November 5, 1966
Plainfield
The Expanding Consciousness
Reading from the Playboy interview with Dr. Timothy Leary
For almost everyone, the LSD experience is a confrontation with new forms of wisdom and energy that dwarf and humiliate man's mind. This experience of awe and revelation is often described as religious. I consider my work basically religious, because it has as its goal the systematic expansion of consciousness and the discovery of energies within, which men call "divine." From the psychedelic point of view, almost all religions are attempts – sometimes limited temporarily or nationally – to discover the inner potential. Well, LSD is Western yoga. The aim of all Eastern religion, like the aim of LSD is basically to get high; that is, to expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within."
Reading from William James, Varieties of Religious Experience as found in THE PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES, p. 231
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet, the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal....
What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state I know not. But the overbelief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.
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There is an astonishing volume of discussion and speculation about the mind-expanding drugs – L.S.D., Psilocybin, peyote and other compounds. Furthermore, experimental services of a new religion founded by an L.S.D. pioneer, Dr. Timothy Leary, have piqued much curiosity and attracted followers.
In attempting to understand the value, reality, and morality of the drug-expanded mind, it is necessary to place LSD enthusiasm in the context of religious mysticism as well as the safety standards of the Food and Drug Administration. Therefore, consider religious mysticism before an attempt is made to evaluate the drug experience and Dr. Leary's religion. Then I would propose to you that the most healthy and productive mind-expanders may be consistently overlooked.
What is Mysticism?
By its nature, mysticism is not communicated by the usual method of conscious word and gesture. Mysticism is ineffable – that is, unspeakable in the sense it cannot be spoken. The prime conviction of the mystic is that there are many other levels of reality than our usual, conscious receptivity of experience through sight, sound, touch.
Mysticism is an immediate experience at a different level than the conscious, reasoning mind. The mystic believes he has experienced such superb and overwhelming real consciousness of God or Ultimate Reality, that no sense-bound explanation can possibly convey the beauty and power of that immediate experience.
Rufus Jones, the sensitive Quaker who died a few years ago, was considered the historian of mysticism. He concedes the difficulty of explaining mysticism to those who may have never known the experience:
"There always be in any audience, where one speaks of the mystic's way of life someone will rise ... and say appealingly, 'Will the speaker kindly tell us in two or three plain words what mysticism really is?' It is always possible to meet that demand by saying that religious mysticism is an immediate, intuitive knowledge of God or one may say it is consciousness of a Beyond or of transcendent Reality or of Divine Presence. One can pack that phrase into his mind and take it home to Aunt Jane or to Grandmother Ann but the phrase will mean much or little or nothing as it wakens or does not waken in consciousness memory of high tide moments when the Spirit flooded in and changed the old levels of life." (RUFUS JONES SPEAKS TO OUR TIME, p. 129)
Ralph Waldo Emerson's concept of the Oversoul was at core a mystical apprehension. The poet, Francis Thompson, seized both the immediate experience and the intellectual paradox of mysticism in the lines,
"O world invisible, I view Thee;
O world intangible, I touch Thee;
O world unknowable, I know Thee;
Inapprehensible, I clutch Thee."
Most mystics have practiced severe disciplines to achieve the immediate experience of marvelous realities beyond the usual conscious state. They have variously fasted, contemplated with an acute sense of concentration, tortured themselves, isolated themselves, gone without sleep and some have used drugs.
One additional insight has been a prime contribution of Dr. Abraham Maslow, expressed in his book, RELIGIOUS VALUES AND PEAK EXPERIENCES: The experience of mysticism is not limited to persons who hold a belief in a particular God or any god, necessarily. The immediate experience of glories and terrors at a level different than the conscious can be known by believer, agnostic, or atheist; furthermore neither time nor culture provide any exceptions to the availability of the experience to those who are attuned to it or are able to tune themselves to it.
LSD – What is it and Why is it News
It is in this context of the mystic experience, which is as ancient as man himself, that we should look at the phenomenon of the L.S.D. experience and Dr. Leary's new L.S.D. religion, the "League of Spiritual Discovery."
LSD is Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, accidentally discovered about twenty-three years ago by a Swiss chemist to have properties that produce alterations in consciousness. When a person takes LSD, expanding experiences of the mind occur beyond the usual state of consciousness. Sometimes the experience is joy, harmony, peace, and unity with the basic reality of all existence. Some persons experience terror, and an ultimate, isolated loneliness that can be shattering. The same limitations apply to the experience stimulated by psychedelic drugs as to an explanation of religious mysticism. Those, like I, who have never used LSD are incapable of any accurate reporting. As a physicist remarked, "Those who have taken a psychedelic drug realize it can't be talked about, and those who haven't naively assume that it can be talked about with the current vocabulary." (p. 15, Introduction, LSD, Solomon & Leary)
The LSD experience is news, nevertheless, under its various names. Hallucinogenic drugs, mind~expanding drugs, mind-manifesting drugs, psychedelic drugs are just a few of many labels being used. In just a few years, over 1000 articles have appeared about it. Dr. Leary asserts that not only have 20% of the young people of the nation used hallucinogenic drugs, but also he predicts that in less than five years from now, between 10 and 30 million persons will have used mind-expanding drugs.
Some artists, composers and creators in various other arts believe that use of LSD, marijuana, or other forms of mind-expanding drugs has increased their creativity, opening the way to new expressions of art, literature, and music. Furthermore, some observers report that among many young people, there is prevailing belief that not only are the drugs no more harmful than liquor or tobacco, but also that the use of "pot", LSD, etc., is the "thing to do." During a recent Senate hearing, "a young lady testified about smoking marijuana, 'Everybody I know uses it except my grandmother!"
What does LSD do? Research people report that awareness is altered by use of the mind-expanders, not only LSD, marijuana, peyote, but also varieties of certain common vegetable and flower seeds. Consciousness is changed. Our usual perspectives of sight in depth, hearting in certain audio ranges, the usual sense of touch are
altered into what is described as "an eerie novel landscape in which every thing seems possible and nothing remains fixed." (LSD)
Dr. Leary explains that every one of our 13 billion brain cells is hooked up to some 25,000 other cells and everything you know comes from a communication exchange at the nerve ending of your cells. At the conscious level, our ego selves and our cultural conditionings limit drastically the potential awarenesses of these uncountable cells and nerves combinations. With LSD, says Leary, "you become aware of processes you were never tuned in to before."
Dr. Leary's Religion
Dr. Leary takes his enthusiasm for the drug-expanded mind a step beyond other scientists who are engaged in research on LSD. Dr. Leary has founded a new religion, L.S.D., "League of Spiritual Discovery." (Some of his critics charge that he is proof that LSD will cause psychic deterioration rather than inaugurating human improvement.)
It should be noted that at the time of announcement, the founder was free on bail on two narcotics charges, one of which has since been dropped. But in the other case, Leary is appealing a Federal sentence of 30 years and $30,000 fine for possession of untaxed marijuana in Texas.
Although the announced program of the League for Spiritual Discovery does not presently provide for the use of LSD in group worship, "he would test in the courts the constitutional right of the members of the sect to use the drugs in their shrines at home." He is arguing for the right to use LSD sacramentally on the grounds that many religions nave used mind-expanding drugs to achieve mental states transcending normal consciousness. This is true, of course. Sects and cults have used such drugs in wide-spread and diverse places and times, as Winston LaBarre pointed out.
The League for Spiritual Discovery has a six-word motto, "turn on, tune in, and drop out." This creed has a sort-of theology which the founder explains, "Turn-on means to go beyond your secular, tribal mind to contact the many levels of divine energy which lie within your consciousness; tune-in means to express and to communicate your new revelations in visible acts of glorification, gratitude and beauty; drop-out means to detach yourself harmoniously, tenderly and gracefully from worldly commitments until your entire life is
dedicated to worship and strength."
Recently Dr. Leary has conducted several celebrations of his psychedelic religion wherein he attempts to recreate through sound, color, movement, something of what a person would experience under LSD. I tried to attend one of these celebrations a few days ago, but discovered that the services are not only sell-outs at $3.00 per person admission charge, but also that Dr. Leary had to move the scheduled service from a 1500 seat theatre to a 500 seat night club because of financial difficulties. This seems highly inconsistent financing to me, but that may just seem so to me because I apprehend only at the dull, conscious level of simple addition, subtraction and multiplication. However, I certainly hope to be able to attend one of the psychedelic celebrations, because if he is moving people to enthusiastic worship, we Unitarians and Universalists may have something to learn.
The Potential and Actual Dangers
The difficult question with which the courts and individuals must wrestle is whether or not the use of LSD, peyote and other chemical or vegetable mind-expanders is dangerous for human use. The question of unlimited freedom on the basis of religious liberty has long since been denied. The multiple marriage system of the Mormons in the last century was claimed by the followers to be a religious right, but the Courts forbade the practice as being against the public interest.
In a time when many may have the opportunity to "take a trip" with LSD, it is of major importance to point out that not only is the use of the mind-expanding drugs illegal except for research under rigidly controlled conditions, but also, all authorities in the field, including Dr. Leary, insist on the necessity of careful screening of all persons who might take the drug for experimental or therapeutic reasons.
There is some evidence to indicate that if a person has a latent psychosis, some terrible inner disturbance which is not manifested in conscious behavior, an LSD "trip" could place such a person in a psychotic state, perhaps for months. There is general agreement on the necessity of experimentation only under conditions which would tend to prevent such occurrence. Obviously then these drug-expanders are highly dangerous when taken for "kicks" in non-scientific situations.
Sociologist Daniel Bell (AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Autumn 66) makes an interesting historical analogy which may have some application: "The Greek idea of Ekstasis (in Latin, "Superstitio"), the leaving of one's body in the mystery rites or ecstasy, was regarded by the Romans as mental alienation and as socially reprehensible."
The Romans had a point. If the LSD trip takes one to the "not self," submerging individuality in an ocean of ultimate, but non-person reality, there is great danger, potentially, at least, of a failure of concern for other human beings. The question can be raised that the mind under the chemically-triggered influence may be escaping from reality rather than uniting with reality. Rufus Jones, the Quaker mystic to whom I referred, recognized this hazard and attempted to deal with it when he wrote, (Ibid, 139), "But the most striking effect of the sense of contact with God is the immensely heightened quality of personality that goes with the experience and the increased effectiveness of the person as an organ of spiritual service."
There is no present evidence that drug-induced mystic experience can uplift personality and sharpen effective service. In addition as the late Professor J.B. Pratt of Williams, one of the most informed scholars of the psychology of religious belief observed long before LSD was making news, "If we could induce some deeply religious mystic to drug himself... we would know if the drug-induced experience is the same as the religious experience induced by more natural disciplines." (ETERNAL VALUES IN RELIGION, p. 97).
Whether or not Leary's religion is a temporary aberration, as so many unusual and bizarre seats have been, or whether it may be a real approach to truth, beauty, and goodness of enduring significance remains to be demonstrated and tested. In the newest issue of the REGISTER LEADER (Nov. 66), Edwin A. Kartman, who intends to study for our ministry, describes his experience while under the influence of LSD. (The experiment was conducted under carefully controlled conditions as part of a legitimate research program.) One sentence in his description is certainly quotable, "To adopt a familiar trinity of Unitarian Universalism, I experienced great beauty, some love, little reliable truth."
We Do Not Use Our Unaided Consciousness Enough
Without taking one ounce of importance from the mystic experience, the unity with reality however achieved, I would like to conclude with the suggestion that quite apart from the levels of experience beyond regular consciousness, we fail to use our unaided consciousness up to its capacity. I like what Dr. S. I. Hayakawa, the pioneer in semantics said about LSD: "perhaps my reason for distrusting dependence on 'mind-expanding' drugs is that most people haven't learned to use the senses they possess. Why disorient your beautiful senses with drugs and poisons before you have half discovered what they can do for you?" (Christian Century, 7/13/66)
As developed in the UNESCO World History, (Vol. 1 p. 1056), expansion of consciousness has been the main theme of history. Nothing has greater significance than the development and exercise of combined powers than intellect and imagination, the two springs of power of human greatness.
To dissociate intellect from imagination is to throw our humanness away and choose to sink in a wild sea of fantasy. To disassociate imagination from intellect to to lose ourselves in an intellectual wasteland – abstract but colorless and sterile.
How do we combine intellect and imagination to achieve fuller use of our powers? We can discover what the senses can do. Years ago I worked on the assembly line of a furniture factory, sanding chairs as they moved by me. Continuous handling of the sandpaper blocks made the skin of my fingers so thin and sensitive that whenever I grasped an object, a whole network of sensitivity registered in my brain.
We do well to sandpaper our emotions to the end that we can identify with the emotions of others. Rejoice with their rejoicing; grieve with their grieving; understand their anguish with uneasy wishes and forbidden notions. After all when one's network is sensitive enough he knows that the morbid fancies and guilt-filled desires of others are much like his own.
In another way we may make fuller use of our conscious senses by recognizing that this experience we call religion can be more than a passing fancy or a trivial way to spend a Sunday hour. Should not religion if it deserves the name have a more total effect on all our patterns of living? How do I conduct myself in the world? Do I continually seek a higher level of adequacy attempting to match the unrelenting demand that the differential be reduced between What I Am and What I Should Be? Between what I ought to do and what I do? To encounter these alternations and wrestle with them, without either unhealthy guilt or fatuous vanity, is to make fuller use of the resources that consciously we possess.
Lastly, let there be a reminder of that which most of you know and which everyone should realize. The hot spark of Unitarianism/Universalism for those who discover it is not [an] intellectual conclusion about the worth of a religion of reason but rather the excitement of the liberation experience. I was a long time coming to this awareness because I was born in the faith and thus never felt the explosion of intellect and emotion when the free faith is discovered and chosen. It is also true whether one has "come-out" of orthodoxy or "come-out" of a churchless secularism that when one permits the experience of liberation to become too routine, too static, the hot spark of the liberation experience cools.
Currently I am aware that philosophers and theologians of all faiths are seeking new shapes for theology, a fresh stance for ritual and a better reason for religious institutions. Although it seems paradoxical, these searching thinkers are looking for theology, ritual, and justification in the secularized movements for a better humanity, particularly civil rights and peace, but not confined to these overarching issues. I am beginning to feel strongly that this search is pursued not only because such movements uphold the human values we profess, but also because shot through these efforts are the emotional sparks – the excitement of liberation experiences.
The great performers in the arts usually create excitement as well as demonstrating accomplished techniques – Picasso, Calder, Olivier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Casals, Koussevitsky. They create greatly by combining intellect (or skill) and imagination in a merger that represents high fulfillment of conscious living.
Perhaps for many, or all geniuses, mystic experience has been the deep pool for the springs of inspiration. There are unconquered worlds of the mind and its origins offering stirring adventures in a world that can become boring in spite of shiny technologies and abundant comforts. Perhaps one day we shall learn that the mind-expanding compounds are a great blessing for the human family; perhaps we shall discover the drugs to be abominable departures from what is true and good. These possibilities are open to painstaking research and the care-full treatment of human beings.
In the liberal churches, as well as others, conversations continue and procedures evolve which may have consequences of considerable change in organized religious life. In our day, much of the discussion rightfully concerns how our ethical imperatives shall be expressed and take reasonable, effective form. But we shall never do more than partially justify the religious nature of man and his religious society unless we also keep before us the kind of question the late Paul Tillich proposed several years ago:
"The question our century puts before us (is): Is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the Holy, the dimension which cuts through the subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not world but is the mystery of the Ground of Being."
Those who resign from this quest will sustain a great loss.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Dimensions of Depth in Unitarian Faith
October 16, 1966
Plainfield
Dimensions of Depth in Unitarian Faith
Because Unitarians hold that answers should be tentative, not dogmatic to the perennial important religious questions, there sometimes prevails the notion that our Unitarian Universalist faith is shallow, not profound, broad, but not deep. In any religion, whether authoritarian or free, shallow beliefs are reflections of individual perception rather than being accurately mirrored in group professions of faith. Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow or deep depending on the individual who holds it. Such range can be discovered across the entire spectrum of religious organizations anytime and everywhere.
In some faiths, theology is believed to be distinctly separated from philosophy, history, or social science. Some persons would still hold that theology is wisdom based on divine, supernatural revelation while all philosophies and sciences are wise words and methodical classifications limited to human knowledge, naturally achieved.
