Unitarian Universalist Principles: A View Of Widening Horizons

February 6, 1983
Lakeland

February 20, 1983
Port Charlotte

When a person belongs to a religious community where no creed is imposed, why devote two Sundays to considering revisions to the principles stated in the by-laws of the Unitarian Universalist Association? With the order of service, there has been included some of the affirmations of Universalists and Unitarians of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries as well as the principles stated when Unitarian Universalists consolidated in 1960; and one proposed revision, these with possible changes and refinements may be adopted in the next couple of years. These statements illustrate how the inevitable process of change has modified the beliefs commonly held by Unitarian Universalists. I believe the changes are a view of widening horizons. Two weeks from now I shall look at dimensions of depth – the plumb line.

Initially there must be one primary emphasis – the historic principles and affirmations have never been creeds – no one has ever been required to say, “Yes, I believe.” Always there has been what the Universalists call the “liberty clause,” sometimes phrased, “neither this nor any other statement shall be required as a creedal test.” This freedom principle is not only for the individual but churches and fellowships as well. Our local congregations are autonomous. As shown by the several unlike affirmations I read, many of our congregations prepared or adopted their own affirmations. Wednesday evening I quoted Marcel Proust, a sentence which I think illustrates why such high priority is placed on individual freedom of belief, “The Universe is true for all of us, but is different for each of us.”

It is this freedom, to disbelieve as well as believe, which contributes to the erroneous notion that Unitarian Universalists simply disbelieve anything anyone else believes. But you will notice that all the affirmations are positive, not negative.

My daughter, Marjorie, who lives in San Francisco, sent me a recent clipping from that city’s newspaper. A columnist had this item: “Tom Youngblood, attending First Unitarian Sunday services for the first time, was assured by a young regular, ‘You’ll love it here. The only thing they’re against is nuclear war.’”

Well, if that were our only proclamation, it would suffice for many. But my intention today is to maintain that the beliefs commonly held through more than 200 years, progressively, positively widened horizons of theology, ethics, and world-view.

First, basic is the search for truth – not the truth that our forbears believed, not the truth of a creed, but the truth as we shall come to it in our individual and shared experiences and reflections. We are guided by truth as an ancient tablet. A verse of James Russell Lowell’s hymn expresses the premise:

“New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth
They must upward still and onward
Who would keep abreast of truth.”

This search for truth has been affirmed.

p. 14 Unitarian, 1880 – In the freedom of the truth
p. 14 Unitarian, 1894 – To seek the truth of love

p. 15 Comm. Ch., 1930 – Unite the Church universal ... which seeks truth in freedom

15 Univ., 1933 – The quest of truth is its sacrament

1 Univ., 1935 – We avow our faith ... in the authority of truth known or to be known.

15 – Unit., 1944 – Discipleship to advancing truth

1960 – Bylaws – support the free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of religious fellowship.

1981 – Proposed – support the free and disciplined search for truth as the center of our religious community.

Those who recommend this revised wording suggest that “foundation” has an hierarchical connotation whereas center connotes heart and expansion. Community is a more inclusive word that fellowship. Such a change seems an improvement.

The second view that has widened is the theological horizon (it is fair to say that there are those who hold that this has been an astigmatic blurring – as with every change). Consider these sequences:

The Winchester Profession – Universalist (1790) stated “We believe there is one God, whose nature is love, revealed in our Lord Jesus Christ, by one holy spirit of grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.”

This statement embodied the central theological position of Universalists at that time. It was a radical position.... They proclaimed, if the nature of God was love, there could be no hell for the damned, because no child of God could be eternally damned. “No hell was the central position.”

Both Unitarians and Universalists in the 19th century affirmed the Fatherhood of God and the leadership of Jesus. Throughout the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries most Unitarians and Universalists considered themselves Christians. They usually attempted to make a primary distinction between the religions about Jesus and the teachings of Jesus. They were “liberal Christians.” Most did not disavow that description.

A 1915 Unitarian declaration said, “We believe in the ideal of human life which reveals itself in Jesus as love to God and love to man.”

The “Great Avowal” of the Universalist Church, 1935, stated, “we avow our faith in God as eternal and all-conquering love.” Thus both these statements describe God as an ideal human quality, not as the King of the Universe.

Then the 1960 statement “to cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity immemorially summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to humankind.”

This provision was the most exhaustively and heatedly debated issue of of our merger.

One proposed change is “Recognize our Judeo-Christian heritage as well as other traditions and seek lasting values and new insights.”

