The Meaning of a Marriage

Eight years ago I presided over my daughter’s wedding in California.  I wrote the following “Introduction” for the occasion, something of a summary of my understanding of marriage’s meaning.

Katie and Mike, this is your day.

You are about to declare your marriage to one another and to the world.  This is the day you’ve been arcing toward throughout your separate lives from the days you were born.

Today, before your families and friends, you will declare that you are married, that you are, indeed, from this day onward husband and wife—a relationship that is honored for its steadfastness and respected for its integrity.

There is no relationship like a marriage in which there is a giving of self—freely and gladly— and in which there is taking from the other –in desire or in need—as the occasion demands.

What allows such a relationship to succeed is not so much desires fulfilled or needs met, but a commitment to the marriage itself, which is greater than desire and need.  Your marriage will be outside of either of you, but possible only through both of you.

A marriage is a sacred undertaking.  It is the means to a new courage, a more resilient strength to make a larger world out your singular worlds, a sanctuary of comfort and peace, and a mutuality of desire fulfilled.  A marriage is a sacred undertaking born and reborn through the changes of your lives together.

A marriage is a commitment to fashion a cup of meaning that holds children in its midst, seeking their nurture, that they may mature into capable and confident human beings.

Mike and Katie, this is your day.

Perched as you are on the threshold of your marriage, take pause to appreciate the declaration you are making.  Know the hope you have within you—a reasonable hope.   Imagine the richness that converges for you and opens to an even greater richness you may together create—richness expanding out of richness. 

As you pause and appreciate, make a silent, solemn, sincere vow that you shall keep your individualism, while not violating the individualism of your partner in your life together.  Let your personalities be greater than before, because you choose to be wife and husband to one another.   Thus you will grow in love, because you will continue to grow individually.

Katie and Mike, this is your day.

We,—your parents, your families, your friends,—we give you our enthusiasm and support for what you are undertaking.  We give you our love, of course; and when you seek the wisdom of our days, we will offer you our counsel.  Don’t hesitate, ever, to call on us. 

We are implicated with you in the sacredness of your marriage.  You extend, continue, and complete us.  We are more than witnesses, we are participants in this great occasion.

Mike and Katie, this is your day.

We give you our blessings, as well as our hopes on this momentous day.

August 10, 2012

Insinuations and Enchantment

An autumn mood insinuates
  change:
The grass a browner shade
  of green and ragged;

A smattering of wrinkled
  leaves accumulating;
And hosta flowers
  sere stalks;

Not to mention lessening days--
  a month and a half
  from the solstice,
  a month and a half
  to the equinox--

Premonitions to disturb
  the complacent.

Yet, meteor showers spangle
  the night sky:
Enchanted Stardust.

Younger Self Counsels Older Self

Each Moment Worthy (1981)

Churches are forever cleaning out their closets.  As soon as a closet is emptied, it begins to fill--now something, then something--until, after several years, stuff fills the closet and it is emptied anew. 

A new administration in a hospital, so I was once told, paints the lobby to indicate change, as well as assert authority.  I wonder if new ministers clean out closets for similar reasons. [I found a stack of your old books in a closet, the recent email read.  Do you want them?]

A small cardboard box arrived this morning, The Vermont Country Store stenciled on its side.  [My immediate response:  Someone sending me a gift from Vermont? Now who would do that?]  The box contained copies of three different chapbooks of poetic meditations I assembled during my five and a half year tenure at my first Church half a lifetime ago.  Yes, half a life time ago, when I was in my early thirties and the mimeograph machine had not yet  replaced the photocopier.  How utterly antique.

I glanced through my favorite collection (1981) of the three and encountered my younger self with wonder and satisfaction.  I was starting out then, yet most of the 31 poetic meditations were good.  I still claim a few today, including one I titled “Always a Beginning.” 

Always there is a beginning —
  a new day,
  a new month,
  a new season,
  a new year.

Forever the old passes away
  and newness emerges
  from the richness that was.

Nothing is ever lost
  in the many changes
  time brings.

What was, in some way,
  will be,
  though changed in form.

Know this:
This moment is a beginning
  and our lives,
  individually and together,
  are full of richness, of freshness,
  of hope and of promise.

When I read this, 1^st among the 31, I drifted in the imaginative realm of time. My younger self spoke across three decades to my older self.  My younger counsel was apropos, as my older self faces the final quarter of life marked by a great transition of retirement.

I'm always amused when I get what I need, not knowing I needed it in the first place.  Thank you, younger self.

Commensality and Radical Hospitality: Axis of the Table

[from an Easter address]

I find Jesus’s life, as demythologized and revivified by thoughtful scholar/theologians, compelling. For example, I’ve long had my eyes open to the phenomenon of food and eating, but Jesus scholars have made me particularly aware of the significance of the phenomenon of with whom we eat.

Our culture is obsessed with food and eating. I believe it’s a matter of mass marketing and consumerism, including branding and conspicuous consumption; of an agricultural policy that feeds the phenomenon of super-sized soft drinks and other corn sweetener laced foods; of our general desire to be entertained, hence a food channel and a plethora of cooking shows; of body image, including a fear of growing old and basic insecurities of self; and of a cultural lack of meaning, resulting in an existential emptiness wanting to be filled.  We are the land of the morbidly obese and of the morbidly thin.

