Dear Friends:

I am looking forward to seeing many of you at the seder the congregation is hosting this evening and during the service tomorrow morning. As you might know, I grew up in an interfaith family that celebrated both Jewish and Christian holidays. My parents raised us Unitarian Universalist because they felt Unitarian Universalism offered a community that welcomed both of their religious traditions. When I lived with my parents we observed both Easter and Passover.

I have continued to observe both holidays as an adult and to celebrate them with my children. My theology leans pretty far away from the resurrection narrative or the idea that Jesus was a divine savior. Nonetheless, I find rich meaning in the ways that Easter reminds us love can conquer death. After despair comes the hope of spring.

In my parents’ house, Passover was a time when we lifted up hope for human liberation from oppression. Some years we had a fairly traditional seder. Other times, we used a Haggadah from the civil rights movement that related the Passover story to the long struggle for justice. In both cases, we remembered what previous generations had undergone. We also paused to reflect upon all of the work needed so that next year the world that may be peace.

While I am celebrating Passover tonight, tomorrow, I will be preaching a sermon for Easter titled “Finding Each Other on the Road to Emmaus.” I will be with you all again at the end of the month for “A Place to Grow Our Souls: Bring a Friend Sunday.” As the title suggests, the service will be an opportunity to bring a friend to the congregation. Please invite someone so we can share with them a little of the special something that is the First Parish Church! On April 22nd, instead of a regular worship service there will be a service service in which people will gather to mark Earth Day by leading a townwide clean-up. If you’re interested in participating just meet at the congregation at 10:00 a.m. like you would on a regular Sunday.

In case you missed them, the texts from last month’s sermons are available online. The March 4th stewardship service was “For What We Have, For What We Give” and the March 25th service was “Our Foremothers’ Blessing.” 

Instead of a poem this month, I offer you a few words from the late Detroit based activist Grace Lee Boggs. She writes:

These are the times that try our souls. Each of us needs to undergo a tremendous philosophical and spiritual transformation. Each of us needs to be awakened to a personal and compassionate recognition of the inseparable interconnection between our minds, hearts, and bodies, between our physical and psychical well-being, and between our selves and all the other selves in our country and in the world. Each of us needs to stop being a passive observer of the suffering that we know is going on in the world and start identifying with the sufferers. Each of us needs to make a leap that is both practical and philosophical, beyond determinism to self-determination. Each of us has to be true to and enhance our own humanity by embracing and practicing the conviction that as human beings we have free will; that despite the powers and principalities that are bent on objectifying and commodifying us and all our human relationships, the interlocking crises of our time require that we exercise the power within us to make principled choices in our ongoing daily and political lives, choices that will eventually, although not inevitably—there are no guarantees—make a difference.

I hope to see you soon!

love,

Colin

as preached at First Parish Church, Ashby, MA, March 25, 2018

Yesterday, Asa and I attended the March for Our Lives in Boston. It was inspiring to be in a group of tens of thousands walking from Roxbury Crossing to the Common. In a time when it is easy to despair, a movement started by high schoolers against gun violence is inspiring. The leadership of students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has been an important reminder that no matter how young, or how old, we are we can work to change world.

I understand that here in Ashby the March for Our Lives hosted by the congregation was quite a success. I have been told that over a hundred people turned up and there were moving speeches by several of local high school students. It is wonderful that our social justice group was able to organize such an event.

Before we get started with the sermon proper I thought it would be nice to bring the spirit of the march into our sanctuary and sing a classic protest song from our hymnal. #170 in the grey hymnal “We Are a Gentle, Angry People” is a pretty good expression of the feelings a lot of us have in response to the epidemic of gun violence. We can sing it without accompaniment, a cappella.

Thank you for singing with me. Let me start the sermon proper. When she was very young Margaret Fuller stopped on a staircase in her parents’ house and asked herself four questions: “How came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” These are big, religious, questions about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. I suspect that many of us have asked ourselves similar ones at various times in our lives. Certainly, as a religious community, we are called to ask parallel questions: Who are we as Unitarian Universalists? How did we get to be this way? What shall we do about it?

Our religious tradition encourages us to draw from a variety of different sources when we try answer such questions. As theological liberals the most important source that we draw from has always been personal experience. It is a core principle of religious liberalism that theological reflection begins with our personal experiences. As the official list of our sources begins, we draw upon “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder… which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

Personal experiences are not enough on their own. To find answers we turn to collective wisdom in its various forms. Collective wisdom tempers our experiences and aids us in their interpretation. One of the places we can look to for collective wisdom is in the lives and teachings of our religious ancestors.

We are blessed to number among our religious ancestors some of history’s most illustrious names. Several U.S. Presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft were Unitarian. We can claim artists and musicians like the composer Bela Bartok and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Our rolls contain social justice activists such as the leading women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony, the civil libertarian Roger Baldwin and the pioneering abolitionist Lydia Maria Child; scientists like Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling and the astronomer Maria Mitchell; and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Beatrix Potter.

The lives and actions of such people point the way towards the answers we might find for our big questions. This morning, in honor of Women’s History Month, we are going to seek answers to our questions by exploring the lives of some of our liberal religious women ancestors. The contributions that Unitarian Universalist women have made to our movement, and to humanity, are significant. They easily merit several volumes rather than a single sermon. So to help us focus we will hone in on the life of a particular Unitarian woman, Margaret Fuller.

Fuller was a central member of the circle of writers, ministers and activists that we have come to call the transcendentalists. She edited their groundbreaking literary journal the Dial. She was also the first full-time foreign correspondent for a U.S. based newspaper and a pioneering women’s rights activist. She wrote “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” a book that has come to be regarded as the foundational text of this country’s women’s rights movement.

Fuller’s life was tragic. She drowned, with her husband and toddler son, off the coast of New York at the age of 40. Emerson, wrote on her death “I have lost in her my audience.”

Fuller possessed a mind and an education that was almost unparalleled by any in her generation. She was born into a prominent Boston area Unitarian family. Her father, Timothy, was a congressman and successful lawyer. He sought to give her all of the educational advantages that he might have given a son.

He oversaw her education himself and before she was ten Margaret could read Greek and Latin. As an early adolescent she worked her way through the major works in the Latin canon and read Shakespeare and other English poets. Later she was sent a progressive school where she studied French, Italian, mathematics and the natural sciences. This was at a time when schooling was not available to most girls. The schooling that did exist for them emphasized the development of the skills necessary to manage a household and attract a husband.

New England society in the early 19th century was not structured to give women like Fuller opportunities. She wished to attend Harvard College, but it was only open to men. She wanted to make her own way in the world but all of the professions were closed to women.

She was, however, able to find a position as a teacher in a progressive school run by Bronson Alcott, the father of the writer Louisa May Alcott. She taught there and then briefly at another school for about two years before launching out on her own. Instead of starting a school she developed her own educational model. It was called the conversations and it was only open to women. A conversation differed from a lecture in that it was more participatory. Instead of announcing a topic and then holding forth on it the converser tried to inspire participants to engage in their own reflections.

Alcott, who had launched a co-educational series of conversations, called it a “Ministry of Talking.” The hope was to bring the participants into a communion around a shared idea. For Fuller her conversations were essential as they offered, in her words, “a point of union to well-educated and thinking women in a city… boasts at present nothing of the kind…” She wanted her conversations to be a place where women “could state their doubt and difficulties with hope of gaining aid from the experience or aspirations of others.”

In this way Fuller’s conversations combined emotional support with intellectual stimulation. At a time when she could neither teach at a university nor preach from a pulpit Fuller was able to create a space where she and other women could further their education and deepen their spiritual lives. It was a safe space to explore matters that were largely regarded as the domain of men.

Her conversations proved to popular. They attracted many of the leading women of Boston, a number of whom were Unitarian. Women from as far away as New York came to participate.

It was not enough for Fuller. She wanted a larger audience and after running her conversations for a few years gradually stopped to concentrate on her editing and writing. Over the next few years she published two books, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” and “Summer on the Lakes,” edited the Dial and, ultimately, secured a position on the New York Tribune.

She worked in New York for close to two years before, in her mid-thirties, accepting an offer to travel to Europe. The newspaper did not want to let her go and so made her what at the time was a remarkable offer. It would continue to pay her as long as she wrote about her travels for its readership.

Prior to Fuller’s offer no newspaper in the country had a full-time correspondent in Europe. When she accepted the Tribune’s offer she made journalistic history. She also created a remarkable record of mid-19th century Europe. She met with, and wrote about, many of the leading literary, political and artistic figures of the continent. She visited the poet William Wordsworth, befriended the French writer George Sand, Sand’s lover the composer Frederic Chopin, and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini.

Mazzini was to a play an important role in both Fuller and Italy’s future. In a Tribune column about him she wrote words that ultimately might be taken for a summation of both her personal justice philosophy and Unitarian moral theology. They read, “there can be no genuine happiness, no salvation for any, unless the same can be secured for all.”

This sentiment was certainly present in her “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” In it she argued that human development and liberty would never be complete until both men and women enjoyed the freedom to develop their full human potential. In this she was partially inspired by her own Unitarian tradition, particularly the teachings of William Ellery Channing and the pioneering British feminist Mary Wolstonecraft, author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.”

Fuller noted that Channing’s claim that all souls contained within the likeness of God extended to women as well as men. Wolstonecraft’s call for women’s rights inspired Fuller but it was her achievements as a writer in general, and not her “Vindication of the Rights of Women” in particular, that was important. Someone like Wolstonecraft, who was both successful and, because of her gender marginalized, demonstrated to Fuller both the women’s potential and the sad reality that that potential went largely untapped.

The intellectual and religious relationship between Channing, Fuller and Wolstonecraft suggests how exploring the life of one of our foremothers is related to our annual stewardship campaign, which runs the month of March. We have a religious tradition because of those who came before us. Fuller’s work built off of the teachings and writings of other religious liberals like Channing and Wolstonecraft. Our religious community benefits from the heritage Fuller and others like her have bequeathed us.

