Gimme That Ole Time Non-Theism

Gimme That Ole Time Non-Theism

May 26 2013

Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta

“Why can’t atheists solve exponential equations?  Because they don’t believe in higher powers.” (http://augustberkshire.com/specific-resources/atheist-humor-jokes/)

Freethinkers, agnostics, secular humanists, ‘spiritual but not religious’ – these terms have often been invoked when people want to avoid the ‘a’ word – atheist. But are atheists coming out of the closet in the 21^st century? Is the hostility, stigma and shunning once attached to famous atheists such as Madalyn Murray O’Hair a thing of the past for believers? And will nontheists ever be able to define themselves in positive – not negative – terms? 

After all, you might have heard about the atheist walking through the woods one day...

‘What majestic trees’! 
‘What powerful rivers’! 
‘What beautiful animals’!
 He said to himself.

 As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. 
He turned to look…and saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him.

He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder & saw that the bear was closing in on him.

 He looked over his shoulder again, & the bear was even closer. He tripped & fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that the bear was right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw & raising his right paw to strike him.

 At that instant the Atheist cried out, ‘Oh my God!’



Time stopped. 
The bear froze.
 The forest was silent.

 As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky. ‘You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don’t exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?’



The atheist looked directly into the light, ‘It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps you could make the BEAR a Christian’? 
The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head & spoke:

 “Lord bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen”.

(http://www.jokes.com/funny-animal-jokes/8ccm34/an-atheist-and-a-bear )

Maybe, since we now have funny atheist jokes, atheism is the new cultural taboo about to be broken, since the gay rights issue seems to be less controversial and increasingly mainstream. But there are still drawbacks, some of them legal, to being ‘out’ as an atheist. From freethoughtpedia.com: Some states have constitutions that discriminate against atheists, and atheists are banned from holding office in Arkansas , Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. However, all laws against atheists holding office were ruled unconstitutional and unenforceable by a 1961 Supreme Court case on a first amendment basis.

                

So it’s not surprising that a very few elected representatives have publicly identified

themselves as nontheists – although Edwina Rogers of the Secular Coalition for America says that 28 of the 525 members of Congress do not believe in any sort of gods. (http://www.atheistrev.com/2012/06/atheists-in-congress.html )

            Democratic California Representative Pete Stark decided in 2007 to come out as the first openly nontheistic member of Congress.[37] In 2009, City Councilman Cecil Bothwell of Asheville, North Carolina was called "unworthy of his seat" because of his open atheism. In the 113^th Congress, Democratic Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who was raised a Mormon, is religiously unaffiliated. She doesn’t describe herself as an atheist, but says she favors a secular approach. (http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/01/03/first-member-of-congress-describes-religion-as-none)

Most politicians have a canny sense for what is acceptable to their constituents. A 2011 Pew Research Center study found that its participants were more likely to vote for a candidate who had "used marijuana, had an extramarital affair, is homosexual or had never held public office than someone who did not believe in God" (http://thehill.com/capital-living/cover-stories/232445-in-god-we-trust-).

But the UU denomination has been one of the most welcoming among the world’s faiths and societies to nontheists. Once, when my mother told her friend that I was preaching one Sunday at a local church, the friend asked her which church – upon hearing it was a UU church, the friend exclaimed, ‘But they let atheists come to that church.’ My mother said something to the effect that because we say we welcome all people, we practice what we preach!

But where does the influence of humanism upon our UU history and liberal theology originate?

William Murry notes in his book Reason and Reverence (2007) that the critique of religion by liberal theologians harks back at least to Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the individual experience that frees religion from a system of doctrines. Another important influence was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s critique of authoritarianism of the Bible and of the church, a critique that was based on his vision of the divinity of humanity and the importance of free inquiry. And early Unitarian Universalist Humanism was challenged to focus on theology – literally, ‘God-talk’ - by the inability of African-American humanists to reconcile the oppression experienced in slavery with “belief in a just and powerful God” (Murry, 34). A bishop back in the 1830s wrote that he was afraid the Christian church was losing the slaves because when they heard their masters professing to be Christians, they lost faith because they knew that “oppression and slavery are inconsistent with the Christian religion” (34).

After the First World War there was a call within Unitarianism for religion to enter the modern world, and to make the shift from belief in a supernatural power to a belief that only humans can transform society by their own efforts.

In 1933 the Humanist Manifesto was created with 34 signers, rejecting supernatural doctrines of religion and affirming human goals and social responsibility. Murry also notes that soon, because of the desire to share the Manifesto’s ‘Good news’, a rigid humanist orthodoxy developed in Unitarian Universalism. One of its effects was to get rid of all but the most scientific, rational discourse in a significant number of UU fellowships and congregations. The lip service paid to our range of sources, in some quarters of Unitarian Universalism, sometimes disguises a deep disrespect for theism that is the legacy of that orthodox influence. Another effect was the ideal of the autonomous individual, diminishing community and the legacy of covenantal theology so important centuries before to the dissenters that settled in New England.

So Unitarian Universalism has more than a passing acquaintance with nontheism. And as we are finding today, there’s a growing number of people who self-identify as non-religious and who may wish to be known as ‘religious independents’. According to author Susan Jacoby, that is roughly 20% of the population of this country. Actually, in last year’s Pew Center poll asking about their religious affiliation, one in 3 young American adults chose the ‘none of the above’ category. The ‘nones’ category contains more atheists than will admit to being so, Jacoby claims, and she is especially critical of those who define themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’. Is this a way of fudging their true feelings – shouldn’t they just come out as nontheists?

In her New York Times article from this past January entitled ‘The Blessings of Atheism’, Jacoby says that nontheists are “reluctant to speak out… with the combination of reason and passion needed to erase the image of the atheist as a bloodless intellectual robot.” They may also want to get out from under the stereotype of atheists as people with a gaping hole in their lives, people who, as Steve Martin says, ‘don’t have no songs’. But their reluctance to speak out as nontheists may also be their distaste of the image of the rabid atheist who wants to sue every time a manger scene appears in front of a city hall.

