Words from Your Minister for December 2017

Dear Friends:

Tomorrow, I am going to spend much of the day in Ashby. In the morning I will be preaching a sermon entitled “Into the Dark of the Night” during the regular service. Then in the afternoon I will be offering the opening prayer for the town’s annual Christmas tree lighting. Asa and I are both excited about the tree lighting and the beef and vegetable stew that follows it.

Later in the month I will be returning for the annual Christmas Eve service. The service will have lots of reading parts. I will assemble the liturgy from a variety of sources: the canonical gospels, gnostic texts, and more contemporary poems. If you plan to attend the service and would like to read one of the texts that I select please get in touch with me. I would love to have your help! I am looking forward to a collaborative service that includes lots of good music from members and friends of the congregation! It should be a special night.

The text for the sermon I preached on November 5th, “Through All the Tumult and the Strife,” is online. On my blog you’ll also find the text of a sermon that I preached at First Parish Cambridge on November 12th called “You and I.” 

As is my practice, I close with some poetry. In this case it is a concluding fragment from Kenneth Rexroth’s magnificent Christmas poem “A Sword in A Cloud of Light:”

I am fifty
And you are five. It would do
No good to say this and it
May do no good to write it.
Believe in Orion. Believe
In the night, the moon, the crowded
Earth. Believe in Christmas and
Birthdays and Easter rabbits.
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out.
Always be true to these things.
They are all there is.

I hope to see you soon!

love,

Colin

Words from Your Minister for November 2017

Dear Friends:

I am looking forward to seeing many of you later this morning for our regular Sunday service. I will be preaching a sermon entitled “Through All the Tumult and the Strife” in which I reflect on what I’ve learned over the course of my ten years as an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. I will be back on November 19th to co-officiate the annual community Thanksgiving service, held in conjunction with our neighbors the Ashby Congregational Church. They’re hosting the service and I am looking forward to celebrating with them.

The texts for the two services I led in October are available online. The October 15th sermon, “Abolition Democracy,” can be found here: http://colinbossen.com/the-latest-form-of-infidelity/14264405/abolition-democracy-ashby The October 29th sermon, “You Say You Want a Revolution” is here: http://colinbossen.com/the-latest-form-of-infidelity/14265421/you-say-you-want-a-revolution Also online are the audio and text for the version of “Abolition Democracy” I preached at Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois.

Last month we also held a congregational goal setting workshop. The Parish Committee and I will be meeting after coffee hour today to discuss. You are welcome to attend. In the meantime, here’s the priorities that people at the workshop set for the balance of the 2017-2018 program year (i.e. through the end of June):

1) Reach out to people on Members and Friends list: ask them to come to church – SOON!
    1a) Look at Ashby UUNews list: ask people if they would like to be on our Members and Friends list: by the END OF DECEMBER
    1b) Schedule Social Events
2) Schedule a Friends Sunday
3) Plan a speaker series for the spring (concert/ movie/ film);
4) Explore using social media for messaging

There were a few other goals that were identified during the workshop that we hope to focus energy on as we can (including completing our Welcoming Congregation work). However, these four will be the main things that I devote my ministerial time to over the next several months. I am excited about them because they are achievable, outward looking, and suggest people in the congregation believe that First Parish Church has something special to share!

I close with a handful of lines from the 8th century Chinese poet Tu Fu, in honor of last night’s full moon:

Isolate and full, the moon
Floats over the house by the river
Into the night the cold water rushes away below the gate.
The bright gold spilled on the river is never still.
The brilliance of my quilt is greater than precious silk.
The circle without blemish.
The empty mountains without sound.
The moon hangs in the vacant, wide constellations.
Pine cones drop in the old garden.
The senna trees bloom.
The same clear glory extends for ten thousands miles.

I hope to see you soon!

love,

Colin

Words from Your Minister for October 2017

Dear Friends:

I return tomorrow to Ashby to lead the first of my two services for the month. “Abolition Democracy” is offered as part of an association-wide teach-in on white supremacy. You can learn more about the teach-in here: https://www.uuteachin.org/ As part of the sermon, I will be talking some about why I think it is important for our congregation to participate. A bit later in the week I will be presenting at Collegium, the scholarly association of Unitarian Universalist theologians, on a similar subject (http://www.uucollegium.org/meeting) and next Sunday I will actually give a different version of the sermon at Oak Park’s Unity Temple, one of the cathedral congregations of our religious tradition (http://unitytemple.org/). 