That bequest is a generous gift. It is a gift that we can repay by preserving and, if possible, improving our community for the next generation. This is the very definition of stewardship, preserving what we have been given so that it might be passed on. Such stewardship is rooted in both gratitude and generosity. We do it because we are grateful for the gifts that we have been given. We are generous because the generosity of previous generations has ensured that we have a tradition to inherit.

As stewards of a tradition we are also tasked with its guardianship. I am reminded of this each election season when politicians and religious leaders on the right try to co-opt our liberal religious tradition for their own purposes. An example of this which you may be aware of is an anti-abortion group called the Susan B. Anthony List. The list creates voting guides to anti-abortion politicians. It claims that in doing so it is working “in the spirit and tradition of the original suffragettes.”

Such claims are revisionist history. Anthony’s opinions about abortion are not particularly clear. The quotes that the List uses to bolster its claim are ambiguous. One for instance, seems to point more to a critique of a male dominated society than an attack on abortion. Anthony observed, “The statutes for marriage and divorce, for adultery, breach of promise, seduction, rape, bigamy, abortion, infanticide-all were made by men.” Another comes from a diary entry written after she visited her brother and found her sister-in-law sick in bed after an abortion. She wrote, “She will rue the day she forces nature.”

Even if these quotes represented an anti-abortion sentiment on Anthony’s part it is difficult to use them to suggest that she would have been part of the so-called pro-life movement. Abortion in the nineteenth-century was something different from abortion in the twenty-first century. Abortions, like most medical procedures then, were risky and pregnancy itself was frequently life threatening. Just as importantly, children often did not survive childhood so attitudes towards the importance and value of a child’s life were different than they are today.

These differences remind us of one of the most important lines separating religious liberals from religious conservatives. As religious liberals we hold truth to be mutable and changeable. What is true for one generation might not be true for the next because human culture is always changing and human knowledge is always expanding.

We believe, in other words, that revelation is ongoing and continuos. As Fuller’s good friend Emerson preached in his famous “Divinity School Address,” we are charged to “speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.”

This is not true of religious conservatives. In contrast to us they belief that the truth is unchanging and that religious knowledge is fixed. In their minds, a quote taken from a scripture written three thousand years ago must mean the same thing today that it did then. Likewise a passage from a diary written a hundred years ago must mean the same thing today that it did then. Because of this lack of critical sophistication, Emerson described conservative’s belief about revelation this way, they understand that “the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.”

It is not our tradition to believe that revelation was given once for all time. If it was women like Anthony and Fuller would have accepted the roles society assigned for them. Instead, Anthony and Fuller believed that social norms and society change over time. If those were unjust people could struggle to change them.

In evaluating whether a group like the Susan B. Anthony List can claim to be the stewards of the tradition they say they represent we must ask two questions: Are they comfortable with the changing nature of society and a changing understanding of truth? Or do they seek to preserve the current social order and social understandings? If the answer is that they are comfortable with social change then they can rightly claim their role as stewards. If not, then not.

At the core of the tradition that Fuller and Anthony represent is the conscience; the idea that within us we each have the ability to make moral decisions. The way Fuller cultivated this ability suggests that most elusive of beasts, the Unitarian mystic and spiritual tradition. It is often lamented that we Unitarian Universalists do not have a tradition of spiritual practice of our own. The majority of us who engage in spiritual practice borrow it from another tradition. We practice yoga or meditation, we engage in prayer. But when asked what sort of spiritual practice we have within our tradition we are frequently at a loss.

The life of Margaret Fuller, and her transcendentalist contemporaries, suggests that there is an authentic Unitarian spiritual practice. The purpose of that practice is to nurture the conscience. Its discipline is three-fold. It begins with contemplative journal keeping. In the journal a person regularly records his or her daily interactions with others and struggles with the wider world. One of the reasons we know so much about people like Fuller and Emerson is because we have access to their journals.

Journal keeping is supplemented by engagement with the natural world. Each of the transcendentalists wrestled with humanity’s relationship with nature. In “Summer on the Lakes,” for instance, Fuller sought to understand how the Great Lakes region was being transformed as it was settled by Europeans. She wanted to know what was being lost in that process and what was being gained. Additionally, throughout her life she regularly took three or four hour daily walks to center herself.

The third part of the discipline is putting the conscience into action. As the conscience is discovered through the journal and stimulated in the natural world it leads one to act. For most of the transcendentalists these actions were taken as individuals. Henry David Thoreau famously went off into the woods and committed civil disobedience on his own.

Ideally, this spiritual practice all takes place within a community where people are free to dialogue about their discoveries. The community can offer support when the struggle of conscience becomes difficult. It can also offer correction and guidance when one appears to act counter to the conscience.

Fuller’s time in Europe led her to put her conscience in action not as an individual but as part of a reform movement. In the late 1840s she moved to Italy and supported the efforts to unify the Italian peninsula under a single democratic government. At the time Italy was broken into nine different states, each ruled by a monarch or despot.

Inspired by her friend Mazzini, Fuller became part of the movement to change that. In doing so she met and married a young Italian aristocrat. The two had a child and when the Italian revolution of 1848 collapsed they fled to the United States together. They did not to make it. Their ship sank, and the entire family drown, within sight of the shore.

But after her death Fuller’s legacy has lived on. Looking to her life we find some possible answers to our questions: Who are we as Unitarian Universalists? We are a justice seeking people called to follow our consciences. How did we get to be this way? Through a rich tradition that reminds us that truth is ever changing and knowledge ever expanding. What shall we do about it? Be good stewards and carry that tradition forward.

That it may be so we close with these words from another liberal religious leader, Loretta Williams:

We, bearers of the dream, affirm that a new vision of hope is emerging.
We pledge to work for that community in which justice will be actively present.
We affirm that there is struggle yet ahead.
Yet we know that in the struggle is the hope for the future.
We affirm that we are co-creators of the future, not passive pawns.

So may it be
and Amen.

as preached at the First Parish Church, Ashby, MA, March 4, 2018

It is always good to be with you. We had quite the weekend of weather down in Medford. The front door was actually torn off of my apartment building by the wind. It was a not so subtle reminder that no what matter we humans might think, nature is actually in charge.

I hope that the weather was not too bad here. I suspect that since Ashby is not right by the coast you were sheltered from the worst of the Nor’easter. I will admit that I never know exactly what the weather is like out here when I am back in Medford. It is remarkable that even though we are only an hour apart, you are actually in your own microclimate.

Today’s sermon is the start of the stewardship season. This year’s pledge drive has three stages. First, today, I am offering a sermon to kick it off. Second, early next week you should be receiving a letter from me in the mail asking you to make a pledge to support the congregation. The goal is to have all pledge cards submitted by March 31st, so we can use the pledges to prepare the annual budget. The third thing I will be doing is following up with folks who do not submit their pledge cards by the end of the month to see what their intentions are towards the congregation. If you have any questions about any of this please feel free to ask me during coffee hour.

So, with that process in mind, let us get started with the sermon proper.

The pale polka dot is not unexpected. It sits, dinner plate size, in the center of a weed strewn and crumbling road. The dot’s rough paint lies uneasily on decaying asphalt. It is something of a shock. A piece of art, roughhewn but art nonetheless, in the midst of urban decay.

The dot is not alone. Casting my eyes forward I see another dot about twenty feet ahead, washed out yellow instead of faded pink. That dot is followed by another, blue this time, and then another and another. Now I understand what the docent at the Detroit Institute of Art meant when I asked for directions, “follow the polka dot road.”

I am driving through one of Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods. The blocks I pass are filled with a mixture of the burned-out shells of vacant houses, empty lots, broken bottles, abandoned furniture and occupied, but usually decrepit, dwellings. I am looking for the Heidelberg Project, the artist Tyree Guyton‘s outsider masterpiece. When I see the first polka dots I know that I am close.

As I travel down the street the polka dots gradually multiple and move. First they are only on the asphalt, barely holding together parts of the disintegrating road. Then they drift onto the broken buckled sidewalks and up the sides of abandoned buildings. The polka dots are everywhere when I finally turn off the main street and onto the side road where Guyton’s project is centered.

The project is difficult to describe. It consists of more than a dozen houses stretched over a block and a half, trees decorated with glass bottles of all colors, a painted school bus, piles of shoes and a makeshift playground. Some of the houses are occupied. Several are abandoned. All have been decorated by Guyton and his neighbors in highly unorthodox fashions. One home is carpeted with numbers, big and little, they come from gas station signs, clocks and broken street signs. Another is covered with dozens of words–Oklahoma, people, jury, white, love–and parts from vehicles: hub cabs, doors and steering wheels. A third is painted entirely in polka dots, some the size of a quarter and others bigger than a hula hoop.

Since its advent more than 30 years ago the Heidelberg Project has been a source of both controversy and pride in Detroit. Some people love it. Others hate it. Both mayors Coleman Young and Dennis Archer tried to destroy it. First Young, and then later Archer, sent in bulldozers to tear down some of the houses.

Whatever people think of Heidelberg, whether they call it piles of trash or brilliant art, there is no debating that its impact is visceral. When I walk through it I feel like I am entering a magic realm. This is certainly Guyton’s intention. He said of it, “This block is a very special place. It is like magic-land.”

Magic alters reality. It is not supernatural. Instead it is a word for the way in which we use our imagination and will power to change the world around us. When we have an idea for something and then bring that idea to fruition we are committing an act of magic.

Heidelberg is filled with magic. Through his vision, and by nurturing the creativity of others, Guyton’s art has transformed a desolate landscape into something wholly new. And that transformation has been more than visual. In the blocks immediately around Heidelberg crime has dropped. The drug dealers have largely left and a greater sense of community has been built. Magic indeed.

There are two lessons that I take from Heidelberg. The first is that art and imagination can overcome ruin. The second is that generosity can be transformative. These lessons are intertwined for art often stems from the generous impulse to make the world more beautiful. That impulse can help us survive when our existence seems painful and ugly.