The nontheist of today may not fit into the mold of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who won the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision which ended school prayer in public schools across the U.S. and turned her into the self-described "most hated woman in America." And although the nontheist population ranges “from devout atheists and rationalists to secular humanists and other freethinkers, they are united in their vision of complete separation of church and state” – and that was O’Hair’s crowning achievement. Her determination is still appreciated to this day; atheists who speak out in the forthright way she did still get a lot of blowback when they voice their feelings or experiences. (http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Secular-Philosophies/Who-Was-Madalyn-Murray-Ohair.aspx?p=2#sthash.zCGZ7MFJ.dpuf )

Other atheist moms are worthy of note here. Before Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s court victory, Vashti McCollum from Illinois filed a lawsuit in Illinois courts in 1945 that laid the groundwork for O’Hair. It objected to prayer and religious education in public schools. The Supreme Court in 1948 supported the so-called ‘wall of separation’ between church and state in the McCollum decision. A PBS documentary called “The Lord is not on Trial Here Today” was broadcast in March as part of Women’s History Month; it told the story of ‘that awful woman’, as McCollum was called, and the McCollum v Board of Education case.

Another mother came to light due to a CNN iReport website that has had close to a million hits to a blog posted on it in mid-January. It’s entitled “Why I Raise My Children without God”. In it the blogger TXBlue08, who is a Texas mother of 2 teenagers, explains “I want my children to be free not to believe and to know that our schools and our government will make decisions based on what is logical, just and fair—not on what they believe an imaginary God wants.” She lists her objections to God, including things like: God does not protect the innocent; God is not fair; God is a bad parent and role model…some of the classic arguments down the ages about the nature of God. What is interesting about this blog is that it has had over 9 thousand replies; many readers have tried to stifle her story by ‘flagging’ it as inappropriate, but CNN has kept it on the website. Just this week after the tornado wiped out most of Moore, Oklahoma, the tolerant face of CNN took a bit of a punch to the nose…Wolf Blitzer interviewed a young mother holding her child and told her that as a survivor ‘you’ve just gotta thank the Lord…do you thank the Lord?’ And here is what a blog posted the next day commented:

“It's fine if Wolf says, "I guess you gotta thank the Lord!" then moves on. But it was weird how he turned it into the Spanish Inquisition. "...*do you* thank the Lord?"

That lady handled it perfectly, though. She didn't go all abrasive …Instead, she just smiled, said she was an Atheist, and extended the "But, I don't blame those that do," olive branch to Wolf. Well played.” (Timothy Burke, ‘The Bottom Up’, http://deadspin.com/wolf-blitzer-asks-atheist-tornado-survivor-if-she-than-509150402 )

Earlier I mentioned Susan Jacoby, an atheist herself, whose book The Great Agnostic (2013) profiles a long-forgotten name in American Freethought, Robert Ingersoll. He was a critic of public religiosity and an advocate of reason in the years leading up to the 20^th century. Ingersoll fervently believed that the responsibility that humans have to one another IS the ‘religion of humanity’. He wrote: “There is no evidence that God ever interfered in the affairs of man…from he clouds there comes no help. In vain the shipwrecked cry to God. In vain the imprisoned ask for liberty and light – the world moves on and the heavens are deaf, dumb, and blind…the frost freezes, the fire burns…the wrong triumphs, the good suffer, and prayer dies upon the lips of faith” (Murry, 31). If you read the blog from Rez this week, a man named Alan who lives in the area of Oklahoma pulverized by the tornadoes pretty clearly articulated Ingersoll’s perspective from over a century ago:

 Things happened to people today.  Devastating things.  They did nothing to ‘deserve’ them.  It was not a ‘punishment’, nor a ‘trial’, nor a ‘test of faith’.  It was nature being nature – absent of any self-awareness – and doing what nature does.  A tornado is neither ‘evil’ nor ‘good’.  It just is,  until it isn’t any longer. When the danger passes – we figure out what we can do, and then we do that. We look out for each other – not because we have to be told, or warned, or threatened – but because, from generation to generation, we know that it’s the right thing to do. (http://rez.li/2013/from-moore-with-contemplation/)

But there has been a rash of New Atheists leading the charge into the 21^st century – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett – who have written a lot of books and who have received a lot of media coverage. Even though most self-identifying nontheists would agree that they have in common no belief in God, the New Atheists since 9/11 have been said to militantly position themselves as being anti-religion – so technically not nontheist but antitheist.

However, taking a closer look at contemporary nontheism, we might see that the picture is not as simple as that for most nontheists:

Black Atheists

If, because of the reasons I mentioned before, the ordinary nontheist is loathe to speak up for nontheism, imagine how much more difficult it must be for a person who belongs to an ethnic group in which 88% believe in God with “absolute certainty and more than half attend religious services at least once a week” (Emily Brennan, “The Unbelievers,” New York Times 11/27/2011).

In 2009 an African-American atheist Facebook page had 100 members, a number that has now passed 800. The Black Atheist Alliance has more than 500 members on Facebook who share their experiences of ‘coming out’.

Even though there is a percentage of the African-American community that is Muslim, the assumption most of us make is that religious African-Americans are Christian. But even non-theist African-Americans feel a cultural affinity with Christianity, according to Pew research: “2/3 of those who report no religious affiliation say religion plays a somewhat important role in their lives.” Black atheists are a minority within a minority, and they run into disapproval from their own community that is based on the feeling that they are turning their backs on African-American history and the struggle for civil rights, which of course, was overwhelmingly a Christian one.

Susan Jacoby says that a reprint of her New York Times article on atheism in the Dallas Sunday News led to an explosion of comments on her website, including one from an 85-year-old African American man, who wrote of how hard it was to have lived as an atheist in Texas and in the African American community.

Faitheism

We are familiar with the type of atheist who is critical of religion and cuts ties to it. But there is an interesting morphing of nontheism today in this country into what has been coined ‘Faitheism’…because a ‘Faitheist’ could be said to find religion a very useful thing – and notice I said, religion, not belief. Chris Stedman wrote a book called Faitheist (2012), a pejorative term that he has instead claimed with pride.