My second sermon for the month will be on the 29th. I will be reflecting on the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation. After the service there will be a workshop open to all members and friends of the congregation designed us to engage in an exercise of assessment and goal setting for the balance of the program year. The start of our ministry together and the congregation’s and the town’s 250th anniversaries all combine to suggest it is a good time to think about what we want to accomplish as a religious community. I am looking forward to the workshop.

But mostly, tomorrow, I am looking forward to being back with you again. I really enjoyed my first two Sundays in Ashby. You were exceptionally warm and welcoming at my first service. The 250th anniversary ecumenical camp meeting was something special that I will long remember. 

For future reference, the texts of my sermons will usually appear on my web-site the Monday after I preach them. So, if you weren’t able to make it to my first service at the church you can find my sermon from September 17th, “Sometimes You Need a Story to Survive,” at: http://colinbossen.com/the-latest-form-of-infidelity/14262255/sometimes-you-need-story-to-survive Each month, before the first Sunday that I preach, I will also be sending out a note just like this that will include, among other things, links to the prior month’s sermon texts.

I love poetry and I believe that people don’t have enough of it in their lives. I will always close with a few verses either from something I have been reading recently or that pertain to the month’s services. Here are a few lines from Audre Lorde about how we might speak to each other during times of crisis:

I speak to you as a friend speaka
or a true lover
not out of friendship or love
but for a clear meeting
of self upon self
in sight of our hearth
but without fire.

from “Conversation in crisis”

I hope to see you tomorrow!

love,

Colin

First Parish Ashby

I am delighted to announce that I have accepted a postion as the minister of the First Parish Church, Unitarian Universalist, Ashby, Massachusetts. I will be serving the congregation part-time. Most of my work will consist of preaching twice a month. I will also be offering some adult religious education and pastoral care. Here is the email I sent to the congregation to introduce myself:

Dear Members and Friends of First Parish Ashby:

I am delighted to be starting as your part-time minister! I know an email has already gone around sketching out my biography and telling you a bit about me. However, I want to send you all a brief hello to let you know that I excited to meet you on Sunday. I am looking forward to our time together.

I will be leading worship twice a month. In September, I will be in the pulpit on the 17th and participating in the camp meeting on the 24th celebrating Ashby’s 250th anniversary. I have never been to an event quite like what is being planned. I anticipate it is going to be a meaningful and moving experience. In the next few days, I will be reaching out to a few of you about helping with music for the service on the 24th.

In general, I will be answering emails and making phone calls about congregational business on Mondays. This will usually happen in the mornings. I will be available to you throughout the rest of the week but might not be able to get back to you immediately. If it is urgent, it is always better to call or text me than to send an email.

It may interest you that I keep a blog at www.colinbossen.com. The text of my sermons will be available on the Monday following a service. So, if you can’t make it to the service on the 17th, you should be able to read what I said on the 18th. A link to the text will put up on the parish Facebook page. From time-to-time, I may post other things relevant to congregational life on my blog or on the parish web-site. If that happens I will be sure to let you know.

In addition to preaching, I am also going to offering adult religious education and providing some pastoral care. If you would like to meet with me please reach out and we can arrange something. I will be working with the Parish Committee in the next few weeks to develop a plan for both adult religious education and pastoral care.

Since I write on September 11th, and against the back drop of the devastation in Florida, Mexico, and Texas, it seems best that I close on a note that reflects more than just my joy and excitement about our coming time together. I offer you this fragment from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” a poem that captures so much what it means to me to be alive:

Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine

I pray that whatever sorrows, horrors, and challenges the world brings us in the coming months we will all find some beauty and joy in life, both as individuals and as a community.

I hope to see you Sunday!

love,

Colin

PS I apologize for the gendered language in Blake’s poem. The way he wrote and thought in the 18th century doesn’t fully reflect the beloved community we aspire to create in the 21st.