This is month is the month of our annual stewardship drive. Stewardship is tied to generosity. We want to be good stewards of what we have so that we can leave something behind for future generations. So, stewardship is partially about giving gifts to people we will never know.

We all have received such gifts. This congregation itself is a gift that previous generations gave us. This beautiful meeting house was built long before any of us were born. Much of the money to sustain the church comes from financial gifts to the endowment from members and friends who are no longer with us. If we are good stewards we will give the gift of this religious community to generations to come.

Such gifts can feel risky. They include the giving of part of the self to another. When we give our money, time and skills to a religious community we are giving part of our selves. With this act comes both the possibility of acceptance and rejection. What if our gifts are not enough or not appreciated? What if they are not wanted? How do we feel then?

Now, I love to cook. And I love to cook for people. One of the ways that I express my appreciation of and affection for people is by cooking them nice meals. But when I cook someone a meal there’s always a little way in which I am haunted by the fear of rejection. If I make something fancy or unusual I worry that the people I am cooking for will be unhappy with it, despite all of the effort I put in. And every once in awhile, that is the case, and then I feel a little rejected.

In his meditation “Feeding and Being Fed” Robert Walsh reflects on the relationship between feeding others and generosity. He writes, “to feed [someone]-is to give life.” There is no more generous act than the gift of life.

Later in his piece Walsh states, “The person who receives the gift of food gives a precious gift as well. It is the gift of trust, an affirmation of the life-giver.” The trouble comes when we give a gift and automatically expect to receive one in return.

When it comes to cooking, my fear of rejection is foolish. The important thing is that I am trying to give a gift, trying to do something life sustaining. The outcome is less important than the intention. The giver, after all, cannot control the outcome. But the giver can set his or her intention. And that intention can be to give something that is life sustaining.

It is easy to forget this. Especially at stewardship time when people get anxious about their ability to give. It takes money and generosity to run a congregation. Everything that people give is appreciated. Whether it is a $2,000 pledge or some change in the collection plate every gift helps sustain the life of our religious community.

Just think about all of the gifts that go into a typical Sunday morning. Our worship is truly a collective effort. It requires many acts of generosity to create. Ward sets a friendly tone at the start of the service. Stephan or the Lizards in the Hayloft offer lively music. Our lay reader helps with the liturgy. And that is not mention all the people who contribute to our fellowship time after the service.

I am sure I am missing someone but that is not the point. The point is that we each give different gifts and that all of those gifts are important. Here I am reminded of a phrase popularized by the ever-controversial Karl Marx, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” We all have gifts to give. We all contribute to the larger whole.

In this way our religious community is not dissimilar to the Heidelberg Project. The project is supported by gifts large and small. The children in Guyton’s neighborhood have no money. Yet they are able to give the gift of their imagination and their time when they paint polka dots and figures alongside Guyton. Other people give Heidelberg large financial gifts that allow Guyton to make his living as an artist, the project to employ a modest staff and the surrounding community to benefit from a community center for arts and education.

There are other parallels between Heidelberg and a liberal religious community like ours. The theologian Rebecca Parker identifies several tasks for Unitarian Universalist congregations. Two she lifts up are prophetic witness and the preservation of endangered knowledge. Parker defines a prophet this way, “A prophet is one who is able to name those places in our lives where we are resisting what needs to be known, closing our eyes to what is really happening, silencing what the world is telling us.”

When we think of prophets we usually think of the ancient Hebrew figures who went around Judah and Israel in sackcloth and ashes proclaiming gloom and doom. Such prophets are not the only kind. The news of the world, even in troubled times like ours when school children shoot each other in school cafeterias and the President muses about becoming dictator for life, is not all bad. One of the truths that we can forget is that we surrounded by beauty.

This is the prophetic message of Guyton and the Heidelberg Project. His art transforms trash and desolation into unexpectedly magical objects. An abandoned toy is not just a worn-out piece of plastic. It is something that can be incorporated into an artistic vision.

In a Unitarian Universalist religious community, we say this not about found objects but about people instead. In his well-known sermon “Dragged Kicking and Screaming into Heaven,” Mark Morrison-Reed quotes the Universalist minister Gordan McKeeman who preached, “…Universalism came to be call ‘The Gospel of God’s Success,’ the gospel of the larger hope. Picturesquely spoken, the image was that of the last unrepentant sinner being dragged screaming and kicking into heaven, unable… to resist the power and love of the Almighty.”

Mark asserts that this image, “the last sinner being dragged, by his collar… into heaven” communicates that ours is “a religion of radical and overpowering love. Universal Salvation insists that no matter what we do, God so loves us that she will not and cannot consign even a single human being to eternal damnation.”

Guyton’s art has a similar philosophy behind it. Each gift that is given is something that builds the Heidelberg Project and strengthens the community. Both the little gifts that children bring, and $50,000 foundation grants are essential to the continuing life of the community.

This truth is one of the pieces of endangered knowledge that I suspect that Rebecca Parker calls for religious communities like ours to preserve. Everyone is important. Everyone can give to sustain the life of the community.

At stewardship time the gifts we talk about are primarily financial gifts. This is not to say that other gifts are not important. It is just, as I said earlier, it takes money to run a congregation. This year we will be promoting the idea of fair share giving. Rather than asking people to give a specific amount we will be asking them to give a percentage of their income. In doing so, we are making a theological statement. That statement is that we appreciate the generous intention behind all gifts and recognize the gift of self that they contain. Hopefully that means that the givers of the gifts, experience an affirmation of the self as a result of their generosity.

If, for whatever, reason that affirmation is lacking generosity can still be transformative. It is the intention that matters most. Sometimes in this way we can become an inspiration for others.

Consider the story of Vedran Smailovic, better known as the cellist of Sarajevo. Twenty-five years ago, in the spring of 1992, there was a long line outside the door of one of the last bakeries in the city of Sarajevo that could still bake bread. At four o’clock in the afternoon a shell struck the bread line and killed twenty-two people.

Smailovic lived nearby and witnessed the event. Prior to the Balkan War he had been the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera. As Paul Sullivan wrote in Hope Magazine, “when he saw the carnage outside his window, he was pushed beyond his capacity to absorb and endure any more. He resolved to do the thing he could do best… Every day thereafter, at 4:00 p.m., Vedran Smailovic put on his full, formal concert attire, took up his cello, and walked out of his apartment into the battle that raged around him. He placed a little stool in the blood-stained, glass splattered crater where the shell had landed, and every day, for twenty-two days, he played Albinoni’s Agadio as tribute to the twenty-two dead. Snipers fired at him (they missed), mortar shells fell all around him, but he played music to the abandoned streets, the smashed trucks, the burning buildings, and to the terrified people still hiding in the cellars, who heard him…”

It would be hard to argue that the bullets that flew around Smailovic were affirmations of his music. And yet his act of bravery helped strengthen the legacy of beauty in the world. His actions have become part of an inspiring story that reminds others that we never know where acts of generosity will ultimately lead.

This brings me to a concluding point about generosity. It frequently stems from my gratitude. My own generosity is often inspired by the gifts that I have been given. I give to Unitarian Universalist institutions because of all of the gifts that our liberal faith has given me. And I cook for friends and family because I am grateful for all the gifts that I have been given.

In this way I am not so different from Guyton. His efforts in Heidelberg stem from his gratitude for all that his community has given him. He started the project with his grandfather as an art school drop-out. It was his way of saying thank you to the community for encouraging him in his art. And so that gratitude turned to generosity.

Generosity often begins with the spirit of this passage from e. e. cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

We give because of what we have received. We give as a way of saying thank you. We give seeking affirmation and we give risking our selves. Through the act of giving we say yes to beauty, yes to possibility, yes to life. So that may we all give generously I say, Amen and Blessed Be.

Dear Friends:

The Nor’easter hit our neighborhood in Medford pretty hard. We didn’t lose power and no one, as far as I know, was injured but one of the big trees in the next door neighbor’s yard came crashing down and ruined another neighbor’s fence. The front door also blew off our apartment building. I hope that nothing similar happened to any of you out in Ashby and its environs. Such a storm was a humble reminder that we humans only have so much control over our lives. Much of the time we’re subjected to fickle winds.

Community is one of the things that helps us bear such storms. When the winds of life batten us down it is often our communities that help us endure. Unitarian Universalism has always been a vital community in my life and if you’re a friend or member of First Parish Church I suspect it has been a vital community for you as well.

This month, in an effort to sustain the communities that sustain us, the congregation will be conducting its annual stewardship campaign. As part of the campaign those of you who are pledging members and friends should receive a pledge card and a stewardship letter in the mail next week. Tomorrow, I will be preaching a sermon titled “For What We Have, For What We Give” to kick off the campaign. Here’s a brief description: “Robert Walsh writes, ‘We are the feeders, and we are those who are fed.’ In this sermon on stewardship we’ll consider how giving and receiving gifts is a spiritual practice.” At the end of the month I’ll be following up with people who haven’t made their pledges to make sure you’ve gotten pledge letters and to learn what your intentions are towards the congregation.

March is women’s history month and I will be back in the pulpit on March 25th to offer a service centered on Margaret Fuller, one of our most famous Unitarian ancestors. She has much teach us about what it means to live a life that is intentionally devoted to beauty and justice.

The text from last month’s sermons are available online, in case you missed them. “Intangible Dreams” is the service from February 6th.  “A Black Christ” is the service from February 18th. On my blog you’ll also find a tribute to the late Rev. Kay Jorgensen, one of my earliest mentors in the ministry.  Last month I also had the opportunity to preach at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, one of the largest congregations in our denomination. There’s a video of the service on YouTube if you’re interested. 

Finally, the social justice group met and I understand that there are a number of exciting things potentially in the works. I am sure that the Parish Committee and the social justice group will be updating everyone soon. In the meantime, friend of the congregation Emily Fine has started a petition to thank Dick’s Sporting Goods for deciding to stop selling assault rifles and limit gun sales to those 21 years of age and older. You can sign it here. 