The introduction is written by Eboo Patel, the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and this year’s Ware lecturer at our Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly in Louisville; Patel describes Stedman this way:

“His atheism doesn’t hate God; it loves people…His goal is to nurture a movement of Humanists who emphasize cultivating humanity, express it in terms of serving others,  and work with people of all faiths, in good faith, towards that end. Chris understands that we get there together or not at all.” (Stedman, xiii)

Stedman criticizes the New Atheist brand of antitheism that “lumps all religious believers together and shames them as a uniformly condemnable bloc” (9). And he feels that it’s their loss when nonbelievers are dismissive of religion, as in his story (3ff) about a reception following a panel discussion on how the nonreligious should approach religion. And Stedman, who is the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, is mainly concerned with building bridges, not separating from those who hold different beliefs. Maybe his concept of respect is what already exists in Unitarian Universalism…

The depth of his anguish about antireligious secularism run amok is captured in this short passage about Stedman’s attempt to introduce interfaith cooperation to the organized atheist movement in this country:

“My first atheist conference…was for me a nightmare. Witnessing the sheer vitriol some expressed toward the religious, I actually cried…I called friends of mine back home – atheists, no less – and recalled what I’d seen. They were shocked and appalled. One friend said to me: “You see, this is why I don’t want to call myself an atheist.” (145)

Now, Stedman is quick to point out that criticism of religion is not the exclusive domain of the nonreligious – there are plenty of outspoken religious leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther, and - oh yes, Jesus of Nazareth.  So, alienating those who may be in a position inside the religious establishment to encourage and perhaps even enact reform is not helpful. But for antitheists who want to do away with religion all together that is not a distinction they are interested in making.

I would like to draw my last example of how nontheism is becoming more nuanced from the latest book by Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists – a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion (2012). Because to read this book is to end up marveling at the genius of using religion as an instrument for building “a sense of community, making relationships last, and reconnecting with the natural world” – only 3 of the uses De Botton suggests that are derived from Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism. And nontheists can do this without having to believe in any of religion’s strange doctrines or weird beliefs.

De Botton describes the often satisfying pastime for atheists of debunking arguments for belief in God, kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. But he goes on to explain that humanity invented religion to serve two ‘Central needs’ that secularism has not been able to satisfactorily deal with: the first is the need to live together in community despite our violent impulses; the other is to help us cope with painful events in our lives, like the death of a loved one, and our own mortality. And he says, “The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed” (12-13). He describes how he came to understand that his “continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths” (14). He says that secular society just has not come up with artifacts or activities that are as satisfying as those that originate in religious observance, and it is not fair to make us choose one and give up the other.

Indeed, De Botton admires the way that Christianity was very skilled at “subsuming countless pagan practices which modern atheists now avoid in the mistake that they are indelibly Christian” – such as the repackaging of the ancient pagan midwinter holiday as Christmas, and the rebranding and occupation of shrines and temples of pagan heroes.

And so, he proposes, we should look at aspects of religious life that can be advantageously applied to the problems of contemporary secular life. The one aspect he begins with is community – which he claims lost its central importance around the time that “we ceased communally to honor our gods” (23). Privatized religion led us to disregard our neighbors.

But De Botton then goes on to discuss the nature of the Catholic Eucharist and the Jewish Passover meal, and how religion knows how to solve the problem of creating tolerance between strangers – by making them eat a meal together (50)!

The book’s chapter on perspective begins by DeBotton proclaiming the book of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures as the most consoling of biblical texts for atheists! Here is a man whose tragic life seems to be direct punishment from God, but Job can’t fathom why that should be. Instead, the moral of the story of Job is that his little life is no match in scale or importance to the vast eternity of the cosmos: “human beings did not bring the cosmos into being and, despite their occasional feelings to the contrary, they do not control it or own it” (198). So listen to what De Botton diagnoses as the danger when we have a godless society:

“When God is dead, human beings…are at risk of taking psychological center stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death…until at last they must collide …with the sharp edges of reality. Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place.” (200)

It’s an intriguing idea that nontheism can prosper by reassuring itself through traditions associated with religion that were, so to speak, sacrificed on the altar of Reason.

You may think that this appreciation of religion that is voiced by people like Chris Stedman and Alan De Botton is a far cry from the passionate rejection of religion found in the writings of Robert Ingersoll, who in 1899 wrote:

         

   ‘Religion can never reform [hu]mankind because religion is slavery.

            It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of            

            to stand erect and face the future with a smile.

            It is far better to… think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life…to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps             and kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music, the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart.

            And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art's nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the             soul. This is real religion. This is real worship.' (The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll:
What Is Religion?
1899. http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/ingwhatrel.htm )

Well, when you read that poetic description, maybe the distance between this ole time nontheism and De Botton’s contemporary appreciation of religion in broadening our perspective past our own importance may not be as far as it first seems!

Those of us who have become so repelled by the excesses and abuses of religion, by the illogical nature of supernatural belief on a higher being, and the infuriatingly smug and vapid pontification of believers on how we should live our lives – or thank God that we survived extreme weather - might want to ponder a bit more on the urgings of nontheists like De Botton and Stedman to think again about the uses of religion as a social system. As De Botton concludes, ”The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of [hu]mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone” (De Botton, 312).

So don’t feel guilty when you get in the car to go home today and listen to a Bach cantata, when you dye some Easter eggs for the kids, when you decorate the Christmas tree and sing along to Joe playing “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

And I in turn won’t feel silly singing an old Gospel hymn to conclude this message, because I can appreciate its sentiment about the wonder of nature without believing that the hands of an anthropomorphic God-figure created the world in 7 days. For me, “How Great Thou Art” (Stuart K. Hine) expresses the humble nature of being human in comparison with the immensity of creation, very much in line with De Botton’s idea of nontheist perspective. I gave up the idea of a personal God who gives me things if I pray for them a long time ago. 

The faith tradition that gave me this hymn is not part of my belief system anymore, but I am grateful for the perspective that allows me to sing it as a love song to life and as a reminder of the transcendent.

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,

Consider all the works Thy Hands have made;

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,

How great Thou art, How great Thou art.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,

How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

 (Lyrics from <a href="http://www.elyrics.net">eLyrics.net</a>)

Blessed be. Amen. 

Where Do You Wear?