While we in the Unitarian Universalist societies are not limited by creedal statements, the belief would certainly prevail among us that wisdom and knowledge are human, acquired through the human interweaving of human knowledge, human reason, and human dialogue. Among us, this human emphasis would be just as true of theologies as with other scholarly fields. This attitude can be described as shallow only by those who assert pretentiously or piously that THEIR interpretation of religious experience is supernaturally revealed and divinely sanctioned. But shallow faith can be characteristic of any self-named believer.
In the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, Shakespeare's genial, gluttonous, conniving rogue John Falstaff says, "I myself sometimes, leaving the fear of God on the left hand and hiding my honor in my necessity am fain to shuffle (equivocate) hedge and lurch."
We live in times when there is equivocation and hedging doubt about the values and standards which should prevail both in our solitary moments of reflection and our outward expressions of belief and conduct in society. The modern poet, Theodore Lockhart has lines entitled, "for the preacher," expressing feelings many persons share:
"There is no ground beneath us.
There is nothing on which to stand.
All that is, is flux,
And in the middle flounders man,
Feverishly he beats the air –
The air, the air, the endless air;
Seeking inside him how to stand.
Cursing God; he does not exist!
Praying God: he must exist!
The moon stands watch over long
Deep night.
Out of charred black muck slips a lily’s shoot,
And the life winter hawked with savage gleam,
Foils the clutch and takes new root
And grass long dead comes a muted green."
Of course Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow. If one wants to ally himself with our faith, he need not be an intense pursuer of deep meaning. If one wishes a religious alliance that can be treated lightly without hypocritical commitment to a creed, he can do so in a Unitarian Universalist society. The individual is on his own. His liberal faith can be simply a rejection of orthodox beliefs,with the religion of an inquiring mind going no deeper than the surface of what religion is and what religion does. One may regret that such triviality occurs sometimes, but it does happen nevertheless.
As the poet indicated, when we dive below the surface, we may not find solid bottom; we almost surely will do some floundering. It is no trivial process whereby the long, dead grass of shallow or rejected faith takes on fresh green and new growth because roots have become abundant with life-giving resources.
Did you see the cartoon in the S.R., (9/17/66), where two unshaven characters are on the park bench and one says to the other, "I’m a rat-race dropout."
Not the least of reasons why life seems a rat-race is that the meaning of human experience becomes elusive; the reasons fade why we should keep laboring for high goals. Many are dropouts from the adventurous search for meaning, and life then seems a rat-race.
But in spite of a considerable amount of expressed bravado and confidence among the ranks of those who profess a more traditional faith, much shallow belief prevails there, too. The recent flap over a theological appraisal by Mr. John Lennon, one of the Beatles, illustrates this neatly. A few weeks ago, John Lennon remarked casually that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. There were cries of outrage from those who responded with instant indignation. But beyond the frequency with which the name of Jesus is invoked by Christian institutions and the undeniable statistic that the hundreds of millions of nominal Christians outnumber even Beatles fans, Jesus' popularity is not great if one is measuring the influence of his life and teachings on the unsolved problems of war, prejudice, poverty and impersonality. [scrawled note: After 1st service: do you know what an English atheist is? Someone who doesn’t believe in John Lennon.]
An English journalist writing about a run-down Christian Church reports that scrawled on the cement-block wall was the sentence, "We love John, Paul, George and Ringo.” Romain Rolland's evaluation, as written into the character of the young Jean Christophe is neither unfair nor uncharacteristic, "Jesus hardly occupied his thoughts at all. It was not that he did not love him: he loved him when he thought of him: but he never thought
of him."
Voluminous writing has been devoted to the "Death of God" theology, but many of the indignant rebuttals by the God-believers have failed to deal with an obvious reality of contemporary experience. As far as handling the difficult problems of life today between and in nations, there seems to be no productive help in either the existence of God or the death or non-existence of God. One's profession about this seems to be a matter important only to individual taste and personal comfort.
But it is of lesser importance to us whether or not most persons of traditional faiths maintain profound levels in their religious beliefs. It is of more importance to each of us here to seek dimensions of depth in our own Unitarian Universalist interpretation of what religion is and what religions should motivate us to do.
In these times of international peril and national tension, there is a persisting strain as the ancient and abiding human failings of anger, greed and misunderstanding are supplied with intolerable weapons for their indulgence. Within our 1100 or more religious societies and in any given single society, the range of beliefs is considerable, not only about the ideas of religion but also the theories of applying religion to life. Amid that diversity are there ways that one can come to terms with himself in deeper dimensions of religion.
Although there is no authoritarian creed, holy book, or divine man to pronounce the word of faith for us, there are guidelines even in an unstructured faith whereby we can measure the vertical as well as the horizontal. We can seek understanding; we can appraise; we can transcend.
We can understand:
If we but realized it more fully than we do, we would discover more depth by rejoicing in and using more the wealth of knowledge and ideas available to us through our appreciation of universality. Because we have given no doctrinal mortgage to any unchangeable doctrine in Christianity or any other particular faith, we are free to understand the knowledge of many disciplines, free to appreciate the testimonies of many faiths.
If we except the ever-changing dynamisms of science, our understanding will be increased the more rapidly because we are not limited by a theology which has prescribed the nature of our universe. The whole range of discovery in the physical and social sciences provide clues to the origin of the universe and the nature and destiny of man.
One illustration out of hundreds possible: There is renewed theorizing and research about the nature of the cosmology of the Universe of which we are a part. The three-story Universe believed in by those who wrote the Bible and formed the doctrines of Christianity has been discarded for centuries. Even though our instruments measure galaxies and see back into time, as light reaches us which originated billions of light years ago, "cosmology, the science of the Universe is in the state electricity was in when Franklin was flying his kite," according to Robert Cowen, a science editor. To over-simplify some of the newer theories of the astronomer Fred Hoyle, there is some probability that the Universe was never created but always renews itself by the internal forces of its being; that the Universe had no Creator but is always creating. To come to terms with such an hypothesis, even if only in our feelings, is to deepen the dimensions not only of mystery but of religious insight. Dr. John Bahcall, a cosmologist at California Institute of Technology comments, "there's much more in the Universe than in anybody's cosmology. There'll be a lot more in everybody's cosmology when we have a lot more facts than we have today."
We can seek to understand people by attempting to learn more about the forces that create individual and group behavior; learn more about the kind of effort which will heal rather than aggravate the more destructive feelings and behavior. We are burdened by no denominational dogmas about man's depravity; we are handicapped by no theological decrees which assert the superiority of any variety of human being; we are not tied to the pronouncements of any State. We are free to understand what social scientists are learning about human behavior. We have the power to receive such findings carelessly and trivially; or we can take such knowledge seriously as an important tool to help dig deeper in our understanding of the nature of man and man' s options for his own destiny.
One thing more: because we reject the notion that anyone's religion has THE TRUTH, we are free to understand the religious search and discovery of others whose faith tradition had different origins and unlike development.
Several years ago I clipped a news story of a disastrous volcanic eruption on the island of Bali, killing more than 150 islanders and burying some villages in lava. The account went on to tell how the Balinese people believed that the gods were angry "because the people failed to ask permission to hold a special festival in the famed Temple of Besakih. Superstitious, you may conclude, but not entirely different from the theology of Job's friends or any other Western theology which implicitly or explicitly holds that natural disasters are punishments for what is named "sin."
Our individual faith can be deepened if each comes to terms with this widespread notion that individuals are punished by natural disasters. One can reject such a theology – certainly I reject it – but one can attempt to come to terms with an underlying supposition even though expressed in superstitious terms: That is a feeling for the oneness and the interrelatedness of all that is in our experience, the nonhuman natural as well as the human. The superstition might just be an overclouded pointer to some concept that is both intellectually valid and rewarding in meaning.
We need to understand that while the Christmas season is soon upon us, that hallowed and expensive though the celebration will be in Christian lands, in India "there are six hundred million people who believe Xmas to be a fantasy." [That was a line from ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER.] We should be singularly able to understand that one’s religious dogma may be some one else's fantasy. But such awareness does not diminish the opportunity to understand more about the great feelings of celebration when the seasons swing on their quarterly pivots.
In Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, when Christian runs to seek eternal life, two neighbors seek to bring him back – one is Obstinate; the other Pliable.
Truth is a running stream, not a locked-in pool. When we fail to reconstruct the truth on the occasion of new discoveries of the mind, or in creating new combinations of accruing human experience, then we are captured by old Obstinate. We can deepen our faith by renewal of allegiance to the authority of truth, known or to be known.
The comparable peril is that we shall confuse an open mind with a vacant one. Then, as in Bunyan's allegory, Pliable robs us of conviction.
Therefore we must not rest with understanding, we must appraise that which is offered for our yeas or nays.
Our faith is deepened when we estimate the worth of the important options before us. Disaster is created by gullible mentalities as well as obstinate ones. The irrationality of a mob, the shallow minds which change direction with each breeze of different influence, no matter how palpably false, destroy dimensions of depth in one's religious faith. Emerson said, best, "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
We will deepen faith by measuring events and claims with an appraising mind – free minds, but tough minds; not only wide-ranging in gathering facts but also focusing on evaluations of truth and falsehood. As John Erskine commented so many years ago, we have an "obligation to be intelligent" because the world of human experience needs the continuing surgery of the inquiring mind steadily cutting away the soft decay which can accumulate when the right questions are not asked; when authentic issues are not appraised.
In recent years there has been an astonishing increase in communication between divisions of the Christian Church, the ecumenical movement it is called, or "dialogue." Obviously we are called upon for only limited participation because we do not share even the somewhat uncertain assumptions of faith which have brought together for conversations the large branches of Christianity. We can be sympathetic to the movement, learn from it. The principles of appraisal suggested by church historian, E.L. Allen are stimulating:
“The convinced Protestant (we would substitute Unitarian Universalist) coming to a better knowledge of Roman Catholicism or Greek orthodoxy finds himself taking four attitudes toward it.
a) He discovers in it the truth he already holds, so that this extreme unity is already present.
b) He finds in it that which he must reject as error. To this extent conflict must continue, but it can be qualified by charity.
c) He finds in it that which appeals to him as new truth, some idea or practice hitherto strange to him which convinces him as something he must learn and make his own.
d) He finds in it that which he can neither accept as truth nor dismiss as error. He realizes its spiritual value for others but it does not speak to his condition. He must respect it, but he cannot make it his own.”
In an age where our religion carries with it an obligation to defend intelligence against vague, confused positions, we will deepen our faith by reasonable, courageous appraisal. In a time where it seems increasingly difficult to maintain one's personhood because we are fair game for "persuasion" and manipulation, the dimensions of personal religion will be less shallow when we measure as well as listen.
A third dimension is needed. Not simply understanding, not alone appraisal, but transcendence is necessary.
The capacity to transcend is not some occult gift of faith. The capacity to transcend is the ability to get beyond self. The capacity to transcend is keeping faithful to splendid loyalties. This is a difficult dimension to maintain because loyalty to a cause beyond self is perhaps the hardest test of our ease-seeking, anxiety-resistant egos. The need for a goal beyond self may have been why Voltaire commented that if “God didn't exist we would have to invent him.” But no particular theistic position is required and none is necessarily dismissed. One must have respect for self, otherwise even worthwhile efforts produce only self-misery. One must have goals beyond self for if these do not call us to fine duties, then the self becomes a perishing Narcissus.
In his poem, "Re-appraisal," Stanton A. Coblentz may have captured the point:
"If from some ultimate observation post
We could review our lives on earth, and see
The selves we were, and what we strove to be,
And all the goals and gods we used to toast,
What, from that pinnacle, would sparkle most?
Riches, I think would seem a broken key
To a door that faded; pride a wind-stripped tree
And fame a mist along a midnight coast.
Only those blocks, I hold, by which we build –
One with a brush or spade, one with a pen,
One with a deed of love, one with a song,
One with a steeple – show a life fulfilled,
And from a peak beyond the paths of men
May shine like stars above the murky throng,"
In his book, THE SEARCH FOR PURPOSE, which is encouraging for the human venture, Arthur E. Morgan likened a person's life to an ocean vessel: “The direction in which the ship will travel is determined by the navigator, using the steering wheel and rudder. The actual motion of the vessel is determined by the power plant and its fuel. Without a power plant the the vessel would only drift; with a power plant, but without a rudder, it would only go in circles, or would zigzag with changing winds and currents."
Arthur Morgan’s metaphor its suggestive – if the capacity to understand is the vessel, and the capacity to appraise, the power plant, the capacity to transcend, to get beyond self is the rudder which enables one to follow the best course.
The deep dimensions of religion – life’s finer experiences, if you will, come to us when we are convinced that religion can be both intelligent and useful; both intellectually honest and ethically inspiring; both reasonable and calling forth our reverence as we seek to know, courageously to appraise and determined fix our course on goals beyond self.
Plainfield
Dimensions of Depth in Unitarian Faith
Because Unitarians hold that answers should be tentative, not dogmatic to the perennial important religious questions, there sometimes prevails the notion that our Unitarian Universalist faith is shallow, not profound, broad, but not deep. In any religion, whether authoritarian or free, shallow beliefs are reflections of individual perception rather than being accurately mirrored in group professions of faith. Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow or deep depending on the individual who holds it. Such range can be discovered across the entire spectrum of religious organizations anytime and everywhere.
In some faiths, theology is believed to be distinctly separated from philosophy, history, or social science. Some persons would still hold that theology is wisdom based on divine, supernatural revelation while all philosophies and sciences are wise words and methodical classifications limited to human knowledge, naturally achieved.
While we in the Unitarian Universalist societies are not limited by creedal statements, the belief would certainly prevail among us that wisdom and knowledge are human, acquired through the human interweaving of human knowledge, human reason, and human dialogue. Among us, this human emphasis would be just as true of theologies as with other scholarly fields. This attitude can be described as shallow only by those who assert pretentiously or piously that THEIR interpretation of religious experience is supernaturally revealed and divinely sanctioned. But shallow faith can be characteristic of any self-named believer.
In the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, Shakespeare's genial, gluttonous, conniving rogue John Falstaff says, "I myself sometimes, leaving the fear of God on the left hand and hiding my honor in my necessity am fain to shuffle (equivocate) hedge and lurch."
We live in times when there is equivocation and hedging doubt about the values and standards which should prevail both in our solitary moments of reflection and our outward expressions of belief and conduct in society. The modern poet, Theodore Lockhart has lines entitled, "for the preacher," expressing feelings many persons share:
"There is no ground beneath us.
There is nothing on which to stand.
All that is, is flux,
And in the middle flounders man,
Feverishly he beats the air –
The air, the air, the endless air;
Seeking inside him how to stand.
Cursing God; he does not exist!
Praying God: he must exist!
The moon stands watch over long
Deep night.
Out of charred black muck slips a lily’s shoot,
And the life winter hawked with savage gleam,
Foils the clutch and takes new root
And grass long dead comes a muted green."
Of course Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow. If one wants to ally himself with our faith, he need not be an intense pursuer of deep meaning. If one wishes a religious alliance that can be treated lightly without hypocritical commitment to a creed, he can do so in a Unitarian Universalist society. The individual is on his own. His liberal faith can be simply a rejection of orthodox beliefs,with the religion of an inquiring mind going no deeper than the surface of what religion is and what religion does. One may regret that such triviality occurs sometimes, but it does happen nevertheless.
As the poet indicated, when we dive below the surface, we may not find solid bottom; we almost surely will do some floundering. It is no trivial process whereby the long, dead grass of shallow or rejected faith takes on fresh green and new growth because roots have become abundant with life-giving resources.
Did you see the cartoon in the S.R., (9/17/66), where two unshaven characters are on the park bench and one says to the other, "I’m a rat-race dropout."
Not the least of reasons why life seems a rat-race is that the meaning of human experience becomes elusive; the reasons fade why we should keep laboring for high goals. Many are dropouts from the adventurous search for meaning, and life then seems a rat-race.
But in spite of a considerable amount of expressed bravado and confidence among the ranks of those who profess a more traditional faith, much shallow belief prevails there, too. The recent flap over a theological appraisal by Mr. John Lennon, one of the Beatles, illustrates this neatly. A few weeks ago, John Lennon remarked casually that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. There were cries of outrage from those who responded with instant indignation. But beyond the frequency with which the name of Jesus is invoked by Christian institutions and the undeniable statistic that the hundreds of millions of nominal Christians outnumber even Beatles fans, Jesus' popularity is not great if one is measuring the influence of his life and teachings on the unsolved problems of war, prejudice, poverty and impersonality. [scrawled note: After 1st service: do you know what an English atheist is? Someone who doesn’t believe in John Lennon.]
