I am preaching today at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford. Services start at 10:30 a.m. Join me if you’re in town! The title of the sermon is “Democracy as a Religious Practice.”
I had thought it was lost. The audio for my all John Cage service from 2010 “The Buddha Should Be As Useful As A Can” has found. You can listen to it here. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done so I hope you will.
as preached at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland, March 10, 2009
This morning I am going to talk about stewardship. Stewardship is the way in which we pass gifts from generation to generation. It is the act of preserving and maintaining the community so that the gifts that we receive from it might be available to future generations. Stewardship has four interrelated and interlocking aspects: love, money, values and tradition. The four facets of stewardship are related to each other and to our spiritual lives.
Money is the part of stewardship we talk about least often during our Sunday services. Love, values and tradition frequently appear in the Society’s other sermons and services throughout the year. Money, however, generally only gets mentioned during the annual stewardship campaign. I suspect that this is because money often stands in tension with religion.
Money is, after all, one of the major ordering forces of the material world. For many of us it determines what kind home we have, what kind of food we eat, what type of clothes we wear and what forms of entertainment we can seek. Our society consistently broadcasts the message that an individual’s self-worth is related to how much money he or she has.
Consumer culture has been built by trying to convince people that they will be happier if only the own certain products. Commercials promise happiness by offering us younger skin, new cars, trendier clothes, exciting food and better homes. The message is always clear. Transformation and personal fulfillment are possible through the consumption of products. What we have defines who we are.
Religion usually posits one of two oppositional messages to this gospel of consumerism. Religious communities suggest that we are either defined by what we believe or what we do. What we have is secondary to who we are. Anyone, regardless of their material possessions, can be a member of a religious community. In fact, someone’s material possessions can stand in the way of their ability to participate in a religious community.
There are plenty of stories about how those with few material possessions and little money have a better chance at having a rich spiritual life. Many of you are probably familiar with a story called the rich young man found in the Christian tradition.
Once when Jesus was sitting with his disciples a rich young man came up to him and asked “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus replied that in order to have eternal life all the young man had to do was keep the commandments. He should refrain from murder. He should not steal or commit adultery. He should love his neighbor as himself.
The young man was not satisfied with this answer and so he asked Jesus “I have kept all the commandments what do I still lack?” Jesus replied “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor…”
The young man was shocked and retreated in confusion. Jesus told his disciples “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter into the kingdom of God.”
This story suggests that to be a member of Jesus’s community you had to eschew material goods. They actually prevented one from being a full member of the community. Jesus favored the poor and the outcast more than he favored the wealthy or even the middle class.
Christianity is not the only religion to suggest that there is a tension between the material and the spiritual world. There is a Taoist story, for example, about the encounter between a Taoist gardener and a disciple of Confucius named Zi-gong.
One day Zi-gong was traveling through the country side when he saw an old man digging a ditch to connect a vegetable garden with a well. Slowly and painstakingly the gardener would draw a bucket of water from the well and pour it into the ditch.
Zi-gong approached him and said, “You know, if you had the right contraption you could water your garden faster and with less effort. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“What type of contraption?” the gardener asked.
“It’s called a well sweep. It is really just a wooden lever that is light in back and heavy in front. You pull on it and it allows you to draw water from the well in a steady flowing stream,” Zi-gong replied.
The gardener was not impressed. In fact, he started to laugh at Zi-gong. Then he said to Zi-gong, “My teacher says that those with tricky tools have tricky business affairs. Those with tricky business affairs have trickery in their hearts. Those with trickery in their hearts cannot remain pure. Without purity they will have restless spirits and for them Dao cannot exist. I would be ashamed to use the sort of tricky tool you suggest.”
In this story there is a clear scorn for material things. What is simplest is best. Any tool more complex than the most basic one might get in the way of an individual’s spiritual life. To be a member of the gardener’s spiritual community one must seek simplicity and avoid significant entanglements with the material world.
There is a certain usefulness and richness to such teachings. Our material lives should not define us. When we enter into a religious community or embark upon a spiritual path what we own and how much money we make should not limit us or even be particularly relevant.
Yet our physical beings and our communities are located in the material world. It is true that when we focus too much on money and material things our spiritual lives can be distorted. It is equally true that if we do not focus on the material world enough our spiritual lives will become distorted.
We Unitarian Universalists should be particularly cognizant of this. Unlike a lot of religious traditions most Unitarian Universalists tend to be skeptical about a realm of pure spirit. The contemporary Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka, for example, argues that we can best understand our human nature by understanding our physiology. While we might have religious lives and spiritual experiences those lives and experiences are, for a large part, shaped by the material world we inhabit. Neglecting the material world can mean that we neglect the realm of the spirit. Our spiritual experiences are shaped by that material world.
“The Magic Penny” is a story that illustrates the connection between the material and spiritual realms. The story suggests that the more we give to others the more, in turn, we receive. You might remember it from the folk song by the same name.
A long time ago, a little girl found a magic penny. She and her family were poor and so she was delighted to have found some money for her own. She thought that, perhaps, she could buy herself a piece of penny candy.
That afternoon when she got home she was excited and told her father about what she had found. She told him that she was hoping to buy a lollypop. That evening her dad had to ask her for the penny. They were almost out of food and he needed the penny to buy a bag of beans so that everyone in the family could have something to eat. He told her he would repay her as soon as he could.
The little girl was crestfallen but she gave her father the penny and, filled with sorrow, went to bed. The next morning she woke-up and under her pillow were two pennies. She told her father and thanked him for giving her two pennies. He said that he didn’t know where they came from.