In my naturally analytical way, I’m continually monitoring my world to understand food and eating, as well as to examine my own ways.  I’ve become particularly aware of what is known as commensality:  “fellowship at table; the act or practice of eating at the same table.”
 
Contemporary Jesus scholars have highlighted Jesus’s radical hospitality. He invited the outcast or second-class persons of his day, women, tax-collectors, sinners, Samatarians, and such, to eat with him.  Scholars argue that this was how Jesus demonstrated as well as implemented his notion of the Kingdom of God—that it was egalitarian most of all, with the implicit notion that all were worthy of being provided for.

I always associate commensality, fellowship at the table, with companion, a word that literally means with bread.  Our companions are those with whom we frequently share food.  At a table where relationships are central, food might not be such a toxic obsession for so many.  And you will not so much become the food you eat, as you become the people with whom you eat.

I recommend that you consider commensality and companionship in your own life—what your table signifies.

 Today, many of you will have a foursquare  Easter dinner—a formal sit down with traditional foods and a circle of family or friends.  Savor your companions even more than you savor your food.

Think about how you might build on the fellowship of the table in your most intimate life to create, sustain, and deepen your relationships.  Much has been made regarding the decline of the family dinner hour.  Is there any more apt situation for connecting to spouse, children, and friends?

And when you are more detached—in a philosophial mood—consider those in our society who do not have a place at your personal table and at our common table.  Hold in your mind the multitude who are also literally hungry in a land of excess calories. 

Jesus’s example is clear.  He enjoyed his food and drink, to such an extent that his detractors called him a glutton and drunkard.  He provided, as in the stories of the loaves and fishes and the wedding feast when he changed water to wine.  He hosted and even served at the dinner table.  Most of all, he did not discriminate, but invited everyone, especially the marginalized and outcast, to eat with him.

The Kingdom he proclaimed had its axis at the dinner table.  That place, which is many tables, yet also one table, is the beginning and the end of society.

Teaching the World to Die

Emerson's Grave:
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

[I've just submitted an essay to Kindle Singles on Unitarian attitudes on death and dying that converge in a contemporary Unitarian Universalist sensibility.  Here's my conclusion--my take on UUism's understanding of the overarching reality of mortality.]

Death and Dying Among Contemporary Unitarian Universalists

Unitarians had an abiding interest in reforming American deathways.  They significantly influenced, intellectually and practically, how the greater culture deals with the overarching reality of the human condition: mortality and death.  Unitarian innovations and reforms cited in this essay served to domesticate death in the name of the universal human condition; challenged traditions and the supernaturalisms that supported those traditions; resisted the commercialization of death by a funeral industry; and lifted up the dignity and worth of the deceased through artful and meaningful “celebrations of life.”

 

There is a palpable Unitarian Universalist way for meeting death, though that way is not prescribed.  Remember, Unitarian Universalism is non-creedal, as well as progressive. Its ethos has continually encouraged the proving of all things while holding on to that which is good.  This search for truth has been tempered, humanized, by love. To seek the truth in love is an enduring mantra.  That notion of love has many dimensions, ranging from love of self and others like one’s self to a love of Life and its often inscrutable ways.

Here are markers of Unitarian Universalism’s contemporary, convergent attitudes and understandings regarding death.

Death should not be invisible.  Death is a hard reality both to accept within one’s own mortality and to experience through a beloved. The American culture has devised strategies of denial. Yet death is a pathway to living fully, even joyfully, in the moment.  The ancient philosophers, the Stoics in particular, counseled memento mori to be regularly reminded that living is dying, not obsessively, but now and again to give living context and perspective. 

Think of Unitarian Universalist ways in terms of the domestication of death, coming to a certain intimacy with death through a variety of attitudes, behaviors, and strategies: memento mori, including contemplation of mortality in a garden cemetery or similar setting, not sequestering the aged or dying, leaving the body in a natural (unembalmed) state, tangibly commemorating the deceased, and through subsequent years remembering.

Death should be conditioned by Nature.  This might be literal, that is, interring the body or cremation remains in a garden cemetery or similar natural setting.  Cremation allows many options, including scattering at a meaningful site or several sites.  Unitarian Universalist churches may have a carefully designed cremation garden or more informally include the ashes in a planting, the tree or shrub serving as a living memorial.  Furthermore, death should be construed as part and parcel of Nature’s cycles of Life continuing through the generations—a natural phenomenon.  Being natural, death is right and fitting in Nature’s scheme.  Nature inspires a richer living through acceptance of mortality’s place in the Web of Life.

Death of a loved one, friend, or member of a community should be observed in an artfully crafted funeral or memorial service. In this service a formal eulogy or a series of individual remembrances speak with loving truth of the life that the deceased chose to live, the influences that played on her or him through the years, how she or he shaped our common world, and what of that person endures in us. With a dignified service and the promise to remember, the deceased have has a blessed assurance that in death and repose there might be a peace said to pass understanding.