An English journalist writing about a run-down Christian Church reports that scrawled on the cement-block wall was the sentence, "We love John, Paul, George and Ringo.” Romain Rolland's evaluation, as written into the character of the young Jean Christophe is neither unfair nor uncharacteristic, "Jesus hardly occupied his thoughts at all. It was not that he did not love him: he loved him when he thought of him: but he never thought
of him."
Voluminous writing has been devoted to the "Death of God" theology, but many of the indignant rebuttals by the God-believers have failed to deal with an obvious reality of contemporary experience. As far as handling the difficult problems of life today between and in nations, there seems to be no productive help in either the existence of God or the death or non-existence of God. One's profession about this seems to be a matter important only to individual taste and personal comfort.
But it is of lesser importance to us whether or not most persons of traditional faiths maintain profound levels in their religious beliefs. It is of more importance to each of us here to seek dimensions of depth in our own Unitarian Universalist interpretation of what religion is and what religions should motivate us to do.
In these times of international peril and national tension, there is a persisting strain as the ancient and abiding human failings of anger, greed and misunderstanding are supplied with intolerable weapons for their indulgence. Within our 1100 or more religious societies and in any given single society, the range of beliefs is considerable, not only about the ideas of religion but also the theories of applying religion to life. Amid that diversity are there ways that one can come to terms with himself in deeper dimensions of religion.
Although there is no authoritarian creed, holy book, or divine man to pronounce the word of faith for us, there are guidelines even in an unstructured faith whereby we can measure the vertical as well as the horizontal. We can seek understanding; we can appraise; we can transcend.
We can understand:
If we but realized it more fully than we do, we would discover more depth by rejoicing in and using more the wealth of knowledge and ideas available to us through our appreciation of universality. Because we have given no doctrinal mortgage to any unchangeable doctrine in Christianity or any other particular faith, we are free to understand the knowledge of many disciplines, free to appreciate the testimonies of many faiths.
If we except the ever-changing dynamisms of science, our understanding will be increased the more rapidly because we are not limited by a theology which has prescribed the nature of our universe. The whole range of discovery in the physical and social sciences provide clues to the origin of the universe and the nature and destiny of man.
One illustration out of hundreds possible: There is renewed theorizing and research about the nature of the cosmology of the Universe of which we are a part. The three-story Universe believed in by those who wrote the Bible and formed the doctrines of Christianity has been discarded for centuries. Even though our instruments measure galaxies and see back into time, as light reaches us which originated billions of light years ago, "cosmology, the science of the Universe is in the state electricity was in when Franklin was flying his kite," according to Robert Cowen, a science editor. To over-simplify some of the newer theories of the astronomer Fred Hoyle, there is some probability that the Universe was never created but always renews itself by the internal forces of its being; that the Universe had no Creator but is always creating. To come to terms with such an hypothesis, even if only in our feelings, is to deepen the dimensions not only of mystery but of religious insight. Dr. John Bahcall, a cosmologist at California Institute of Technology comments, "there's much more in the Universe than in anybody's cosmology. There'll be a lot more in everybody's cosmology when we have a lot more facts than we have today."
We can seek to understand people by attempting to learn more about the forces that create individual and group behavior; learn more about the kind of effort which will heal rather than aggravate the more destructive feelings and behavior. We are burdened by no denominational dogmas about man's depravity; we are handicapped by no theological decrees which assert the superiority of any variety of human being; we are not tied to the pronouncements of any State. We are free to understand what social scientists are learning about human behavior. We have the power to receive such findings carelessly and trivially; or we can take such knowledge seriously as an important tool to help dig deeper in our understanding of the nature of man and man' s options for his own destiny.
One thing more: because we reject the notion that anyone's religion has THE TRUTH, we are free to understand the religious search and discovery of others whose faith tradition had different origins and unlike development.
Several years ago I clipped a news story of a disastrous volcanic eruption on the island of Bali, killing more than 150 islanders and burying some villages in lava. The account went on to tell how the Balinese people believed that the gods were angry "because the people failed to ask permission to hold a special festival in the famed Temple of Besakih. Superstitious, you may conclude, but not entirely different from the theology of Job's friends or any other Western theology which implicitly or explicitly holds that natural disasters are punishments for what is named "sin."
Our individual faith can be deepened if each comes to terms with this widespread notion that individuals are punished by natural disasters. One can reject such a theology – certainly I reject it – but one can attempt to come to terms with an underlying supposition even though expressed in superstitious terms: That is a feeling for the oneness and the interrelatedness of all that is in our experience, the nonhuman natural as well as the human. The superstition might just be an overclouded pointer to some concept that is both intellectually valid and rewarding in meaning.
We need to understand that while the Christmas season is soon upon us, that hallowed and expensive though the celebration will be in Christian lands, in India "there are six hundred million people who believe Xmas to be a fantasy." [That was a line from ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER.] We should be singularly able to understand that one’s religious dogma may be some one else's fantasy. But such awareness does not diminish the opportunity to understand more about the great feelings of celebration when the seasons swing on their quarterly pivots.
In Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, when Christian runs to seek eternal life, two neighbors seek to bring him back – one is Obstinate; the other Pliable.
Truth is a running stream, not a locked-in pool. When we fail to reconstruct the truth on the occasion of new discoveries of the mind, or in creating new combinations of accruing human experience, then we are captured by old Obstinate. We can deepen our faith by renewal of allegiance to the authority of truth, known or to be known.
The comparable peril is that we shall confuse an open mind with a vacant one. Then, as in Bunyan's allegory, Pliable robs us of conviction.
Therefore we must not rest with understanding, we must appraise that which is offered for our yeas or nays.
Our faith is deepened when we estimate the worth of the important options before us. Disaster is created by gullible mentalities as well as obstinate ones. The irrationality of a mob, the shallow minds which change direction with each breeze of different influence, no matter how palpably false, destroy dimensions of depth in one's religious faith. Emerson said, best, "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
We will deepen faith by measuring events and claims with an appraising mind – free minds, but tough minds; not only wide-ranging in gathering facts but also focusing on evaluations of truth and falsehood. As John Erskine commented so many years ago, we have an "obligation to be intelligent" because the world of human experience needs the continuing surgery of the inquiring mind steadily cutting away the soft decay which can accumulate when the right questions are not asked; when authentic issues are not appraised.
In recent years there has been an astonishing increase in communication between divisions of the Christian Church, the ecumenical movement it is called, or "dialogue." Obviously we are called upon for only limited participation because we do not share even the somewhat uncertain assumptions of faith which have brought together for conversations the large branches of Christianity. We can be sympathetic to the movement, learn from it. The principles of appraisal suggested by church historian, E.L. Allen are stimulating:
“The convinced Protestant (we would substitute Unitarian Universalist) coming to a better knowledge of Roman Catholicism or Greek orthodoxy finds himself taking four attitudes toward it.
a) He discovers in it the truth he already holds, so that this extreme unity is already present.
b) He finds in it that which he must reject as error. To this extent conflict must continue, but it can be qualified by charity.
c) He finds in it that which appeals to him as new truth, some idea or practice hitherto strange to him which convinces him as something he must learn and make his own.
d) He finds in it that which he can neither accept as truth nor dismiss as error. He realizes its spiritual value for others but it does not speak to his condition. He must respect it, but he cannot make it his own.”
In an age where our religion carries with it an obligation to defend intelligence against vague, confused positions, we will deepen our faith by reasonable, courageous appraisal. In a time where it seems increasingly difficult to maintain one's personhood because we are fair game for "persuasion" and manipulation, the dimensions of personal religion will be less shallow when we measure as well as listen.
A third dimension is needed. Not simply understanding, not alone appraisal, but transcendence is necessary.
The capacity to transcend is not some occult gift of faith. The capacity to transcend is the ability to get beyond self. The capacity to transcend is keeping faithful to splendid loyalties. This is a difficult dimension to maintain because loyalty to a cause beyond self is perhaps the hardest test of our ease-seeking, anxiety-resistant egos. The need for a goal beyond self may have been why Voltaire commented that if “God didn't exist we would have to invent him.” But no particular theistic position is required and none is necessarily dismissed. One must have respect for self, otherwise even worthwhile efforts produce only self-misery. One must have goals beyond self for if these do not call us to fine duties, then the self becomes a perishing Narcissus.
In his poem, "Re-appraisal," Stanton A. Coblentz may have captured the point:
"If from some ultimate observation post
We could review our lives on earth, and see
The selves we were, and what we strove to be,
And all the goals and gods we used to toast,
What, from that pinnacle, would sparkle most?
Riches, I think would seem a broken key
To a door that faded; pride a wind-stripped tree
And fame a mist along a midnight coast.
Only those blocks, I hold, by which we build –
One with a brush or spade, one with a pen,
One with a deed of love, one with a song,
One with a steeple – show a life fulfilled,
And from a peak beyond the paths of men
May shine like stars above the murky throng,"
In his book, THE SEARCH FOR PURPOSE, which is encouraging for the human venture, Arthur E. Morgan likened a person's life to an ocean vessel: “The direction in which the ship will travel is determined by the navigator, using the steering wheel and rudder. The actual motion of the vessel is determined by the power plant and its fuel. Without a power plant the the vessel would only drift; with a power plant, but without a rudder, it would only go in circles, or would zigzag with changing winds and currents."
Arthur Morgan’s metaphor its suggestive – if the capacity to understand is the vessel, and the capacity to appraise, the power plant, the capacity to transcend, to get beyond self is the rudder which enables one to follow the best course.
The deep dimensions of religion – life’s finer experiences, if you will, come to us when we are convinced that religion can be both intelligent and useful; both intellectually honest and ethically inspiring; both reasonable and calling forth our reverence as we seek to know, courageously to appraise and determined fix our course on goals beyond self.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
The Generation of Power
October 9, 1966
Plainfield
The Generation of Power
The slogan "Black Power" symbolizes a difficult test of one's knowledge and an authentic challenge to one's real, moral values. When we are honest with ourselves, it is a blunt reminder of the need to persist in the never-ending struggle to close the gap between what is and what should be. If one wishes to raise the spectre of fear, or heat to steaming the filthy brew of bigotry or to reduce support for civil rights legislation or enforcement of existing legislation, one has only to mention the name of Stokely Carmichael, or repeat the Watts incantation, "burn, baby, burn." Is White America becoming scared that "we shall overcome" is being replaced by "we shall overthrow?" Is a defeated generation which struggled patiently and peacefully being replaced by a generation which seeks power openly and forcefully?
It is passing strange to me, because in the past few months I have listened to comments surprising to me, that first I must testify to my belief that facing up squarely to this issue is a moral necessity; and that what is moral i[s] unavoidably religious. A question invites answer on a moral level when the issue involves one's sense of what is right and what is wrong. That the issue and answers may be controversial is all the more reason for being known for one's present convictions.
The statement of purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association reads in part, "to strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship...to affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man and the use of the democratic method in human relationships." I do not believe these principles because the U.U.A. has them as a purpose; rather I believe in these values and remain a Unitarian Universalist because the organization maintains these principles as foundation statements.
The implications of the search for truth, the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of every man and the democratic method seem quite clear to me. Freedom is fraudulent when persons continue to be deprived of equal opportunity; when there is neglect or failure to apply the Bill of Rights which was the constitutional form created to guarantee that a minority will not be deprived of rights by the majority. When such principles and practice do not prevail, then I have a moral obligation to add my influence, little though it may be, to the side that tries to bring about in reality what our national Pledge of Allegiance premises in theory, "one nation, indivisible, with freedom and justice for all."
All world religions hold high the Golden Rule, human brotherhood, "loving one’s neighbor as oneself" Jesus’ powerful parable told the story of the Good Samaritan who bound up the wounds of the traveler and took him to safe lodgings. This was loving one's neighbor as oneself
But social service is not enough; social justice is necessary. The authentic moving force in any religious movement is moral enterprise and its consequent obligation of commitment. Sometimes we forget that commitment to the idea of commitment is nonsense. One commits his time, energy and influence to issues involving needs recognized through one's sense of commitment. Love for one's neighbor requires equal distribution of justice; otherwise love must be either impossibly vague or sentimentally transient. Perhaps Jesus did not include that in his parables, but as I interpret the traditions of the gospels, Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem not because he came to heal the sick or bind up wounds, but because the Roman occupying powers and their collaborators feared Jesus would change the social order.
Consequently the question of "Black Power" involves the moral scales on which one weighs conscience and conviction. A prime question to be raised in appraising the storms and tensions of our day is, are too many people like Janus, the two-faced God of Roman antiquity? Are they looking one way at those who have never had equal opportunity and another way at those who would prevent, delay, deter the accomplishment of freedom and justice for all?
Consider that slogan, "crime in the streets" – words which supposedly symbolize the wrong effects of the civil rights movements. Editorials, political war whoops and so on, again and again associate "crime in the streets" with civil rights demonstrations, peaceful marches, non-violent action. In the Cicero troubles this summer, the civil rights marchers were law-abiding, had a permit to march, obeyed police regulations. It was the good, white people of Cicero who began throwing stones, initiating violence, exhibiting bigotry of the rankest sort. In 1951, when the good people of Cicero invaded the private dwelling of a neighbor, threw his goods and furnishings into the street and burned them, there was no wide-spread alarm, or "crime in the streets," although that was precisely what it was.
When political self-seekers and others talk about "crime in the streets," they never seem to be talking about the intimidation of minorities and violence visited upon minorities.
Were you not shocked and shamed by the newsreel clips coming out of Grenada, Miss? White segregationists, armed with ax handles, pipes and chains, attacked Negro children and their parents. A twelve-year-old boy, limping because his leg was broken had to run a gauntlet of savage white men, young hoodlums, and cursing white women. He finally escaped, bleeding and with clothes torn. Not only were children beaten, but the white mob assaulted newsmen and photographers. The Grenada police were so derelict in their duty that State Troopers finally arrived to escort children to school. But not before 30 to 50 Negroes had been beaten.
But when people worry about "crime in the streets," they never seem to be concerned about the crimes committed by Whites in Grenada, Miss., but only with ghetto violence in Harlem, Rochester, Watts, San Francisco.
Stokely Carmichael created a furor with his call to Black Power on the 1966 Mississippi March. People tremble, and say, "no more civil rights legislation." But Stokely Carmichael received a respond because White Power had shotgunned James Meredith who was on a lawful, peaceful journey. How much concern was there for that crime in the streets?
Is it not true that too many persons look one way at peaceful civil rights demonstrators who march with a permit – and by some prejudiced reflex consider this a danger and a cause of crime in the streets; and look another way at assassins and child-beaters and bomb throwers, as though such actions were somehow excusable because Americans of a minority group are alleged to be "moving too fast" when they struggle peacefully for freedom and justice for all?
A news dispatch out of Washington this week reported that the House Un-American Committee was going to investigate civil rights movements because Chairman Willis of La. and Rep. Tuck of Virginia are fearful that Communists have infiltrated civil rights movements.
Curious isn’t it, that the House Un-American Committee sees nothing un-American about the wretched activities of violent segregationists in Grenada, shotgun assassins shooting at James Meredith, bombings in Alabama, or the fifty or more murders of Civil rights workers and sympathizers for which no one has been convicted?
A double standard of judgment is applied by too many persons, who find such a double standard comforting to their latent or conscious prejudice, or who use such double standards as an excuse to escape involvement in the terrible struggle of our time.
It is sheer hypocrisy to pay lip service to the worth and dignity of every human being while being willing, even eager, to maintain two ways of judging persons and their acts. There will be those who will believe that because I have said this, that I am willing to tolerate riots and let violence, looting, burning in ghetto areas go unpunished. Not at all. I’m saying that all accused law-breakers should receive equal treatment. If the people of Grenada, Miss. who ran amok in their disgusting attacks on children were treated as San Francisco rioters and Harlem Rioters and Rochester rioters, the Miss. jails would have been crowded with white prisoners in September.
A filmclip on the TV news showed five men holding down a rioter in San Francisco. Perhaps five were needed to subdue the rioter, but one officer was repeatedly kicking the prisoner hard and brutally. I know of no white rioter in Grenada or Cicero receiving such treatment. Nobody should, of any color.