Later that day she went to the candy store and bought her little brother a piece of candy. The next morning she discovered that her pennies had multiplied again. She continued to lend out her pennies or spend them on gifts for others. With each gift given or loan made her pennies came back to her, more than before.
After awhile she started to horde her pennies. Within a few days she noticed that her pile was decreasing in size. Every day that she went without lending out a penny or using a penny to buy a gift for someone her pile would get a little smaller.
The folk song compares the magic penny to love. The chorus and first verse of the song read:
Love is something if you give it away,
Give it away, give it away.
Love is something if you give it away,
You end up having more.
It’s just like a magic penny,
Hold it tight and you won’t have any.
Lend it, spend it, and you’ll have so many
They’ll roll all over the floor.
Love is like the magic penny because the more love we give the more we receive. If we hold ourselves in, are afraid to engage with others, and fail to share we will end up alone and unloved. It is only by loving others and seeking love that we can find it.
The song and the story capture the spirit of congregational stewardship perfectly. The more you give the more you receive. And stewardship is not just about giving money. It is about sharing our love, our values and passing along our tradition. The song reflects this. It is part of our tradition. It was written by Malvina Reynolds, a Unitarian Universalist folk singer who lived in Berkeley, California.
I first heard the song not as child but as an adult when I was a member of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists. Even though she died in the late 1970s Reynolds was still a presence within that congregation’s life. People sang her songs and her family–Unitarian Universalists who attended other congregations in the Bay Area–came to do a program about her every few years.
The song was created by Reynolds as an expression of her love for her daughter Nancy. It is one way that Reynolds passed her love and her values down to the next generation. So, not only does the song provide a nice metaphor for stewardship it actually reflects the practice. Stewardship is not just about money. It is about how we pass along and share what is most important to us.
Passing along gifts between generations was a topic this past week in the Unitarian Universalist parenting group that Sara and I facilitate. As part of the class we the read the poem by Antoine de St. Exupery “Generation to Generation.” The poem is about how values are passed from one generation to the next. It ends with the lines: “We live, not by things, but by the meanings / of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords / from generation to generation.”
After reading the poem participants took a little time to reflect upon and share the passwords that had been handed down to them from a previous generation. Passwords help us gain entrance into secret or closed places. In the sense of the poem they are the keys that unlock our identities. They help us define who we are and what means to be a member of particular community or family.
In the class, people shared words like justice, spirit or love. These were often key concepts that had ordered their lives. Such things are worth sharing with the following generations.
The conversation was about being stewards of our religious and familial values. As members of families and a religious community we are inheritors of traditions. It falls upon us to continue those traditions.
Stewardship is the act of preserving and nurturing the tradition for those who will come next. You may not know but anyone sitting in this room is the beneficiary of the stewardship of previous generations.
Those previous generations were filled with love. They proclaimed that all of humanity is worthy of God’s love and wanted to share that message with others. They believed that love was transformative and that one of the purposes of religious community was to teach us to love better.
They sought to nurture a tradition that expressed and articulated that love. A tradition that provided an alternative to more orthodox religious movements that taught that the love of God and the humanity community are both limited.
This tradition and that love gave them the values to proclaim that women and men should have equal rights, that people of all colors and creeds are full members of the human and that sexual orientation should not limit one’s right to have a partner or a family. This love and tradition called them to create a religious community where there is room for many different beliefs so that we might have a congregation which includes atheists, pagans, theists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and people with other religious understandings.
And in order to share their love, nurture their tradition and spread their values they gave time and money to support Unitarian Universalism. Without that dedication and sacrifice we would not have a place to worship on Sunday. Without them we would not be able to broadcast the message that all of humanity is one family and that everyone is welcome–regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender or other human divisor–in our community. Without that dedication and sacrifice we would not have a community from which to reach out to refugees, advocate for peace, emphasize the importance of our connection to the natural world, speak out in favor of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights and work for justice.
Think of all of these gifts you have received. Surely they are worth nurturing and passing down to the next generation. One of the ways we pass these gifts down is through the act of financial giving. It is just one part of stewardship but it is an important part.The money that we give to our Unitarian Universalist congregation is an expression of the love we have for each other, the tradition we hold sacred and the values that we seek to promote. Giving money to the congregation sustains it and allows us to continue spreading and sharing our tradition of love.
This year as we launch our annual canvass we are trying something new. We are shifting to something called fair share giving. With fair share giving each person or family is asked to give a percentage of their income, rather than a specific dollar amount. Fair share giving allows you to self-identify how important this congregation and Unitarian Universalism are to your life. You can call yourself a supporter and give 3% of your income, a sustainer and give 4%, a visionary and give 5% or offer a full tithe of 10%. The goal of fair share giving is to have everyone give a meaningful amount rather than raise a specific dollar amount. Fair share giving recognizes that everyone’s circumstances and different and that for some even giving at the 3% level can be a stretch. The hope is even if you cannot make a commitment to fair sharing this year you might be able to work towards it next year.
Fair share giving is like the magic penny. In the end it is not the amount that is given that is not as important as the commitment. If everyone gives their fair share we will have more than enough for all of the congregation’s needs and ministries.
John Wolf said, “There is only one reason for joining a Unitarian Universalist church. That is to support it with your time and money. You want to support it because it stands against superstition and fear. Because it points to what is noblest and best in human life. Because it is open to women and men of whatever race, creed, color, place of origin or sexual orientation.”
I hope that agree that this congregation and this tradition are worth supporting. If you do I am certain you will receive more than you give and find, like the magic penny, your love and your pledge multiplied many times over.
