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

Preach-In on Global Warming

Preach-In on Global Warming

Aiken Unitarian Universalist Church

February 10 2013

Are you ready to tell your children they were born a generation too late? That there is nothing you can do to fight the destruction of the earth’s climate?





This is the way Javier Sierra begins his article “Were Your Children Born a Generation Too Late?”…and I must admit, it is a startling thought. Only…it is something that has crossed my mind before, and I have even said aloud to my oldest granddaughter, “When you get older, maybe you and your sisters and your cousin should consider not having any children.” She was shocked and asked me why I would say such a thing. And I replied, “because the world is going to be in such bad shape, it would be unfair to subject your children to that.”

And I do believe that, and how can I keep quiet when my grandchildren - as parents - would be subjecting their children to living in a world where global warming has destroyed much of the ecosystem that we happily enjoy now?

Yet, how can I not be aware that I am asking them to forego reproducing, to make that kind of sacrifice? Having children is one of the most beautiful, fulfilling things we as humans can do. It is something I struggle with as I assess the century to come.

To recognize that children born ten or twenty years from now will as adults have a much harder life – and maybe a very much poorer quality of life – may lead some people to make exactly that choice.

And we do – in the West – have that choice, but many people in poorer countries, whose high child mortality rates and whose need for enough willing workers to contribute to a family’s basic living, may not be so lucky.

Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers (New York: Grove Press, 2005), says

“we are the generation fated to live in the most interesting of times, for we are now the weather makers, and the future of biodiversity and civilization hangs on our actions.” (P306)

What a heavy responsibility weighing on our shoulders! It may well be that we humans only have a few years left in which to turn things around, so that our planet will remain habitable for our grandchildren’s children.

Climate change is a pressing matter that is also an ethical, moral, and spiritual issue for each of us to consider today. Because today across this country, ministers are holding a Preach-in for Global Warming, sponsored by Interfaith Power and Light, an organization that provides environmental justice resources to congregations in 40 states. I first became acquainted with this group’s Georgia chapter when Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was released in 2007, and Interfaith Power and Light sponsored congregational film screenings and discussions. You may recall that Al Gore won a Nobel Peace prize for his work, although his book and subsequent film were criticized by the right-wing, and his statistics and claims of a global warming crisis were condemned.

Diverting the urgent need to act by attacking the messenger – the logical fallacy called ad hominem – has no doubt had an effect on America’s failure to create a coherent and effective environmental policy. And religious leaders – even Richard Cizik, of the National Association of Evangelicals – have been urging the government to act. This morning, I want to ask you to remain hopeful, even in the face of denial and inaction by those who have the power to turn around the crisis that awaits should we do nothing.

I. global warming facts

So, let me give you four basic facts as offered by the Environmental Defense Fund’s website:

1.   There is scientific consensus on the basic facts of global warming. The most respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that global warming is occurring, and that people are causing it.

2.   Scientists are certain that the Earth is warming, and has been for 100 years.

3.   Human activity is causing the Earth to get warmer. Only CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activities can explain the observed warming now taking place on Earth.

4.   The effects of warming can be seen today, through disappearing habitat, shrinking arctic sea ice, and extreme weather.

(www.edf.org/climate/global-warming-facts)

II. Storm Nemo

It’s ironic that many ministers in the northeast US who were planning a Preach-In like this one have had to cancel their services because of Storm Nemo this weekend! On Friday night a message went out from Interfaith Power and Light, that their prayers go out to all of those along the path of the storm, many of whom are still recovering from the effects of Superstorm Sandy; this morning we join our prayers to theirs. But it also pointed out that this is a teaching moment for us all:

“Nemo was a massive, possibly historic storm, or to use the Weather Channel’s language ‘epic.’ It dumped more three feet of snow in New England, underscoring the amplification effect of climate change. Forecasts warn of significant, widespread damage throughout the region, parts of which are still coping with the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.”  (http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html)

The email mentioned the “somewhat counter-intuitive nature of the public’s understanding of the relationship between extreme winter weather and global warming”, and asked that we be prepared to explain the links between this storm and global climate change.

So here goes:

“The past few years have been marked by unusually severe extreme weather characteristic of climate change. Global warming puts more energy into storms. Storm surge now rides on sea levels that have risen over the last century due to global warming. This amplifies flooding losses if and when a surge strikes. Storm surge now rides on sea levels that have risen over the last century due to global warming.

Nemo is part of the larger trend. In the last century, we have witnessed a 20 percent increase in the amount of precipitation falling in the heaviest rain and snow events, directly tied to climate disruption. The Northeast has been particularly vulnerable, experiencing a dramatic increase in one-day precipitation extremes during the October to March cold season.

Coastal flooding has also become more common as climate change drives sea levels higher. Off-shore water temperatures are higher than normal right now, adding to the potential for heavy precipitation by feeding Nemo with additional moisture.” (IPL email 2/8/2013)

And that ends the weather segment of the sermon!

III. WCC

A statement from a meeting in Doha of the World Council of Churches (www.oikoumene.org) two months ago starts with this exclamation: “The world cannot wait – climate change is happening!”