Consider too the incident that touched off the San Francisco rioting. A police officer saw a boy running away from an automobile. When the boy failed to stop on the officer's command, the officer shot the boy in the back, fatally. Now if you can, imagine a change only in the physical environment and color: an all-white suburb, a white boy running away from an automobile, the command to stop, the shot and sudden death. The agitation might have taken a different expression, but there would have been furious indignation in the suburb and consternation and investigation in the high places of government. One must bear in mind too that the car was not reported stolen until hours after the shooting.
Any student of the times could add many additional chapters and verse to point out that we must have a law-abiding social order, of course; but the distinctions must be clearly maintained between civil liberties and unlawful offenses; and the processes of apprehensions, arrests, and trials must be equally applied to the members of both majority and minority groups.
This I believe – if all citizens are willing to measure the behavior of all other citizens by one set of rules, then this scare slogan of "Black Power", other than what is represented by a tiny segment, resolves itself into definitions, attitudes, and actions which should be encouraged with thorough understanding, not rejected with irrational panic.
I would ask you to seek out the varying meanings and intensity levels intended by different persons when they use the words, "Black Power." We owe it to ourselves and our fellow humans to acquire as much knowledge as may be available, because (as Winston LaBarre pointed out in THE HUMAN ANIMAL, p. 259), "... learning is a feedback mechanism through which experience communicates cues for the correction of an organisms’ future action."
Malcolm Boyd, the Episcopal clergyman who is so responsive to the real essence of issues, said it well, (“RENEWAL”, August 66, p. 9),
"It seems to me that the cry for black power contains as many ambiguities within it, as, say, reciting the Nicene Creed, singing the Star Spangled Banner or uttering the words, ‘I love you.’ Black power, when it means black votes and black dollars to redress calculated and long-term injustice, is an historical necessity and a moral right. When, on the other hand, it means an inverse form of racism and an expression of hatred, it is a perpetuation of cancerous self-destruction and a moral wrong.”
Or take this statement: "We are encouraging the development of black consciousness, a pride in black history, culture, institutions, as other ethnic groups have developed cultural awareness and pride....
"Psychologically the Negro has been in a box that he could not get out of, and what he wants to do now is to do what everybody else in the world has done. He wants to build something of his own ... that is not anti-white. When you build your own house, it doesn't mean you tear down the house across the street. It just means that you are building your own house.” Some persons may be surprised that those reasonable words interpreting "Black Power" were spoken by Stokely Carmichael, (quoted by Homer Jack, "Register-Leader," Oct. 66, p. 8)
Or take another example, the words of another man usually thought to be the firebrand type of agitator, Floyd McKissick, exec. direc. of CORE:
"One, we’ve stated that black people must decide this for themselves; they must have the self-determination to determine the direction and pace at which they will become total citizens in this society. And in doing so six basic ingredients are needed: One, political power; two, economic power; three, an improved self-image of the black man himself. As you will know, that's not in the history books, what we've done, and the contributions that we've made; four, the development of young, militant leadership; five, the enforcement of Federal laws, the abolishment of police brutality; and six, the development of the black consumer bloc. This is basically what we describe as black power.” (quoted N.Y.Times, 8/22/66)
Of course, bitter, even threatening things are said by persons who with cause have lost heart in the hope that municipal, state or federal governments will enforce civil rights legislation adequately and equally. Hard things are said by those who have lost hope that the privileged will voluntarily desegregate and end discrimination. The record is that unless there is painstaking vigilance by interested and involved citizens and unless persistent protest is maintained, the patterns of discrimination and segregation will not be seriously altered even when civil rights legislation is on the books. So the frustration of the disenfranchised can reach levels of fury and disgust. From those filled with indignation – righteous indignation in most instances – such cries as “move over or we'll move on over you,” are going to be heard. Those of us who were placed in the majority color by the lottery of birth should give attention to certain recognitions. These are recognitions which provides no concessions to unlawful or illegal behavior but rather comprise admission that the changes sought for by the dedicated doers for civil rights are both legally right and morally correct.
We all know, or should know, that political gains are achieved in the political arena where needed legislation and authentic enforcement receive the strongest leverage from voters who vote, lobbies that lobby, leaders who lead.
In a discussion of the meaning and implications of "Black Power" among college students who had been activists in the civil rights movement, there was a variety of expression. A Hawaiian student of Japanese ancestry said succinctly, "Face it. The Big White Father bit is over." He may have meant that racial minorities are no longer going to rely upon the paternal favors of the White majority, who when properly appealed to, do the right and moral thing. A determined and united minority represents a formidable political wedge in opening the tight doors of equal opportunity. The potential power of this political wedge is no longer going to be overlooked. In a democratic political system, this is neither illicit nor deplorable, but legal and commendable.
In a telegram to the President when the San Francisco rioting erupted, Mayor John Shelley appealed "in the name of God and human decency" for emergency funds, pinning the basic cause on a lack of jobs for young people. Mayor Shelley, a onetime chief of the California Labor Federation also charged, "discrimination by some labor unions is just as sorrowful and just as unfair as the attitudes expressed by some members of employer or management groups."
Multiply San Francisco by the number of cities in the nation. Only a mammoth political solution with an unprecedented involvement of economic resources can reshape the facets of the cities – better schooling, slum dispersal, occupational uplifting. Equally demanded is loyalty to human rights, even when inconvenience appears and new ways are necessary. Only the most naive persons would feel that significant change can happen unless the political power of citizens is applied. Political power is human power applied to the direction of political affairs. "Black Power" alone cannot achieve the result, even though much more attention is needed to the obvious necessity of recognizing everywhere leadership ability among Negroes. Martin Luther King calls for striped power – black and white together. Human power is the most productive phrase – human power exerting peaceful, legitimate pressures for necessary and forthwith change. But the extreme positions of some – racist, Black Nationalist, violent – should be an omen, not a threat, but a prediction of things to come if moderation continues to fail. Moderate progress should be measured not by the privileged and the affluent but by the disenfranchised and the poor. Otherwise the wind that has been sown will be reaped in whirlwind.
In conclusion, I must remind myself and you that professions of good will are tested by actions and attitudes in our daily experience in occupation, community efforts, home atmosphere and neighborhood stance.
There is no single best way to demonstrate that one means what he professes about the worth and dignity of every human person. Each of us is of unlike temperament, responding in different ways to the experiences and opportunities that occur.
Some prefer a solitary posture and individual effort, standing alone for what is believed to be right and just and needed now. Such individualism deserves applause. Would that there were many more who were known because of the attention they gave to the issues of living.
Some persons combine their individual effort in unity with others in such joint efforts as the Committee on Social Responsibility of this Society, a Committee which speaks for itself. This Committee is always in need of more persons to the end that there may be increasing depth in discussion and more human power for tasks and actions undertaken together.
Others apply strength in other organizations – community, professional, social action. This is commendable. One hopes for greater participation to achieve greater leverage to open wider the doors of progress.
Still others may not be able to engage in any of these but ... are persons who can add weight to the scales of distributive justice by simply refusing to permit bigotry to go unchallenged; by discerning when two-faced standards of justice prevail and letting this knowledge be known.
Those who may believe that words such as these do not represent spiritual support for which you come to worship, [and] those who remain unconvinced that the issue of equal opportunity in housing, education, employment is momentous, should at least inquire of themselves whether their voice or their silence, their acts or their non-action square with what their religious belief professes about the nature of man and the worth of every person.
In his book, THE HUMAN ANIMAL, Winston LaBarre wrote, (p.227):
“... in the historical rise and fall of cultures and societies, man gives every evidence of being ultimately self-responsive for his fate. The viability of a society does seem to depend upon a maturity of moral decision and upon the sheer hard-boiled animal effectiveness, adaptability and survival-value of the choices made."
In the beginning I inquired, Is White America scared that "we shall overcome" is being replaced by “We shall overthrow?" That was the partial statement of Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist who heads the Medical Committee for Human Rights Activities. A more complete quote is, "we shall overthrow the vicious system of segregation, discrimination and white supremacy." (quoted "Ramparts," p. 4, Oct. 66) That is a just cause for allegiance, for I believe our goal should be neither Black supremacy nor White supremacy, but human supremacy in an equal opportunity society.
Plainfield
The Generation of Power
The slogan "Black Power" symbolizes a difficult test of one's knowledge and an authentic challenge to one's real, moral values. When we are honest with ourselves, it is a blunt reminder of the need to persist in the never-ending struggle to close the gap between what is and what should be. If one wishes to raise the spectre of fear, or heat to steaming the filthy brew of bigotry or to reduce support for civil rights legislation or enforcement of existing legislation, one has only to mention the name of Stokely Carmichael, or repeat the Watts incantation, "burn, baby, burn." Is White America becoming scared that "we shall overcome" is being replaced by "we shall overthrow?" Is a defeated generation which struggled patiently and peacefully being replaced by a generation which seeks power openly and forcefully?
It is passing strange to me, because in the past few months I have listened to comments surprising to me, that first I must testify to my belief that facing up squarely to this issue is a moral necessity; and that what is moral i[s] unavoidably religious. A question invites answer on a moral level when the issue involves one's sense of what is right and what is wrong. That the issue and answers may be controversial is all the more reason for being known for one's present convictions.
The statement of purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association reads in part, "to strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship...to affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man and the use of the democratic method in human relationships." I do not believe these principles because the U.U.A. has them as a purpose; rather I believe in these values and remain a Unitarian Universalist because the organization maintains these principles as foundation statements.
The implications of the search for truth, the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of every man and the democratic method seem quite clear to me. Freedom is fraudulent when persons continue to be deprived of equal opportunity; when there is neglect or failure to apply the Bill of Rights which was the constitutional form created to guarantee that a minority will not be deprived of rights by the majority. When such principles and practice do not prevail, then I have a moral obligation to add my influence, little though it may be, to the side that tries to bring about in reality what our national Pledge of Allegiance premises in theory, "one nation, indivisible, with freedom and justice for all."
All world religions hold high the Golden Rule, human brotherhood, "loving one’s neighbor as oneself" Jesus’ powerful parable told the story of the Good Samaritan who bound up the wounds of the traveler and took him to safe lodgings. This was loving one's neighbor as oneself
But social service is not enough; social justice is necessary. The authentic moving force in any religious movement is moral enterprise and its consequent obligation of commitment. Sometimes we forget that commitment to the idea of commitment is nonsense. One commits his time, energy and influence to issues involving needs recognized through one's sense of commitment. Love for one's neighbor requires equal distribution of justice; otherwise love must be either impossibly vague or sentimentally transient. Perhaps Jesus did not include that in his parables, but as I interpret the traditions of the gospels, Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem not because he came to heal the sick or bind up wounds, but because the Roman occupying powers and their collaborators feared Jesus would change the social order.
Consequently the question of "Black Power" involves the moral scales on which one weighs conscience and conviction. A prime question to be raised in appraising the storms and tensions of our day is, are too many people like Janus, the two-faced God of Roman antiquity? Are they looking one way at those who have never had equal opportunity and another way at those who would prevent, delay, deter the accomplishment of freedom and justice for all?
Consider that slogan, "crime in the streets" – words which supposedly symbolize the wrong effects of the civil rights movements. Editorials, political war whoops and so on, again and again associate "crime in the streets" with civil rights demonstrations, peaceful marches, non-violent action. In the Cicero troubles this summer, the civil rights marchers were law-abiding, had a permit to march, obeyed police regulations. It was the good, white people of Cicero who began throwing stones, initiating violence, exhibiting bigotry of the rankest sort. In 1951, when the good people of Cicero invaded the private dwelling of a neighbor, threw his goods and furnishings into the street and burned them, there was no wide-spread alarm, or "crime in the streets," although that was precisely what it was.
When political self-seekers and others talk about "crime in the streets," they never seem to be talking about the intimidation of minorities and violence visited upon minorities.
Were you not shocked and shamed by the newsreel clips coming out of Grenada, Miss? White segregationists, armed with ax handles, pipes and chains, attacked Negro children and their parents. A twelve-year-old boy, limping because his leg was broken had to run a gauntlet of savage white men, young hoodlums, and cursing white women. He finally escaped, bleeding and with clothes torn. Not only were children beaten, but the white mob assaulted newsmen and photographers. The Grenada police were so derelict in their duty that State Troopers finally arrived to escort children to school. But not before 30 to 50 Negroes had been beaten.
But when people worry about "crime in the streets," they never seem to be concerned about the crimes committed by Whites in Grenada, Miss., but only with ghetto violence in Harlem, Rochester, Watts, San Francisco.
Stokely Carmichael created a furor with his call to Black Power on the 1966 Mississippi March. People tremble, and say, "no more civil rights legislation." But Stokely Carmichael received a respond because White Power had shotgunned James Meredith who was on a lawful, peaceful journey. How much concern was there for that crime in the streets?
Is it not true that too many persons look one way at peaceful civil rights demonstrators who march with a permit – and by some prejudiced reflex consider this a danger and a cause of crime in the streets; and look another way at assassins and child-beaters and bomb throwers, as though such actions were somehow excusable because Americans of a minority group are alleged to be "moving too fast" when they struggle peacefully for freedom and justice for all?
A news dispatch out of Washington this week reported that the House Un-American Committee was going to investigate civil rights movements because Chairman Willis of La. and Rep. Tuck of Virginia are fearful that Communists have infiltrated civil rights movements.
Curious isn’t it, that the House Un-American Committee sees nothing un-American about the wretched activities of violent segregationists in Grenada, shotgun assassins shooting at James Meredith, bombings in Alabama, or the fifty or more murders of Civil rights workers and sympathizers for which no one has been convicted?
A double standard of judgment is applied by too many persons, who find such a double standard comforting to their latent or conscious prejudice, or who use such double standards as an excuse to escape involvement in the terrible struggle of our time.
It is sheer hypocrisy to pay lip service to the worth and dignity of every human being while being willing, even eager, to maintain two ways of judging persons and their acts. There will be those who will believe that because I have said this, that I am willing to tolerate riots and let violence, looting, burning in ghetto areas go unpunished. Not at all. I’m saying that all accused law-breakers should receive equal treatment. If the people of Grenada, Miss. who ran amok in their disgusting attacks on children were treated as San Francisco rioters and Harlem Rioters and Rochester rioters, the Miss. jails would have been crowded with white prisoners in September.
A filmclip on the TV news showed five men holding down a rioter in San Francisco. Perhaps five were needed to subdue the rioter, but one officer was repeatedly kicking the prisoner hard and brutally. I know of no white rioter in Grenada or Cicero receiving such treatment. Nobody should, of any color.
Consider too the incident that touched off the San Francisco rioting. A police officer saw a boy running away from an automobile. When the boy failed to stop on the officer's command, the officer shot the boy in the back, fatally. Now if you can, imagine a change only in the physical environment and color: an all-white suburb, a white boy running away from an automobile, the command to stop, the shot and sudden death. The agitation might have taken a different expression, but there would have been furious indignation in the suburb and consternation and investigation in the high places of government. One must bear in mind too that the car was not reported stolen until hours after the shooting.
Any student of the times could add many additional chapters and verse to point out that we must have a law-abiding social order, of course; but the distinctions must be clearly maintained between civil liberties and unlawful offenses; and the processes of apprehensions, arrests, and trials must be equally applied to the members of both majority and minority groups.
This I believe – if all citizens are willing to measure the behavior of all other citizens by one set of rules, then this scare slogan of "Black Power", other than what is represented by a tiny segment, resolves itself into definitions, attitudes, and actions which should be encouraged with thorough understanding, not rejected with irrational panic.
I would ask you to seek out the varying meanings and intensity levels intended by different persons when they use the words, "Black Power." We owe it to ourselves and our fellow humans to acquire as much knowledge as may be available, because (as Winston LaBarre pointed out in THE HUMAN ANIMAL, p. 259), "... learning is a feedback mechanism through which experience communicates cues for the correction of an organisms’ future action."
Malcolm Boyd, the Episcopal clergyman who is so responsive to the real essence of issues, said it well, (“RENEWAL”, August 66, p. 9),
"It seems to me that the cry for black power contains as many ambiguities within it, as, say, reciting the Nicene Creed, singing the Star Spangled Banner or uttering the words, ‘I love you.’ Black power, when it means black votes and black dollars to redress calculated and long-term injustice, is an historical necessity and a moral right. When, on the other hand, it means an inverse form of racism and an expression of hatred, it is a perpetuation of cancerous self-destruction and a moral wrong.”
Or take this statement: "We are encouraging the development of black consciousness, a pride in black history, culture, institutions, as other ethnic groups have developed cultural awareness and pride....