As is my practice, I would like to close with a few verses of poetry. Since we’ll be having a service devoted to Margaret Fuller at the end of the month it seems fitting to share one of her poems:

Flaxman

We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone,—
A higher charm than modern culture won
With all the wealth of metaphysic lore,
Gifted to analyze, dissect, explore.
A many-colored light flows from one sun;
Art, ’neath its beams, a motley thread has spun;
The prism modifies the perfect day;
But thou hast known such mediums to shun,
And cast once more on life a pure, white ray.
Absorbed in the creations of thy mind,
Forgetting daily self, my truest self I find.

I hope to see you soon!

love,

Colin

Kay Jorgensen died on January 15, 2018. She was one of my earliest mentors in the ministry. I met her when I was a young adult living in San Francisco. I moved there in 1998 after I graduated from college to work as a software engineer. Kay and her longtime collaborator Carmen Barsody were just then starting the Faithful Fools, their street ministry in the city’s Tenderloin District.

I lived in the Bay Area through the spring of 2002. Kay consistently encouraged me throughout that time as I transitioned from active lay leader to budding seminarian. I participated in the street retreats  she and Carmen led and spent a fair amount of time just hanging out at the Faithful Fools building.

The street retreats are a ministerial model inspired by liberation theology and the practice of accompaniment. They last somewhere between a few hours and several days. Participants spend their time on the street in the same spaces as homeless people: eating where the homeless eat and sleeping where they sleep.

The Fools use the street retreats to do two things. The first is to be present to and minister to the very poor and homeless without judging them. In other words, the Fools see the Tenderloin’s residents for what they are, human beings, and then treat them as human beings. Second, the retreats are opportunities to breakdown stereotypes that people with various kinds of economic privilege such as myself have about the very poor and homeless. By inviting participants into the same spaces as the residents of the Tenderloin we learn that despite whatever stereotypes we might carry in our heads, the people struggling on the streets are just as human as we are. We all need the same things: food, shelter, love, and a bit of work to call honest.

The street retreats are pedagogically structured around praxis. In their efforts to breakdown stereotypes, the Fools ask participants to reflect upon what they expect to see and encounter before they begin their time on the streets. At the end of the retreat the Fools again ask participants on the stereotypes they have about the Tenderloin’s residents. The transformation is often remarkable. I remember people in the first round of reflection focusing on words like shame, poverty, and sadness. My memories of the second round of reflection is that they frequently contained words such as hope, pride, and joy.

I didn’t just learn from the Fools practice of street retreats. I also learned from their generosity. For many years they served as the fiscal agent for and the mentors of the human rights and solidarity organization that Roxanne Rivas and I founded in 2001—the C.A.S.A. Collectives (Colectivos de Apoyo, Solidaridad y Accion).

Based on their own work in Nicaragua, they often gave us pointers on how to be authentically in solidarity with the communities we worked with in Mexico. They wanted us to understand that it wasn’t authentic solidarity unless we were willing to share the same risks that communities we were working with faced. I remember Kay and Carmen once discussing Ben Linder’s death at the hands of an assassination squad in Nicaragua with me at great length. We talked about what his death had meant to the people he worked with there, the solidarity community, and the United States government. Part of the lesson was that it had sparked international coverage of the atrocities that were then taking place in Nicaragua that the massacres of thousands of peasants had not. That was part of the legacy of white supremacy and colonialism, that a colonizer’s life always mattered more to the colonizers than the lives of any of the colonized. Even if the colonizer was in solidarity with the colonized.

I thought about that conversation a lot when a few years later C.A.S.A. had to evacuate our offices in Oaxaca City after death threats were made against our staff over paramilitary controlled radio. It was during the 2006 Oaxaca uprising and Brad Will, who sometimes worked with C.A.S.A. folks, had just been killed. I also talked with Kay a bit about that situation and remember her calm and steady presence.

Perhaps my fondest memories of Kay are from a fundraiser that the Fools held in the late 90s. It was a dinner at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Fransisco. After the dinner was over as we cleaned up the dishes Kay started to sing old Wobbly songs. She seemed to know all the words to “Hallelujah” and “Solidarity Forever.” So, perhaps it is best to close a tribute to one of the truly great ministers in my tradition with a few verses from “Hallelujah,” a song written and sung in skid rows of the early 20th century that spoke of the pride and defiance of an earlier generation in the face of the catastrophes of capitalism and the degradation of poverty.

O, why don’t you save
All the money you earn?
If I did not eat,
I’d have money to burn!

Hallelujah, I’m a bum!
Hallelujah, bum again!
Hallelujah, give us a handout–
To revive us again.

Rest in power, Rev. Kay Jorgensen, aka Oscard, you have blessed the world more than anyone will ever know.

as preached at the First Parish Church, Ashby, MA, February 18, 2018

It is good to see you, the brave and hardy crew who made it through the winter snow to church this morning. Down in Medford, I awoke to the unpleasant task of digging my car out of a good four inches of heavy snow. I imagine that many of you arose to a similarly disagreeable chore. So, thank you for making it to church despite the wintery weather. Snow or no snow, it is good to be together.

This morning I offer you a sermon for black history month. I recognize that Ashby is not a particularly diverse community. But that makes it all the more important for us to take time to consider African American history and, the subject of today’s sermon, African American conceptions of Jesus. The United States is a multiracial and multicultural country. In order to build a morally just society we need to understand something of each other’s experiences and perspectives.

And so, I think it is vital for white Unitarian Universalists to understand something about black theology and religion. Across our denomination, we have often worked closely with historically black churches in the quest to build racial justice. Unitarian Universalists were intimately involved in the civil rights movement. Many prominent African American thinkers and activists have belonged to or attended Unitarian Universalist churches. Frederick Douglass worshipped at All Souls in Washington, DC. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King attended Unitarian Universalist congregations in Boston while Martin was studying for his doctorate at Boston University. According to the Pew Forum, the political beliefs of members of Unitarian Universalist churches and members of historically black churches are virtually identical. The notable exception to this is around the issue of GBLT rights, but even the disparity there has decreased in recent years.

It is also true that for white people, gaining a better understanding of black theology and religion is central to one of the most important political projects of our time: dismantling white supremacy. White supremacists have been gaining dramatically in strength in recent years. At the same time, growing awareness of patterns of police violence against people of color and the racial injustice of the criminal justice system have made it impossible to ignore a simple truth: this country, particularly its white majority, is in need of a conversion experience. The human cost of continuing to live in a white supremacist society, a society that values the lives of white more than the lives of people of color, is too high. Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams defined conversion as “a fundamental change of the heart and will.” Many of us who are white need to be converted from a perspective that claims that the lives of people of color somehow matter less than the lives of white people.

Have you ever had such a conversion experience? One that forced you to re-examine all of your previously held beliefs and develop new ones? I suspect that some of you have. Unitarian Universalism is, by in large, a religion of converts. Only about 1 in 10 of the adult members of our congregations were raised Unitarian Universalist. The majority of us were either brought up in another religious tradition or in no religious tradition.

One powerful conversion story comes from the Unitarian Universalist minister Bill Breeden. As I remember it, Bill, who is white, started life as a fundamentalist Christian. His tradition did not require clerical education and as a teenager he began preaching at a small Pentecostal church. At the same time, to make ends meet, he was working at a local grocery store as a stock boy.

It was there that Bill had his conversion experience. One of his duties was to dispose of unsalable or expired food. This was the 1960s and the food was destroyed in a burn pit behind the store. Once a day Bill would gather up the food, take it out back, douse it with gasoline and make a sort of bonfire. Often times the food that he destroyed was still perfectly edible.

One evening as he prepared to pour gasoline over the assembled pile and light it aflame he heard a voice. “Please, sir, could I have that cheese? I am hungry and I would like something to eat. I would like some food for my family.” Bill turned and found himself facing a middle aged Black woman. He let her have the cheese and she went on her way.

Put before she did Bill saw Christ in her. Something about her, some manner in which he connected to her, caused him to see the world in an entirely different way. In that moment Christ was transformed from a blond haired, blue eyed, white skinned male to a poor Black woman standing in front of him. His universe, his understanding of the sacred was forever altered.

Over the next years Bill left his fundamentalist community and developed a theology of Universalist Christianity. He saw the divine in all people and upheld the human family as one. Eventually Bill found Unitarian Universalism.

I doubt most people have conversion stories that are quite as dramatic. Few, if any, Unitarian Universalists I know claim to have seen Christ. Many of us are not Christian and grow squeamish when the word is mentioned. Others, such as myself, would argue that the word Christ is a metaphor for the human potential and the possibility of perfection that lies within all of us. In this theological strain seeing Christ in someone else means sharing a moment of absolute connection and recognition; witnessing the impossible glorious mystery of the universe in the face of another. It is such a moment that Bill had when he encountered the woman behind the grocery store. In her he saw himself and all of the human family. He realized that the two them shared some sort of deep connection, some type of kinship, on an ineffable level.

There are thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of people of color who would not suffered needlessly and died violently if white people had been able to see the divine in them. To offer two recent example: Michael Brown would still be alive if Darren Wilson had seen the divine in him when he pointed his gun. Trayvon Martin would still be with us if George Zimmerman had seen him for a human brother rather than as a threat. To go further back in history: thousands of black men and women would never have been lynched if white supremacists understood that there is no difference between white skin and brown skin. Jim Crow would not have lessened the lives of millions if white moderates and liberals saw their own children in the eyes of black and brown little boys and girls. The horror of slavery would have been avoided if slavers had heard their own cries in the voices of their victims.

The great Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing taught the kinship of the whole human race. He wrote, “I am a living member the great Family of All Souls.” He also said, “I cannot improve or suffer myself, without diffusing good or evil around me through an ever-enlarging sphere.” The knowledge that all humanity is, on some deep level, one family and that we are all connected means that the actions of an individual can and do effect the many.