May be it so. Amen.
as preached at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland, May 16, 2010
There is at least a segment of you who are wondering what just happened. The order of service shows that before the sermon we were supposed to have a piece of music called 4’33”. But instead of playing music Karin sat in front of the piano doing nothing. No notes were played. No melody emerged. Nothing happened. This nothing is the entirety of this piece by the American composer, philosopher and artist John Cage. Yet the very presence of nothing throughout the piece makes 4’33” one of the 20th century’s seminal musical compositions. Its central premiss is that everything that occurs during the piece is part of the piece. Each cough, uncomfortable shift in a chair, reluctant sigh, bird sound, traffic noise or incredulous murmur is music. 4’33” can, therefore, be understood as expanding music’s definition.
Cage arrived at this piece when he set out to experience absolute silence. In the early 1950s he was invited to make use of an anechoic chamber. The chamber used a variety of techniques to blot out all external sound. Inside of it there was no rattle from a passing truck, no whisper of the wind, no ring of a telephone… There was supposed to be nothing. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear pure silence. Instead he discovered two sounds, a high pitched whine and a low but steady beat. Upon leaving the chamber he asked the engineer in charge about the two sounds. The engineer explained to him that what he had heard was the sound of his nervous system, the high tones, and the sound of his heart, the low ones.
From this experience Cage learned that we are surrounded by sound at all times. “Sounds,” Cage wrote, “occur whether intended or not.” He realized that the traditional understanding of music was, in his words, “an ideal situation, not a real one.” When conceiving of a piece of music a composer indicates through a score that a composition is comprised of certain notes to be produced on specific instruments. When the piece is performed listeners hear something different than what the composer intended for them to hear. They hear both the planned notes and the ambient noise of the environment. This realization led Cage to seek to incorporate his environment’s, and his body’s, unintended sounds into his music.
4’33” derives from Cage’s realization about the constant presence of sound. The only sound in the piece is the unintended sound of the body and the environment. Normally the ambient noise of the environment is the background upon which music unfolds. Cage has reversed the situation. In 4’33” the ambient noise is the music itself.
Changing his listeners’ understanding of what art and music are is one of the central tasks of Cage’s work. Profoundly influenced by Zen Buddhism and other forms of Eastern religion Cage saw art as having “the function of awakening people to the life around them.” One of his teachers, the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, put it slightly differently by telling him, that “the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” Cage came to understand that the divine is “all things that happen in creation.”
Cage’s art is useful to a religious community like ours because his works help us to see and hear everyday life as beautiful. His music can provide a focus point through which we reinterpret and reengage with our environment. The actual sounds that are contained within his work might be unusual or may fall outside of the realm of what we normally consider music. This is intentional. Cage wanted his music to challenge listeners to reconsider the nature of music itself. He wrote, “People may leave my concerts thinking they have heard ‘noise’ but… then [they will] hear unsuspected beauty in their everyday life.”
Heard with Cage’s ears music becomes not a matter of composition or performance but the result of an attitude. The rattle of a washing machine is placed on an equal level with a fugue by Beethoven. One is not more beautiful than the other. Both are collections of sounds–the bow drawn across the tense strings of the violin, the water and clothes pushing against the metal sides of the machine, the piano’s hammers hitting the wires and the bolts jangling as dirt is shaken loose from fabric. The beauty of the sounds is not an inherent value. It is a value assigned to them. If we choose we can assign all sounds the value of beautiful. Doing so allows us to take greater pleasure from them. It also opens up the world of experience. If, as Cage said, we “get over our likes and dislikes,” then we can fully engage with anything that we encounter.
Cage drew inspiration from the French artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp used his work to confront conventional understandings of what art is. He is perhaps most famous for his readymades. These were a series of ordinary objects that Duchamp signed, gave titles to and placed in art galleries. They included a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel and a urinal labeled “Fountain.” Duchamp hoped that seeing such familiar objects in the space of an art gallery would cause the viewer to ask questions like: Are these pieces art? What is art? Are we surrounded by art at all times?
Duchamp’s work had the desired result on Cage. During an interview Cage shared this story about seeing some of the readymades: “his work acted in such a way that my attention was drawn to the light switch on the wall, away from–not away, but among–the works of art…the light switch seemed to be as attention-deserving as the works of art.”
When I first learned of Duchamp’s work it had a similar effect on me. One afternoon a friend and I went to a local grocery store. While there we encountered a clear milk jug filled with neon insecticide. The object fascinated me. It seemed beautiful and grotesque and problematic all at once.
The bottle of bug killer had as much of a story to it as any other object. It was unique. It had been conceived by a human mind, built with human tools and placed in front of me by human hands. The florescent light that shone on it caused the jug to cast a pale green shadow.
When Cage had such experiences they reminded him to celebrate the uniqueness of each object he encountered. During an interview with the scholar Joan Retallack he reflected on seeing a soup can in the supermarket: “when you see a row of soup cans, you notice rather quickly and easily that light falls on them differently. Each can is separate from each other can. They’re only connected as ideas in our heads. But in reality light falls on each one uniquely, so that it is at the center of the universe, or is the Buddha, you see. So, it’s worthy of honor…”
In response to Cage’s ruminations Retallack replied, “Presumably the Buddha should be as useful as a can.” Sharp quips aside, Cage’s point was that viewed from a certain perspective everyday objects can trigger moments of insight. Every object encountered is both unique and connected with all other objects in the universe. Considering these facts can turn the most mundane incident into a spiritual experience. Any sound we hear, any article we see or touch is an invitation into deeper connection with the world around us.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nat Han created the word “interbeing” to describe this interrelation of all things. In one of his books he invites his readers to look at the piece of paper on which his words appear. Looking at it closely reveals that it is a connected to all things. “Your mind is in here and mine is also…You cannot point to one thing that is not here–time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper,” he states.