"Psychologically the Negro has been in a box that he could not get out of, and what he wants to do now is to do what everybody else in the world has done. He wants to build something of his own ... that is not anti-white. When you build your own house, it doesn't mean you tear down the house across the street. It just means that you are building your own house.” Some persons may be surprised that those reasonable words interpreting "Black Power" were spoken by Stokely Carmichael, (quoted by Homer Jack, "Register-Leader," Oct. 66, p. 8)
Or take another example, the words of another man usually thought to be the firebrand type of agitator, Floyd McKissick, exec. direc. of CORE:
"One, we’ve stated that black people must decide this for themselves; they must have the self-determination to determine the direction and pace at which they will become total citizens in this society. And in doing so six basic ingredients are needed: One, political power; two, economic power; three, an improved self-image of the black man himself. As you will know, that's not in the history books, what we've done, and the contributions that we've made; four, the development of young, militant leadership; five, the enforcement of Federal laws, the abolishment of police brutality; and six, the development of the black consumer bloc. This is basically what we describe as black power.” (quoted N.Y.Times, 8/22/66)
Of course, bitter, even threatening things are said by persons who with cause have lost heart in the hope that municipal, state or federal governments will enforce civil rights legislation adequately and equally. Hard things are said by those who have lost hope that the privileged will voluntarily desegregate and end discrimination. The record is that unless there is painstaking vigilance by interested and involved citizens and unless persistent protest is maintained, the patterns of discrimination and segregation will not be seriously altered even when civil rights legislation is on the books. So the frustration of the disenfranchised can reach levels of fury and disgust. From those filled with indignation – righteous indignation in most instances – such cries as “move over or we'll move on over you,” are going to be heard. Those of us who were placed in the majority color by the lottery of birth should give attention to certain recognitions. These are recognitions which provides no concessions to unlawful or illegal behavior but rather comprise admission that the changes sought for by the dedicated doers for civil rights are both legally right and morally correct.
We all know, or should know, that political gains are achieved in the political arena where needed legislation and authentic enforcement receive the strongest leverage from voters who vote, lobbies that lobby, leaders who lead.
In a discussion of the meaning and implications of "Black Power" among college students who had been activists in the civil rights movement, there was a variety of expression. A Hawaiian student of Japanese ancestry said succinctly, "Face it. The Big White Father bit is over." He may have meant that racial minorities are no longer going to rely upon the paternal favors of the White majority, who when properly appealed to, do the right and moral thing. A determined and united minority represents a formidable political wedge in opening the tight doors of equal opportunity. The potential power of this political wedge is no longer going to be overlooked. In a democratic political system, this is neither illicit nor deplorable, but legal and commendable.
In a telegram to the President when the San Francisco rioting erupted, Mayor John Shelley appealed "in the name of God and human decency" for emergency funds, pinning the basic cause on a lack of jobs for young people. Mayor Shelley, a onetime chief of the California Labor Federation also charged, "discrimination by some labor unions is just as sorrowful and just as unfair as the attitudes expressed by some members of employer or management groups."
Multiply San Francisco by the number of cities in the nation. Only a mammoth political solution with an unprecedented involvement of economic resources can reshape the facets of the cities – better schooling, slum dispersal, occupational uplifting. Equally demanded is loyalty to human rights, even when inconvenience appears and new ways are necessary. Only the most naive persons would feel that significant change can happen unless the political power of citizens is applied. Political power is human power applied to the direction of political affairs. "Black Power" alone cannot achieve the result, even though much more attention is needed to the obvious necessity of recognizing everywhere leadership ability among Negroes. Martin Luther King calls for striped power – black and white together. Human power is the most productive phrase – human power exerting peaceful, legitimate pressures for necessary and forthwith change. But the extreme positions of some – racist, Black Nationalist, violent – should be an omen, not a threat, but a prediction of things to come if moderation continues to fail. Moderate progress should be measured not by the privileged and the affluent but by the disenfranchised and the poor. Otherwise the wind that has been sown will be reaped in whirlwind.
In conclusion, I must remind myself and you that professions of good will are tested by actions and attitudes in our daily experience in occupation, community efforts, home atmosphere and neighborhood stance.
There is no single best way to demonstrate that one means what he professes about the worth and dignity of every human person. Each of us is of unlike temperament, responding in different ways to the experiences and opportunities that occur.
Some prefer a solitary posture and individual effort, standing alone for what is believed to be right and just and needed now. Such individualism deserves applause. Would that there were many more who were known because of the attention they gave to the issues of living.
Some persons combine their individual effort in unity with others in such joint efforts as the Committee on Social Responsibility of this Society, a Committee which speaks for itself. This Committee is always in need of more persons to the end that there may be increasing depth in discussion and more human power for tasks and actions undertaken together.
Others apply strength in other organizations – community, professional, social action. This is commendable. One hopes for greater participation to achieve greater leverage to open wider the doors of progress.
Still others may not be able to engage in any of these but ... are persons who can add weight to the scales of distributive justice by simply refusing to permit bigotry to go unchallenged; by discerning when two-faced standards of justice prevail and letting this knowledge be known.
Those who may believe that words such as these do not represent spiritual support for which you come to worship, [and] those who remain unconvinced that the issue of equal opportunity in housing, education, employment is momentous, should at least inquire of themselves whether their voice or their silence, their acts or their non-action square with what their religious belief professes about the nature of man and the worth of every person.
In his book, THE HUMAN ANIMAL, Winston LaBarre wrote, (p.227):
“... in the historical rise and fall of cultures and societies, man gives every evidence of being ultimately self-responsive for his fate. The viability of a society does seem to depend upon a maturity of moral decision and upon the sheer hard-boiled animal effectiveness, adaptability and survival-value of the choices made."
In the beginning I inquired, Is White America scared that "we shall overcome" is being replaced by “We shall overthrow?" That was the partial statement of Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist who heads the Medical Committee for Human Rights Activities. A more complete quote is, "we shall overthrow the vicious system of segregation, discrimination and white supremacy." (quoted "Ramparts," p. 4, Oct. 66) That is a just cause for allegiance, for I believe our goal should be neither Black supremacy nor White supremacy, but human supremacy in an equal opportunity society.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Ineffable Stream – Human Filters
September 25, 1966
Plainfield
(rewrite Lakeland 1984)
Ineffable Stream – Human Filters
Today I suggest there are religions and there is religion. Beyond the humanistic emphasis which generally prevails in the way my convictions are formed and interpretations made, I believe a certain resonance sounds within us responding to the great source of all life. Consider the Ineffable Stream of creation and change which to our senses is known only through human filters, particularly religious systems and cultures.
Until last Sunday I was going to quote today as a poetic text those lines by Shelley from “Adonais,”
“The one remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.”
But last week, John Ciardi, affable and wise, convinced me that one should attempt to communicate in 20th century words rather than 18th or 19th century forms because the older forms do not communicate with modern man. Therefore instead of Shelley, let me quote E. E. Cummings, for I believe he too was reaching for an understanding of the ineffable in those lines he called,
i thank you God
i thank You God for this most amazing
day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
To me, “ineffable” means undefinable but real, unutterable but authentic, nevertheless. While that which is ineffable does not lend itself to philosophical systems or formal composition, there is a reality which the poets have reached for, so I believe. Shelley was feeling for the Ineffable when he wrote of “the One remains, the many change and pass.” E.E. Cummings was trying to slash through the explainable to that which is elusive when he wrote,
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
But we do doubt; we rely on the experience filtered through our ways of human culture. Too frequently the filters screen out the power and beauty of that unimaginable. In the same way that candid theologians have always found it astonishingly easy to say what God is not and staggeringly difficult to express what God is, so I would have you consider how the human filters distort and transform that quality of total existence the poets call the “One that remains” or “the unimaginable You.”
There may be some of you who will recognize that I am attempting to elaborate two basic points of my beliefs. First, that experience precedes interpretation; second, that I respond to Abraham Maslow’s hypothesis of the “peak experience.” To quote him, “all mystical or peak experiences are the same in their essence and always have been the same. They should therefore come to agree in principle on teaching that which is common to all.” And again, “Much theology, much verbal religion throughout the world, can be considered the more or less vain effort to put into communicable words and formulae and into symbolic rituals and ceremonies the original mystical experience of the prophet.” (RELIGIOUS VALUES AND PEAK EXPERIENCES, p. 20 & 24).
Aldous Huxley was on the same search in THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY writing that “The divine ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being.” (p. 21).
The first observation I would offer is that the human filters of creed, tradition, and dogma screen out the reality of the power of this Ineffable Stream, this ultimate reality. But the mythology survives. Human mythologies are never-endingly demonstrated to be myths. By definition, a myth is not true, but points to some abstraction believed to be true. But many believers have trusted the myth to be reality rather than representation.
Consider the myth of the Holy Book – the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. The scripture takes written form when scribes or disciples attempt to preserve the spiritual or moral truths uttered by the prophet or poet. But the language forms can only be of the time of the writing. More basic still, no language is adequate to transmit the profound experience which inspired the religious leader. But the impact of such a person is so powerful that continuing sanctity becomes attached to what is essentially static, the book. There is a self-defeating nature to the process because the greater attachment there is to past interpretations of past experience, the less sensitivity there can be to immediate experience. The human filters of one’s immediate experience have much more readiness to be open to the peak experience than the human filters of the past where the screen has become muddied up by the repetition of many interpretations.
This is true of religious dogmas and creeds as well as of a Holy Book. Whitehead wrote that “the dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind.” (RELIGION IN THE MAKING, p. 57). When the myth becomes authority rather than illumination, it shadows intellect and deceives emotion.
The orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a pertinent example. Christian theologians are usually candid in admitting that the doctrine of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – is not a New Testament teaching. There is no evidence that the disciples formulated their faith in any such abstract theology. Confronted by Hellenistic philosophies and Mediterranean religions of dying-rising savior gods, the growing Church developed the Trinity as a theological explanation of their interpretation of the religious feelings of earlier founders of the Christian movement.
The orthodox justify this process of perpetuating interpretations as the best way to preserve and teach religious truth. H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, “without symbols nothing has intelligibility and form for us.” (THE RESPONSIBLE SELF, p. 157).
But Unitarians and Universalists, as well as many others, have moved away from fixed theological formulas and do not accept creeds fixed by tradition or church authority. For one thing there is inevitably huge inconsistencies in the pat answers of religion directed by the past. Rudolf Bultmann, the German theologian who has shaken some of the easy assumptions of the Christian believer pointed out that early Christianity was a blend of several strands of history or tradition; and many inconsistencies were simply ignored as the Church grew and accumulated authority: “The world is the creation of God, who cares for the birds and decks the grass of the field with its beauty (Matthew 6: 26,30). Yes at the same time it is the realm of Satan, the ‘god of the world.’ (II Corinthians 4:4), the prince of this world (John 12:31). The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (I Corinthians 10:26). Yet creation is subject to vanity and corruption, yearning for the day of its deliverance. (Romans 8: 19,22)....” (PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY, p. 178).
The reasonable mind turns away not only from such inconsistent interpretations, but also observes that the dogma or the symbol tends to become the object of worship rather than the experience the symbol is supposed to represent. Fixed liturgies, rigidly performed sacraments, safe-journey medals, the ritualistic gestures – all these become magic formulas rather than meaningful symbols. The experience has been filtered out by interpretations.
In the NY Times Book Review section, (9/4/66. p. 2) John Bowen writes about an author who “once described some seagulls in one of his novels. He went to Brittany to check its description by observation and was forced to the decision that since seagulls he observed were not much like the seagulls he had described, his seagulls were more real than the real seagulls.” Myths that filter out facts let in a pious sentimentality that may be intolerant of common sense.
Such is the continuing error of those who filter interpretations of new experience through the screen of bygone myth, dogma, or authority. The ancient symbols become more real than one’s own experience. Then the ineffable fails to come through the filters. The sensitive mystic, Meister Eckhart, comprehended this in one sentence when he wrote, “He who seeks God under settled form lays hold of the form while missing the God concealed in it.”
The second observation I would make is that none of us are free from the filters through which experience is interpreted. We may reject religious orthodoxies but nevertheless our experiences are filtered through and expressed in some structure of belief and culture.
We live in a particular time, 1966; we are members of a culture experiencing turbulent social change. What we say and what we do hinges on what our values are, where our self-interests reside, and to what degree we feel sufficiently free to transcend the ways our cultures and subcultures expect us to say and do.
Konrad Lorenz wrote “the best definition of man is that he is the one creature capable of reflection, of seeing himself in the frame of the surrounding universe.” (ON AGGRESSION, p. 295). But man’s vision of himself is filtered through the expectations others have – the cultural framework.
Consider the experience of any international incident; then compare how differently Washington, Moscow, Paris, and Peking will interpret the event. Sometimes of course there is deliberate deceit or double-talk. But often enough differences can be accounted for by the varied interpretations, which are the filtered products of unlike ideological screens and unidentical basic biases.
Let me illustrate by an ancient event and a modern process. In the days of the early Christian movement, there are indications that the apostle Paul was upset as religious fellowship was being disrupted because people separated into divisive groups. The missionary religion had wide appeal, drawing converts from both the rich and poor or slave classes. But seemingly within the Christian fellowship itself, the rich and cultured separated out from the less educated and poorer, refusing to share the provisions of the Christian fellowship meals. Each class experienced this new faith but interpreted it differently, at least insofar as conduct was concerned. Social structures and culture were greatly different. Even the enthusiasm of a new religion did not prevent such separation. It was the separation of suburb and slum, if you will.
A few months ago a scientist was discussing the explosion of new knowledge which rapidly makes textbooks, educational equipment and methods obsolete or outdated. He commented that scientific knowledge was doubling every two years; and then remarked provocatively, “after a person receives his PhD and leaves the University for professional work, he very soon ought to consider himself a dropout because knowledge in the field will have so rapidly advanced or critically changed.”
As knowledge modifies and restructures method and the former achievements, the more up-to-date scientist may be filtering experience through a different screen of assumptions and values than did his predecessor in the university or the laboratory.
Alfred North Whitehead phrased the dynamics of such evolution when he wrote, “Progress in truth – truth of science and truth of religion – is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality.” (RELIGION IN THE MAKING, p. 127).
My third observation is to emphasize that it is important not to deny or ignore the manner in which our beliefs, attitudes, and acts are filtered through a cultural framework which may differ from the family across town or the nation across the world. Such a recognition will not enable us to escape from our filters, but such a recognition may motivate us to k now ourselves better and to understand the framework which contains our beliefs and values.
I’m sure you all are familiar with the kaleidoscope, the viewing device wherein we observe patterns of colored glass. We see ever-new patterns by turning the kaleidoscope. This summer was my first experience with a taleidoscope, similar to a kaleidoscope, except that at regular intervals in the design end, there are glass lenses which see through the tube to objects beyond it. As one turns the tube looking at a face, for example, we see through the lens, shifting views of the face, punctuated by colorful design creating varying distortions like the changing faces of circumstances as different lenses come to focus.
So with understanding not only our view of others but also our interpretation of experience. The view is our own, but to recognize that the lenses are fitted into our own culture, and within the culture, individual design, [we] will increase our understanding and should strengthen our desire to know ourselves better in order to know reality better.
Does this imprisonment by culture and belief indicate that we cannot be touched by the Ineffable Stream, the “unimaginable You?” There are many who would assert that basic reality is unknowable, beyond any possible reach of human understanding. Many would quote Isaiah (40/12):
“To whom then will ye liken God?
Or what likeness will ye compare with him?”
When quoting such ancient Biblical agnosticism, one must observe that the word “God,” itself, is an image, an interpretation of experience, not the experience itself.
No one can provide assurances that stand the tests of reason or unanimous interpretation. Most persons settle for the security of a creed or the comfort of never brooding about such difficult and tantalizing notions as the Ineffable Stream.
Yet I believe there is an adventure of mind and spirit waiting for those who reach for some taste, touch, or hint of that which was before we were; which will be when we are no more. We can reach for the experience of the Creative Source, that Power which defines matter out of energy and transforms matter to energy is an awesome reality. The words of Christian theology are not illuminating for me but this should not prevent me from reflecting on an interpretation that does put me in touch, however remotely, with what is basic and never-ending.
The experience which filters through for me is creativity – creation, re-creation; new forms, refined values ever emerging from the old. My ideas may be heretical, ludicrous, irrational or whatever to those who use a different filter. But beliefs arise, values emerge, words accrue because of the impact of the basic experience of living upon the idea system and emotional set of the human person.