Unitarian Universalist ministers should be, and generally are, well-prepared to plan and conduct funeral and memorial services, entrusted by their congregations and a larger community to navigate the complexities of end of life concerns and rituals.  This includes grief counseling skills.  A Unitarian Universalist minister seeks to subtly express transcendent meanings, such as the continuing influence of love that the deceased brought into the world—a love that endures and is passed on through the generations.

The funeral and memorial service should address the varied grief that the family and gathered community are experiencing. This includes a continuing promise to remain steadfast for those who grieve, acknowledging that grief is an extended process, unique to each person who grieves.

Death should be planned for.  This planning has certain aspects.  Every individual should leave instructions about final wishes.  This includes the practical and existential, what is often included in a Living Will, regarding the parameters of medical procedures to take or not to take in one’s final days. A Living Will often designates a trusted person to have Power of Attorney for Health Care, charged to make ultimate decisions.  Such a directive often is accompanied by a designation of the same or other person to have a fiscal Power of Attorney.  Of course, a legally drawn will alleviates hindrances and complications of the deceased’s estate.  Valuable, too, are instructions regarding final rites; this includes disposition of the body, burial or scattering. Instructions might include memorialization, such as cemetery plot and monument, but also designated charities for contributions in the deceased’s memory. It is good to memorialize in tangible forms; and for those who survive, it is good to visit memorials, respecting and remembering. Also important are directives for the funeral or memorial service: music, readings, participants, officiant, location, and the like, again in consultation with family and clergy.

It is good to do such planning in conversation with family and perhaps clergy.  This models how to confront death, honestly and compassionately, letting genuine feeling have its full day. Such planning has benefits when death does come and the grief it brings in its wake.  

Such planning addresses considerations around consumer concerns regarding funeral providers.  A valuable resource is the not-for-profit  Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA) successor to the memorial society movement’s national organization.  The FCA declares: “We are the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting a consumer's right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable funeral. We offer education and advocacy to consumers nationwide and are not affiliated with the funeral industry.” The FCA website has many valuable resources to inform and guide.

Typically, after a house and car, a funeral is a person’s third greatest life expenditure.  End of life arrangements should not be undertaken during duress, when circumstances are pressing and emotions are vulnerable to compliance techniques.  All involved should counsel together about desired arrangements before death comes.

Hospice care, often at home, has become an increasing choice for Unitarian Universalists.  This fits earlier considerations regarding the domestication of death.

An emerging option among Unitarian Universalists is green burial, allowing the unembalmed body, often in a simple shroud, to decompose naturally in a natural setting.  This reflects scruples about cremation’s effects on the environment, particularly the energy required to fire the crematorium.  Green burial also looks to the body’s constituent parts leaching back into Nature.  (In advocating for a rural cemetery in the early nineteenth century, Unitarians cited a dramatic example of Nature’s embrace of the body.  When the body of Major John Andre was exhumed in 1821, his skull was held and pierced by roots of a peach tree. For those advocates of the taking death into the countryside, this offered a romantic and compelling example.)  Today, green burial resonates to the Unitarian Universalist seventh principle: “respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.”

There is no doubt that the first principle of Unitarian Universalism, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” summarizes, as well informs this liberal religion’s attitudes regarding its deathways.  Through two centuries Unitarian Universalists have increasingly emphasized the personal and universally human, especially above traditional dogma and theology.  

Unitarian Universalist reforms and innovations around death and dying emphasize essential human dignity.  Unitarian Universalists find the human condition transcendent and sacred.

As the author intoned in In Memoriam:

A human life is sacred.
It is sacred in its being born.
It is sacred in its living.
And it is sacred in its dying.

Introduction to a Same Sex Wedding Ceremony

The One Whom You Love

I’ve performed several hundred wedding ceremonies in my three and a half decades of liberal ministry. The larger portion by far involved couples outside the two congregations I’ve served.  


Unless asked, I don’t formally counsel the couple; but in an initial interview, I frame the event for them by drawing on insights I’ve cobbled together through the years. I may, in the actual ceremony, offer a few words formally known as an “admonishment:” that a declaration of marriage is a serious but not solemn undertaking.

I tell them that a marriage ceremony contains symbolic elements that connect to the medieval Catholic Church and cultures of Europe.  I explain how the ceremony evolved into the generic Protestant outline I follow. 

I never neglect to mention that a wedding ceremony is a public event, with the invited guests serving as proxy representatives for all of society.  Society has a vested interested in committed relationships for the sake of its own survival.  A marriage is foundational, a conservative element in our larger society.  So the words spoken on the couple’s behalf, as well as the words they say, have additional importance for the perpetuation of society.

Early on as a minister, I fell under the influence of an analysis called the Natural History of a Marriage.  In the light of this analysis, I sometimes caution the couple, in a loving way, of course, that they may be getting married for a cluster of wrong reasons. In the throes of peer, family, and cultural influences, as well as the intoxication of early love, neither has a true sense of the other, yet.  So one day, when the proverbial honeymoon is over, one or both will wake up one morning, and find they married a figurative stranger.  Then, whether its seven months or seven years, the real work of creating a deep relationship will begin.  Here, I toss in a little of Martin Buber’s notion of an I/Thou, subject/subject relationship, when each part of the equation accepts the other in her and his fullness of being—as subject (or complete person) and not an object.  When this occurs, the Eternal Thou—God—is realized.