Seeing the sheet of paper for what it is requires a certain perspective. Such a perspective is not always easy to obtain. Often we focus on the utility of an object or simply ignore it, consigning it to the sensory background. Cage’s work is helpful because engaging with it can require a shifting of perspective: the paper is seen in a new manner; the washing machine heard for the first time; and the background sounds come to the foreground.
It is possible to cultivate this type of perspective through spiritual practice. Spiritual practice stills and sharpens the mind. It tunes the senses. It brings the background into the foreground. Spiritual practices vary by individual and community. Some choose meditation or prayer as their spiritual practice. Others prefer journal writing, painting or a regular exercise routine. All spiritual practices serve the same function, to center the self and to point to the possibility of insight.
For Cage composition was a spiritual practice. It brought him into tune with nature. Cage felt that “personality is a flimsy thing on which to build…art” and sought to transcend it through the use of chance operations in his later pieces. Chance operations are methods of generating art independent of an artist’s conscious intentions. They range from simple things like rolling dice or throwing darts to more complicated methods involving the ancient Chinese divination tool the I-Ching or computer programs. Cage developed a complex methodology for composition using the I-Ching as a base. He would set a certain number of parameters for a piece–its length, the number of performers or the number of instruments–and then flip coins to derive a series of I-Ching hexagrams to determine the rest. This stripped intention from his work and led it, in his view, to more closely mirror the natural world. “What we do, we do without purpose. The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operations,” he wrote, reflecting on his composition technique.
Cage’s understanding of the natural world reinforced his views about music and art. His primary engagement with the natural environment was through his passion for mushrooms. He foraged for fungi every opportunity he got.
Mushroom foraging is a lot like chance operation in composition. You commit to a particular technique–or in the case of mushrooms area–pay attention and see what the world brings you. Sudden shifts in consciousness may occur.
As a frequent forager myself I know how easy it is to slip from a forest bereft of mushrooms to a forest full of them. The chance turning of a leaf reveals a morel. Before there was nothing but early spring May Apples. Now the ground is littered with wrinkled grey caps.
Reflecting on this dynamic Cage once said, “ideas are to be found in the same way you find wild mushrooms in the forest, just by looking.” The chance encounter of a mushroom is similar to the discovery of an unusual sound. He wrote, “a mushroom grows for such a short time and if you happen to come across it when it’s fresh it’s like coming upon a sound which also lives a short time.”
Cage believed that we are surrounded by beauty, writing “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Within this attitude to I hear echoes of the first source of our Unitarian Universalist Association: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…which moves us to a renewal of spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” Cage’s work challenges us to directly experience the world that surrounds us. It is not be meditated through symbolic interpretation or given an explanation. It is just to be experienced. Such an openness leads to a constant state of wonder.
If this view has a limitation it is that, perhaps, ironically for a Buddhist, it does not offer an adequate approach to suffering. Throughout his writings and works Cage never seems to seriously wrestle with suffering. Instead he focuses on the possibility of beauty within the world. But I am not so sure we should ultimately find all things beautiful. Torture, pain, the degradation of the environment, war, liking or disliking these things is not a matter of aesthetics but a matter of ethics. While there might be moments of beauty found within them–the iridescent whirls of oil on water, the harsh stillness of a field before battle–it is probably best not to view them as beautiful. Doing so could lead to complacency or acceptance. In the face of the world’s problems inaction is not a realistic option.
Art only pushes into daily life so far. It may be provocative to quote, as Cage did in his piece “Indeterminacy,” the Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna by offering the words–“When Sri Ramakrishna was asked why, if God is good, is there evil in the world, he replied, ‘To thicken the plot.'”–but it does little to goad people in action. It is no doubt my own rooting in a religious tradition that’s objective is, in the words of one Unitarian Universalist author, “to build the world we dream about” that finds limitations in Cage here. He does not point the path to that world. In some of his writings he envisions an anarchist utopian society where work has been abolished and people respect the planet. Yet he never offers thoughts on how to create such a society.
Such was not his purpose. Instead Cage’s work offers us the invitation to see the world as a blessing. And that is surely the first step towards making it whole. Cage suggests that viewed properly each movement we make is part of a dance, each breath the catch of a song, each thing we see a thing of wondrous beauty. If we understand the world’s beauty how could do anything but cherish it? As Cage himself would say, “Everyday is a beautiful day.” Let us make it so.
Amen.
A few years back the UU World published an essay of mine entitled “Black Humanism’s Response to Suffering.” It’s still up on the World’s web site but it has just recently been anthologized in the new book Humanist Voices in Unitarian Universalism. I’m excited to have my work appear alongside some of my former seminary professors (David Bumbaugh, Bill Murry, and Carol Hepokoski) and exciting emerging voices in Unitarian Universalism like Emerson Zora Hamsa and Amanda Poppei. The text is $14 and you can order a copy from the UUA Bookstore. It is not on Amazon yet but I imagine it soon will be.
Sunday I preached a sermon that leveled a prophetic critique against the incoming Trump administration. I labeled it a neo-Confederate project and argued that in the coming years liberal religious communities would be called to resist it and dream freedom dreams.
Curiously, in the last 72 hours my web site traffic has spiked. The spike in traffic has not come, sadly, from my sermon going viral. Rather it appears to be coming from a Russian spam bot whose browser language is set to “Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!” Traffic from the Russian spam bot as of this evening is accounting for 95% of my site traffic. I would be interested to know if other folks out there who have been outspoken about the next President are seeing a similar phenomena. I can’t but wonder if there’s a connection.
as preached at the First Unitarian Church of Worcester, November 27, 2016
I am grateful to be back with you. It now seems worlds ago, but I was last with you the Sunday you installed Sarah Stewart as your twelfth minister. I understand you colloquially know her as M12.