As an affirmation of belief, I hold that operation of mind and emotion upon experience is not reaching for something that is not there. Symbols change. Rituals eventually fail to communicate, but the basic real force of our Universe abides ever.
The poet, A.L. Lazarus (Christian Century, 8/24/66, p. 1028), says it well in his lines, “Some People”:
Some people say that god is love;
they mean the pass-making kind, perhaps,
as distinguished from the merely passive.
Some people feel in their bones that god is sin
and worship religiously within that shrine.
Some people get tired of waiting for god
but never do anything about it.
For others, up and giving makes their day
and even reactivates their metabolism.
Faith, hope, and charity, sacred or profane:
all these deserve their innocent divinities.
Some few divine the true theology:
creating is all they know, or need to know;
Someone Out There is also doing it.
No one is more conscious than I that this sermon has been difficult to follow. It is much easier to speak of practical problems, of obvious issues, of the values and political choices before us. It is not difficult to take apart the premises, conclusions, and implications of another’s religion.
I have no evidence that reflection on origins and realities we cannot understand will make us better or more effective persons. But even the most pragmatic of persons will concede that the human person is a curious being. He speculates about the force that created us; he wonders whether life is worthwhile; or whether we are more than a spectacular, conscious mixture of accidental life, heedless evolution and compulsive culture. Cosmic curiosity is a unique character of the human family.
Whether or not we ever are touched authentically by the Ineffable Stream of creation is not demonstrable by laboratory experiment or learned dissertation or devout theology or sacred ritual.
But if through the filters of human living one can still surmise that beyond us there is a unified force of splendid energy impregnating all that we call life, then perhaps we may say with Auden (lines in praise of W.B. Yeats):
“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
Plainfield
(rewrite Lakeland 1984)
Ineffable Stream – Human Filters
Today I suggest there are religions and there is religion. Beyond the humanistic emphasis which generally prevails in the way my convictions are formed and interpretations made, I believe a certain resonance sounds within us responding to the great source of all life. Consider the Ineffable Stream of creation and change which to our senses is known only through human filters, particularly religious systems and cultures.
Until last Sunday I was going to quote today as a poetic text those lines by Shelley from “Adonais,”
“The one remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.”
But last week, John Ciardi, affable and wise, convinced me that one should attempt to communicate in 20th century words rather than 18th or 19th century forms because the older forms do not communicate with modern man. Therefore instead of Shelley, let me quote E. E. Cummings, for I believe he too was reaching for an understanding of the ineffable in those lines he called,
i thank you God
i thank You God for this most amazing
day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
To me, “ineffable” means undefinable but real, unutterable but authentic, nevertheless. While that which is ineffable does not lend itself to philosophical systems or formal composition, there is a reality which the poets have reached for, so I believe. Shelley was feeling for the Ineffable when he wrote of “the One remains, the many change and pass.” E.E. Cummings was trying to slash through the explainable to that which is elusive when he wrote,
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
But we do doubt; we rely on the experience filtered through our ways of human culture. Too frequently the filters screen out the power and beauty of that unimaginable. In the same way that candid theologians have always found it astonishingly easy to say what God is not and staggeringly difficult to express what God is, so I would have you consider how the human filters distort and transform that quality of total existence the poets call the “One that remains” or “the unimaginable You.”
There may be some of you who will recognize that I am attempting to elaborate two basic points of my beliefs. First, that experience precedes interpretation; second, that I respond to Abraham Maslow’s hypothesis of the “peak experience.” To quote him, “all mystical or peak experiences are the same in their essence and always have been the same. They should therefore come to agree in principle on teaching that which is common to all.” And again, “Much theology, much verbal religion throughout the world, can be considered the more or less vain effort to put into communicable words and formulae and into symbolic rituals and ceremonies the original mystical experience of the prophet.” (RELIGIOUS VALUES AND PEAK EXPERIENCES, p. 20 & 24).
Aldous Huxley was on the same search in THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY writing that “The divine ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being.” (p. 21).
The first observation I would offer is that the human filters of creed, tradition, and dogma screen out the reality of the power of this Ineffable Stream, this ultimate reality. But the mythology survives. Human mythologies are never-endingly demonstrated to be myths. By definition, a myth is not true, but points to some abstraction believed to be true. But many believers have trusted the myth to be reality rather than representation.
Consider the myth of the Holy Book – the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. The scripture takes written form when scribes or disciples attempt to preserve the spiritual or moral truths uttered by the prophet or poet. But the language forms can only be of the time of the writing. More basic still, no language is adequate to transmit the profound experience which inspired the religious leader. But the impact of such a person is so powerful that continuing sanctity becomes attached to what is essentially static, the book. There is a self-defeating nature to the process because the greater attachment there is to past interpretations of past experience, the less sensitivity there can be to immediate experience. The human filters of one’s immediate experience have much more readiness to be open to the peak experience than the human filters of the past where the screen has become muddied up by the repetition of many interpretations.
This is true of religious dogmas and creeds as well as of a Holy Book. Whitehead wrote that “the dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind.” (RELIGION IN THE MAKING, p. 57). When the myth becomes authority rather than illumination, it shadows intellect and deceives emotion.
The orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a pertinent example. Christian theologians are usually candid in admitting that the doctrine of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – is not a New Testament teaching. There is no evidence that the disciples formulated their faith in any such abstract theology. Confronted by Hellenistic philosophies and Mediterranean religions of dying-rising savior gods, the growing Church developed the Trinity as a theological explanation of their interpretation of the religious feelings of earlier founders of the Christian movement.
The orthodox justify this process of perpetuating interpretations as the best way to preserve and teach religious truth. H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, “without symbols nothing has intelligibility and form for us.” (THE RESPONSIBLE SELF, p. 157).
But Unitarians and Universalists, as well as many others, have moved away from fixed theological formulas and do not accept creeds fixed by tradition or church authority. For one thing there is inevitably huge inconsistencies in the pat answers of religion directed by the past. Rudolf Bultmann, the German theologian who has shaken some of the easy assumptions of the Christian believer pointed out that early Christianity was a blend of several strands of history or tradition; and many inconsistencies were simply ignored as the Church grew and accumulated authority: “The world is the creation of God, who cares for the birds and decks the grass of the field with its beauty (Matthew 6: 26,30). Yes at the same time it is the realm of Satan, the ‘god of the world.’ (II Corinthians 4:4), the prince of this world (John 12:31). The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (I Corinthians 10:26). Yet creation is subject to vanity and corruption, yearning for the day of its deliverance. (Romans 8: 19,22)....” (PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY, p. 178).
The reasonable mind turns away not only from such inconsistent interpretations, but also observes that the dogma or the symbol tends to become the object of worship rather than the experience the symbol is supposed to represent. Fixed liturgies, rigidly performed sacraments, safe-journey medals, the ritualistic gestures – all these become magic formulas rather than meaningful symbols. The experience has been filtered out by interpretations.
In the NY Times Book Review section, (9/4/66. p. 2) John Bowen writes about an author who “once described some seagulls in one of his novels. He went to Brittany to check its description by observation and was forced to the decision that since seagulls he observed were not much like the seagulls he had described, his seagulls were more real than the real seagulls.” Myths that filter out facts let in a pious sentimentality that may be intolerant of common sense.
Such is the continuing error of those who filter interpretations of new experience through the screen of bygone myth, dogma, or authority. The ancient symbols become more real than one’s own experience. Then the ineffable fails to come through the filters. The sensitive mystic, Meister Eckhart, comprehended this in one sentence when he wrote, “He who seeks God under settled form lays hold of the form while missing the God concealed in it.”
The second observation I would make is that none of us are free from the filters through which experience is interpreted. We may reject religious orthodoxies but nevertheless our experiences are filtered through and expressed in some structure of belief and culture.
We live in a particular time, 1966; we are members of a culture experiencing turbulent social change. What we say and what we do hinges on what our values are, where our self-interests reside, and to what degree we feel sufficiently free to transcend the ways our cultures and subcultures expect us to say and do.
Konrad Lorenz wrote “the best definition of man is that he is the one creature capable of reflection, of seeing himself in the frame of the surrounding universe.” (ON AGGRESSION, p. 295). But man’s vision of himself is filtered through the expectations others have – the cultural framework.
Consider the experience of any international incident; then compare how differently Washington, Moscow, Paris, and Peking will interpret the event. Sometimes of course there is deliberate deceit or double-talk. But often enough differences can be accounted for by the varied interpretations, which are the filtered products of unlike ideological screens and unidentical basic biases.
Let me illustrate by an ancient event and a modern process. In the days of the early Christian movement, there are indications that the apostle Paul was upset as religious fellowship was being disrupted because people separated into divisive groups. The missionary religion had wide appeal, drawing converts from both the rich and poor or slave classes. But seemingly within the Christian fellowship itself, the rich and cultured separated out from the less educated and poorer, refusing to share the provisions of the Christian fellowship meals. Each class experienced this new faith but interpreted it differently, at least insofar as conduct was concerned. Social structures and culture were greatly different. Even the enthusiasm of a new religion did not prevent such separation. It was the separation of suburb and slum, if you will.
A few months ago a scientist was discussing the explosion of new knowledge which rapidly makes textbooks, educational equipment and methods obsolete or outdated. He commented that scientific knowledge was doubling every two years; and then remarked provocatively, “after a person receives his PhD and leaves the University for professional work, he very soon ought to consider himself a dropout because knowledge in the field will have so rapidly advanced or critically changed.”
As knowledge modifies and restructures method and the former achievements, the more up-to-date scientist may be filtering experience through a different screen of assumptions and values than did his predecessor in the university or the laboratory.
Alfred North Whitehead phrased the dynamics of such evolution when he wrote, “Progress in truth – truth of science and truth of religion – is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality.” (RELIGION IN THE MAKING, p. 127).
My third observation is to emphasize that it is important not to deny or ignore the manner in which our beliefs, attitudes, and acts are filtered through a cultural framework which may differ from the family across town or the nation across the world. Such a recognition will not enable us to escape from our filters, but such a recognition may motivate us to k now ourselves better and to understand the framework which contains our beliefs and values.
I’m sure you all are familiar with the kaleidoscope, the viewing device wherein we observe patterns of colored glass. We see ever-new patterns by turning the kaleidoscope. This summer was my first experience with a taleidoscope, similar to a kaleidoscope, except that at regular intervals in the design end, there are glass lenses which see through the tube to objects beyond it. As one turns the tube looking at a face, for example, we see through the lens, shifting views of the face, punctuated by colorful design creating varying distortions like the changing faces of circumstances as different lenses come to focus.
So with understanding not only our view of others but also our interpretation of experience. The view is our own, but to recognize that the lenses are fitted into our own culture, and within the culture, individual design, [we] will increase our understanding and should strengthen our desire to know ourselves better in order to know reality better.
Does this imprisonment by culture and belief indicate that we cannot be touched by the Ineffable Stream, the “unimaginable You?” There are many who would assert that basic reality is unknowable, beyond any possible reach of human understanding. Many would quote Isaiah (40/12):
“To whom then will ye liken God?
Or what likeness will ye compare with him?”
When quoting such ancient Biblical agnosticism, one must observe that the word “God,” itself, is an image, an interpretation of experience, not the experience itself.
No one can provide assurances that stand the tests of reason or unanimous interpretation. Most persons settle for the security of a creed or the comfort of never brooding about such difficult and tantalizing notions as the Ineffable Stream.
Yet I believe there is an adventure of mind and spirit waiting for those who reach for some taste, touch, or hint of that which was before we were; which will be when we are no more. We can reach for the experience of the Creative Source, that Power which defines matter out of energy and transforms matter to energy is an awesome reality. The words of Christian theology are not illuminating for me but this should not prevent me from reflecting on an interpretation that does put me in touch, however remotely, with what is basic and never-ending.
The experience which filters through for me is creativity – creation, re-creation; new forms, refined values ever emerging from the old. My ideas may be heretical, ludicrous, irrational or whatever to those who use a different filter. But beliefs arise, values emerge, words accrue because of the impact of the basic experience of living upon the idea system and emotional set of the human person.
As an affirmation of belief, I hold that operation of mind and emotion upon experience is not reaching for something that is not there. Symbols change. Rituals eventually fail to communicate, but the basic real force of our Universe abides ever.
The poet, A.L. Lazarus (Christian Century, 8/24/66, p. 1028), says it well in his lines, “Some People”:
Some people say that god is love;
they mean the pass-making kind, perhaps,
as distinguished from the merely passive.
Some people feel in their bones that god is sin
and worship religiously within that shrine.
Some people get tired of waiting for god
but never do anything about it.
For others, up and giving makes their day
and even reactivates their metabolism.
Faith, hope, and charity, sacred or profane:
all these deserve their innocent divinities.
Some few divine the true theology:
creating is all they know, or need to know;
Someone Out There is also doing it.
No one is more conscious than I that this sermon has been difficult to follow. It is much easier to speak of practical problems, of obvious issues, of the values and political choices before us. It is not difficult to take apart the premises, conclusions, and implications of another’s religion.
I have no evidence that reflection on origins and realities we cannot understand will make us better or more effective persons. But even the most pragmatic of persons will concede that the human person is a curious being. He speculates about the force that created us; he wonders whether life is worthwhile; or whether we are more than a spectacular, conscious mixture of accidental life, heedless evolution and compulsive culture. Cosmic curiosity is a unique character of the human family.
Whether or not we ever are touched authentically by the Ineffable Stream of creation is not demonstrable by laboratory experiment or learned dissertation or devout theology or sacred ritual.
But if through the filters of human living one can still surmise that beyond us there is a unified force of splendid energy impregnating all that we call life, then perhaps we may say with Auden (lines in praise of W.B. Yeats):
“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Vital Rhythms of Religion
June 19, 1966
Plainfield
The Vital Rhythms of Religion
On a Sunday such as this when we declare a recess for awhile from formal Sunday services, it is appropriate to think about two vital rhythms of religion. One is our need to become restored spiritually by touching ancient sources of help; to seek that which grasps our human experience with the sense of wonder. Can you thrust aside the curtain of personal tensions which has beset you and be open to words which conjure up images of restoration? For if you can, you are in touch with a vital rhythm of religion:
(Take Sky – Laurie)
But while we rest and re-create, surrounded by the perfumes of parklands and picnics; while we are engulfed by the drowsiness of days emancipated from usual problems, can we remember a world that will not cease from tremblings just because we take our ease? Can you confront a world of bristling threats and uncertain future? For if you can, you are in touch with another vital rhythm of religion:
(Sestina of Sandbars and Shelters – Joss)
The vital rhythms of religion are restoration and reality. Rayner Johnson writes, "a living and vital religion ought to, broadly speaking, do two things for the plain man. It should be related to his tasks in everyday life, to the workshop, office or factory in which he earns his daily bread.
It should also set his life in the context of a greater whole so that the crises which overtake him – accident, suffering, disease, loss and finally death – can be faced with serenity and fortitude because they are believed to be part of a meaningful pattern." (NURSLINGS OF IMMORTALITY, p. 156).
Did you see the cartoon in the "New Yorker" (4/30/66? An obviously depressed business man is returning to the kitchen just after having left for the office and says to his bathrobed, hair-curlered wife, "I don’t mean my car battery has run down, I mean MY battery has run down."
There is some scientific confirmation for the cartoonist's insight. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical School not long ago offered the opinion that when a person loses his zest for life, it usually isn’t long before illness strikes. The researchers are calling this the "giving-up-complex." When a person loses confidence, when the encounters of living no longer provide zest, when one is overpowered by the feeling that one just cannot "take it anymore," then this corrosion of hope may lead to a deterioration of health.
We need restoration. For some it is travel; for others, seclusion; for others, excitement; for others, golf links, harbors, beaches, summer theatre or bustling festivals.
There is some restoring quality in recognizing that all our religious dependence must not be on the religious institution. Perhaps that is a minister's June bias as he looks forward to a break in routines. Obviously, persons in my profession point to the church as an organization deserving support, worth upholding as a functioning society which meets needs for common worship, religious education, group service, societal relationships. Yet, one should not depend on any institution for all resources, because institutions, religious institutions not excepted, can sometimes induce one to be busy and pre-occupied with externals, while the internals of conviction, awareness and resolution are neglected. We can be so busy with the outward institution that the inward faith becomes paralyzed from disuse. We need to remember Whitehead's definition that religion is what man is in his solitariness. Restoration comes from responding to the occasional rhythmic pulse which beats out our need to remember that we can become better citizens and churchmen and churchwomen, if, in addition to group responsibility, we now and then feel free to maintain a portion of our life-emphasis individually, seeking strength that may be uniquely our own.