In more recent years I might tell a couple not to expect each partner to first and forever fill all the needs of the other.  The mere expectation is a recipe for failure.  No one person can fulfill another person’s needs.  Here I interject what Joseph Campbell called the myth of marriage, that the myth exists outside each partner; and a marriage succeeds when the couple first commit to the myth they share before committing to one another.

Anecdotally, the ceremonies I perform generally result in enduring marriages.  Only a few that I know of have led to divorce.  This probably measures the relatively mature and thoughtful persons who seek me out, wanting to begin their life together with the sort of a personally meaningful ceremony properly conceived as a religious ceremony.

 

From what I understand, the state’s involvement in issuing so-called marriage licenses resulted largely from nineteenth century lobbying by evangelical Protestants, eager to impose their moralism on society.  Through the nineteenth century a preponderance of marriages were what we now call common law.

Same sex marriage continues to be a controversial issue in the so-called, ongoing culture wars.  I come to Gay Marriage with some experience, as well as wide ranging knowledge of the evolution and meaning of marriage.

I favor same sex marriage as a matter of civil rights, including equal opportunity and protection, under the Constitution.  But even more, I favor it for intimate, relational, and social reasons, which my longtime companion Ecclesiastes has helped inform.

My standard wedding meal blessing draws from Ecclesiastes, an ancient Old Testament work:  “Enjoy life with the one whom you love all the days of your life.  Whatever your hands find to do, do with all your might.  Eat your bread with gladness, and drink your wine with a merry heart, because your God has already approved what you do.”  [adapted]

Long ago I adapted the word “wife” to the phrase “the one whom you love,” to include the woman as well as the man.  Now, as I’ve come to realize that love, straight or gay, come from the same impulses and has the same results, I’ve expanded my public intentions in saying “Enjoy life with the one whom you love, all the days of your life.”

A public ceremony (wedding) and a civil contract (license) together give a love relationship meaning and imprimatur, plus legal status, no less or more for a same sex couple, as for a heterosexual couple.

Today, we come together to perform a religious ceremony, a wedding of two souls.  Susan and Lori have already entered into a legal covenant—a marriage in the State of Iowa.

As in most relationships that continue and mature, their initial meeting was serendipitous.  Initially, there was attraction but reluctance, too.  The wayward course of their togetherness gradually surmounted the impediments and transformed the difficulties.  And they become one in that mythic sense they proclaim and affirm today.   Central to their growing relationship was and is their respective faiths.  Each has her own understanding of God; yet together they have reached a common faith that the Divine works through their individualities and their togetherness, as God’s Providence works through the larger world.

This afternoon before us gathered here and the world, Lori and Susan proclaim not only their love for each other, but also for the overarching Love of God.  The foundation of Susan and Lori’s marriage is surely their mature love for and seasoned devotion to each other.  Yet they freely and faithfully proclaim that the source and strength of their marriage is a shared faith that God loves and sustains us all.  They will embody that love in their dealings with one another and take that love into the larger world of which they and we are all a part. 

Joseph Campbell declared that a true marriage results from the recognition and more importantly the practice that the couple commits henceforth, not merely to one another’s welfare, but to a transcendent relationship the marriage itself, informed and accountable and accountable to God’s Abundant Blessing.

There is no doubt that this couple is Blessed by their love, and in this hour and in all their time together they stand under  the Blessing of Creation, especially as that Blessing is affirmed and proclaimed by an d made real by their Church and embodied in the living community of believers that creates their Church.

As the old Puritans proclaimed: marriage is a little church within the Larger Church, each formed and sustained by the Love of God.

Blessings of Divine Love on us all.  But in this auspicious hour, blessings most of all on Lori and Susan.

Enduring Values

Wisdom accumulates within one’s own life and lasts in myriad cultural deposits, such as the Book of Ecclesiastes. Wisdom is a larger category that contains enduring values of self and culture.

From a philosophy of life perspective, what endures? This is what I’ve found and with which conventional wisdom agrees.

Life matters. The old Stoics recommended that one should now and again reflect upon mortality. The Latin term is memento mori.The reflection need only be fleeting, and it should bring you to a realization and appreciation of the fleeting moment. Consistent with our moral instincts, the realization of one’s own life leads to empathy and compassion with other life and the Web of Existence. For each of us there is no greater gift than our life, nothing more precious than the life around us. Nature has bought Life into being and found clever means to pass Life through the generations. 

The Mind matters. Experience joined to more formal education, processed by imagination and reason, produces our individual consciousnesses. Each of us is a rich and complex world, unique and at the center of the universe. Let us be curious and free thinking.

Connections/Relationships matters.  By nature, we humans are social creatures. We’re all in this together. Simply put we need one another for a variety of reasons and purposes.  The deeper connections go by the name of love. My recently deceased colleague Forrest Church proposed that our immortality rests upon love, the love that endures though we have died. The philosopher Martin Buber beguiled us with transcendent nature of subject-subject encounters, the purest state of being reaching to the Divine. A deep or mystical consciousness recognizes the extent of our connections, which we often express as an ‘interdependent web of existence.”