Drop a pebble in water and it ripples outward. Act, speak or simply live your life and you cannot know ultimately what effect you will have. The choices that we make impact not only ourselves and our families but future generations.

The events in recent years that spurred the growth of Black Lives Matter have been a reminder of this truth. The police often treat people of color outrageously because of America’s long history of racism. Unarmed black men have been killed by white police officers for hundreds of years. The narrative is almost always the same, a white person with a gun felt threatened by a black person without a gun. A white person with power was scared by a black person without it. This century old story is the legacy of slavery. This century old story is rooted in the terror that many whites feel, at a subconscious level, that someday black and brown people will rise up and take back what is theirs. This country was partially built on the labor of African slaves. All of the lands that make up our nation were stolen from Native Americans.

We have the power to change the story. We have the power undo racism and value the lives of every member of the human family the same. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition urges us to do so. Channing taught one of the purposes of religion was to help people gain insight into their impact on and connection with others. Religion could nurture the conscience and help individuals tune themselves to the “Infinite God…around and within each.” The more developed the conscience, the greater the understanding of how each and every action effects those around us. The truly wise, he wrote, “will become a universal blessing.” They understand how “an individual cannot but spread good or evil indefinitely…and through succeeding generations.” Understanding this they weigh their choices carefully.

Channing’s theology caused him to affirm that humanity’s spiritual nature included “the likeness of God.” Within each person was “the image of God” and by the choices one made that image would either be “extended and brightened” or “seem to be wholly destroyed.”

Casting Bill’s experience into Channing’s theology it would appear that at the moment of his encounter, Bill was made aware of the image of God within both himself and the woman. Their differences were blotted out. Bill realized that, in the language of Channing, they were both members of “the great Family of All Souls.”

The images we have of God can obscure the divine from our view. Each image is, by necessity, only partial. Yet often people mistake them for the whole. Even the very word God is misleading. In trying to describe the ultimate mystery of the universe we naturally run across the limits of our human language and human imagination. God is a useful metaphor for those limits. Using the word allows a humanist like me ways to communicate with my friends who resonate with more traditional understandings of the divine. We are all trying to understand the same ultimate mystery, the unfathomable vastness and complicated beauty of universe, just as we are seeking to comprehend our part in that mystery.

Orthodox forms of Christianity try to make the mystery more fathomable by claiming that Jesus Christ was God. A human God is a God that we can relate to and, perhaps, understand.

But by making God human the orthodox imprison her within all of the various complexities of humanity. There is a paradox here. For if God is only fully present in one person then that one person somehow reflects what is of ultimate value differently than anyone else. Jesus is male, so God must be male. God is male, so males must have the highest worth. This theology of incarnation has led to a place where God is no longer ultimate and universal. Instead, God is partial and trapped in human images. God, the symbol, reinforces human hierarchies.

There are significant stakes in how the divine is portrayed. The image of Christ as White suggests that because God choose to be embodied in as a white person whites are somehow closer to God than others. For some a white Jesus is the foundation of that most pernicious form of partialism, white supremacy.

The Black Christ is presented by some black theologians as a counter to the White Christ. In various ways these theologians argue that if Christ must be a color that color must be black. As Kelly Brown Douglas points out, historically, “in the United States Blackness is synonymous with inferiority.” By recasting Christ as Black the “bond between Blackness and inferiority” can be severed. This move also “fosters Black people’s self-esteem by allowing them to worship a God in their own image, and by signifying that Blackness is nothing to be detested. On the contrary, it is a color and condition that even the divine takes on…”

For most of these black theologians the White Christ was a Christ of slaveholders. Brown Douglas identifies the Black and White Christs as having different theological significance.

“The White Christ,” Brown Douglas writes, “is grounded in an understanding of Christianity suggesting that Jesus of Nazareth was Christ…because God made flesh in him. The incarnation itself is considered the decisive feature of Christianity.” Through this Christ Christians view themselves as saved from original sin because of something called atonement theology. This system argues that we humans were born wicked and sinful but God, in his infinite love, choose to accept Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as a substitution for the punishment that all humanity deserved.

Brown Douglas argues that this system has at least two major problems. “First, little is required of humans in order to receive salvation.” One either accepts Christ as Lord and savior and is saved or one does not and is not. If one accepts Christ then no further action is required. There is no call to ethical living. Jesus’s ministry to the poor and oppressed is of secondary importance. Right belief, and not right behavior, is the focus of the system.

This first observation leads Brown Douglas to a second: “in order for humans to benefit from God’s saving act, they must have knowledge of Jesus as the divine/human encounter.” Without that knowledge salvation was not possible.

The logic of this White Christ served as a justification for slavery. Enslaving Africans and introducing them to Christianity “saved” them from the eternal damnation they would have faced otherwise. As one pro-slavery advocate argued: “The condition of the slaves is far better than that of the Africans from among whom they have been brought. Instead of debased savages, they are, to a considerable extent, civilized, enlightened and christianized.”

In contrast, the Black Christ, in Brown Douglas’s words, “empowered the Black slaves to fight for their emancipation from the chains of White slavery.” The important feature of this Christ is that not he somehow saved humanity. It is “that Jesus helped the oppressed in his own time.” Importantly, for many, “Jesus was a living a being with whom the slaves had an intimate relationship.” That Jesus, because of his own suffering, could offer succor and understanding in times of crises.

Starting in the 1960s, with the rise of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements, black theologians such as James Cone, J. Deotis Roberts and Albert Cleage further developed articulations of the Black Christ. These theologians, each in their own way, recast the Black Christ in terms that some Unitarian Universalists might find familiar.

Cleage, a minister in Detroit, argued that the historical Jesus was a black man. Further, he suggested that the bodily resurrection of Jesus had not occurred. It was a lie perpetrated by those who used Christianity as a tool for subjugation. The good life was not to be had in heaven after death but here on Earth. The myth of heaven was something that was used to oppress people. Jesus’s resurrection after his death came through the continuation of his ministry by his disciples. This ministry had freedom from oppression as its central goal.

Cone, the founder of the academic school of black liberation theology, understood the Black Christ to be a symbol. Symbols allow humans to communicate imperfect knowledge of the divine. They are important because they point beyond themselves and suggest some fundamental truth about reality. God, for Cone, stands on the side of the oppressed. Therefore, he argued, God must have a black aspect.

Roberts used the Black Christ as a symbol for what he thought of as “Christ’s universality.” For him there was not just a Black Christ but a Red Christ and a Yellow Christ. Christ could be seen in all the colors of humanity. Re-imagining Christ in this way allowed for Roberts to try to free, in his words, Jesus from “the cultural captivity of… Euro-Americans.”

There is significant overlap between these understanding of the Black Christ and much of Unitarian Universalist theology. Like Cleage traditional Unitarians affirm a human Jesus and emphasize his ethical teachings. Like Cone most Unitarian Universalists understand Christ as a symbol–one of many in the world–that offers to teach us something about the mystery of life. With Roberts, Unitarian Universalists affirm that God, or the divine, is present in all of the human races.

Unitarian Universalists might also agree with a criticism that later generations of black theologians have of their predecessors. For black women theologians such as Brown Douglas it is not enough to make Christ Black. Christ also has to become a woman so that the full spectrum of humanity can be represented in the divine.

These understandings of the Black Christ remind me of Channing’s dictum that we are members “of the great Family of All Souls.” And like Channing’s words, I suspect that the image of the Black Christ has something to teach us, regardless of the hue of our skin. This symbol is a reminder that the divine can be found in all. If we, like Bill Breeden, can learn to recognize that divine spark in others no matter how unlike we are we can take a step towards truly building a community that welcomes and affirms all. We do not know where such steps might lead us or how such recognitions might change us.

Alice Walker, in her novel, the Color Purple wrote: “Here’s the thing…the thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else.” With this in mind, in the coming weeks try the following spiritual exercise. Take five minutes each day as you walk down the street or drive in your car and try to see God in the people around you. Acknowledge that God, the metaphor for the mystery of creation and destruction, death and birth, that binds us together, is part of and beyond us, can be seen in each and every person that surrounds us. Apply this practice to those least like you and see if you notice a change or a transformation.

Perhaps you will. We can end the violence that people of color experience at the hands of whites in our lifetimes. But we can only do so if we can begin to see each other as members of the same human family and see the divine that resides in each of us.

That it may be so, I say Amen and Blessed Be

as preached at the First Parish Church, Ashby, MA, February 6, 2018

This may be the first congregation I have ever been to, let alone served, that has its own pizza ovens. I must admit that it seems like a bit of an odd quirk. And yet, I am really glad we have them. The pizza last night was tasty, and the games were fun. It was a pleasure to spend time with some of you outside of the confines of Sunday service. And it was also lovely to meet a few members of the wider community who showed up just to eat pizza and play games. The whole event was a good reminder that church is not just something we do on Sunday morning. Church brings us to together to share our lives. And what is more central to our lives than sharing food and fun?

Our sermon today is about how Unitarian Universalist communities can and do play a vital role in birthing a better world, the one in which peace, justice and liberty are so common that no one talks “about them as far off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book, and voice.”

To get us started, I want to ask you a simple question. Do you believe in magic? I do. And by magic I mean nothing more than act of creating something from nothing. Some years my friend Richard taught me about it. Richard is a distinguished medical doctor and HIV researcher. He is also a proponent of magic.

He explained it to me this way, “Colin, magic is imagining something that does not exist and then bringing that thing into being. It is simple. Imagine that I am hungry and I want a sandwich. I do not have one so I am going to make one. I get a couple of pieces of nice rye bread, a bit of sharp cheese, some good oily tuna, a few capers, a little mayonnaise, and pretty soon I have a sandwich. I have used my imagination to create something that did not exist before in the world, a delicious sandwich. Incidentally, would you mind passing the mustard and pickles?”