Roger Williams (ca. 1600-1684), the exemplar of liberty of conscience, was a persuasive example of one who maintained great personal faith almost to the exclusion of the organized institution. Coming to Colonial New England for reasons of conscience, again and again he endured persecution because he placed conscience first and the institution second. He renounced the Church of England. He denounced the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony because (in Williams' view) it falsely represented the King as a Christian and because the Charter gave away title to land the King didn't own: "The Indians owned the land," declared Roger Williams. Furthermore, he stood squarely opposed to the practice of the citizen’s oath of loyalty.
His faith was strong enough to direct him to the wilderness when he was banished; to live with the Indians; to establish Providence Plantation wherein majority civil rule and liberty of individual conscience were established.
Churches, municipalities, the nation, the corporations which hire our time and talents have a major claim on our effort and loyalty. But not completely. We need the opportunity to restore our strength in re-creation, rest and change of pace. Wordsworth had some appropriate lines in "A Poet's Epitaph:"
"The outward shows of sky and earth,
of hill and valley he has viewed;
and impulses of deeper birth
have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart."
In a season of restoration there is quiet strength to be obtained from embracing the poet's injunction,
"Put not asunder
Man’s first word: wonder...wonder."
But restoration can degenerate into decadent world-apartness if reality is ignored. Think of those lines that Joce read,
"O sky and sand and blue of here and now,
how shall we keep you always for our friends
and us, and for our sons when we are gone,
or save some certainty for all, and shelter
the dream of living for a piece of time
within a known and tolerable world?"
Reality is the other vital rhythm of religion that I would have you consider today. Summer is a time for picnic and summer theatre, highway and mountaintop, sailing and surfing, sand and sun. But summer days have been days marking enormous social change and disruption when pivotal happenings have turned about the trends of history.
July 4 marked the Declaration of Independence; July 14, the French Revolution gathered irresistible momentum when the Bastille fell; it was June 28 in 1914 when Arch-duke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, plunging Europe and later, other Continents, into that awful event, World War I.
July 16 is the anniversary of a radically new world, for on that date 21 years ago, 300 scientists watched the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico. August 6 and August 9 were summer days when our nation used atomic bombs against cities – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Summer is a time when one should be alert to the religious rhythms of reality too.
Joseph Wood Krutch once observed that "the ancient world ended and the Dark Ages began when the army of Belisarius cut the Roman aqueducts and, overnight, turned Rome from a community with a water supply, said to have been comparable with that of a modern city, into a Dark Ages town where a few wells and cisterns had to serve a large population. A calamity even greater, but no less easy to imagine, might introduce us to a new Dark Age." (AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Spring 66, p.132)
Recreation can become little more than leisurely decay unless there beats also the rhythm of reality of our world. One author writes, "Why talk about World War III when the last one isn't over yet? From Warsaw comes the report that in 1965, forty-five Polish children have been killed and 718 injured by explosives left from World War II." (Jerome Beatty, Jr., "Sharps and Flats," SR 11/65)
The alternating rhythms of restoration and reality are so deeply a part of religious myth, legend and history that we can feel some degree assurance that these contrasting experiences combine to make us more whole persons. Moses retreated to the mountaintop and came back to the Exodus camp a better leader with more definitive convictions and more creative plans. Jesus went to the wilderness; and there acquired the strength of spirit which was to be his adequate reserve when his powerful convictions led him to confront fearlessly a world which neither understood nor accepted him. Toynbee wrote at length of this pattern of "withdrawal and return" as explaining the source of the courage and moral reserves of authentic great leaders.
Neither restoration nor reality are sufficient when each is emphasized alone. Gandhi once said, "you can wake up a man who is asleep, but if he is merely pretending to be asleep, your efforts will have no effect on him." (quoted by Dwight McDonald, in letter to NR, 1/29/66) Edwin Muir, writing in the British Unitarian publication, "The Enquirer", (8/31/63), summed up the matter in two sentences: "Our minds are possessed by three mysteries: where we come from, where we are going, and since we are not alone but members of a countless family, how we should live with one another. These questions are aspects of one question, and none of them can be separated from the others and dealt with alone."
Where do we come from? Where are we going? How shall we live with one another? Such are the interwoven themes of living. [We deal] with these now and then in solitude and relaxation, but it is in returning always to grapple with the living problems in the experiences of home, office, church, state, continent and world that we may expect to achieve authentically both restoration and reality.
From the murmur and subtlety of suspicion with which we vex one another, give us rest.
Make a new beginning and mingle again the kindred of the nations in the alchemy of love.
And with some finer essence of forbearance temper our minds.
Aristophanes
Plainfield
The Vital Rhythms of Religion
On a Sunday such as this when we declare a recess for awhile from formal Sunday services, it is appropriate to think about two vital rhythms of religion. One is our need to become restored spiritually by touching ancient sources of help; to seek that which grasps our human experience with the sense of wonder. Can you thrust aside the curtain of personal tensions which has beset you and be open to words which conjure up images of restoration? For if you can, you are in touch with a vital rhythm of religion:
(Take Sky – Laurie)
But while we rest and re-create, surrounded by the perfumes of parklands and picnics; while we are engulfed by the drowsiness of days emancipated from usual problems, can we remember a world that will not cease from tremblings just because we take our ease? Can you confront a world of bristling threats and uncertain future? For if you can, you are in touch with another vital rhythm of religion:
(Sestina of Sandbars and Shelters – Joss)
The vital rhythms of religion are restoration and reality. Rayner Johnson writes, "a living and vital religion ought to, broadly speaking, do two things for the plain man. It should be related to his tasks in everyday life, to the workshop, office or factory in which he earns his daily bread.
It should also set his life in the context of a greater whole so that the crises which overtake him – accident, suffering, disease, loss and finally death – can be faced with serenity and fortitude because they are believed to be part of a meaningful pattern." (NURSLINGS OF IMMORTALITY, p. 156).
Did you see the cartoon in the "New Yorker" (4/30/66? An obviously depressed business man is returning to the kitchen just after having left for the office and says to his bathrobed, hair-curlered wife, "I don’t mean my car battery has run down, I mean MY battery has run down."
There is some scientific confirmation for the cartoonist's insight. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical School not long ago offered the opinion that when a person loses his zest for life, it usually isn’t long before illness strikes. The researchers are calling this the "giving-up-complex." When a person loses confidence, when the encounters of living no longer provide zest, when one is overpowered by the feeling that one just cannot "take it anymore," then this corrosion of hope may lead to a deterioration of health.
We need restoration. For some it is travel; for others, seclusion; for others, excitement; for others, golf links, harbors, beaches, summer theatre or bustling festivals.
There is some restoring quality in recognizing that all our religious dependence must not be on the religious institution. Perhaps that is a minister's June bias as he looks forward to a break in routines. Obviously, persons in my profession point to the church as an organization deserving support, worth upholding as a functioning society which meets needs for common worship, religious education, group service, societal relationships. Yet, one should not depend on any institution for all resources, because institutions, religious institutions not excepted, can sometimes induce one to be busy and pre-occupied with externals, while the internals of conviction, awareness and resolution are neglected. We can be so busy with the outward institution that the inward faith becomes paralyzed from disuse. We need to remember Whitehead's definition that religion is what man is in his solitariness. Restoration comes from responding to the occasional rhythmic pulse which beats out our need to remember that we can become better citizens and churchmen and churchwomen, if, in addition to group responsibility, we now and then feel free to maintain a portion of our life-emphasis individually, seeking strength that may be uniquely our own.
Roger Williams (ca. 1600-1684), the exemplar of liberty of conscience, was a persuasive example of one who maintained great personal faith almost to the exclusion of the organized institution. Coming to Colonial New England for reasons of conscience, again and again he endured persecution because he placed conscience first and the institution second. He renounced the Church of England. He denounced the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony because (in Williams' view) it falsely represented the King as a Christian and because the Charter gave away title to land the King didn't own: "The Indians owned the land," declared Roger Williams. Furthermore, he stood squarely opposed to the practice of the citizen’s oath of loyalty.
His faith was strong enough to direct him to the wilderness when he was banished; to live with the Indians; to establish Providence Plantation wherein majority civil rule and liberty of individual conscience were established.
Churches, municipalities, the nation, the corporations which hire our time and talents have a major claim on our effort and loyalty. But not completely. We need the opportunity to restore our strength in re-creation, rest and change of pace. Wordsworth had some appropriate lines in "A Poet's Epitaph:"
"The outward shows of sky and earth,
of hill and valley he has viewed;
and impulses of deeper birth
have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart."
In a season of restoration there is quiet strength to be obtained from embracing the poet's injunction,
"Put not asunder
Man’s first word: wonder...wonder."
But restoration can degenerate into decadent world-apartness if reality is ignored. Think of those lines that Joce read,
"O sky and sand and blue of here and now,
how shall we keep you always for our friends
and us, and for our sons when we are gone,
or save some certainty for all, and shelter
the dream of living for a piece of time
within a known and tolerable world?"
Reality is the other vital rhythm of religion that I would have you consider today. Summer is a time for picnic and summer theatre, highway and mountaintop, sailing and surfing, sand and sun. But summer days have been days marking enormous social change and disruption when pivotal happenings have turned about the trends of history.
July 4 marked the Declaration of Independence; July 14, the French Revolution gathered irresistible momentum when the Bastille fell; it was June 28 in 1914 when Arch-duke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, plunging Europe and later, other Continents, into that awful event, World War I.
July 16 is the anniversary of a radically new world, for on that date 21 years ago, 300 scientists watched the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico. August 6 and August 9 were summer days when our nation used atomic bombs against cities – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Summer is a time when one should be alert to the religious rhythms of reality too.
Joseph Wood Krutch once observed that "the ancient world ended and the Dark Ages began when the army of Belisarius cut the Roman aqueducts and, overnight, turned Rome from a community with a water supply, said to have been comparable with that of a modern city, into a Dark Ages town where a few wells and cisterns had to serve a large population. A calamity even greater, but no less easy to imagine, might introduce us to a new Dark Age." (AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Spring 66, p.132)
Recreation can become little more than leisurely decay unless there beats also the rhythm of reality of our world. One author writes, "Why talk about World War III when the last one isn't over yet? From Warsaw comes the report that in 1965, forty-five Polish children have been killed and 718 injured by explosives left from World War II." (Jerome Beatty, Jr., "Sharps and Flats," SR 11/65)
The alternating rhythms of restoration and reality are so deeply a part of religious myth, legend and history that we can feel some degree assurance that these contrasting experiences combine to make us more whole persons. Moses retreated to the mountaintop and came back to the Exodus camp a better leader with more definitive convictions and more creative plans. Jesus went to the wilderness; and there acquired the strength of spirit which was to be his adequate reserve when his powerful convictions led him to confront fearlessly a world which neither understood nor accepted him. Toynbee wrote at length of this pattern of "withdrawal and return" as explaining the source of the courage and moral reserves of authentic great leaders.
Neither restoration nor reality are sufficient when each is emphasized alone. Gandhi once said, "you can wake up a man who is asleep, but if he is merely pretending to be asleep, your efforts will have no effect on him." (quoted by Dwight McDonald, in letter to NR, 1/29/66) Edwin Muir, writing in the British Unitarian publication, "The Enquirer", (8/31/63), summed up the matter in two sentences: "Our minds are possessed by three mysteries: where we come from, where we are going, and since we are not alone but members of a countless family, how we should live with one another. These questions are aspects of one question, and none of them can be separated from the others and dealt with alone."
Where do we come from? Where are we going? How shall we live with one another? Such are the interwoven themes of living. [We deal] with these now and then in solitude and relaxation, but it is in returning always to grapple with the living problems in the experiences of home, office, church, state, continent and world that we may expect to achieve authentically both restoration and reality.
From the murmur and subtlety of suspicion with which we vex one another, give us rest.
Make a new beginning and mingle again the kindred of the nations in the alchemy of love.
And with some finer essence of forbearance temper our minds.
Aristophanes
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Space for Man
June 12, 1966
Plainfield
Space for Man
One of the more lamentable mistakes we can make is to believe that because the conquest of cosmic space seems assured, therefore the prospect for man automatically becomes more promising. We have proclaimed that space is for man. But the future depends more on the space in man. I would have you think on these things today, because our survival, both physically and ethically, depends more on the character of our moral passions than on the complexities of our skillful rocketry.
About 2550 years ago, a strange Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, was possessed by strange visions which have since teased the imagination of those who have pondered his scripture. Ezekiel lived in a time when national disaster struck the Hebrew people. The kingdom had been overwhelmed by Nebuchadnezzar, thousands had been exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon, and the temple had been destroyed. Ezekiel, then a young man, was overwhelmed by a melancholy conviction that Yahveh had abandoned Jerusalem to a desolate fate.
Ezekiel’s prophetic imagination painted a strange vision. He saw four strange creatures, each of whom was supported by a wheel within a wheel. "When the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. Wherever the spirit would go, they went and the wheels rose with them... for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels...."
Our times are stranger than the calamitous days of Ezekiel. The fantastic creations of his feverish religious imagination were produced by his own feelings in his own times, of course, but think of one of his phrases as we find ourselves in our marvelous age when space may be for man. "The spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels." Does this not suggest an inescapable reality? Wheels have no ethics; solid fuel has no moral character. But the people who elect leaders determine whether or not cosmic miracles will bring blessings or miseries, because leaders appoint those who draw the plans, turn the wheels, and ignite the fuel.
Progress in space technology has been little short of the miraculous. Who could readily count up the number of men and women who have orbited the earth since Major Gagarin of the Soviets and Commander Shepard of the U.S. made the pioneering ventures for their respective countries? The astronauts have been propelled through space at speeds no other persons in history have experienced; they have returned safely to earth after probes into the unknown which translated into achievement that which up to then had been imaginary exploits of science-fiction writers. The Soviets and ourselves have made soft landings on the moon, using unmanned space vehicles equipped with instruments that have surveyed and reported back to planet Earth something of the nature of the moon's surface. Due to the marvels of photography and electronic transmission, we have viewed objects on the moon through the camera lens. No persons in any other generation have experienced that marvel.
The spectacular progress achieved by the rocket rides of the astronauts, the achievements in the wonder worlds of electronics and chemistry provide considerable evidence that space is for man. But more basic than theoretical physics and applied research is the question, "Is man for space?" In other words, do we have the ethical foundations and the moral habits to handle the scientific developments which have given us powers beyond all the ancient dreams? How secure would you feel in a small, crowded room, in the midst of which an 18-month-old infant was playing with a loaded, double-barreled shotgun, equipped with the most sensitive of hair triggers. I think our peril is something of the order of such an analogy. The tensions in the world and the presence of the frightening edge of war are evidence. How quickly can we mature?
Winston Churchill, in his book, THE GATHERING STORM, speaking of the secret but efficient re-establishment of German air power in the years immediately preceding World War II, commented (p.110), "But owing to the unlucky discovery by an immature civilization of the internal combustion engine and the art of flying, a new weapon of national rivalry had leapt upon the scene, capable of altering much more rapidly the relative war power of states."
Are all the inventions and developments which have occupied our attention, "unlucky accidents" because man is not grown-up enough for dangerous weapons, not ready to handle himself in space?
You will recall the old Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus fashioned wings which were held together with wax. He and his son, Icarus, experimented with the wings and were able to fly. Icarus, young and rash, tried to fly too high. The sun melted the wax bindings, the wings collapsed, and Icarus fell to his death in the sea.
Re-entry is well-planned for modern astronauts. Stafford and Cernan navigated to the rendezvous point with the most accurate precision yet demonstrated. A helicopter brought flotation gear, together with a team of frogmen to ensure safety for the men in the metal cocoon. Nevertheless, there is warning in the old myth of Icarus.
We have mastered many of the basic, technical problems of orbit and re-entry. Scientists have learned enough about the nature of the operation of the planetary system to orbit and re-enter with considerable accuracy and reasonable safety. The wax won’t melt. But the irrational passions that stir us, and the foolish vanities that betray us into wretched mistakes, are still part and parcel of the human condition. From the cliff-dwellers of the Stone Age to the modern residents of skyscraper apartments, persons have always had a more formidable opponent than Nature, "red in tooth and claw." That antagonist is ourselves.