M12’s installation took place, you might remember, a couple of weeks after the death of Freddie Gray. In the days leading up to the service there were large protests in Baltimore against police brutality. People were mobilizing to proclaim Black Lives Matter. Ministers and congregations across the country, I observed, were spending their Sundays talking and praying about the need for racial reconciliation and racial justice. I suggested that I was, at best, skeptical about such efforts. In many liberal religious communities, I complained, serious conversation about racial and social justice only take place against the backdrop of calamity. The crisis occurs. Congregations confront the tragedy with much hand wringing. Little changes. The traumatic event is largely forgotten, or becomes normalized, or fades into the background of daily life.
The only way this pattern would change, I argued, was for religious communities like yours to become sites for conversion. Conversion might be defined, I told you, in the words of James Luther Adams as a “fundamental change of heart and will.” Conversion brings with it a new perspective, a shift in a point of view. After the death of Freddie Gray, and the deaths of far too many others, I offered that most whites in America needed to undergo a conversion process. Those of us who imagine ourselves to be white, I urged, need to shift our point of view to see the United States from the perspective of people with darker skin. Whites must come to understand that white supremacy is not an abstract concept or a political slur. White supremacy is an economic and political system in which white wealth is built upon the dual exploitation of brown and black bodies and the natural environment. Those of us that claim we are white must empathically comprehend that racism is as much physical as it is psychological. For human beings with brown and black bodies, racism, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “is a visceral experience… it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.”
It is only once those of us who believe ourselves to be white imaginatively shift our perspective, I claimed, that we can begin to participate in the work of dismantling white supremacy. Otherwise, I warned, the pulpit would remain silent on issues of racial and social justice except at moments of crisis. Speaking out only when tragedy strikes is a form of idolatry. It allows the pretense that the community uplifts justice when in reality it worships comfort and complicity.
In retrospect my sermon from last year appears quaint. For many of us, the world in late November 2016 feels fundamentally different than it did in May 2015. The United States has been through a desperately polarizing election. A new President has been elected through the undemocratic peculiarities of the American political system. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by more than two million votes. He lost the popular vote by a larger margin than any successful candidate for the national executive since 1876. The man who assumes the executive office on January twentieth will be at the head of what can only be termed a minority government.
He gained that office by what can best be termed bad faith. His tactics were those of a con man: misdirection mixed with outrageous lies. He violated electoral norms. He praised autocrats and called for foreign intervention in the presidential election. He refused to release his taxes. He revealed himself to be a sexual predator. At times, the man who will be the next President stirred base human instinct: fear, hatred, misogyny, and racism. He verbally attacked immigrants, Muslims, women, and anyone who challenged him. He received open support by white supremacists and an endorsement by the Ku Klux Klan. Despite all of this he will soon head the most powerful government in the history of the world.
We have now come to a moment when there are calls to unite behind the incoming President. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, urged such unity in her concession speech, “We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” The current President has offered a conciliatory tone. He has enjoined American citizens “to remember that we’re actually all on one team.”
The New York Times columnist Charles Blow responded this week writing, “Let me tell you here where I stand on your ‘I hope we can all get along’ plea: Never. You are an aberration and abomination who is willing to do and say anything–no matter whom it aligns you with and whom it hurts–to satisfy your ambitions.” Russian American dissident and critic of autocracy Masha Gessen has spent her life writing about the regime of Vladimir Putin. She warns that calls to reconciliation that fail to recognize that “Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election” are foolhardy. In her analysis, he is an aspiring autocrat, a proto-totalitarian, a neo-fascist.
Now me, I’m not much of a political liberal. I place myself in a similar camp to Blow and Gessen. I trust the President-elect. I assume that he will govern like he campaigned. He has already indicated he wants figures whose politics are best described as white supremacist as part of his administration. He has indicated that he will be intolerant of dissent. He intends to round up and deport several million immigrants. He refuses to place his businesses in a blind trust, creating the possibility of conflict of interest and corruption on an unprecedented level. I reject the idea of normalizing our next President.
I suspect that there are a few present here who would like to stop my wind-up to a jeremiad at this point. My litany of woes may seem out of place on a Sunday morning. I imagine that those of you whom I am making uncomfortable desire to remind me that religious communities are not places for partisan politics. So, let me be clear. I am not being partisan. I am offering a prophetic critique. If Hillary Clinton had been elected President, I would be standing before you a warning of the Democratic Party’s complicity in attacking immigrant communities. More people have been deported under President Obama than under any other President. I would be reminding you of Secretary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy tendencies. She was instrumental in pushing for the violent overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi. It was an event which resulted in civil war, the deaths of thousands, and the further destabilization of an already instable region. I would be criticizing the Democratic nominee for her longstanding practice of promoting economic programs that benefit the few at the expense of the many. And I would prod you to remember that she helped oversee the massive expansion of a prison industrial complex that targets human beings with brown and black bodies. In the 1990s she notoriously coined the phrase “super predator.”
But Secretary Clinton did not win the majority of votes in the electoral college. She is not going to be the forty-fifth President. Donald Trump is. And so he, not her, is the subject of my critique. And while Clinton would have represented yet another figure in the long standing, tragic, crisis of the moral bankruptcy of political liberalism, Trump represents something even more sinister, neo-Confederate autocracy. The question before this religious community and each of us as individuals is not to figure how to live responsibly in Hillary Clinton’s America. It is to discern how to live responsibly in Donald Trump’s.