I can predict with considerable confidence that this will be the most controversial of all proposed revisions. It can be anticipated that there will be much highly charged orations about the rejection of the Deity by Unitarian Universalists. I, for one, [cannot] predict what changes, if any, there will be on this provision.

One could talk from now until the 4th of July about reasons and causes for the shifts in affirmations in 200 years in varieties of Unitarian Universalist thoughts and beliefs about the ideas of God and Jesus. Without exhausting the list of considerations ... :

The consequences of logic, reason, and the finding of science (geology, physics), psychology, sociology. These disciplines are not theologies, but there are always theological inferences and implications in the views advanced about the nature of the cosmos and human nature.

Universalists and Unitarians have been receptive to the profound implications from the historical studies of the Bible: the scholarly analyses of higher and lower criticism of this collection of books, more authors than there are books, have convinced most Unitarian Universalists that the Bible is literature, not revelation.

Then, too, over the last 130 years or so there has been increasing knowledge and appreciation of other world religions. Most of us here recognized that Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Parsees, others have sought truth in their own ways, guided by their ancient myths of creation, destiny and human nature. Their scriptures had a similar process of growth, change, editing and bias as have the scriptures of Jews and Christians. There are many paths to search for truth and warmth. If our theological trails and by-ways are for us, their trails and by-ways are for them. We seek to learn from them; and if they choose, learn from us.

Correlated with this, and to me, the brightest widened horizon, is the growth of a concern for all persons.

Implicit in the prime Universalist principle, that no one would be damned but all saved, is the belief that all are worth saving. As the 1790 Winchester Profession had it, the whole family of mankind would be restored to holiness and happiness. The older statements asserted belief in the Brotherhood of Man. The 1944 principle of Unitarian advance included “universal brotherhood undivided by nation, race, or creed.” The 1935 Universalist Washington statement asserted belief in the supreme worth of every human personality.

Within the memory of most of us was the recognition that to classify all humans as part of the “brotherhood of man” was an expression of the male bias and a continuation of the ages-old put-down of women. While there were many women who were Universalist ministers in the 19th century, and some Unitarian, there was a male bias. In the church of my youth, the church board was always entirely male. Organizations named “Women’s Auxiliary” were not uncommon. In 1965 I became minister of a Unitarian church whose just-elected President, Margaret Heinold, was the first woman president, although the church had been organized since 1890. Two theological schools I attended never had a woman on the faculty.

Fortunately, although belatedly, this has been changing. More and more women are not only qualifying for our ministry, but are being chosen by Unitarian Universalist congregations. Our present UUA moderator, Sandy Caron, is a woman re-elected to a second term. The Study Commission comments, “Feminism is seen by many in our day as presenting a challenge to theological and social thinking as radical as that of humanism to traditional theism a few decades ago, as that of universal theism to historic Christianity at the turn of the last century, or as Protestantism to the medieval Catholic synthesis in the 16th century. We are being called upon to consider a quantum shift in our perspective on what it means to be human, female and male.”

This is addressed in proposed revisions. One revision adds the principle, “Recognize the importance of equality among women and men.”

In addressing our consciousness of the whole world, instead of just ideas of brotherhood, a revision phrases it, “strive for a world community of love, justice, and peace.”

One thing more, one revision adds, “Acknowledge our responsibility to cherish earth and its resources.” This too is a late arrival in our principles but many Unitarian Universalists have been conscious and active in conservation concerns. The awareness has been growing that by carelessness, greed, and apathy, the air, water, earth could become the poison potions of humankind unless vigilance and outcry are able to place more and more limits on pollution and depletion of the resources of our planet Earth. Many believe this should be plainly stated in our purposes and principles.

I could go on, but let me conclude today with a paragraph from Ray Jones, Chair of the Purposes and Principles,

“This UUA and its constituent societies are our spiritual home. They have been a place of our growing up, they have discovered new and deep roots for us in the birthright heritage of humankind, and they have lent credibility to our basic trust in the good that is possible for us personally and in society, if we are both honest and caring. We intend that this free, challenging, and supporting community shall live and grow.”

Is Questioning Enough?

January 1983
Lakeland
Port Charlotte

February 13, 1983
Tampa

Comedian Mort Sahl said satirically, “If you’re a bigot and want to drive a Unitarian Universalist out of your neighborhood, burn a question mark on his lawn.” In another area of the country it is reported that in response to many bumper stickers proclaiming, “Honk if you love Jesus,” some Unitarian Universalists adorn their bumpers with “Honk of you’re not sure.”