 Earth Day is here again! Since it began in 1970, it has been a challenge to all of us to remember what we should be doing to take care of our home…the only home we have. And our honey-do list is long when it comes to what we need to do to make the earth a better place to live – indeed, to save it for generations to come so they can live here, too.

The Earth Day theme this year as set by the UU Ministry for Earth is “Working Towards Sustainable Communities”:

          “The need for sustainable communities – ones that are economically, environmentally, and socially healthy and resilient – has never been stronger. The current and future impacts of our changing climate and extreme weather events affect the lives of families and communities across the country; our out-of-control materialistic consumer culture challenges Earth’s finite resources and contributes to environmental degradation; many in our increasingly diverse society endure an unequal burden of economic and environmental injustices; and social isolation and loss of meaning in life continue to be an all-too-familiar fact of life for many. Resilient sustainable communities offer integrated solutions to many of these challenges when they are based on long-range perspectives, reflect their local circumstances, and speak to the needs of current and future residents. The Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth (UUMFE) is focusing this year’s Earth Day resources on Sustainable Communities because we believe such communities, with their focus on realizing and sustaining a just and equitable world, embody our mission and reflect key Unitarian Universalist principles. For Earth Day 2013, the Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth (UUMFE) is asking congregations to connect to issues related to realizing sustainability and to commit to actions that will help build a sustainable and just world, one congregation and one community at a time.” (http://uuministryforearth.org/2013-ED-Main-Page).

Today my message concerns something that we take for granted: the clothes we wear everyday. But who makes those clothes? Are they getting a fair wage for making them? Are they making them in acceptable working conditions? Are they working with dangerous machinery? Are they children?

Lots of questions we could ask, and here is another one for you to ponder:

If you had to choose between buying a piece of clothing that costs $20 and you are not sure how it was made, and one that is certified as not made in a sweatshop but costs $25, which one would you buy?”

My sermon title for today, "Where do you wear?" is based on Where Are You Wearing, the title of a book written by a young man named Kelsey Timmerman. In it he describes how he embarked on a global tour to the countries, factories, and people that make our clothes. He writes: “One day while staring at a pile of clothes on the floor, I noticed the tag of my favorite t-shirt: MADE IN HONDURAS.

I read the tag. My mind wandered.

A quest was born.”

Earlier, we saw our children as they looked at the tags of their clothing and tried to imagine who the people were who made them. Maybe their parents will help them look up on the web the name of the brand, and maybe they can find out where the clothing is made and even who made it. They might even think to themselves that when they get older, they might like to do what Kelsey did and travel around the world to different places.

Kelsey is no radical activist, he didn’t do this for a newspaper expose, I don’t know if he is even a Unitarian Universalist! He didn’t think at first about creating a sustainable and just world, - in fact he really didn’t know what to expect when he decided to become a ‘consumer on a quest’…except that he was finishing college, he didn’t want to become engaged to his girlfriend yet, he didn’t want to grow up yet. With a degree in anthropology he set off in eager anticipation to meet people who lived in exotic faraway locations very different from his home in the flat fields of Ohio. He did first go to Honduras, but it was more of a beach bum experience, although he did meet  a worker from the factory that made his t-shirt.

But the idea would not let go of him, even when he went back home, got engaged, bought a home and a flat-screen tv. So he took out a second mortgage and went into the world of the globalized garment industry. Kelsey says that he’d learned about globalization in school and had negatively associated it with the problems Americans faced when factories closed and work went overseas. He’d heard the term ‘sweatshop’ in sociology class, and had the image of “dark, sweaty, abusive, dehumanizing, evil sweatshops” (4). But his travels made him an engaged consumer, aware of the complexity of the garment industry. He asks “What are we to do as consumers? If we buy garments made in some developing country, we are contributing to an industry built on laborers whose wages and quality of life would be unacceptable to us. But if we don’t, the laborers might lose their jobs.” (10)

One place Kelsey went was to Bangladesh, because that was where his favorite underwear came from – they were faded boxer shorts with a Christmas ornament design on them, with the words ‘Jingle These’! What he found was not the exact factory – there were too many. But he was treated like a rock star – being a blond, blue-eyed foreigner, he was a real rarity. He met village elders and the village chairman, who sent out for soft drinks and cookies; he was challenged to play kabbadi, an amazingly fast-paced game on a court where you try to reach your opponents baseline while chanting "kabbadi, kabbadi." The villagers let Kelsey win.

Then he met an underwear business executive, and then was taken to a few factories. Kelsey comments that for him, the true meaning of the word ‘sweatshop’ really comes from the intense heat that hit him as he entered, especially in the color dye factory where furnaces helped to set the color. But then he met some of the young workers, teenagers using wooden sticks to help push the cloth into the furnaces, others who prepared rolls of thread for feeding into machines. And here is where Kelsey began to reflect uneasily on what he saw, and contrasting the scene with how American children live. 

Kelsey met many workers in his travels: Arifa from Bangladesh, who worked at a garment factory and hoped to make enough money to support her family so that she is not forced to send another child to work in Saudi Arabia – one of her sons who is 18 is there, and he sends half his paycheck home to her each month. He makes $146 a month.  In China, at the factory where his flipflops were made Kelsey met a husband and wife, who, because they need to pay off debt, work long hours and rarely see their son. He even went into a Wal-Mart near Guangzhou; he was greeted by a Wal-Mart greeter and saw flat-screen tvs that cost over a thousand dollars. He saw Barbies that were Caucasian, and the speakers in the dairy section were blaring the Queen anthem ‘We Will Rock You”. And he spoke with a store manager and asked him, “Some people back home won’t shop at Wal-mart because most of their products are made in China. Do people in China not shop at Wal-Mart because it is an American company?” (208)

He was told no, and that Wal-Mart was an exciting place to work. Because more and more Chinese are moving from rural to urban areas there will be more Wal-Marts to accommodate their consumer needs.

Interesting that Wal-Mart was in the news just before Christmas because of a factory fire in Bangladesh. The fire killed over one hundred workers who were making clothes for Wal-mart .According to a Huffington Post report, Bangladeshi factories often ignore safety precautions in order to supply major retailers in the US and Europe (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/walmart-bangladesh-factory-fire_n_2197441.html)  - this fire was caused when an exit door was locked, but also fire extinguishers didn’t work. When a fire alarm went off the workers were told to stay at their machines, and they became trapped or jumped from windows eight floors down to their deaths. This sounds depressingly familiar.