Drawing from the prophetic liberal religious tradition, I suggest that this congregation and other Unitarian Universalist congregations like it have five tasks ahead. We must boldly proclaim our vision of what it means to be and flourish as humans. We have to develop a historical and social analysis that allows us to truthfully describe our present moment. We need to dream freedom dreams of what might be possible and, in the words of Robin Kelley, aid us “to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives.” We are called to translate those dreams into action. We must maintain a spiritual practice to sustain ourselves through difficult years.
We are part of a liberal religious community. These tasks are not tasks for an individual. They are tasks for our collectivity, our gathered community. If we accept them, we will accept them as a community that upholds the inherent worth and dignity of each individual human being; a community that practices democracy; a community that honors the web of interrelation and interconnection of which we are all a part.
Unitarian Universalism is a religious tradition with a particular understanding of what it means to be a human being. Close to two hundred years ago your congregation, like other New England Unitarian churches, rejected a theology that taught that human beings were innately depraved. Our religious ancestors instead favored a theology that viewed human nature as predicated upon freedom. We each contain within us, in William Ellery Channing’s famous words, “the likeness to God.” The choice whether we will tilt towards that likeness or give ourselves over to baser instincts is ours.
What ultimately distinguishes religious liberals from religious conservatives is that we believe that human nature is not fixed. It is flexible. People can change. This assertion is more a matter of faith than it is a scientific claim. That we uphold it is one of the things that makes Unitarian Universalism a religion. Human freedom has yet to be empirically proven to be true or untrue. Faced with this wager we boldly bet on freedom, on the possibility that we can freely choose who and what we will be.
As a religious tradition we are comfortable with our claims about the essential nature of human freedom. In contrast, developing a historical and social analysis that truthfully describes our present moment is a far more difficult task. White American society–the society that celebrates the Declaration of Independence, worships the Constitution, and lionizes consumer choice–is quite comfortable with abstract discussions of freedom. But historical and social analysis is something that is widely frowned upon. Media outlets like Fox News and the white supremacist Breibart mock rigorous analytics as an egg-headed, liberal, elite activity.
So be it. Our religious tradition is one which is committed to telling truths in church. Describing the world as it actually exists is the most important form of truth telling. Offering a detailed analysis of what happened on November eighth and is happening now would require far more time than we have remaining on this bright Sunday. But allow me to make a few gestures that might help you as a community in your own truth telling. If you disagree with me at the very least my words will give you a helpful data point for the “not that.”
The presidential administration of Donald Trump will be a neo-Confederate autocracy. Like other kinds of neo-fascist, fascist, proto-totalitarian, autocratic, or right populist regimes, it emerges from a failure in political liberalism.
Since its inception a leading strain of thought, culture and economic practice in the United States has been brazenly white supremacist. The Constitution was written to favor slaveholding states. The Electoral College is partially a legacy of slavery. It was designed to ensure that Southern slave states had disproportion power in the new republic. Otherwise, they threatened secession. Indeed, when a split electorate chose an anti-slavery politician as President the South did secede.
The Civil War was a war to maintain chattel slavery and white supremacy. It was also a war to maintain male supremacy. The two substantive differences between the United States Constitution and the Confederate States Constitution were that the second proclaimed that only whites and only males could be ever citizens.
When I label the rising presidential administration neo-Confederate I am explicitly thinking of the Confederacy’s claim to white male supremacy. The appointment of Stephen Bannon as Trump’s Senior Counselor and the nomination of Jeff Sessions to Attorney General can be read as a commitment to an ideology that puts the needs and rights of white males over and against the rights of everyone else. As Senior Counselor, Bannon will push Trump to consider the needs of white voters, the next President’s electoral base, over the needs of all others. As Attorney General, Sessions should be expected to launch a full assault on what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow like efforts of voter suppression will go unchallenged by the federal government. White supremacist hate groups will not be investigated by the Justice Department and police will not be held accountable for violent acts.
I use the label neo-Confederate to place the new Presidential administration within the context of the American history. Neo-Confederate reaction first emerged as a national political force after the Civil War, during the failure of Reconstruction. In the years of and immediately following the Civil War the United States government was largely controlled by a political alliance that the great W. E. B. Du Bois called abolition democracy. Abolition democracy was an alliance between abolitionist and anti-slavery Northerners and Southern African Americans against white supremacy. It was committed to ending chattel slavery and incorporating freed blacks into the American body politic. It collapsed in the mid-1870s when the Northern white elite decided that it had more in common economically with the Southern white elite than it did with African Americans.
The demise of abolition democracy brought about an era of reaction that created the regime of Jim Crow. This regime of legalized racial discrimination was only partially overturned when abolition democracy reconstituted itself in the civil rights era. Again, in the 1950s and 1960s Northern elites allied themselves with African Americans and other people of color to oppose what was then the neo-Confederate state governments of the South. This project reached a great pitch in the mid-1960s with the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts. It could be argued that it reached its zenith in the Presidency of Barack Obama. And it might be said that the failed candidacy of Hillary Clinton represents its second collapse.
One way to describe Democrats like Clinton is that they believe that American elites have more in common with global elites than they do the working class. Clinton advocated free trade, possessed a dodgy record on civil rights, and abandoned the Democratic Party’s base in labor unions. She lost for the same reason that abolition democracy fell apart in the 1870s. Working people of all races stopped supporting it in sufficient numbers to maintain it because they felt that liberal elites did not have their best interests at heart.
Knowing what went wrong in the past and what is wrong with the present can aid us in dreaming of a different future. If we want to live in a world where the neo-Confederate vision of white supremacy and male dominance is relegated to the dust bin of history then we must imagine a world that is structurally different than the one in which we live now. We must dream freedom dreams.
One of my intellectual heroes, the historian Robin Kelley urges us to dream such dreams. Drawing from the teachings of his own mother he challenges “us to imagine a world free of patriarchy, a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstituted… to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives.” We need to dream of a world without white supremacy before we can build one. Poetry can help us.