Outer space is for man; this seems assured. The success and safety of Stafford and Cernan and their predecessors were not accidental. Safety and success were planned. Top level scientists, technologists, administrators were engaged. The full support of the Executive and Congressional branches of government was given, including all the money necessary to do the job, no matter how many billions might be required. This will continue to be the pattern as our space agencies continue persistent efforts to land a man on our satellite moon, to bring him home safely; and then turn to voyaging in space to other planets in our solar system. After that, perhaps, the deeper reaches of space.
Space is for man because the United States Government and the Soviet Government seem to have the will to commit the necessary human knowledge, national resources and effort to the conquest of space. To use Ezekiel’s vision as a parable, these accomplishments have been achieved – Alan Shepard, John Glenn and all their successors down to Stafford and Cernan have been successful because "The spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels."
But, we are failing to confront adequately the ethics gap in our scheme of national values when Cernan can walk more safely thousands of miles in planetary orbit than James Meredith can walk twenty-seven miles from Memphis, Tenn. to Hernando, Miss. Is not the visor of moral vision befogged when a man is shot down as he attempts to demonstrate that freedom should be more than a word which describes only the condition of privileged peoples of light skin?
Observers have commented that more alert police work by the law officers with the Meredith party could have prevented the shotgun attack. Mr. Katzenbach, the Attorney General of the U.S. has indicated that protection could have been better, although seemingly, he fails to recognize that the Department of Justice should have been more alert and vigilant.
Does not James Meredith deserve the same protection against possible disaster as Edward Cernan? Cut either one and he will bleed. When there is insufficient allowance for known hazards, there will be disaster paid for with human life. "The spirit of living creatures (must) be in the wheels" of the administration of justice and the protection of human rights, as well as in the engines and circuits of research and development in the National Space Agency.
Space for man on earth requires manpower, efficiency, money applied to the support of the basic value of the worth of man – every man, James Meredith as well as Edward Cernan. If there had been as many lives lost in space during the last ten years as there have been assassinations of civil rights workers in the same period, there would have been a volcanic eruption of widespread indignation such as no administration could have endured.
In the show, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER, Melinda says to Mark,
"A marriage of convenience is called that not because money is involved, but because love is not. Love is so very inconvenient." Love in the basic sense of good-will to others is not always convenient. It may interfere with comfortable prejudices; or love may require inconvenient commitments. There will be an ethics gap as long as persons are convinced that good will is more inconvenient than it is necessary.
Because a moral gap does exist, legislation is required to make it increasingly difficult for assassins and bigots to get away with their brutal crimes and cruel discrimination.
It is in such context that our Senators and Congressmen should be acting, not stalling, on the Civil Rights Bill of 1966.
In brief, the President's Bill provides (from Summary provided by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Our Unitarian Universalist Association, Commission on Religion and Race, is one of the cooperating organizations in The Leadership on Civil Rights):
"1) It is meant to prevent discrimination in the selection and service of state and federal juries where such discrimination is based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin or economic status;
2) It would provide additional means for facilitating the desegregation of public schools and other public facilities;
3) It would provide protection for Negroes and civil rights workers against any interference, by threats of violence, with the exercise of their constitutional rights in voting, education, housing, employment, jury service, travel, use of public facilities, public accommodations and federally supported programs.
4) It would prohibit, as a matter of national policy, all racial and religious discrimination in the sale and rental of housing."
In addition, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights urges such strengthening amendments as:
1) "the establishment of an Indemnification Board that will award damages [to] the victims of civil rights violence.
2) the enforcement of the fair housing provision by an administrative agency because of the enormous difficulties faced by individuals when attempting to enforce a grievance case.
3) Stronger, more specific measures to end jury discrimination.
4) And the extension of the equal employment section to state and local government employees.
At the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Dr. Martin Luther King reminded us that "legislation cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. By legislation I cannot force a man to love me, but I can keep him from lynching me and that's pretty important."
At the White House Conference on Civil Rights, just concluded, the civil rights leaders pledged an all-out effort to get the 1966 Civil Rights Act passed this Summer. "Urgency is the key" said Roy Wilkins. And he said this before James Meredith was felled by a shotgun blast. The House Judiciary Committee under the chairmanship of Emmanuel Celler is currently meeting in closed session discussing the bill. Some reports indicate that there is a need for those who favor the legislation to let their opinion be known to that committee as well as one's own Congressional representatives.
Some years ago, commenting on the exploits of the astronauts, Dr. Karl Menninger, one of the world's well-known psychiatrists, commented that humanity needs to view its problems from a new perspective and we may get that by looking at the world from space (Christian Century, 5/17/61). It is more accurate, probably, to acquire a new perspective by looking at the space in man.
By space in man, I mean our capacity to control ourselves; as man in space refers to our technical ability to control propulsion and navigation beyond the atmosphere of planet Earth. Without space in man, man in space may represent the prelude to catastrophe.
Of course when we enlarge the space in man, we will create areas of loneliness. When we seek out the facts, the partisans, who do not want their prejudices confused by facts, will leave us. When we seek by trial and error to improve our way, we will be deserted by those whose inner space is too small to admit error. To be reasonable is to be lonely, much of the time.
Space in man demands that we be idealistic in our goals and blunt in our expectations that not only can Eugene Cernan walk the cosmic ways, but also that James Meredith may be free to walk from Memphis to Jackson. We have an obligation to apply our resources and strength to goals so that not only may Earth-man visit planet Mars, but also that Earth-man in our nation may be free to live in his country anywhere and his finances will provide and according to his choice. Furthermore there is greater need to be enthusiastic in the widening of equality on earth than zealous for the expansion of interstellar rocketry. Not that space research experiments and voyages are unnecessary; such development is needed. But we are foolish if we forget that the best place to deploy the abundance of our wealth is planet Earth – here is the location for efforts for justice; and here the power of our decisions should create a fairer world for man.
Our destiny is best molded when [our] inner capacity and the strength of our feelings pushes our ideals from attractive vision to functioning reality. Like Ezekiel of old, we must demonstrate that in our marvelous devices and everyday ways, “the spirit of living creatures (is) in the wheels.”
Plainfield
Space for Man
One of the more lamentable mistakes we can make is to believe that because the conquest of cosmic space seems assured, therefore the prospect for man automatically becomes more promising. We have proclaimed that space is for man. But the future depends more on the space in man. I would have you think on these things today, because our survival, both physically and ethically, depends more on the character of our moral passions than on the complexities of our skillful rocketry.
About 2550 years ago, a strange Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, was possessed by strange visions which have since teased the imagination of those who have pondered his scripture. Ezekiel lived in a time when national disaster struck the Hebrew people. The kingdom had been overwhelmed by Nebuchadnezzar, thousands had been exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon, and the temple had been destroyed. Ezekiel, then a young man, was overwhelmed by a melancholy conviction that Yahveh had abandoned Jerusalem to a desolate fate.
Ezekiel’s prophetic imagination painted a strange vision. He saw four strange creatures, each of whom was supported by a wheel within a wheel. "When the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. Wherever the spirit would go, they went and the wheels rose with them... for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels...."
Our times are stranger than the calamitous days of Ezekiel. The fantastic creations of his feverish religious imagination were produced by his own feelings in his own times, of course, but think of one of his phrases as we find ourselves in our marvelous age when space may be for man. "The spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels." Does this not suggest an inescapable reality? Wheels have no ethics; solid fuel has no moral character. But the people who elect leaders determine whether or not cosmic miracles will bring blessings or miseries, because leaders appoint those who draw the plans, turn the wheels, and ignite the fuel.
Progress in space technology has been little short of the miraculous. Who could readily count up the number of men and women who have orbited the earth since Major Gagarin of the Soviets and Commander Shepard of the U.S. made the pioneering ventures for their respective countries? The astronauts have been propelled through space at speeds no other persons in history have experienced; they have returned safely to earth after probes into the unknown which translated into achievement that which up to then had been imaginary exploits of science-fiction writers. The Soviets and ourselves have made soft landings on the moon, using unmanned space vehicles equipped with instruments that have surveyed and reported back to planet Earth something of the nature of the moon's surface. Due to the marvels of photography and electronic transmission, we have viewed objects on the moon through the camera lens. No persons in any other generation have experienced that marvel.
The spectacular progress achieved by the rocket rides of the astronauts, the achievements in the wonder worlds of electronics and chemistry provide considerable evidence that space is for man. But more basic than theoretical physics and applied research is the question, "Is man for space?" In other words, do we have the ethical foundations and the moral habits to handle the scientific developments which have given us powers beyond all the ancient dreams? How secure would you feel in a small, crowded room, in the midst of which an 18-month-old infant was playing with a loaded, double-barreled shotgun, equipped with the most sensitive of hair triggers. I think our peril is something of the order of such an analogy. The tensions in the world and the presence of the frightening edge of war are evidence. How quickly can we mature?
Winston Churchill, in his book, THE GATHERING STORM, speaking of the secret but efficient re-establishment of German air power in the years immediately preceding World War II, commented (p.110), "But owing to the unlucky discovery by an immature civilization of the internal combustion engine and the art of flying, a new weapon of national rivalry had leapt upon the scene, capable of altering much more rapidly the relative war power of states."
Are all the inventions and developments which have occupied our attention, "unlucky accidents" because man is not grown-up enough for dangerous weapons, not ready to handle himself in space?
You will recall the old Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus fashioned wings which were held together with wax. He and his son, Icarus, experimented with the wings and were able to fly. Icarus, young and rash, tried to fly too high. The sun melted the wax bindings, the wings collapsed, and Icarus fell to his death in the sea.
Re-entry is well-planned for modern astronauts. Stafford and Cernan navigated to the rendezvous point with the most accurate precision yet demonstrated. A helicopter brought flotation gear, together with a team of frogmen to ensure safety for the men in the metal cocoon. Nevertheless, there is warning in the old myth of Icarus.
We have mastered many of the basic, technical problems of orbit and re-entry. Scientists have learned enough about the nature of the operation of the planetary system to orbit and re-enter with considerable accuracy and reasonable safety. The wax won’t melt. But the irrational passions that stir us, and the foolish vanities that betray us into wretched mistakes, are still part and parcel of the human condition. From the cliff-dwellers of the Stone Age to the modern residents of skyscraper apartments, persons have always had a more formidable opponent than Nature, "red in tooth and claw." That antagonist is ourselves.
Outer space is for man; this seems assured. The success and safety of Stafford and Cernan and their predecessors were not accidental. Safety and success were planned. Top level scientists, technologists, administrators were engaged. The full support of the Executive and Congressional branches of government was given, including all the money necessary to do the job, no matter how many billions might be required. This will continue to be the pattern as our space agencies continue persistent efforts to land a man on our satellite moon, to bring him home safely; and then turn to voyaging in space to other planets in our solar system. After that, perhaps, the deeper reaches of space.
Space is for man because the United States Government and the Soviet Government seem to have the will to commit the necessary human knowledge, national resources and effort to the conquest of space. To use Ezekiel’s vision as a parable, these accomplishments have been achieved – Alan Shepard, John Glenn and all their successors down to Stafford and Cernan have been successful because "The spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels."
But, we are failing to confront adequately the ethics gap in our scheme of national values when Cernan can walk more safely thousands of miles in planetary orbit than James Meredith can walk twenty-seven miles from Memphis, Tenn. to Hernando, Miss. Is not the visor of moral vision befogged when a man is shot down as he attempts to demonstrate that freedom should be more than a word which describes only the condition of privileged peoples of light skin?
Observers have commented that more alert police work by the law officers with the Meredith party could have prevented the shotgun attack. Mr. Katzenbach, the Attorney General of the U.S. has indicated that protection could have been better, although seemingly, he fails to recognize that the Department of Justice should have been more alert and vigilant.
Does not James Meredith deserve the same protection against possible disaster as Edward Cernan? Cut either one and he will bleed. When there is insufficient allowance for known hazards, there will be disaster paid for with human life. "The spirit of living creatures (must) be in the wheels" of the administration of justice and the protection of human rights, as well as in the engines and circuits of research and development in the National Space Agency.
Space for man on earth requires manpower, efficiency, money applied to the support of the basic value of the worth of man – every man, James Meredith as well as Edward Cernan. If there had been as many lives lost in space during the last ten years as there have been assassinations of civil rights workers in the same period, there would have been a volcanic eruption of widespread indignation such as no administration could have endured.
In the show, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER, Melinda says to Mark,
"A marriage of convenience is called that not because money is involved, but because love is not. Love is so very inconvenient." Love in the basic sense of good-will to others is not always convenient. It may interfere with comfortable prejudices; or love may require inconvenient commitments. There will be an ethics gap as long as persons are convinced that good will is more inconvenient than it is necessary.
Because a moral gap does exist, legislation is required to make it increasingly difficult for assassins and bigots to get away with their brutal crimes and cruel discrimination.
It is in such context that our Senators and Congressmen should be acting, not stalling, on the Civil Rights Bill of 1966.
In brief, the President's Bill provides (from Summary provided by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Our Unitarian Universalist Association, Commission on Religion and Race, is one of the cooperating organizations in The Leadership on Civil Rights):
"1) It is meant to prevent discrimination in the selection and service of state and federal juries where such discrimination is based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin or economic status;
2) It would provide additional means for facilitating the desegregation of public schools and other public facilities;
3) It would provide protection for Negroes and civil rights workers against any interference, by threats of violence, with the exercise of their constitutional rights in voting, education, housing, employment, jury service, travel, use of public facilities, public accommodations and federally supported programs.
4) It would prohibit, as a matter of national policy, all racial and religious discrimination in the sale and rental of housing."
In addition, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights urges such strengthening amendments as:
1) "the establishment of an Indemnification Board that will award damages [to] the victims of civil rights violence.
2) the enforcement of the fair housing provision by an administrative agency because of the enormous difficulties faced by individuals when attempting to enforce a grievance case.
3) Stronger, more specific measures to end jury discrimination.
4) And the extension of the equal employment section to state and local government employees.
At the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Dr. Martin Luther King reminded us that "legislation cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. By legislation I cannot force a man to love me, but I can keep him from lynching me and that's pretty important."
At the White House Conference on Civil Rights, just concluded, the civil rights leaders pledged an all-out effort to get the 1966 Civil Rights Act passed this Summer. "Urgency is the key" said Roy Wilkins. And he said this before James Meredith was felled by a shotgun blast. The House Judiciary Committee under the chairmanship of Emmanuel Celler is currently meeting in closed session discussing the bill. Some reports indicate that there is a need for those who favor the legislation to let their opinion be known to that committee as well as one's own Congressional representatives.
Some years ago, commenting on the exploits of the astronauts, Dr. Karl Menninger, one of the world's well-known psychiatrists, commented that humanity needs to view its problems from a new perspective and we may get that by looking at the world from space (Christian Century, 5/17/61). It is more accurate, probably, to acquire a new perspective by looking at the space in man.
By space in man, I mean our capacity to control ourselves; as man in space refers to our technical ability to control propulsion and navigation beyond the atmosphere of planet Earth. Without space in man, man in space may represent the prelude to catastrophe.
Of course when we enlarge the space in man, we will create areas of loneliness. When we seek out the facts, the partisans, who do not want their prejudices confused by facts, will leave us. When we seek by trial and error to improve our way, we will be deserted by those whose inner space is too small to admit error. To be reasonable is to be lonely, much of the time.
Space in man demands that we be idealistic in our goals and blunt in our expectations that not only can Eugene Cernan walk the cosmic ways, but also that James Meredith may be free to walk from Memphis to Jackson. We have an obligation to apply our resources and strength to goals so that not only may Earth-man visit planet Mars, but also that Earth-man in our nation may be free to live in his country anywhere and his finances will provide and according to his choice. Furthermore there is greater need to be enthusiastic in the widening of equality on earth than zealous for the expansion of interstellar rocketry. Not that space research experiments and voyages are unnecessary; such development is needed. But we are foolish if we forget that the best place to deploy the abundance of our wealth is planet Earth – here is the location for efforts for justice; and here the power of our decisions should create a fairer world for man.
Our destiny is best molded when [our] inner capacity and the strength of our feelings pushes our ideals from attractive vision to functioning reality. Like Ezekiel of old, we must demonstrate that in our marvelous devices and everyday ways, “the spirit of living creatures (is) in the wheels.”
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