In 1911 a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City took the lives of 146 young immigrant workers; the youngest was only 14 years old. Fire inspections and safety precautions were woefully inadequate at the time. Survivors spoke about how they tried to open the ninth floor doors to the stairs. They and many others afterwards believed they were deliberately locked by the factory owners, who’d claimed in the past that because workers stole materials they needed to lock the exit doors. Even if the workers got out onto the ninth floor fire escape, it bent under the weight of the factory workers trying to escape the fire. “Others waited at the windows for the rescue workers only to discover that the firefighters' ladders were several stories too short and the water from the hoses could not reach the top floors. Many chose to jump to their deaths rather than to burn alive.” (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/story/fire.html)

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire at least led “to the transformation of the labor code of New York State, and to the adoption of fire safety measures that served as a model for the whole country”; and the desperate working conditions drove workers to form unions, such as the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.

A century later, “Recent studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor found that 67% of Los Angeles garment factories and 63% of New York garment factories violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Ninety-eight percent of Los Angeles garment factories have workplace health and safety problems serious enough to lead to severe injuries or death.” (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/story/sweatshopsStrikes.html)

So what can we do, when we know that even here in the US working conditions are still not ideal? Remember the question I asked about how you would choose between buying a piece of clothing for $20 but not knowing where it was made, or buying one that s certified as not being made in a sweatshop for $25? A poll by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 61% of those polled said they would pay $5 more for the piece certified as not being made in a sweatshop.

Maybe we can work with the industry to produce a new labeling system that would tell us about the working conditions…except that there are problems with that, like the changing conditions of factories when they’re bought by new owners.

In Where Are You Wearing? Kelsey suggests that we ask ourselves what kind of consumers we are: if we are bargain hunters who just want a good deal, then we are not concerned with who made our clothes or where they were made. If we are patriotic consumers who just want to buy American, there are companies like American Apparel that sell only American clothing and give their workers fair wages and benefits. And if we want clothes that are made by workers who get fair treatment and a living wage, we can find them online at sites like No Sweat Apparel.

When we talk about sustainability and the ‘unequal burden of economic and environmental injustices that exist on our planet, maybe we need to think about being consumers who make a low-impact on the environment and buy secondhand clothing or even make our own clothes. But in today’s world, whatever kinds of consumers we’ve been in the past, we can become engaged consumers who base our buying decisions on our research.

Last fall, I gave this book to the students in my Intercultural Communication class as an assignment. They were asked to research the origins of some of the typical items of clothing that they wear. And most of them were very surprised at what they found out. They were shocked that some of the most popular brands are not the most ethical when it comes to how the companies treat their workers or the earth. As teens many of them had purchased clothes from Aeropostale or Abercrombie and Fitch.

In a study done on the people who manufacture Aeropostale clothing, Geoffrey Vollmer found that some of their clothing was produced in Sri Lanka, where the average wage is 2500 rupies a month, the equivalent of 32 US dollars. The main workforce of Sri Lanka’s garment industry are single young women, and factories typically have poor working condition. Vollmer fund that ‘in most factories workers only get 30 minutes for a lunch break, less than enough time to eat lunch and go to the toilet. In fact in 2002 the government of Sr Lanka made laws that force women to work more overtime, up to 60 hours; and they also are forced to use restroom tokens for their restroom breaks. Sexual harassment is frequent, and occupational health and safety practices are either poor or almost nonexistent. (http://www.units.muohio.edu/ath175/student/vollmega/index.html )

According to the International Labor Rights Forum, Abercrombie and Fitch has the dubious honor of having made the Top Ten Sweatshop Hall of Fame in 2010: clothing is manufactured at the Alta Mode factory in the Phillippines, and employees of the factory tried to form a union to address concerns. On the day when the worker’s union was to be certifies all of the more than 100 members and officer were placed on forced leave. Abercrombie and Fitch does not have a code of conduct and has employed factory inspectors who have missed or not reported safety issues.

Some of us might buy Hanes or LL Bean products. They too appear in the Sweatshop Hall of Fame because of their use of cotton from Uzbekistan. The Uzbeck government has mandated children as young as 7 to work in cotton fields during the late summer harvest, even if they miss the start of the school year. More than 25 companies have committed to boycotting the use of Uzbeck cotton, but although Hanes and LLBean have been contacted about the issue they refuse to address it. (http://madeinusachallenge.com/2011/abercrombie-fitch/ )

Kelsey suggests visiting the websites of companies who make products you’re interested in to see if they monitor the factories that make them. He says that the Fair Labor Association is an organization that companies can affiliate with; Patagonia Inc belongs to the FLA and on its website has a feature called The Footprint Chronicles. You can trace the footprint a product leaves on the environment – from the raw materials used to make it, to the manufacturing and distribution of it. You can also go to Greenpages.org to find clothing companies that are helping to grow a ‘green economy for people and the planet’.

When we become engaged consumers, we will choose companies whose values echo ours when we decide on what role we want shopping to play in our lives. We as Unitarian Universalists have the Seventh Principle to guide us when we are reflecting on our roles as consumers: the interdependent web of life, of which we are a part, is never more apparent when we look into where we wear. It helps us to see our shared humanity with those workers who sewed your jacket or colored this scarf.

As Kelsey says in the conclusion of his book, “When I walk into my closet, I think about the hundreds – if not thousands – of people around the world who had a hand in making my clothes. Jeans are no longer just jeans, shirts are no longer just shirts, shoes no longer just shoes, clothes are no longer just clothes. Each is an untold story.” (243)

May the stories our clothes tell us open our hearts and minds and may we be moved to do our part to create sustainable communities for ourselves and our children.