Unitarian Universalist congregations are places where we make magic happen. In our religious communities we collectively imagine things or social arrangements that do not presently exist and then we bring them into being. There is a formula, a spell if you will, for this kind of magic. It runs conscience plus imagination plus love equals magic.

Conscience is something we invoke in one of the principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It is at the core of our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” We might think of it as the ability to discern right from wrong. We tap into our conscience when we confront a situation when we are asked to do something that we know to be wrong and we refuse to do it. We also tap into our conscience when we encounter a societal wrong and refuse to participate in it. It is at the root of the practice of civil disobedience. When people commit civil disobedience they intentionally create disruption in the hopes of undermining a law or situation they believe to be unjust.

Conscience tells us something is wrong with the way the world is. Imagination tells us the world can be different. “In our dreams we have seen another world,” one of our texts read. In my friend Richard’s act of imagination he knew the world he lived in could be different than it was currently, it could be a world in which there was a tasty sandwich. In our Unitarian Universalist communities we often imagine that the world in which we live could be different. We imagine a world without racism, sexism, ablism, classism, a world in which everyone has enough to eat, in which there is clean air and water for all, a world where every child and every adult has access to quality education, a world with adequate shelter and love for everyone, a world with… well, I invite you to use your imagination.

Conscience and imagination are not enough, to make magic happen we need to add one more ingredient, we need to add love. Opening ourselves to love means opening ourselves to the possibility of change. It means making ourselves vulnerable. It means seeking connection with someone, and something, beyond ourselves. It means recognizing that none of us alone is sufficient, that we need each other to survive.

Love is very much a part of our Universalist heritage. Our Universalist ancestors believed that a loving God did not punish sinners with eternal damnation. But more than that, they believed that God’s love was not limited. It was unlimited. That might be a good way to summarize their theology: Universalism, the church of God’s love, unlimited.

When we combine conscience, imagination, and love we can perform powerful magic. This magic is about creating things that do not yet exist. It is also about making ourselves aware of the things that already exist. Sometimes, the better world hope for is already right here.

One of the places I learned this lesson was from my favorite children’s author, Daniel Pinkwater. You might have heard of him, he used to be a regular commentator on NPR. Now, I have been reading a lot of Pinkwater lately. One of the great things about being a parent is that I get to return to the books of my youth when I share them with my kids. In the past couple of years, I have probably read more than a dozen of Pinkwater’s books. They have great titles like “The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death,” “Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars” or “Yobgorgle, the Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario.”

Reading these books as an adult, I have realized that they all have a common theme–the world is filled with magic. The trick is finding it. And finding it does not turn out to be all that difficult. It is often just a matter of perceiving things around you a little differently. When you do, you start to notice wonderful things that you hadn’t seen before.

Take “The Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death.” It is novel about three friends who snarkout–that is sneak out of the house late at night to go see the movies. They do not got to any movie theater, they go to the Snark Theater. It is a twenty-four theater that shows all kinds of movies–everything from blockbusters to obscure French or Japanese classics. The Snark isn’t just a movie theater, it is a way of life.

Going there allows the kids to enter into a world that they would have never encountered otherwise. They meet a man with a dancing chicken. He keeps the chicken under his hat and takes her out to perform–he accompanies the bird by singing. They find a wonderful bohemian garden filled with art and music. They learn to speak on street corners. They collaborate with the world’s greatest detective to solve a case. This magical world already existed. The three friends just had to find it.

My favorite verses in all of the Christian New Testament make a similar point. They are Luke 17:20 to 21. Do you know them? In one version they read, “Once Jesus was asked… when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is! or ‘There it is! For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.'”

The Russian novelist and philosopher Leo Tolstoy titled a book after these verses. His text “The Kingdom of God is Within You” is a pacifist classic. Mahatma Gandhi was so impacted by it that he wrote, it “overwhelmed me.” It played a central role in his development of strategies for the non-violent transformation of the world. He even named the intentional community he started in South Africa Tolstoy Farm in honor of Tolstoy and the book’s influence on him. For Gandhi, the nonviolence Tolstoy inspired was partially rooted in “the infinite possibilities of love.”

Gandhi was a great inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr. King called Gandhi “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” Like Gandhi and Tolstoy before him, King saw nonviolence as based in love and self-transformation. He said, “it is love that will save our world.” He also also claimed that nonviolence was not primarily about changing the hearts of the oppressors. Instead, “It… does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had.”

Practitioners of the kind of nonviolence advocated by King, Gandhi, and Tolstoy, understand that changing the world has to begin by changing yourself. There is a strange way in which it is a bit like my friend Richard’s sandwich. If you want a sandwich you have to make it. If you want to live in a different world you have to start engaging in the world differently. One of the best places we can do this is in a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

It was not very long ago that same-sex marriage was illegal, and the idea of marriage equality seemed a fanciful dream. I am just old enough to remember when it seemed that almost every member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities I knew in my hometown was in the closet. Or at least, in the closet everywhere except the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in. In my Unitarian Universalist congregation, we had a diversity sexual orientations and gender identities. Through religious education and in my youth group I was taught that honoring this diversity made our community a freer and more loving place, one in which we could bring the fullness of who we were in a way that was not possible in many other spaces.

The same was true in the congregation I served in Cleveland. It is a small urban church. Cleveland is a somewhat culturally conservative place. We were the only religious community in our neighborhood that performed same sex unions. Same-sex marriage was then illegal in Ohio, but we believed in marriage equality. We believed in celebrating a diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities.

I remember one celebration for a same sex union we did. It was for a couple who lived in the neighborhood. The two women did not attend the congregation. I never saw them on Sunday morning. But one day they came up to the church and knocked on our front door.

They were very much in love. They wanted to know if we would do a service to bless their union, to honor their love. They came from very conservative families. They told people that they lived together as roommates. But they were able to share their beautiful truth with us. So, we organized a service in the sanctuary where they could commit to each other and sanctify their bond.

We were just one of hundreds of Unitarian Universalist congregations across the United States that did similar things–performed same-sex unions when same-sex marriage was illegal. But here’s the secret, in our congregations we lived as if same-sex marriage was already legal. We lived as if it was perfectly normal for there to be families with two Dads or two Moms. We did this as just we lived as if it was perfectly normal for there to be families with single parents or two heterosexual parents. And because we did that we helped to create a world in which it is possible to celebrate many kinds of families and many kinds of partnerships.

This is how social change happens. A group of people imagine that the world can be different. And then they act as if the world is different. And then the world changes. It is magic. And it is something we can do in our congregations.

This theology runs deep in the collective rafters of our Unitarian Universalist congregations. Many people know that Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” is one of the foundational texts of nonviolent philosophy. Thoreau was raised a Unitarian and many of us like to claim him as one of our own. But less known is a figure named Adin Ballou.

Ballou was by turns a nineteenth-century Unitarian and Universalist minister–there was a lot of that going on before the Unitarians and the Universalists merged to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. He was a committed abolitionist. He also believed in nonviolence. Ballou taught, “We cannot render evil for evil … nor do otherwise than ‘love our enemies.'”

Ballou was one of the inspirations for Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God is Within You.” Such as Ballou’s influence on the Russian novelist, that when he was asked who he thought was the greatest American writer Tolstoy replied, without hesitation, Adin Ballou.

Ballou taught that the only way to make social change was to start where you live and make the change there. With several friends, he started a utopian community called Hopedale. They believed in women’s equality and so in their community women were able to hold office and vote. This was seventy years before women won the right to vote in federal elections. They wanted a fairer economy so they created cooperative business enterprises. They opposed slavery so they refused to buy goods that we created by enslaved people. They questioned many of the ways that things were done in the world and then did things differently. And because of this there’s a direct line that can be traced from their work to Tolstoy to Gandhi to the civil rights movement and the philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hopedale and Unitarian Universalism’s work for marriage equality are but two examples of how our religious communities are places where we make magic happen. Can you think of others? How have Unitarian Universalist congregations stood for reproductive health? How have we stood for the rights of migrants? How have we struggled against racism? How have we fought for gender equality? How have worked towards economic justice?

The challenge, and the question, really is, how can this congregation be a place where we make magic happen? I know that we are small and in a small community but we can still be a place where we imagine a different world and then bring that world into being. In modest ways, we already do. We have a rainbow flag that we are going to hang out front of the church to let the town know that we bless a diversity of genders and sexual orientations. This Wednesday members and friends of the congregation are meeting to plan some social justice events for the spring. Last night, we held a pizza and games party that brought people together for fun and food. In doing so, we did a little to confront one of the most pressing issues of our time: social isolation. The rainbow flag, social justice events, pizza and games, all acts of magic, all bringing something new into the world and into Ashby that would not exist otherwise.

Rather than giving myself the last word. I would like to give it to you. I invite you to turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, this congregation is a place where we can make magic happen. Let’s make some magic together.”

May it Be So and Amen.

Dear Friends:

I hope that you’re excited about pizza and games tonight! Asa and I are looking forward to it. We’re bringing a few of our favorite games and one of Asa’s friends. It should be a lovely time in the fellowship hall. Our religious community doesn’t just exist on Sunday morning and gathering to share food and fun is just as important as worshipping together. It is a wonderful way to exercise one of the primary purposes of the church: bringing people together to share our lives. And what is more central to our lives than food and fun?

This month I am leading two worship services. The first is tomorrow and is titled “Intangible Dreams.” In this service we will consider how Unitarian Universalist congregations are places where we are free to imagine how the future might be different from the present. And we will ask: What shall we dream? What must we do to make those dreams a reality?

My second service for the month is on the 18th. In honor of Black History month, “A Black Christ” will prompt to us to ask: What would it mean if Christ and other images of the divine were imagined as black? 

The texts for both of my sermons from last month are now online. You can read “You and I” and “Two Bodies, One Heart” on my blog. 

I know that the national debate over immigration has been a concern for many of us over the last months. After the Trump administration announced that it would cancel Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadoran immigrants I posted a reflection I wrote on life in El Salvador after taking part in a human rights delegation in 2014. It is worth a read, especially if you would like to know more about why so many people from Central America come to the United States. You can read my piece “Fleeing a Culture of Violence” here.

