a series of such brushes the summer between my first and second years in seminary. As part of my ministerial training I was required to do a ten week internship as a hospital chaplain. I went into the experience terrified. Our society hides death and terminal illness in the corridors of sterilized medical facilities and somnambulant hospice centers. At twenty seven I had never experienced the loss of a close relative or seen a corpse anywhere other than a funeral home. I did not understand how I, with such scant experience, could provide comfort to the dying or solace to the grieving. I was frightened of how I would react when I stood next to someone crossing the threshold between life and death.

For these reasons internships as hospital chaplains are described by some as “boot camp for ministers.” In a few short weeks they force the untested to confront their known and unknown baggage about mortality and suffering.

The tests and confrontations began almost as soon as I started. My internship supervisor believed that one learned by doing and reflecting. Within two days he had me and the other interns–almost all untried seminarians like myself–visiting patients by ourselves. After our visits we would check-in with him and describe our encounters. Consistently he would gently berate us for everything that we did wrong.

My own mistakes often revolved around my efforts at information gathering. Entering a room with the sick or the dying I wanted to know about them. I would ask them a series of questions that provided basic information about who they were. These conversations never really went anywhere. I was more an annoyance than a balm. It was as if the star thrower had stopped to identify the starfish–discern their scientific name and perhaps their place in the ecosystem–without ever throwing them back into the water. Such information gathering might net information but it did not produce a genuine connection.

And that was what I could offer. Not trained as a medical professional, any information that I gathered about person was really irrelevant. My gift to give was merely myself and what I represented as a member of the clergy. A human presence in a hospital room coupled with an invitation to consider the divine or the ultimate, whatever that might mean.

Compared with the care of the nurses and doctors it did not seem like much of a gift. But sometimes it appeared sufficient. With a few words of prayer or meditation or the offer of a hand to hold I would sit with a dying person or a family about to lose a loved one and my presence would bring comfort. It was not the words I offered but the connection that I brought that mattered. On the very edge of death my being there brought a sense to someone that they were not alone.

And, of course, it was not my unique presence that really mattered. It was the presence of another human being to witness suffering and pain that was important. Anyone, not just a minister, can provide connection and grounding in the finite when one’s fellows face the infinite. In its own way, my experience as a intern hospital chaplain was about learning my finite place in an infinite world. There was a particular role I could play, there were things I could do and could not do.

Offering a moment of connection is my way of finding a purpose, constructing a narrative, when confronted with the infinite mysteries of pain and death. Others might find different purposes or construct different narratives. Indeed for society to function it is necessary that, at least in some times and places, they do. It is probably best that medical professionals in a hospital find a different purpose than simply offering connection.

Yet when confronted with the infinite any one of us might offer another the opportunity for connection. There’s a parallel here with my experience on the ocean shore witnessing the whales. That anonymous other, that man whose name I never learned, provided me with a deeper connection to what surrounded me than I would have had on my own. We shared in the wonder that was the whales. In its own way that was enough.

Looking into the infinite we are often made aware of our own finitude. The mortal facts of existence come into contrast against the ordinary veneer of the everyday. We become aware of our own beginnings and endings.

This is why we celebrate during the holiday season. Day by day, the light lessens, the Earth grows cold and the year dies. Then at the darkest moment, on the darkest night, light begins to increase again and the year is reborn. Every solstice marks the death of the old year, the narrowing in on the time of our own oblivion. Yet every solstice also brings with it the promise of new life, a new spring. We are finite but the Earth stretches out infinitely before us. Waiting for us to connect with it, to make meaning, to find some purpose to help order our lives.

And so, when we gaze into the yawning void and are aware of our own limited natures let us be wise enough to hear these words from T.S. Eliot, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.”

Amen.

This Land is Your Land?

Comment

preached at the First Parish of Sudbury, Unitarian Universalist on November 4, 2012

At the heart of my sermon this morning is a theological concept called the Doctrine of Discovery. As this is a term I imagine that many of you are unfamiliar with I want to begin by explaining it. If you can hang with me for a couple of moments I promise we will move quickly away from the didactic.

The General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association passed a responsive resolution this June repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery. The assembly passed the resolution at the request of the organizations we have been working with in Arizona to oppose that state’s racist anti-immigrant laws. When we began to work with them in 2010 we discovered something surprising, they viewed Arizona’s laws as part of a continual process of colonization that stretched back to Christopher Columbus.

Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas prompted European political and religious leaders to develop what indigenous activists refer to as the “Christian Doctrine of Discovery.” This is the belief that because the lands of the Western Hemisphere were without Christians prior to 1492 they were free for the taking upon “discovery.” For indigenous activists in Arizona the issues at stake in the state’s racist laws are as much political as theological.

The history of Christian Doctrine of Discovery can be traced to a series of 15th century papal bulls and treaties between Spain and Portugal. These documents created a theological and legal framework that justified the expropriation and division of indigenous lands by Spain and Portugal.

What is especially upsetting about the doctrine is that the framework it created to facilitate the seizure of indigenous lands continues to form the core of much of federal property law today. This is particularly true as it relates to indigenous property claims. A recently as 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court has cited the doctrine in their decisions.

To aid us in our reflection on the doctrine I offer Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land is Your Land” as a text. You are probably familiar with the song’s first verses:

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

This is, on the surface, a problematic text to take as a starting point for a discussion about the doctrine. Guthrie was a European American. His song almost sounds like a celebration of conquest. It makes no acknowledgement of the original inhabitants of the land that European Americans call the United States and our indigenous brethren call by various names including Abya Yala. The song references California and New York Island but not the tribal nations, be they the Ohlone or the Algonquian, that are the original inhabitants of those lands. It could be argued that Guthrie’s “you and me” unconsciously excludes indigenous peoples and asserts European dominance over indigenous lands and communities.

There are, however, others verses of the text. One towards the end usually gets forgotten. I certainly did not learn it in school:

As I was walking — I saw a sign there
And that sign said — private property
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In thinking about the doctrine I want to suggest that for those of us who are primarily of European descent the task is two-fold. First, we need to move from thinking about the side of the sign with the words “private property” to thinking about the other side. Second, we need to enter into right relationship with the land and her original inhabitants, our indigenous brethren. The first step is about learning to erase the borders that we have created within our minds and understanding how those borders were created. The second step is working to reconcile ourselves to our mother earth and all of her peoples who our ancestors harmed, and who we continue to harm, through the ongoing process of colonialism.

We should not engage in this work out of some sort of pity for the oppressed and marginalized peoples of the world. Instead, we should engage in it with the understanding that all of us, whatever our ethnicity or race are victims of colonialism. The borders that the United States government and our ancestors have inflicted upon the Earth afflict us as well.

I was reminded of this past summer when, with two of my friends, I was detained crossing the border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Our passports were in order, we were not in possession of illegal substances and we are not terrorists. Nonetheless, we were detained.

Now, I do not know how many of you have ever been detained but I can tell you that the experience is not pleasant. The entire process is designed to dehumanize, even if you are a United States citizen and have what one of my friends jokingly refer to as the “complexion connection.”

From the time the border agents ordered us out of our car to the time they gave us back the keys we were treated more like things being processed than human beings. The guards did not smile. The guards did not make conversation. The guards did not use our names. The guards either snapped orders, “You, take everything out of your pockets and go through that door,” or ignored us entirely.

Our detention ended relatively quickly. Within a little less than an hour they were able to set a drug dog on our car, interrogate us briefly about our activities in Canada and Detroit and send us on our way.

Such an experience is mild, almost not worth mentioning, in comparison to the horrors that the United States government inflicts upon so-called undocumented immigrants. We were not separated from our families. We were not deported. We were not directly threatened with violence.

I say directly because the threat of violence was always present. If we had refused to stop our car we probably would have been shot. If we had declined to enter the door when we were told to enter we most likely would have been beaten. The entire system of border creation and enforcement is predicated upon violence. If we do not go along with that system, it does not matter who we are, we will suffer its violence.

The conversation that we Unitarian Universalists have entered into about the Doctrine of Discovery will help us to understand our complicated relationship to the system of borders. Most of us comply with the system for a mixture of reasons: we benefit from it in some way; we cannot imagine another system; or we are afraid of the violence that will be inflicted upon us if we rebel against it.

Unitarian Universalist religious communities like this one can play a role in helping us as individuals and stewards of institutions untangle our complicity with the system of borders. It is my hope that by beginning to untangle our own complicity we can ultimately be part of the process of undermining that system.

The great Unitarian Universalist social ethicist James Luther Adams envisioned our religious communities playing such a role when he suggested a “vocation of the church and of the minister.” That vocation is, in his words, “to reveal the hidden, to point to the hidden realities of human suffering, and also… to point hidden realities that offer release and surcease.”