Sun Ra:
Imagination is a Magic carpet
Upon which we may soar
To distant lands and climes
And even go beyond the moon
To any planet in the sky
If we came from
nowhere here
Why can’t we go somewhere there?
Diane Di Prima:
Left to themselves people
grow their hair.
Left to themselves they
take off their shoes.
Left to themselves they make love
sleep easily
share blanket, dope & children
they are not lazy or afraid
they plant seeds, they smile, they
speak to one another. The word
coming into its own: touch of love
on the brain, the ear.
I will not tell you what your freedom dreams should be. I just suggest you should cultivate them. Look to your daily life. When do you feel most fully yourself? Gardening? Cooking? Playing with your children? Riding your bike? At work? At rest? With your partner? Your friends? Alone? At a worship service? Perhaps such moments are good places to start looking for freedom dreams. True freedom is about the transformation of everyday life.
I invite you now to pause and complete the sentence: “I dream of…” Take a moment in silence “I dream of…” [Wait a minute.] Now, if you are comfortable turn to a neighbor and share what you dream of. [Wait a minute.]
Our freedom dreams will only become reality if we share them with each other. If we share them not just inside this building but outside of it with members of our family, our community, and throughout the world.
This sharing is the first step towards action. For action is the next task before religious communities in this time of crisis. I am not your minister. I am just a guest that you have generously invited into your pulpit. I don’t want to overstep my bounds. And so while I want to stir your dreams and push your analysis I suggest that finding your path forward is your collective task, not mine.
I can offer you this advice. Action will not be successful if you act alone. The new President will be at the head of a minority government. Actions that succeed in challenging him will come from mobilizing the majority of the populace. So build networks, resist together, not alone. Reach out together. Forge new relationships and strengthen the ones you already have.
The next four years will be difficult. The neo-Confederate agenda is clear. In order to survive and to act it will be necessary to maintain a strong sense of self and a calm center. The last task before us is simply to take care of ourselves, to nurture the spiritual practices that will sustain us again and again in what I know will be disappointing work. Meditate. Pray. Write in your journal. Cook a nice dinner for your family. Tell your partner that you love them. Hug your kids. Go for long walks on the edges of the city, through autumnal forests, or by frozen river banks. Ride your bike across town. As you nurture yourself you will find that you nurture others.
As you nurture yourself you will find strength for the tasks ahead. You will find companionship. You will find joy and, perhaps, a modicum of peace. You will find yourself dreaming. Let yourself dream. For in our dreams we can see a better world, a world that stirs in our hearts. It is a world that no matter how treacherous the path before us we can yet bring into being. So, let us set ourselves to the tasks ahead. And let us dream freedom dreams. And let us share those dreams with others.
Amen and Blessed Be.
It has been a week and a half since Donald Trump was elected President. In the past ten days he has begun to make clear the direction of his Presidency. He has articulated a plan for his first hundred days and started to make political appointments. The agenda of his administration is a hard right agenda. Here are ten things I expect from it:
1. President-Elect Trump has made it clear he is committed to the project of building and maintaining white supremacy. The appointment of Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions should not be interpreted any other way. Under a Trump administration, there will be an increase in racialized violence and an assault on civil rights legislation. Given his track record, Sessions should be expected to launch a full assault on what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow like efforts of voter suppression will go unchallenged by the federal government. White supremacist hate groups will not be investigated by the Justice Department and police will not be held accountable for violent acts.
2. Under a Trump Presidency families will be torn apart and lives irreparably damaged as the President-Elect moves forward with his pledge to round-up between two and three million undocumented migrants. Neighborhoods and police throughout the United States will be further militarized as a result.
3. A Trump administration will likely unleash government suppression of dissent at a level not seen since the 1960s. The rhetoric of law and order and the President-Elect’s complaints about protestors do not bode well for those who oppose him, articulate an alternative leftist vision of American society, or speak out against racialized violence and white supremacy.
4. During a Trump administration any kind of externally triggered crisis, such as a climate disaster or a terrorist attack, will be used as an excuse to further militarize the country and possibly the world. The Bush administration was able to turn the 9/11 attacks into an excuse for launching a disastrous war of choice in Iraq, a massive clampdown on dissent, and the destruction of international human rights norms.
5. The Trump Presidency represents a threat to human existence on two levels. On one level, it will be run by committed climate change deniers at a moment when it is critical that the human species address human fueled global warming. On another level, Trump seems to be in favor of tactical uses of nuclear weapons and supports the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
6. The Republicans plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). They have not articulated a clear plan to replace it. It is likely that any plan that they do propose to replace it will include an effort to defund or privatize Medicaid. If the Republicans repeal the ACA without a plan to replace it as many as twenty two million people will lose their health insurance. This will lessen the spans of the people’s lives. It will increase the amount of general ill-health in the population, both reducing many individuals’ quality of life and their ability to contribute to the economy.
7. The appointment of reactionary Supreme Court justices who will almost certainly launch a full blown assault on women’s rights, civil rights, and the rights of the LGBT community. President Trump will most likely make equally reactionary appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, the Environmental Protect Agency, and a host of other federal agencies.
8. The announced Trump tax cuts will increase the federal debt by as much as $7 trillion dollars. This will make future spending on social projects difficult. The Bush tax cuts fueled inequality and were the largest source of the federal deficit during the Obama Presidency. The Trump tax cuts will increase inequality and saddle future generations with even more government debt.
9. The increase in deficit spending from tax cuts will be coupled with increased spending on defense. Again, this will increase the deficit and make the funding of future social projects difficult.