Finally, I close with a poem from the poet Nikki Giovanni. We will be using it in worship tomorrow.

Revolutionary Dreams

i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i’d be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural 
woman doing what a woman
does when she’s natural
i would have a revolution

I look forward to seeing you soon!

love,

Colin

as preached at the First Parish Church, Ashby, MA, January 21, 2018

This week marked the year anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump. Shortly before he was inaugurated, I preached a sermon to a different congregation in which I said that one of our most important tasks for the coming years was to nurture the spiritual practices that would sustain us through difficult times. Today, as part of my two-sermon series on the self as social creature, I want us to consider one of those spiritual practices: the practice of friendship.

The image of an elderly Emerson, perhaps resting in dusty sunlight on an overstuffed armchair, asking his wife, “What was the name of my best friend?” is moving. It suggests that Thoreau’s name faded long before the feelings his memory evoked. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are not exactly the type of people I usually think of when I think of friends. Thoreau, the archetypical non-conformist, sought to live in the woods by Walden Pond to prove his independence. His classic text opens, “I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself… and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.” For Thoreau solitary life was permanent while life amongst his human fellows was but a sojourn, a temporary condition.

Emerson was equally skeptical about the social dimensions of human nature. In his essay “Self-Reliance” he claimed, “Society everywhere is a conspiracy against… every one of its members.” He believed that self-discovery, awakening knowledge of the self, was primarily a task for the individual, not the community. When he was invited to join the utopian experiment Brook Farm, Emerson responded that he was unwilling to give the community “the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself.”

Yet both of these men sought out the company of others. Emerson gathered around him a circle of poets, preachers, writers, and intellectuals whose friendships have become legendary. That circle contains many of our Unitarian Universalist saints. I speak of the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, of course, but also the pioneering feminists Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, the fiery abolitionist Theodore Parker, and the utopian visionary George Ripely. What we see when look closely at Emerson and Thoreau is not two staunch individualists but rather two men caught in the tension between community and individuality, very conscious that one cannot exist without the other.

Emerson wrote on friendship and in an essay declared, “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.” Margaret Fuller’s tragic death, she was forty when she drowned at sea, prompted him to write, “I have lost my audience.” Emerson thought that Fuller was the one person who understood his philosophy most completely, even if they sometimes violently disagreed. Of her he wrote, “more variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent… magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles…” Of him she wrote, “that from him I first learned what is meant by the inward life… That the mind is its own place was a dead phrase to me till he cast light upon my mind.” Perhaps Fuller’s early death is why Emerson recalled Thoreau, and not her, in the fading moments of his life. But, no matter, a close study of their circle reveals an essential truth: we require others to become ourselves.

The tension between the individual and the community apparent in the writings of our Transcendentalists leads to contradictory statements. Emerson himself placed little stock in consistency, penning words that I sometimes take as my own slogan, “…a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Let us consider Emerson the friend, rather than Emerson the individualist, this morning. If for no reason than when Emerson was falling into his final solitude he tried to steady himself with the memory of his great friend Thoreau. Emerson himself wrote, “Friendship demands a religious treatment.”

Have you ever had a good friend? A great friend? Can you recall what it felt like to be in that person’s presence? Perhaps your friend is in this sanctuary with you this morning. Maybe you are sitting next to them, aware of the warmth of their body. Maybe they are distant: hacking corn stalks with a machete, sipping coffee in a Paris cafe, hustling through Boston, caking paint on fresh stretched canvas, or driving a taxi through Mumbai’s mazing streets. I invite you to invoke the presence of your friend. Give yourself to the quiet joy you feel when you are together.

Friendship is an experience of connection. Friends remind us that we are not alone in the universe. We may be alone in the moment, seeking solitude or even isolated in pain, but we are always members of what William Ellery Channing called “the great family of all souls.” If we are wise we learn that lesson through our friends.

Again, Emerson, “We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.” Such dreams and fables can become real, they can become, “the solidest thing we know.” Seeking such relationships is one of the reasons why people join religious communities like this one.

When I started in the parish ministry it took me awhile to realize this. In my old congregation in Cleveland we had testimonials every Sunday. After the chalice was lit a member would get up and share why they had joined. Their stories were almost always similar and, for years, I was slightly disappointed with them. The service would start, the flame would rise up and someone would begin, “I come to this congregation because I love the community.”

“That’s it?,” my internal dialogue would run. “You come here because of the community? You don’t come seeking spiritual depth or because of all of the wonderful justice work we do in the world? Can’t you get community someplace else? If all you are looking for is community why don’t you join a book club or find a sewing circle? We are a church! People are supposed to come here for more than just community! Uh! I must be a failure as minister if all that these people get out of this congregation is a sense of community!”

Eventually, I realized that community is an essential part of the religious experience. The philosopher William James may have believed, “Religion… [is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude,” but he was wrong. Religion is found in the moments of connection when we discover that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Life together, life in community, is a reminder of that reality. People seek out that experience in a congregation because of the isolating nature of modern life. In this country we are more alone than ever before. Just a few years ago, Newsweek reported that in the previous twenty years the number of people who have no close friends had tripled. Today at least one out of every four people report having no one with whom they feel comfortable discussing an important matter.

Congregations like this one offer the possibility of overcoming such a sense of isolation. We offer a place for people to celebrate life’s passages and make meaning from those passages. Friendship requires a common center to blossom and meaning making is a pretty powerful common center.

Aristotle understood that friendship was rooted in mutual love. That love was not necessarily the love of the friends for each other. It was love for a common object. This understanding led him to describe three kinds of friendship: those of utility, those of pleasure and those of virtue, which he also called complete friendship. Friendships of utility were the lowest, least valuable kind and friendships of virtue were the highest kind. Erotic friendship fell somewhere in between. Friendships of utility were easily dissolved. As soon as one friend stopped being useful to the other then the friendship dissipated.

It took me until I was in my twenties to really understand the transitory nature of friendships of utility. I spent a handful of years between college and seminary working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. I worked for about a year at on-line bookstore. When a recession hit there were a round of lay-offs and, as the junior member of my department, I lost my job.

Up until that point I spent a fair amount of social time with several of my colleagues. We would have lunch and go out for drinks after work. I enjoyed the company of one colleague in particular. I made the mistake of thinking that he was really my friend. He had a masters degree in classical literature. Our water cooler conversations sometimes revolved around favorite authors from antiquity, Homer and Sappho. “From his tongue flowed speech sweeter than honey,” said one. “Like a mountain whirlwind / punishing the oak trees, / love shattered my heart,” said the other. Alas, when I lost my job a common love of literature was not enough to sustain our relationship. My colleague was always busy whenever I suggested we get together. Have you ever had a similar experience? Such friends come and go throughout our working lives. Far rarer are what Aristotle calls friendships of virtue. These are the enduring friendships, they help us to become better people. Congregational life provides us with opportunities to build such friendships.

The virtues might be understood as those qualities that shape a good and whole life. A partial list of Aristotle’s virtues runs bravery, temperance, generosity, justice, prudence… Friendship offers us the opportunity to practice these virtues and, in doing so, helps us to become better, more religious, people. The virtues require a community in which to practice them.

Let us think about bravery for a moment. The brave, Aristotle believed, stand firm in front of what is frightening not with a foolhardy arrogance but, instead, knowing full well the consequences of their decisions. They face their fears because they know that by doing so they may achieve some greater good.

Seeking a friend is an act of bravery. It always contains within it the possibility of rejection. Emerson observed, “The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” I have often found, when I hoped for friends, that I need to initiate the relationship. I need to start the friendship. I am not naturally the most extroverted and outgoing person. Many days I am most content alone with the company of my books or wandering unescorted along the urban edges–scanning river banks for blue herons and scouring wrinkled aged tree trunks for traces of mushrooms.

But other people contain within them possible universes that I cannot imagine. My human fellows pull me into a better self. And so, I find that I must be brave and initiate friendships, even when I find the act of reaching out uncomfortable or frightening. Rejection is always a possibility. I was rejected by my former colleague. Rejection often makes me question my own self-worth. When it comes I wonder perhaps if I am unworthy of friendship or of love. But by being brave, and trying again, I discover that I am.

Bravery is not the only virtue that we find in friendship. Generosity is there too, for friendship is a giving of the self to another. Through that giving of the self we come to know ourselves a little better. We say, “I value this part of myself enough to want to share it with someone else.”

We could create a list of virtues and then explore how friendship offers an opportunity to practice each of them. Such an exercise, I fear, would soon become tedious. So, instead, let me underscore that our friends provide us with the possibility of becoming better people. This can be true even on a trivial level. A friend visits: I take the opportunity to make a vanilla soufflé, something I had never done before but will certainly do again. We delighted in its silky sweet eggey texture. It can also be true on a substantive level. A friend calls and reminds me I should try to make the world a better place. I recommit to justice work and march to oppose white supremacy and racial hatred.

How have your friends changed your life? Emerson and Thoreau certainly changed each other’s lives. And I know that the two men, whatever their preferences for individualism, needed each other. I half suspect that Emerson’s tattered memory of his friend, “What was the name of my best friend?” was actually an urgent cry. As Emerson disappeared into the dimming hollows of his mind Thoreau’s light was a signal that could call him back into himself.

I detect a similar urgency in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem to Marianne Moore: “We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, / or play at a game of constantly being wrong / with a priceless set of vocabularies, / or we can bravely deplore, but please / please come flying.” Whatever was going on in Bishop’s life when she wrote her friend the most pressing matter, the strongest tug of reality, was that she see her friend. Surely it is an act of bravery to admit to such a need. Truly it is an act of generosity to wish to give one’s self so fully.

Let us then, be brave, and seek out friends. Such bravery can be a simple as saying, “Hello, I would like to get to know you.” Let us be generous, then, and give ourselves to our friends, saying, “I have my greatest gift to give you, my self.” Doing so will help us to lead better, more virtuous, lives and may draw us to unexpected places and into unexpected heights.