The Doctrine of Discovery is one of those hidden sources of human suffering that needs to be revealed. It is not something that is mentioned in most school books. I did not learn about it in elementary school, high school, college or seminary. I have heard no mention of it in the mass media. But despite this in remains present within United States case law and, more importantly, within the way most European Americans think about our relationship to the land.

Waking up to the Doctrine of Discovery is like the character Neo taking the red pill in the movie “Matrix.” Maybe you remember the scene. Neo is a hacker on the run from what appears to be black suited government agents. He is rescued by another hacker and taken to a safe house. There he is told that everything he knows about the world is wrong and offered two choices. He can take a blue pill and wake up back in his own home safe, his whole experience of flight and his new knowledge merely a feverish dream. Or he can take a red pill and wake up to true reality. Neo chooses the red pill and discovers that the world he inhabits is an illusion and that human beings are not free, they are an energy source for a society of autonomous intelligent machines.

Waking up to the Doctrine of Discovery is a similarly radical experience. As I have learned about it I have come to understand that it structures the world which I inhabit. Consider the issue of immigration. The whole debate around immigration is predicated upon the belief that the United States government is the legitimate sovereign of a large part of what is now called the North American continent, the Hawaiian islands and an assortment of Atlantic and Pacific territories. This government has demarcated particular borders and then decided who can and cannot cross those borders. It then uses violence and artificial physical barriers, which are a form of violence on the land, to enforce those borders.

Many of the people who the United States government seeks to keep from crossing the borders are descendants of the original inhabitants of the land. To give an example, the state of Arizona is part of the Uto-Aztecan lingual region which stretches from parts of Oregon to Honduras. For thousands of years members of the Uto-Aztecan lingual group moved freely throughout the region. The borders of the United States now prevent that movement. Those borders were established through the Doctrine of Discovery when Europeans claimed that land as their own. The descendants of the original inhabitants of the land are now labeled as immigrants while descendants of European colonizers claim to be its legitimate inhabitants.

The hidden reality that needs to be uncovered about the Doctrine of Discovery and the border system is that they are products of the human imagination. They are not real in the same way that a rock, a river or a human being is real. They were created in human minds and they can be uncreated in human minds. We all, no matter who our ancestors are, can imagine a world where they do not exist.

This is a task for our religious communities, to open up the human imagination to vistas beyond the Doctrine of Discovery. To return to the lesser known verses of Guthrie’s song, it is realize that the sign and the words on the sign are both human creations.

As we engage in this work of re-imagining we Unitarian Universalists can reach out to begin to enter into right relationship with our indigenous brethren. We Unitarian Universalists are the institutional descendants of the original religious institutions of the colonizers of Massachusetts. The Unitarian church in Plymouth started out as the church of the Mayflower pilgrims. Many of our congregations throughout the Boston area, including this one, began as churches of the Puritan colonizers.

I am not sure what right relationship with the indigenous peoples who our religious ancestors forcibly removed from their lands will ultimately look like. I do know that we have begun the process. We took an important step when we passed our Responsive Resolution repudiating the doctrine. Our Unitarian Universalist Association is taking another by advocating for the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples by the United States government. These actions are parts of a conversation with our indigenous brethren about what is necessary for healing the ancient and festering wounds of colonization.

A congregation like this one can attempt to do this by reaching out to the indigenous peoples whose land your inhabit. This may not be easy. It will require self-reflection and wrestling with the ways in which we who are the descendants of the European colonizers have ourselves been colonized by the border system and the Doctrine of Discovery.

Still, it can begin with something as simple as phone call. There are indigenous communities and community centers throughout the continent. Here in Massachusetts there is a state-wide organization, the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness, that represents many of the area’s tribal nations. You can call them up and ask to meet with one of their representatives. If you enter into the relationship with good intentions, and the commitment from our religious association to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery and support indigenous rights, an opportunity to make your relationship right will, perhaps, eventually present itself.

Meanwhile, we Unitarian Universalists can continue to work to rid our imaginations of the imprint of the Doctrine of Discovery and the border system. In doing so we may cease to think people as immigrants but understand that we are all human beings journeying through the same lands together. The land then will not be your land or my land. Instead we will we understand that we are not owners of the land but its children. All of us, no matter what our ancestry is, draw sustenance from the same Earth, are blessed by the same sun, are nurtured by the same air and sustained by the same water. And that truth is more powerful than any border or doctrine. It is what unites us all whether we will it or not.

Amen and Blessed Be!