Gaye W. Ortiz

April 21 2013

Broken Hallelujahs: the Creative Character of Surrender

Broken Hallelujahs: the Creative Character of Surrender

Introduction

If you had peeked inside my bedroom any day after school when I was a young teenager you would have seen me playing one of these (hold up Beatles album)…and again after dinner and before bedtime. Music was such a big part of my life as I grew up. I was an only child in a troubled home, and to get away from it I retreated to my room to listen to music. It gave me solace and took me away into a different place. A place that even now, I can remember, because of how I felt when I heard the music playing. I knew more than the lyrics and every chord - I was a Beatlemaniac who knew that George Harrison was into Indian mysticism when he recorded “Within You, Without You”  (although I didn’t have the slightest idea what that mysticism was). I knew that Paul McCartney had written “Martha My Dear” and had named it after his old English sheepdog. And when “Hey Jude” was first played on a radio station – almost certainly WBBQ - in Augusta, I made sure to be in my room to hear it, with the stereo speakers pressed up against my ears as tight as I could hold them.

I also loved Motown, and my cousin Donna and I used to mime and dance to all the Supremes songs, and dance the watusi, the jerk, the mashed potato. At the same time we would sing gospel music in the local Pentecostal and holiness churches as a trio – she sang soprano, I harmonized, and my cousin Harold tearing up the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis – who after all was the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s cousin! The sacred and profane never clashed for me, and so today I want to talk about how for many musicians ‘feel the spirit’ as they compose and perform their music. 

The title ‘Broken Hallelujahs’ is taken from the book published in 2011 by Christian Scharen, subtitled ‘Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God’. I feel honored to follow the theme of music that Leon Spencer introduced to us two weeks ago. Over the past year and a half of serving this congregation, there may have been sermons that I felt were necessary to preach; some that I thought the congregation may have felt they wanted to hear; but today this is one sermon that I am excited to preach because I want to challenge all of us to listen with our hearts and not our minds!

History of popular music

In 1958,a Catholic youth center newsletter urged kids to ‘smash the records you possess which present a pagan culture and a pagan way of life.’ (Detweiler,126) More and more white teenagers of that time were listening to black music, blues that came from musicians like John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters.

There were plenty of white Christian people in our part of the world who thought that rock and roll was the music of the devil, and there were other people in the music business who made it more palatable when it was sung by white artists like Elvis Presley!

But music is at it most powerful when it has no racial boundaries; According to Brian Ward in his book Just my Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (U of California 1998), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a gathering of black DJs in Atlanta in 1967, saying : "In a real sense you have paved the way for social and political change by creating a powerful, cultural bridge between black and white.... You introduced youth to that music and created a language of soul and promoted the dances which now sweep across race, class and nation."

Artists as spiritual seekers

Music contains a multitude of spiritual expressions – many artists inhabiting the black music genres, for instance, grew up singing in gospel choirs. While their church attendance may no longer be as steady, their spiritual roots go deep. (Detweiler 130)

The folk music of Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary had lyrics that cried out for justice and peace, and their music was performed passionately.

That passion carried over into the message of love expressed in the Flower Power music of the later 60s, and is still going strong in the music of the decades since then. Many musicians find their music is a powerful way to express their beliefs, convictions and search for meaning.

You may know who the Beastie Boys are, and you may not appreciate their music, so it may surprise you to know that Adam Yauch organized the Tibetan Freedom Concerts to raise support and awareness of the plight of Tibetan Buddhists. As a practicing Buddhist he manages to slip dharmic slogans into Beastie Boy songs about parties, rebellion, and not growing up: “every thought in the mind is a planted seed” (Detweiler). Adam Yauch died from cancer last May at the age of 47.

My husband Wil is a big fan of Bruce Springsteen, who has written songs with the themes of alienation, unemployment and despair found in the white working-class urban experience. His song ‘Born in the USA’ was not the big celebratory anthem that Ronald Reagan tried to say it was – in 1984 it was actually a song that told the story of a Vietnam vet who can’t find the American dream in his hometown. 

What makes Bruce so revered as a singer-songwriter is that he has never forgotten his roots in New Jersey, and that was brought home to him in the fall of 2001. Springsteen told Rolling Stone magazine that he hadn't thought about the possibility of doing an album about the tragedy of 9/11 until a car stopped next to him a few days after the attacks, and the driver (a fan, someone he didn't know) said simply, "We need you now."  

He produced ‘The Rising’ by the next August, and the album’s songs give a patchwork impression of how the attacks affected a variety of people. The title of one song, ‘Empty Sky’, “taps the many emotions triggered by the view of the Manhattan skyline after the Twin Towers fell. Its lyrics describe those who lost relatives and friends on 9/11.” 

I woke up this morning
I could barely breathe


Just an empty impression
In the bed where you used to be


I want a kiss from your lips
I want an eye for an eye


I woke up this morning to the empty sky 

http://classicrock.about.com/od/artistsnz/tp/The-Rising.htm 

Many music artists today are spiritual seekers. Sometimes the music that resonates most with us has conflicted song lyrics that mirror competing beliefs within a musician (Detweiler, 130).

Leonard Cohen is a good example of this; he’s a deep thinker who writes and sings about the human condition of brokenness – he does it so well because he’s been there and can still find value in the experience. One of his lyrics (“Anthem”) says, “there are cracks in everything – that’s how the light gets in”.

Cohen felt pulled much of his life by the “ritual and roots of Judaism” (Scharen). His early success faded and personal relationships failed, and by the end of the 1970s Cohen was suffering from depression when he “re-engaged” with his Jewish roots. He said that he felt silenced in all areas of his life, and the only thing that helped was to write down his prayers “to apply to the source of mercy”. So he wrote a book called Book of Mercy, which contained one prayer for each of his 50 years of life.

His next project was an album called Various Positions. He tells a story about what he was like while working out the lyrics for ‘Hallelujah’; he describes himself as being in his underwear, crawling along the carpet in a shabby hotel room, unable to get a verse just right.

Once he had gone through the agony and triumph of creating his songs, he realized that the fading of his initial popularity actually gave him freedom from the ego’s expectation – but he had a hard time getting the record label to trust his commercial viability. The president of Columbia Records said, “Look Leonard, we know you’re great but we just don’t know if you’re any good” (Scharen). The album was released in the US 6 years after its European release, and has some of his best-known songs including ‘Hallelujah’, which is Hebrew for Praise God. Two cover versions of the song were Top 10 hits, one by a contestant on ‘American Idol’.