John Morris Has Died (A Remembrance)

Yesterday the New York Times brought news that famed photo editor John Morris died at the age of 100. Morris was the photo editor of the New York Times during the Vietnam War and made the decision to publish two of the most famous images of the war on the newspaper’s front page–the informally titled “Napalm Girl” by Huỳnh Công Út and Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution.” He made sure that these images appeared on the top fold of the paper, which meant they were seen even by people who didn’t build the Times. He was Robert Capa’s photo editor for many years and the founding photo editor for Magnum Photo. You can read the Times’s obituary of John Morris here. They’ve also made a nice video tribute

John was a long time friend of my parents. I believe they met him through their friends Nicole Ewenczyk and Gilles Perrin–my father collaborated on a book with them a few years ago. Last summer, while I was visiting them in Paris, I had the pleasure of attending one of his lectures. John’s talk focused on his century of experience as a photo editor. He spoke about his commitment to pacifism and his belief that photo editing could be a kind of anti-war activism. The selection of images that highlighted the horrors of war, he hoped, could engender empathy for the victims of violence and inspire people to oppose their government’s involvement in international conflicts.

After John’s lecture we all had dinner at the little bistro across the street from his studio. I was seated next to him and we talked about the civil war in Syria. A few years ago I penned a piece for the Huffington Post arguing against military intervention after the Assad government used chemical weapons. I have since had some ambivalence about the question of military intervention and come to support, in principle, the Kurdish anarchist movement, Democratic Union Party. I have never been convicted of absolute pacifism and, as in the case of my longstanding support for the Zapatistas, believe that organized violent resistance to various forms of fascism and totalitarianism can sometimes be the only way to arrest them.

John did not agree. After his experiences in World War II, he felt that violence always beget further violence. Any support of a military movement in Syria, he believed, would only extend the conflict and cause further suffering. I suspect that his position was also tempered by his Quakerism.

Unfortunately, the bistro was too loud for us to converse more in-depth. Nonetheless, it was a memorable experience. It deepened my already deep respect for the photographers, and their editors, who strive to document our world as political and ethical acts. Social documentary photography is an art form and art in all its forms can be a powerful act of resistance to the viciousness of human brutality.

Paper Presentation: Unitarian Universalism and the White Supremacist Theological Imaginary

I will be presenting a paper entitled “Unitarian Universalism and the White Supremacist Theoligical Imaginary” at the 2017 meeting of Collegium. Here’s the text of the accepted paper proposal: 

This exercise in comparative theology will contrast the white supremacist theological imaginary with the theological imaginaries of two Unitarian Universalism’s foundational figures: Hosea Ballou and William Ellery Channing. The paper will begin with an analysis of the white supremacist theological imaginary as crystalized in one of the most explicitly religious and powerful white supremacist organizations in the history of the United States, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. The Klan was vocally Protestant and attracted modest support from some Unitarians and Universalists. The Klan’s founder held Unitarianism in esteem and Klan publications frequently quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson. This suggests a certain resonance between some aspects of Unitarianism and Universalism and individuals within them and the white supremacist theological imaginary.

After summarizing the Klan’s theological anthropology, eschatology, ecclesiology, and understanding of the history and place of the United States in the world, the paper will then turn to examinations of the theological imaginaries of Ballou and Channing to attempt to answer the questions: What was it about liberal theology that appealed to members of the Klan? To what extent should the theological imaginaries of Ballou and Channing be understood as inherently white supremacist?

The paper will conclude with a reflection on the theological imaginaries of figures contemporary to Ballou and Channing who articulated unitarian and universalist theologies but have not been incorporated into the institutional history of Unitarian Universalism. It will argue that while elements of white supremacy can be found within the writings of both Ballou and Channing they are not found in the works of figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Constantin Francois Volney. These figures formed a part of a Trans-Atlantic multiracial revolutionary abolitionist antinomian tradition which included significant numbers of individuals who held universalist and/or unitarian theologies. Incorporating their theological imaginaries into the theological imaginaries of contemporary Unitarian Universalists might prove to be a helpful antidote to whatever aspects of the white supremacist theological imaginary contemporary Unitarian Universalists have inherited from the movement’s foundational figures.