My fourth and final enduring value is work and the results of work.Work matters.  Ecclesiastes declares, “Whatever your hands finds to do, do with all your might.” I agree. Work is the means by which we meet the world, discover self, and make our special contribution, embedding our values just where we are.

When I first started my ministry, I took to heart a wise colleague’s advice on how to attain immortality: plant a tree, raise a child, or write a poem—all aspects of one’s Life work.

Happiness flows from an ever-growing alignment of self with enduring values.

Hold LIFE in a gentle/strong embrace.

Only CONNECT.

Let your MIND be free and expansive.

Do your WORK, your vocation as well as your avocation, with dedication and purpose.

Infuse these enduring values into your life and you will repose in happiness.

Wise Elder

[from Wisdom for the Ages: A Season with Ecclesiastes available from Kindle Direct]

D

o you have a wise elder in your life?  There’s no better means to discover and cultivate your inner wisdom.

Ecclesiastes has long served as a surrogate wise elder for me.  But I had a flesh and blood wise elder who entered my life as I began a ministerial career in my early thirties.  He was a member of my little congregation in Youngstown, Ohio.  He appeared when my psyche, in its journey of individuation, was ready to progress toward its next stage, according to the Jungian scheme.

Dick Shook reminded me of the actor, Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard of Oz in the classic movie.  A seventyish man, with a gray mustache and receding hairline, silver hair combed straight back, Dick generally dressed in well-worn dress slacks, cardigan sweater, and tie.  He always seemed at ease with self and others.  His wife Pat, slim and graceful, was a good match.  Their home, a snug North Side cottage, had simple, good furnishings, a brick fireplace that burned aromatic hardwood, and unique knick-knacks.  The mantle had an array of Dick’s childhood iron toys and miniature steam engines.  When he fired them up, they putt-a-putted and emitted little bursts of steam.  Dick was happy, his dark eyes shiny like coal.

Dick had worked as a salesman and designer for General Fireproofing, a once famous Youngstown manufacturer of steel office desks and aluminum office chairs.  Half a century later these pieces are collectible, signifying a golden age of industrial America. By the time I came to Youngstown, however, General Fireproofing had gone out of business.

For a few years, my wife Ellie and I spent a couple of hours every week at the Shooks, while our daughter took piano lessons from their next-door neighbor.  Dick knew how to mix cocktails.  At the beginnings of our visits, he exited into the kitchen and in a few minutes returned with a tray of four glistening drinks.  His servings were generous, always a double shot for me.  After two glasses of bourbon on the rocks, everything settled into a warm golden glow.  Dick’s warm and friendly eyes took on an extra twinkle.  The Port Salut cheese that Pat served on a plate with a mound of stone ground Canadian crackers became extra tangy-rich.

On those mellow afternoons, little twilight eternities, we had easy and wonderful conversations about words and language, books, world events, and Youngstown lore.  Once, the subject of dirigibles popped up.  “Come with me,” Dick said.  “I’m going to show you something in the garage.”  Up in the rafters above his car was the frame of a pewter-hued metal chair.  He lifted it down and said, “Here,” presenting it to me. 

I nearly dropped it, because I’d expected it to have a certain heft.  However, it was as light as a feather.  “It’s from a dirigible.  It’s made of magnesium.”  Dick then explained how he’d acquired it, telling yet another of his signature stories of being at the right place at the right time.

As a child, he sat at the family dinner table while they entertained all three hundred pounds of William Howard Taft.  While attending respective Cleveland colleges during Prohibition, Dick and Pat, when they dated, had rubbed elbows with notorious mobsters in speakeasies.  At the 1933 Century of Progress World Fair in Chicago, Dick had watched Sally Rand’s beguiling fan dance.  I ceased to be amazed, but was always interested, when a topic of our conversation led to yet another of Dick’s fascinating first hand tales.

The domestic tranquility of their home, the comfortable affections of their marriage, their unpretentious good taste and septuagenarian handsomeness, their treasure of memories of people and places, their continuing pleasures in continuing pursuits struck me as how I would like my life to be when I was seventy.

Dick taught me about death, too.  Cancer claimed him toward the end of my Youngstown sojourn.  He dealt with dying with considerable dignity.  He breathed his final breath in the home he’d designed and loved.  I sat with Pat in the familiar living room, as Dick’s body in a blue, zippered bag was carried out of the house, into the ambulance.  I gave his eulogy and wrote a poem of remembrance for him.

Dick provided a worthy example for me on how to live an ordinary life to its fullest, in whatever time and place I might find myself.  He offered an example that I appreciated then and used as a guide thereafter.

Ecclesiastes’ wisdom, the wise elder example of the Narrator, isn’t as intimate and warm as a living mentor, such as Dick Shook was for me.  But on an intellectual level, it works.  At least, it has worked and continues to work for me.

In our youth and when we begin to grow our psyche, we need wise elders to stimulate what we already have within us.  In literary and intellectual ways, Ecclesiastes serves this universal purpose.