It was recently announced that the Trump administration has decided to cancel Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans who have been allowed to legally live and work in the United States since 2001 when devastating earthquakes struck El Salvador. There are approximately 200,000 Salvadorans currently living in the United Country under the program. Almost all will try to stay. While some of the country’s infrastructure has been rebuilt El Salvador remains one of the most violent countries on the planet. This should be reason enough to extend TPS for many years to come.

In the summer of 2014 I travelled to El Salvador as part of a human rights delegation with the National Day Laborers Organizing Network. Upon my return, I published a theological reflection in the UU World and preached a sermon about my experiences there that I shared with congregations throughout New England. I wrote a third piece that I submitted to several magazines but was never able to publish. It seems like now is a good time to post the unpublished manuscript. My hope is that it will help further an understanding of what life is like in El Salvador and the kinds of situations that the Trump administration is planning to send Salvadorans back to.

Fleeing a Culture of Violence; Migration and El Salvador

After we pass the thick line of waiting family members I notice a white column next to the gate. At least, it was originally white. Now it is covered with a thick hatch of black ink, the remnants of finger-printing. The deportees emerge, one at a time, through the mesh gate and wipe their hands on the column, hoping, I imagine, to quickly leave behind at least one sign of their humiliation. They were heroes when they left, some of them walking for weeks until they reached the U.S./Mexico border. They were heroes while they were there, many of them sending several hundred dollars a month back to El Salvador to support their extended families. But now they are mostly ashamed and afraid.

I have travelled here with NDLON, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, to learn about the experiences of migrants: why they leave and what it is like for them when they are brought back.

We visit two repatriation centers during the week I am in El Salvador. The one at El Salvador’s International Airport, the one with the white column covered in fingerprints, is where deportees from the United States arrive. There are as many as 700 of them in a week. The other center is in San Salvador’s La Chacra neighborhood. It is for deportees from Mexico. The center by the airport reminds me of both a prison and a Greyhound bus station. When the deportees are taken off the planes they wait for processing in a poorly-lit room filled with rows of plastic molded Eames chairs in bold colors. None of the red, blue, black, and beige chairs are empty. In each one sits someone whose face is weighed down with a mixture of exhaustion and trauma. One part of their ordeal, usually months in detention, is coming to an end. Another, confronting their place in Salvadoran society, is about to start.

+++

We are not allowed to bring cameras or audio recorders or cell phones into the repatriation centers. The deportees themselves aren’t eager to share their names. But they are willing to share their stories. At the center for deportees from Mexico, one man tells us he was deported after living in the United States for eleven years. He is almost quivering with anger. His wife and children are still there. This is his second time being deported. The first time he was caught in the United States and flown back to El Salvador on a plane. This time he only made it as far as Mexico; he was shipped back on a bus. He says that as soon as he can he will leave again.

Another man at the center explains why he fled. He is a victim of gang violence. He and two of his friends had operated a bus together. He was the driver, while his friends tended to the passengers and collected fares. One day some gang members boarded the bus and killed the fare collector. The bus driver and his other friend were allowed to live. Shortly afterwards the gang members changed their minds. They let it be known that they planned to kill the two friends, because they had witnessed the murder. The gang murdered the friend while he ate dinner at a neighborhood pupuseria. That’s when the bus driver decided to leave the country.

When the deportees arrive they are processed quickly. They are given a soft drink, a pupusa, and sent into a waiting room. After a brief wait they are interviewed by an immigration officer and, if necessary, given a health exam. If any of the deportees have criminal charges pending in El Salvador they are handed over to the police. There are three phones where, afterwards, they are permitted to make a free phone call.

The bus driver says he called his mother. She told him that it wasn’t safe for him to come home. He has no idea what he is going to do next.

+++

Away from the repatriation centers I interview Sandra Elizabeth Borja Armero. She is eager to tell me her story. Before she was deported, she worked with NDLON in Los Angeles, taking part in their Teatro Jornalero Sin Fronteras (Day Labor Theater Without Borders). Her husband and son still live in Los Angeles. Her son is five. He is named Barack, after the President who oversaw her deportation. “It is ironic,” she tells me. Like many Hispanics, she thought that the election of the first black President would herald a better life for undocumented immigrants. Instead, she says, the first black President has deported more brown people than any of the white Presidents who preceded him, to date more than two million. She and her husband named their son after President Obama because of the hope he represented. She says, “I want to be with my son” before repeating, “Barack, it is ironic.”

+++

A red mesh bag containing a wallet, a cell phone, maybe a couple of pieces of mail, shoelaces, is all deportees are allowed to bring back with them from the United States. Whether they were caught sneaking across the border or rounded up after living in the States for fifteen years, they bring back the same small number of possessions.

+++

I meet José Efrain Mortimez Rivas at another event organized by NDLON. This man wants his story told. He lived in the United States for six years. He worked hard, got married, and regularly sent money back to El Salvador. Twice a month, he sent $300: $100 for his mother, and $100 each for the mothers of his two children in El Salvador.

His move to the United States was a family investment. Before he left his family raised $6,000 to pay a coyote to smuggle him from El Salvador to the United States. The investment more than paid off. During his time in the United States he sent back over $40,000. There are no other financial instruments available to poor people in El Salvador with six-hundred percent return rates.

Rivas lived in Melbourne, Florida, and worked as day laborer there. He made, on average, $70 to $80 a day. Now that he is back in El Salvador, when he can find work, which isn’t often, he is lucky if he can make $10 a day. He isn’t able to support his mother or his children. His wife, who still lives in Florida, has left him. He is not sure if he wants to risk the return journey, but he knows that his options if he stays are very limited. He is exactly my age, 37, and tells me that the best part of his life is over.

+++

The journey to the United States is dangerous, the deportation process ugly. One young woman I meet outside the repatriation center describes a little of her experience. It took her five weeks to travel to the United States. Before she made it across the border she saw two of her fellow migrants die. Both young men, they drowned trying to cross a flooding river. She was in the United States for ten months: the first five in Los Angeles hustling for all kinds of work; the last five in a deportation center in Texas.

Her story about her time in detention catches my attention. The place was called the Coastal Bend Detention Center. There, she worked everyday from 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. She says, she was paid $1.00 a day. A phone call cost a dollar. A bag of chips from the canteen was $2.50. The center, she claims, was privately run.

+++

When we arrive at the repatriation center in San Salvador, there is a small swarm of reporters. They are waiting outside to get interviews with and pictures of families that have been deported. No one wants to talk to them. The families draw shirts up over their heads and pile into taxis in an effort to escape the journalists. The journalists, meanwhile, chase after the taxis like paparazzi pursuing celebrities. Two news anchors, young women caked in make-up and wearing bold single color dresses, have started to work-up a sweat.

Our arrival provides a welcome distraction. Pablo Alvarado, NDLON’s Executive Director, holds an impromptu press conference to publicize the results of a study on migrants that his organization has commissioned with José Simeón Cañas Central American University (which everyone calls UCA). Then the gate opens, the journalists scatter, and the chase after another taxi begins.

+++

Inside the repatriation center a bus with children from Mexico has just arrived. I see a nursing mother whose baby can’t be more than a month old. There are three boys traveling together unaccompanied, the oldest no more than fifteen. The center feels like a refugee camp. It is overrun. There’s no place for the adults to sit or for the children to play. The bathrooms don’t include tables for changing diapers. After seeing the nursing mother I ask someone in my group, “How bad does your life have to be to make migrating to the United States with a tiny baby seem like a good idea?”

+++

While not visiting the detention centers, we talk with NDLON leaders, attend presentations, and meet with some senior government officials. The main reason we have any access here is Francisco “Pancho” Pacheco, NDLON’s National Director of Organizing. Pancho is a former central committee member of one of the organizations behind Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, better known as the FMLN, now El Salvador’s ruling party. It turns out that many of Pancho’s old comrades in arms are now leading members of the government. During our week in El Salvador we meet with the President of El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, the Vice President, the Vice President’s wife, and Lidwina Magarín, the Deputy Foreign Minister for Salvadorans Living Abroad. Lidwina fought under Pancho and took his command when he fled to the United States in 1995, three years after the Peace Accords were signed. In the years between the signing of the Accords and Pancho’s decision to leave El Salvador he survived three assassination attempts.

He arrived in Los Angeles with little English and began shaping up on corners, looking for work, like so many other Salvadorian migrants. A brilliant organizer, he naturally began to talk to other day laborers and became involved in a local workers center. This led, in time, to him becoming part of NDLON’s leadership. In recent years it has become safe for him to travel back to El Salvador. The FMLN has won the last two presidential elections and more than twenty years have passed since the end of the civil war. Politically motivated violence is largely a thing of the past. Now, the danger is gang violence. Despite this change, Pancho doesn’t want to move back to El Salvador. After almost twenty years in the United States it feels like home and he is not confident he could find work in his native country. Still, he tells, he thinks he might move back when he retires.

During the week I spend in El Salvador I only see Pancho get flustered once. The van we are traveling in breaks down in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. Quickly, I learn that we are in gang territory. On one side of the road: a coffee plantation. On the other side of the road: sheer rock crowned by crowded foliage, trees draped in tropical greenery.

Pablo, or someone, makes a phone call and two cars appear. There are three white people in our delegation. It is urgent that the three of us leave immediately. As we get into the cars I see that a group of people had begun slowly moving up the highway towards us.

+++

As many as 90,000 unaccompanied children are expected to migrate from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to the United States in 2014. The majority say they are fleeing violence. The murder rate in the communities they are leaving is below only Syria.

Another member of our delegation tells me about a child who successfully made it to her community in Los Angeles. He left because the local gang started threatening the kids on his soccer team, trying to extort money from their parents. When the gang killed one of the team members, he fled. By the time he was safely reunited with family members in the United States, the gang had murdered six more children on the team.