The song draws upon a variety of Biblical images and figures – King David, Samson, the Creator, the Book of Exodus. Its message is that ‘we’re able to raise a broken Hallelujah – Praise God! - because of what God has done for us’ and not what we can do ourselves, because there is no perfection in this world. We all have broken hearts and broken lives, but that is no excuse for anyone; on the contrary, we need to stand up and say Hallelujah under those circumstances (Scharen). 

Another Cohen song, ‘If It Be Your Will’, captures this mood and brokenness becomes part of a prayer: “If it be your will that I speak no more, and my voice be still as it was before, I will speak no more, I shall abide until I am spoken for, if it be your will.” (Scharen) The lyrics borrow from the Kol Nidre, which is a prayer recited for the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur: “May it therefore be your will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, to forgive us all our sins, to pardon all our iniquities, to grant us atonement for all our transgressions.” (Scharen) For the documentary about Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man, the narrative flows through a concert featuring not only Cohen but musicians like Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave and U2. But a little-known transgender artist named Antony stole the show with his rendition of ‘If It Be Your Will’. [VIDEO]

The music of the Icelandic group Sigur Rós has been called ‘postrock’ and described as ‘the soundtrack of heaven or music from God’. Yet the group members are not professing religious believers; but they use historically religious forms, such as a sung mass performed in a church with Latin words, in songs like ‘Credo’. And in a 2005 interview, they said, “We are not trying to be spiritual or anything. We are making music that moves people. Trying, you know, we want to do that. You know, that people get something out of it. Maybe that is spiritual!”(Scharen) They also invented their own language, which they call ‘Hopelandic’ to convey ideas about life…listeners cannot understand but they interpret beginning with feeling, not thinking. The song you heard if you came in during the prelude is called Ára Bátur (‘Row Boat’), and some of the lyrics are:

“You tried everything. Yes, a thousand times, experienced enough, been through enough, but you it was who let everything into my heart, and you it was who once again, awoke my spirit.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcvFWFOsIE )

The music of Sigur Rós can create a mood that is ethereal, angelic. And it has been used in movies such as 127 Hours and Vanilla Sky. There is nothing else like it; it has a fragile majesty (to use a phrase Jonsi from Sigur Rós used for the music of Washington Phillps). It soars and if we surrender to it we can be lifted up, we can soar with it. Their fans on Facebook have one site called ‘Sigur Ros is my religion’ with the rationale “because everyone knows that listening to any album of theirs is, in fact, a spiritual experience.” (Scharen) 

Like the language of Hopelandic invented by Sigur Rós, many artists try new things. The imaginative and adventurous nature of exploration, of playing the notes in a way that has never been done before, makes music new. In that way, creativity emerges, because with every new piece, a musician can return to being a beginner. Leonard Cohen once said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often!” “To let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure, that's the key to creativity” (Jonah Lehrer). Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a veteran performer, says that he strives for that “state of the beginner”: "One needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello," Mr. Ma says. "Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure." (Lehrer)

And when we hear music that pleases us, we want to join in, beat the rhythm, we have an instinctive, emotional reaction to it. It “sets off our imagination and takes us to a different place” – we surrender to it.

C.S. Lewis once said that “we must in some form surrender to a work of art if we are to understand whether it’s any good” (Detweiler) What did he mean by that? I think surrender is when we lay aside all our preconceptions and judgments. We sometimes use the criterion of taste, is it to our taste, is it in good or bad taste. We can be what Christian Scharen calls ‘cultural Puritans’ who have constricted imaginations. Scharen says that God gets terribly small when we use a checklist as a way to make judgments instead of seeking to understand another. When we surrender we let the artist’s point of view take center stage. We surrender what limits us, whether it be our age, class, gender, our likes or prejudices – surrendering makes us vulnerable, in just the way as we give over our hearts to those we love.

And so I come to the last and maybe most challenging example of music and the creative character of surrender: the song ‘Jesus Walks’ by Kanye West. The music video shows us people who are swept up into drug deals, poverty, violence, incarceration – all issues of race and class that plague this country.

Kanye West claims that Jesus walks with all these people. That is the heart of the Gospel, the good news that Jesus preached and lived. [VIDEO]

The sample music behind Kanye’s rap is “Walk with me” from the ARC Gospel Choir, whose members are recovering from addictions. Kanye has the presence of mind to criticize the media, because the powers that be of the music industry welcome songs about guns and sex, but if he sings about God they won’t play his music. “Dangerous topics fraught with tensions and challenges…are where people live” (Scharen)…people who have lost all hope but still want God to show them the way, are all around us. Kanye West was able to step inside their shoes and express their brokenness: this ability to sing for the outcasts of our society could be what the Apostle Paul was writing about in his Letter to the Romans (8:26): “God does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.” (Scharen)

The author Christian Scharen looks to the Second Book of Corinthians in valuing the spiritual aspect of what these songs are telling us: “God has opened our ears so that we can listen to what God is listening to – bending an ear to the cries of love and loss, sorrow and suffering, and moving in the midst of them to witness and join God’s work of new creation” (2 Cor 5).

This coming week is one when surrender is very much on the minds of Christians. Today is Palm Sunday, marking the triumphant entry of Jesus and his followers into Jerusalem. By the end of Holy Week Good Friday recalls the surrender of Jesus to his fate and the bewilderment of his followers when he is crucified. By this time next Sunday the joy of Easter morning marks a new beginning, new possibilities. Out of the depth of surrender and death comes hope and new life…an age-old motif.

But no matter what your religious perspective, music can help in the work of new creation, when we truly listen and surrender to its fragile majesty, when we create a space for our hearts to respond in love to the world and to the possibilities all around us. Music still makes me feel like that young teenage girl in her room, finding solace in a song that was written not for me, but for and by someone who found powerful expression in surrendering to the creative process. Some of the music we’ve explored today is transcendent in its beauty, some of it is eye-opening and challenging. All of it requires us to surrender to our feelings, something not usually asked of us in our UU worship services! But if we don’t acknowledge the emotion behind the music, how can we possibly hope to understand the “contemporary spiritual search for meaning and purpose” (Scharen)?