Introduction to a Eulogy

At times such as this, when we remember a loved one who has died, publicly celebrating her life, our memories are something like a photo album with snapshots frozen in time.

We stare at the images.

Emotions flow for times we never knew, as well as for times we shared.

Our younger selves often stare back at us and we are haunted.

We witness the progress of a lifetime, a goodly span of years.

We wonder at the role of circumstance and chance, as well as see, perhaps for the first time, the moral arc of a life lived deliberately, and how we are affected: her life infused in our life.
.

Why I Am a Religious Liberal

Twenty years ago I was gifted with a 2 volume set—an encyclopedia of American Religions. It arranged an astounding number of faith traditions—old and new—into categories or what the editors called Families. My interest in religion and history, as well as a penchant for the quirky, made these 2 volumes one of my favorite bathtub reads. While taking a soak I’d roam the pages, for as little or as long as I wished, exploring more than 1200 varied churches.  (A recent edition lists twice that many.)

For example, after sauntering through the Loop and encountering a 12 story office building named the I AM TEMPLE, with a remarkable image (for me, creepy) of St. Germain in the window and an elderly woman at a small reception desk in the dimly lit lobby, I became curious about the I AM movement of the 1930s. Their teachings about the Ascended Masters, including Jesus, who bring special messages to Earth, now focuses on activities at Mt. Shasta in California. And like Sears, I AM has moved its national headquarters from the city to Schaumberg.

I enjoy arcane religious history of the American experience.

My big takeaway from this encyclopedia of American Religions concerned the Unitarians. The encyclopedia made a section transition from what it called the Conservative Family to the Liberal Family of Protestantism. The Liberal Family included the likes of the Ethical Society and the Religious Humanists. Unitarian Universalism sat on the transition line. The encyclopedia wondered whether UUism was  the most liberal faith organization of the conservative tradition, or was it the most conservative organization of the liberal religious tradition.

I vote for the former: the most liberal faith tradition of the conservative tradition. Our roots are in the New England Pilgrim/Puritan Congregational Church. We are independent congregations joined into an association.  We have ministers trained in traditional seminaries, including Harvard Divinity School, the first in America and once Unitarian. We meet on Sundays and listen to sermons and sing hymns. And so on.

Here’s my understanding of liberal religion as it applies to Unitarianism. 1) We were conceived in and emerged from the Age of Reason—the Enlightenment. Freedom of belief and freedom of conscience remains central. 2) We value the worth and dignity of each and every person. In this regard, our founder William Ellery Channing spoke emphatically that the human condition was made in the image of God. A generation later, Emerson urged us to “Trust thyself” in a celebrated essay “Self Reliance.” 3) We have no creed.  Nothing must impede the free mind and hamper free will. But we do need education and an adventurous life full of experiences to best use our freedom. 4) We believe in progress, the endless seeking of perfection of the individual (character) and of society (justice). 5) Democracy is the best form of government to achieve social progress, while continually nurturing the individual in the ways of freedom and responsibility.

Generally, and so it applies to religion, I see liberalism as the means of liberation of the human personality, in which liberalism implicitly trusts. In contrast, conservatism has a dimmer view of the human condition, what I see as Calvinistic. Humankind in this old Protestant view is essentially depraved  (original sin or at the very least fallen from grace plays here). In the conservative view, the individual and society needs all sorts of controls to maintain order and condition goodness. (I might be able to trust in me, but I’m not sure that I can trust you, is the conservative bottom line.  So, follow my rules, though they might not absolutely apply to me.)

My mantra is, “I’m a religious liberal for me and for you.”

Let our spirits soar!

The Role of Negative Examples

I once received a Native American ceremonial rattle: a buffalo rib painted with red ochre, ornamented with a raw hide thong that secured crow feathers, a coyote tooth, and a patinated, over-sized  brass jingle bell.  The legend on an attached card said that in the Lakota Sioux tradition personalities and roles were grouped into clans or societies.  This rattle belonged to the small group known as the “rotten-bellies,” the naturally disruptive.  At social gatherings and even during sacred rituals, these few might fart and belch (hence, a rotten belly), speak out of turn and otherwise misbehave.  Rotten bellies were at the almost intolerable edge of society.  But they served an important service—to be negative examples.  A parent or leader might say to a child, “Stop that.  You don’t want to grow up to be a rotten belly, do you?”  The child had a palpable and disgusting, example before her or him.

This is a rather odd lead-in to tragic celebrity deaths, such as just occurred for Whitney Houston at age 48, a fallen diva of the 1980s and early 1990s.  She was found DOA in a Hollywood hotel bathtub on the eve of the Grammy Awards.  The autopsy report is being withheld.  Foul play isn’t suspected.  She may have drowned.  Probably drugs and/or alcohol played a part. 

Her history of drug and alcohol abuse long provided grist for the great American celebrity media mill.  A famous interview in which she claimed “crack is wack” became the subject of comedy spoofs.  Her stormy marriage to another celebrity singer likewise played prominently in popular culture—a latter day Ike and Tina Turner maelstrom of outrageous behavior, possibly including physical abuse.