10. Throughout the Trump years there will be unprecedented corruption. He has already refused to place his businesses in a blind trust and will instead hand them over to his children. This will create conflicts of interest on a level unseen before. The President-Elect’s anti-corruption rhetoric should not be taken seriously. He is already attempting to escape press scrutiny. His actions fail to either address his own conflict of interest or do anything meaningful to get monied interests out of politics. For example, he does not support overturning Citizens United. Terms limits on Congress would most likely result in the increased power of corporate lobbyists in Washington.
President-Elect Trump was elected by a minority of American voters. He received less votes than Hillary Clinton. More Americans decided not to vote than voted for either of the major candidates. The hard right agenda of the Trump administration does not represent the views of the majority of the American populace. Combating his agenda will require more than just pointing out all of the things that are wrong with it. It will require developing clear alternative demands such as health care for all, full employment, living wages, affordable housing, an expansion of civil rights, good schools, nuclear disarmament, and then organizing people around and for that alternative vision. Let’s not lose heart. Let’s build a better world.
Today and tomorrow graduate students at Harvard will vote on whether or not to form a union with the UAW. Harvard students will be the first graduate students at a private university to vote on forming a graduate student union after the National Labor Relations Board’s decision in August that teaching and research assistant are employees. I plan to vote for the UAW. I do so enthusiastically.
I do so for several reasons. This morning I offer three of them. The first is that having a union will allow graduate students to negotiate with Harvard collectively instead of as individuals. Without a union contract students who are teaching or working for a professor as a research assistant have no easy recourse when they are mistreated. I know of several students who have been paid egregiously late. In one instance, a student wasn’t paid for multiple months by an administrator he did work for. In another, a teaching fellow wasn’t paid for more than a month after starting teaching. I am confident that having a union contract at Harvard will put an end to such abuses.
Second, Harvard is the first of several private universities where there will be graduate student union elections in the next months. A union victory at Harvard will encourage graduate students at Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and other institutions in their efforts to form unions. By voting for a graduate student union at Harvard I am voting to improve the lives of graduate students not just at Harvard but at other institutions throughout the country.
Third, the election of President Trump will be likely mean that the labor movement itself comes under increasing attack. Voting to form a graduate student union at this time is a statement in support of the labor movement at time when it needs one. Unions have long been a force for fighting inequality. By supporting HGSU-UAW I will be standing with not just graduate students but workers across the country.
Improve the lives of Harvard graduate students, stand in solidarity with graduate students at other institutions, and fight for the wider labor movement, #UnionYes!
I write this as it becomes apparent that a xenophobe who has openly boasted of sexually assaulting women and been supported by white supremacist organizations is going to become the next President of the United States. Like so many, I am feeling a mixture of emotions: shame, anger, fear, frustration, paralysis… Already the political pundits are talking about what went wrong. Those of us on the left need to start talking about what happens next. But even more importantly than that, we need to start talking about what we are going to do.
There are 73 days until President-elect Trump assumes office. Once that happens it is pretty much anyone’s guess what will occur next. He has promised to round-up 11 million people. Elements within the FBI clearly support him and, my guess is, will probably launch some sort of intensified renewed version of COINTELPRO against Black Lives Matter, the water protectors in North Dakota, and other social movements. Whatever the case, we should expect increased white supremacist violence as Trump’s supporters go after the communities of color and others he has encouraged them to target.
The temptation in the face of this looming disaster will be give into despair and become defensive or isolate ourselves. We must not give into that temptation. Instead, we need to use the next 73 days to build a movement that cannot only protect the communities that will come under increasing assault but point a way forward. This movement must aim beyond recapturing the White House in 2020 or Congress in 2018. Instead, if it is to be effective, it must work to recast the political terrain, claim the moral ground, and, in the coming years, build institutions on the left that are powerful enough to challenge the resurgent white supremacist right.
I will not pretend to fully know how to do this. I can suggest some concrete actions. The first and most important comes from the recognition that we are far more powerful together than when we are alone. We humans are social creatures and we gain strength from each other. If you are not already part of an organized group, join one. If you can’t find one to join then form one. If you’re part of a group already then work to connect your group with others. The goal is ultimately to build a mass movement made up of many groups that can resist the coming Trump regime and push past the dawning national turn to the right.
Second, don’t give into despair. With despair comes immobility and inaction. What we need is action. Find something to give yourself a little hope. In far darker times than these people have dared to dream freedom dreams. Tomorrow, when all seems impossible, ask yourself what is your freedom dream? In it you will find a kernel of hope.
With these two things in mind, here is what I am going to do in the next few days. I am going to reach out to friends and comrades. I am going to let them know that I am committed to the work of movement building. I am going to share with them my freedom dreams and encourage them to share with me their own. I am going to encourage every person I contact to reach out to someone else and share a little of their vision. Perhaps in this way we might spark some of the hope and imagination that we need to get us through and move us beyond.
I will also ask my friends and comrades if they are currently part of a group. If they are not I will suggest that they consider visiting a prophetic religious community. I will make this suggestion not because I want to save their souls but because I understand that in the United States prophetic religious communities have played an important role in sustaining radical alternative visions in times of crisis. This weekend visit a Unitarian Universalist congregation, a radical church in the United Church of Christ like Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a progressive mosque, a Jewish Renewal synagogue, or a progressive Baptist church like Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland. I know my friends will find a little of the vision they need there and more than that they will connect with others looking for a way forward.
These are but first steps. Others, wiser than I, will offer further steps or, perhaps, point a different way that we must take. We have 73 days until President-elect Trump assumes office. That hour is late. The path ahead is dark. Let us begin. Let us dream.
* The phrase freedom dreams comes from Robyn Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.