We Unitarian Universalists place much reliance on the right to question any proposition offered for our consideration. We take as basic propositions that no creed is sufficiently authoritative that we may not challenge it; no doctrine so hallowed that we may not question it; no principle so pure that we may not investigate its foundation. “To question is to answer” is another of our bumper stickers. “Living in the Questions” is a fine book written by Ralph Helverson (W. Palm Beach). We are in the tradition of Socrates, who pursued constant questioning as a means of sifting truth from falsehood; the logical from the illogical, the important from the trivial.

We have also designated our religious approach as “the religion of the inquiring mind.” As Ed Ritchie so ably developed a couple of weeks ago, “the search shall make you free,” Duncan Howlett, one of our distinguished ministers, in his superior book, THE CRITICAL WAY IN RELIGION, writes (p. 12),

“... experience has shown again and again that the supposed certainties of one generation of religious leaders are frequently modified and often abandoned outright by the leaders of the next. Much as we may yearn for certitude, continuous inquiry, not finality, seems to be our lot when it comes to the ultimate questions.

“While the critical way in religion has never really been identified, its presence has been sensed by many writers. Its essential character has sometimes been grasped, but for the most part it has been misunderstood and very often caricatured. Ideas associated with the critical way in religion include heresy, nonconformity, infidelity, dissent, protest, skepticism, positivism, liberalism, rationalism, agnosticism, atheism, humanism, secularism, ..., freethinking, the Enlightenment. Many of these terms originated as epithets. Many are epithets still. Consider, for example, the fact that ‘thinker’ is an honored designation to apply to anyone. ‘Free’ is one of the most precious words in the language. Yet, ‘freethinker,’ a term often applied to those of an independent mind in religion even today bears within it the sting of opprobrium and derision.

“The critical way in religion is not encompassed by any of the foregoing terms. Each is too narrow, and most involve elements the critical tradition could not tolerate. How, then, is it to be described? It involves concepts like the following:

Freedom, tolerance, and self-reliance.
Inquiry, experimentation, and testing;
Change, progress, growth and evolution
Uncertainty and probability
Unity and universality.
Consistency, integrity, and objectivity.”

I believe that summary; have said it many times in my own way, although not as clearly or concisely.

Nevertheless, this topic today “Is Questioning Enough?”.... Some 31 or 32 years ago I attended a gathering of Universalist ministers (before merger) at a resort hotel in Western Pennsylvania (the off-season). It was a time when what we now call “group process” was in its infancy. [CJW note: only a few had experience with it “Beth-el”. Carl Rogers’ methods in counseling – non-directive] A qualified resource person from a large N.Y. university was engaged to facilitate the involvement.

He used the question method, and succeeded in stirring us to many inquiries about our profession, our churches, our angers, complacencies, goals, values. The leader was more concerned about our descriptions of ourselves and our roles than he was to provide us with prescriptions to achieve more effective ways of churchmanship. His style, a good one, but unappreciated by many at the time, was to respond by turning the question back to the questioner.

At the concluding session, one of our older ministers who had not been pleased with the process got to his feet, face hostile in posture, and in his thunderous pulpit bass, “I came with questions, I’m going away with questions, all I’ve heard is questions when what came for and what I need is answers!” It didn’t help his blood pressure at all when the professional group leader replied, “you are saying you need answers – that is a rich and fruitful suggestion.”

Is questioning enough? In a Unitarian Universalist group, in the sense that you will be presented with certainties, you will not be handed them on a doctrinal, revealed, religious, political, psychological platter. I trust that will never happen. You have to be exposed not only to inquiries but also convictions. But those inquiries and convictions are not a handed down edict or a party line. Thus, in what you hear and experience in a Unitarian Universalist group, yes, questioning is enough.

But in an important way, questioning is not enough. That way is for my/your own self. I, you, have a need to come to some functioning conclusions of our own, conclusions that may hardly ever be certainties. Such conclusions or choices must be open to new insights and experience that will arrive later. But for an integrated self, a maturing self, a growing self, or an autonomous self, each needs to respond to the questions – at least to oneself, if not publicly proclaimed.

It has been my experience that occasionally through the years I will encounter a person who is a neurotic questioner.

By that I mean that I have observed such persons over a period of time asking questions, the same questions, usually with no indication that the questioner has wrestled with the question. It is as though they were permanently halted at the red light of their own questions and never saw the green light which would permit them to advance.

Charles Dickens, that keen and sensitive observer of his life and times, illustrates this in the character Mr. Dick in DAVID COPPERFIELD. Mr. Dick, a gentle but hapless man, is befriended by Aunt Betsy Trotwood. Mr. Dick has been working on a manuscript, a “memorial” as he calls it to Lord somebody or other, but is stymied by King Charles’ head, the monarch who was executed in the Puritan Revolution. Every time Mr. Dick sits down with his quill pens and ink, he makes no progress because of his obsession with King Charles’ head. Mr. Dick asks, but never can answer, what happened to King Charles’ mind when he was beheaded? “Do I now have King Charles’ mind?” Mr. Dick asks continuously – never gets the manuscript finished – never makes progress on it. He was blocked by his own irresolute and irrelevant questioning.