How could someone so beautiful, so talented, and so successful, who grew up in a religious setting and who sang inspirational songs, allow herself to succumb to such publicly-apparent mistreatment and self-destruction? Whitney Houston, who seemingly had it all, inspiring a generation of young women, especially young black women, how could she not be the happiest woman in the world?

Once the initial grief and the tributes to her greatness have waned, there will be opportunity for the tragic arc of her life to be explored.  Now, there is simplistic talk of demons  she battled with.  Then, there will be more thoughtful analysis of influences that led her into torment and an early death, and even more important, choices she made to feed a downward spiral ending in a hotel bathtub. A cautionary tale of her life waits to be told—needs to be told.

Why do I say needs to be told?

As society has evolved, becoming at least not so much familial or tribal, rather somewhat global, our examples increasingly come from the media and involve celebrity.  Once, Whitney Houston provided a positive example. Iconic is a popular descriptive.   Now, in death, she provides a negative example, as the rotten bellies once did for the Lakota Sioux.  Her life narrative is complete.

I don’t pick on Whitney Houston in a gossip-mongering or in a peek–through-the-keyhole and invade her  privacy sort of way.  She chose to be a celebrity and reaped the benefits.  As a society we are justified in seeking the meaning of her death.

I think we can, in a loving way for our children, say, “Look at her life.  This is what brought on her fall and an untimely death.  Don’t you do the self-destructive things she did.”

Romney and Religion

For me it was a bizarre moment in a presidential candidates' debate.  A Charleston audience huzzahed Newt Gingrich for being "appalled" at John King's opening question regarding a former wife's allegations.  She claimed that  Gingrich asked her for an "open marriage" so he could could continue an adulterous affair with the woman who subsequently became his third wife. In essence, Gingrich took King to task, implicating him as part of a "media elite" that is pro-Obama.

So an audience, surely strong on traditional family values and leaning toward conservative Christianity, resoundingly cheered  a thrice married, twice divorced, admitted adulterer.  Gingrich won the primary a couple of days later, decisively defeating Mitt Romney, whom the pundits, for weeks, had projected the likely winner.

In vivid contrast, Romney represents family values lived: a faithful husband in a long marriage to a high school sweetheart, a dedicated father, and a man of faith long-dedicated as lay-clergy and local leader to his birth church to which he tithes.  And there's the rub.  Romney is a Mormon.

In the wake of the South Carolina primary, a negative response to Romney's Mormon identity is being questioned.  The consensus concludes, it was less of an issue for South Carolina's Evangelicals than it was four years ago; but such a view doesn't dismiss it altogether as an issue.

The Protestant right and Catholics, too, don't find Mormonism to be Christian, despite Mormon contentions that they are.

There's an unspoken religious litmus test for political candidates that relates to belief in God--the God of the Jewish Christian tradition, preferably a conservative Christian take on that God. (It's been proven by reputable polls that the most reviled minority in America are atheists.)  For most Americans, Mormonism  stands outside the Christian pale.

The pundits are beginning to say that Romney must address his staunch Mormon identity, that it's the elephant in the room of his crumbling campaign.  It's not easy to pin down why Mitt Romney doesn't excite popular enthusiasm. On appearance, except for his Mormonism, he should.  He's what used to be called "four square."

So, a socially conservative audience, huzzahed a morally suspect Newt Gingrich when challenged on his character/behavior; and a conservative electorate made him the anti-Romney of the week.

Religion matters.
    

Imagine

January 1995

I originally proposed a sermon on the theme “ How Would Our World Be Different, If Dr. King Had Lived?”  I wanted to try my hand at counterfactual history, also known as alternate or “what if” history.

I did a little research and thought about a design.  However, I was overwhelmed by a retrospective sadness for the course of America since 1968, seen through a lens of possibility—how Dr. King’s moral arc would have affected our national moral arc.

You surely know, I’m referencing Dr. King’s quotation “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  Perhaps you know that President Obama has a rug in the oval office with those words woven around the edge. You probably don’t know that Dr. King borrowed that now famous phrase from Unitarian minister Theodore Parker who said in 1853, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

As I reflected on what might have been, I realized how monumental Martin Luther King Jr. had already become as he entered his full maturity at age 39.  He’d inspired and contributed to the organization of the greatest political/cultural event of the 20th century: an astonishingly successful expansion of  civil rights largely won by the moral effort of the people oppressed by 400 hundred years of entrenched racism.  Dr. King had begun to campaign for economic justice (The Poor Peoples’ March and his reason for being in Memphis, a sanitation workers strike); and he had begun to oppose the Vietnam War.  He was dramatically transforming the notion of Love from neutered Christian sentiment to transformative action—the swift sword of Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but without violence and blood.

He threatened a smug, self-serving economic and political establishment that, in his absence over the last four decades, has grown into a Plutocracy that has cynically abused national interest (of, by, and for the people—another Theodore Parker phrase) for selfish gain.