May it be so, Blessed Be, AMEN.

Sources:

The Beatles, “Here Comes the Sun” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6tV11acSRk

Cohen, Leonard. “Poem 50” from Book of Mercy (1984).

Detweiler, Craig  and Taylor, Barry.  A Matrix of Meanings (2003).

Lehrer, Jonah. “How To Be Creative.” The Saturday Essay. The Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203370604577265632205015846.html

Scharen, Christian. Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God (2011).

Sigur Rós. “Ára Bátur” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcvFWFOsIE

Springsteen, Bruce. “The Rising” lyrics, http://classicrock.about.com/od/artistsnz/tp/The-Rising.htm 

Ward, Brian. Just my Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (1998).

West, Kanye. “Jesus Walks” •http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g

Our Welcoming Congregation Journey

Our Welcoming Congregation Journey

February 17 2013

I. Looking back…

 “There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.” -Hindu proverb

What were we like, our previous selves, when we began this journey to become a Welcoming Congregation just one year ago?

I began my sermon, with the title ‘Standing on the Side of Love,’ last February by saying that it had been a good week for marriage equality because of judicial rulings in federal court, and legislation passed in the Washington State legislature. I can say that this year we have even more to be excited about in terms of marriage equality and in the number of states that now allow it, in the steps that have been taken nationally to extend rights of partners in same-sex marriages, and in the climate shift toward equality from the military to the Boy Scouts…we hope!

And I also quoted Linda Stout, Executive Director of a social advocacy group called Spirit in Action:

 This is a time for boldness –not giving up. It is a time of great courage – not letting our fears stop us. If we just work on small changes, though they are fulfilling and valuable, we will not make long term, big changes in the world. We have to bring all the puzzle pieces together – small changes, individual work and big ideas – in order to create a different world. (SSL Campaign literature)

Ten workshops and services later, I can say that as far as this church is concerned, we have put our best efforts into the Welcoming Congregation program as we try to create a different world. And not all of the members of the WC committee are here today – Linda Warren and Julie Evonna are at the Southern UU Leadership Experience this week – but I’d like to extend to the other members our gratitude for giving their time and talent to this year’s work: Naomi, Jennifer, Sandra, Lynne.

During this service the committee members and Principle Singers are going to remind us of some of the music we enjoyed in some of the services of this past year, and first we will have Uncommon Love.

What did we find to talk about at those 10 workshops and services?

We began by examining our expectations about this program, and we invited DeLeon Peacock and Mary Freeman from the UU Fellowship of Coastal Georgia to reassure us about starting it! Their congregation had just been through it and the week after Mary and DeLeon were here, it was designated a WC by the UUA, which of course is our goal as well.

We showed films, such as the documentaries The Celluloid Closet and For the Bible Tells Me So. We had speakers, such as Sandy Hochel, who spoke about the Radical Right, and Maryka from Interweave.

I myself learned a lot from the sermons that I preached, and one of them – How Homophobia Hurts Us All – was the basis for my sermon before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee in December, when I was granted preliminary fellowship as a UU minister.

We put a lot of information in our weekly announcements, resources that everyone could look up to answer question that perhaps they needed answers for but were unwilling to ask in public.

We also had – and continue to have - in this building a great resource for the community begin to offer monthly support meetings – PFLAG, which stands for Parents and friends of Lesbians and Gays. The Aiken chapter was begun here and has given support to families whose children are exploring their sexual identities or have come out. Thanks to Ann Willibrand, Vera DeVito, and Julie Evonna, we have successfully branched off from the initial CSRA PFLAG group and have made a difference already in the short time Aiken PFLAG has been in existence.

And as members of the Aiken UU Church, we have had conversations between ourselves, trying to find ways to acknowledge and challenge our biases, our assumptions, and our ignorance; and we have also had the benefit of tips for people of faith on how to communicate about homophobia.

And so, we have a sense of accomplishment and pride as we look over at the rainbow flag, on which all but today’s final one of our events and activities have been placed.

This rainbow is NOT an illusion, as the song “The Rainbow Connection” says…it is evidence of the commitment of this congregation to exploring the way we can be a more welcoming and diverse presence in the wider Aiken community.

II. and looking forward…

So, going forward, we recognize there is no magic wand we can wave over each person here today to make us all shining examples of complete and total love. However, the WC program has even for skeptics brought home the importance of standing on the side of love individually and in the makeup of this church and in UU congregations across this country. We have seen a lot of progress in the past twelve months…but we cannot slow down or decide that we have turned a page and this is not something we need to consider anymore.

Right after this service, the congregation will meet to vote to support our application to the UUA to become officially recognized as a WC. Once the WC committee finishes compiling all the paperwork and evidence of our program, then we will hope that this designation will come in the next few months.

Yesterday, members of this congregation marched in solidarity with the African-American community in the Black History Parade. Out on the bulletin board you can see the short biographies of two of our Unitarian Universalist civil rights martyrs, the Rev James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo. We have a history of building the beloved community together.

The struggle for equality for our LBGT sisters and brothers is being supported by those who worked for the civil rights movement in the true spirit of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

In my sermon last February I quoted Benjamin Jealous, NAACP President, who said,

“…let us move forward in unity and with the collective vision and determination to build the America that we dream for all of her children. An America where everyone can get a good job,

And where everyone can obtain a quality education.

An America where everyone has access to health care and communities with clean air and water.

An America in which opportunities are afforded to all.

And most importantly, an America in which no matter a person’s race, creed, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity— she or he can live in a country free of discrimination—where her or his basic human rights and dignity are respected.

…let us all recall the words of the late great Harvey Milk-who said “It takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no survey to remove repressions.”

(http://thetaskforceblog.org/2012/01/27/naacp-president-ben-jealous-opening-keynote-address-at-creating-change/ )

So we can speak out individually and collectively to win the struggle. When we live out our words, including the words of Unitarian Universalists through the centuries who have been standing on the side of love, we can build the Beloved Community. We can speak up with the knowledge that ours is a faith that backs us in our struggle for justice, equality and freedom.

May we be the ones that make it so, Blessed Be, Amen.

Gaye Ortiz 2/17/2013