It’s worth reading a segment of this statement to get a sense of the urgency felt by this worldwide fellowship of churches, because it brings up another potentially life-threatening effect of climate change:

“As people of faith concerned for our sisters and brothers, we come to Doha extremely worried about food security as the severe shortages in crops face us with the prospect of horrific humanitarian crises that should be avoided. The present situation at world food markets, exemplified by sharp increases in wheat, soybean and corn prices compels leaders to act urgently to be sure that these outstanding high prices do not drive into an appalling scenario, harming tens of millions.”

The statement goes on to acknowledge that there is only a handful of nations who are large producers of staple food commodities – and this past year’s severe drought in two of them, the US and Russia, sent grain prices skyrocketing.

“Time has arrived,” the WCC says, “to promote more sustainable and climate resilient food production to urgently make more food available to sustain the human family especially in the most vulnerable societies, ill prepared to deal with food scarcity. Moreover, diversion of food stock for non-food purposes and financial speculation are unethical and immoral.”

We’ve seen how oil prices and the housing market have been manipulated for financial gain in the recent past – none of us would be surprised to see market speculation and other immoral tactics if food becomes another commodity of great value.

The WCC calls attention in this document to the ‘Principle of Intergenerational Equity’ that declares "the Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind."

(http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/justice-diakonia-and-responsibility-for-creation/climate-change-water/statement-to-cop18-un-climate-change-conference-doha.html?print=1_%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%22%20onfocus%3D%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%22blurLink%28this%29%3B%2Fprint%3D1_%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%22%20onfocus%3D%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%5C%22blurLink%28this%29%3B%2F)

Back to the idea that we hold the future for our children and their children, and “that our generation is probably the very last generation having it in our hands to still limit global warming to less than 2ºC while future generations won’t have this freedom of choice but will have to adapt to climate patterns we have left to them.”

“The World Council of Churches believes that the whole Earth community deserves to benefit from the bounties of creation. Faith communities are addressing climate change because it is a spiritual and ethical issue of justice, equity, solidarity, sufficiency and sustainability.”

V. Rebecca Parker – loving our neighbor

And not only that…it’s an issue of love. In this month associated with love, and a month when we in the Aiken UU church stand on the side of love, we emphasize the love we have for our congregation and our wider community through our acts of justice and equality – Grace Kitchen, the Black History Parade, the Welcoming Congregation service.

Rebecca Parker, in her book Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now (Skinner House, 2006), says that what we are doing here in this church is what the world needs to do – have a ”spiritual and practical revolution that embodies love for neighbor and the world through sustaining structures of care and responsibility” (145).

How can we afford to wait until we face an emergency in dealing with climate change, instead of beginning now to prevent the worst of it? As ‘weather makers,’ to use the words of Tim Flannery, we can turn to each other for the solution. 

The Rev. Roger Bertschausen urges us to consider a ‘spiritual approach to global warming’ and says that maybe “part of the answer to the profound challenge of global warming is community. Maybe we need to figure out how in this world crowded with six billion people we can truly connect with other people. Maybe we need to turn to the people around us and get to know them. Maybe we need to realize we’re in this together.

And not just the people right around us we’ve turned to, but even the people way on the other side of the world. Experiencing connectedness with those around us is only significant if we also understand that the connectedness goes far beyond our small circle. Maybe with a deeper sense of community we’ll realize that we have enough.

We don’t need more cars, more electronic gadgets, more this, more that to be happy—especially when we realize that all too often our “more” is the direct result of other people’s “less.” (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:TXwwxIX7xCwJ:www.fvuuf.org/index2.php?option%3Dcom_docman%26task%3Ddoc_view%26gid%3D26%26Itemid%3D208+global+warming+and+spirituality&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESh5dRnXHYuMsDG8fAiXk393M4K_XqeNqBxINfWMkhWl_JR_Cj3zA27x6MQ0UMKoUitwQlKVMzPxjgkMy-V9D1V3aFf43Ci-8_z8KhRRYkAg9aauoxZr6GuVaNPNN1dTfrzH37mU&sig=AHIEtbTXeE-5yhcPz2TM9Xn412P8zz4bJw )

Rebecca Parker reminds us that reverence is a form of love, and describes it as “a response to life that falls on its knees before the rising sun and bows down before the mountains” (146).

We can start to be reverent by living our first and seventh principles, to affirm and promote the worth and dignity of each person, and the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part. We see those principles written around us in this sanctuary, in our hymnals… and it is too easy to say ‘of course we believe those things’. Living them is a much harder thing to do!

We can begin by lessening our carbon footprints in the ways our children were looking at doing in the Time for All Ages. We can begin by telling the leaders of this city, this state, this country, that we want more, faster action to save our planet.

VI. Spiritual approach to GW

A spiritual approach to global warming, then, takes on urgency, but also meaning, as an act of reverence. This sanctuary for us is one place where we contemplate the reverence that we pay to those things, beliefs, and values we hold dear. But it’s out there where we – with our children and grandchildren - need to make a difference, because, as Mark Belletini’s “Communion Circle” meditation reading makes clear, “everything, for good or ill, is part of the shared whole.”

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

Gaye Ortiz

2/10/2013