In my imagination, I injected Dr. King into the events of tumbling decades: the 70s, 80, 90s, the 2000s.  I was literally overwhelmed at the imagined gravitas of his presence, the difference he would have made.  His baseline, the transformative power of Love, would have at the very least been a constant goad, a reminder always to keep in mind the notion of a moral arc bending ever closer to Justice not for some but for all.  He would have pushed American Christianity away from Evangelicalism’s selfish prosperity theology, toward a generous social justice ethic of view true to Jesus’s own revolutionary ministry.

Seventeen years ago, I had the occasion to visit the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was shot.  Memphis was literally closed because of an ice storm that had passed through the area night before.  The motel was worn and tired, much like the decaying  industrial/transportation district surrounding it.  A single wreath on a balcony marked the 2nd floor where Dr. King was shot.  It was a bright, sunny mid-winter, Sunday afternoon. The sensations of the day mingling with my active imagination,--standing on holy ground,--made it one of the more memorable and poignant experiences of my life. 

I imagined the report of a rifle, the slumping body, the ooze of blood, but I knew couldn’t fully comprehended the full import of the tragic event.  Such a realization still exceeds my ability to order and hold it, relative to the course of events of the last 43 years.

Our world would have been a better place—a much better place—had Dr. King survived to walk with us at age 83.

I grieve for what might have been but never was.

Fruit of the Tree

[My favorite religious myth comes from Genesis.  The two trees, Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, haunt my religio-spiritual imagination.  A mystery of the human condition is a moral consciousness joined to a sense of mortality.  This is a consciousness that often comes to a relatively young child.  I sometime am asked to talk to a child as young as nine who has realized that s/he won't live forever.  Here's a vignette from my new book on Ecclesiastes, Wisdom for the Ages, that speaks to this fundamental human awareness, the proverbial loss of innocence.]

The Thisness of Being

I

’ve just listened to a Canadian Broadcast Corporation “Writers and Company” interview with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein, regarding her new book Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God.

You can’t judge a book by its cover‒at least by its title.  Ms. Goldstein’s new book is a novel‒a philosophical novel.  She is a professional philosopher, a professor at Brandeis University, who some years ago wearied of analytical philosophy’s restrictions and branched into the writing of fiction.  Her new book has garnered interest, in part, for the appendix that lists said thirty-six arguments and offers a brief critique of each.

The interview began with Ms. Goldstein remembering her youth, when she would lie in bed and think about the strangeness of her being.  In thinking of her existential self, she had an extraordinary, heightened awareness that was both terrifying and thrilling.  She wondered, why am I me? Do others perceive this me?  At a very early age, she was genuinely mystified by the thisness of her own existence.

A practicing Orthodox Jew by birth through the years of her first marriage, she now declares herself probably agnostic, though she admires the rich nuances of a religious outlook.  In the interview, she mused on the existential problem of death from a very ordinary point of view: how can all the aspects of personality, the complex world that each person is, simply cease to be?  This non-existence was easy for her to accept for herself, but she couldn’t so readily accept it for those she loved, such as her father.

As a child, she had pondered death. As a philosopher, she’s still mystified by what she called the thisness of being.  This blows her away.  In this regard, philosophizing seems an ordinary human activity to her, as she seeks to understand what she first experienced non-rationally as a child.

Her memories stirred mine.  I remember lying in bed as a child, the night dark and the room still.  I thought about the common stuff of childhood‒school, friends, sports and such.  But I also remembered that now and again, seeping in from where I didn’t know, came strange images of death, the thisness of my being falling into an abyss of nothingness.  If I remember the accompanying emotion accurately, it had a sense of awesome dread that was also compelling. Fascinating is the mystical term.  I didn’t want to think about non-being, but when I did, I had to take it to the edge of an abyss.  Much later, when I encountered Rudolph Otto’s concept of the mysterium tremendum, I had a phrase to describe these episodes of apprehension and fascination about death.  Later, Emily Dickinson’s haunting, “when I have fears that I may cease to be,” assured me that I wasn‘t alone in confronting this disturbing conclusion to being, the end of the thisness of my life and every life.

By no means a morbid child, I didn’t dwell on death.  Was I precocious?  Perhaps.  But probably more children spontaneously entertain such episodes than we imagine. 

Dying and death are important aspects of ministry, involving pastoral care and the rite of passage of either a funeral or memorial service.  When the compulsion to write and publish a book came upon me in my mid-thirties, I followed the advice to write what I knew about.  I fashioned a guide on crafting modern funeral and memorial services called In Memoriam.  It’s been in print since 1993, reissued in 2000 in a second edition, and has become a standard resource even beyond the confines of my liberal religious tradition.

Considering this, my affinity for Ecclesiastes pops into focus.  Though Ecclesiastes offers a litany of observations and aphorism about death, I’ve never found it morbid.  It’s Realistic and it’s philosophical in a commonsense, everyman’s way. 

A number of verses might be cited to highlight Ecclesiastes sensibility regarding mortality and the human response to it.  In light of my own scheme of Natural Religion, I cite this selection:

I said in my heart, with regards to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts.  For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other.  They will all have the breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.  All go to one place; all are from dust, all turn to dust again.  Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?  So I saw that there is nothing better than a man should enjoy his work, for that is his lot; who can bring him to see what will be after him?  [3:18-22]

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