As Charles Morris (THE OPEN SELF, p. 13) reminds us, we all have to deal with our own irrationalities – anxieties, drives, passions, dislikes, joys, and he writes, “To be rational is simply to accept ideas and ideals after critical reflection, after careful consideration of what would follow from the acceptance of a given idea or ideal.”

I respond to the way Frances Wicks described the process (THE INNER WORLD OF CHOICE, xi),

“There is a cycle which we all experience:

1)the maintenance of an established system of values and of action (commonly implanted by parents), which, if prolonged beyond its limited season of utility and fruitfulness, will not uncommonly result in zestless repetition, rigidity, stagnation, apathy, and discontent;
2)the emergence of a new potentiality, value, opportunity, or challenge, which, being opposed by the established system, generates
3)an internal conflict, a conflict, the author insists, that should be faced and settled by a conscious choice for which the chooser takes personal responsibility. As a rule, only a choice that favors the embracement and incorporation of the new potentiality will result in
4)a beneficial enlargement and reconstruction of the self ... that is attended by an illuminating extension of consciousness.

“In other briefer terms the successive phases are

a restricted sameness (thesis)
a birth of novelty (antithesis) – causing conflict, temporary or prolonged, of which the happiest issue is
synthesis – establishing a new level of being.

“Seldom is this process easy or comfortable. With the poet’s insight and imagination, May Sarton writes:

‘We must go down into the dungeons of the heart,
To the dark places where the modern mind imprisons
All that is not defined and thought apart.
We must let out the terrible creative visions....
Return to the most human, nothing less
Will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart,
The torn mind, to accept the whole of its duress,
And pierced with anguish, at last act for love.’”

We act out many roles in society – occupational, parental, political, religious, friendship. Inevitably we have responsibilities to others because each of us is a human among humans. Because I am a self (and you), I am responsible for my self. You are responsible for your self. Socrates said, “Know thyself.” But also that can be extended – trust thyself. Be thyself. And just questioning is not enough to struggle to that level of being.

Michelangelo was a poet as well as, perhaps, the most gifted sculptor and painter of them all. He wrote about the task of the sculptor, lines which are also a powerful insight into knowing and trusting ourselves:

“The best of artists has
that thought alone
which is contained within
the marble shell;
The sculptor’s hand only
can break the spell
to free the figures
slumbering in the stone.”

(Quoted by Rene Dubos)

[CJW note: Picture of self – the sculptor is you – me.]

If I had to put briefly all I have been trying to say I would quote the Zen master who said,

“Not knowing how near the
truth is
People seek it far away:
What a pity.”

And also, Langston Hughes:

“When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know you have turned
All the corners that are left.”

Preparing for 1984

January 2, 1983
Lakeland
Port Charlotte

Introduction:
George Orwell – Biographical Comments

After preparing my presentation on 1984, it occurred to me that George Orwell, the man, the writer, his personal history would be a help to my understanding, and perhaps to yours.

He was born in India in 1903, child of a British civil servant. The child and his sister were taken to England following a usual custom for rearing and education in the mother country. His real name was Eric Blair and he did not adopt his pen name, George Orwell, until rather late in his life.

When he was eight years old he was placed in a boarding school, St. Cyprians, where he was a student until the age of 13. Some commentators on his life felt that St. Cyprians was an experience that strongly influenced his life-long distrust of power and authority. The education system at St. Cyprians was one of continuous caning even for trivial things, surveillance (Big Brother is watching you) – even letters sent home to parents. The food, housing, and sanitation at St. Cyprians were wretched. [CJW note: proprietors “build character”]

He did well enough in his studies to qualify in a competitive examination for Eton. At Eton, he did not do well enough to qualify for college. It was not that he was idle or wasted his time. He was more interested in reading an studying subjects outside the curriculum. Particularly, he found his interest in socialist ideas, reading such non-conformist thinkers as G.B. Shaw, the Webbs, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and earlier radical thinkers.

Following Eton, there was little opportunity in England for the impoverished son of a middle class family. He took exams for foreign civil service and qualified. He was assigned to Burma, where he served in several posts, including Rangoon and Mandalay.

After a few years, he resigned, appalled and disgusted at the racialism, despotism, attitudes, and practices of the British Imperial system. The discrimination, injustice, and cruelty toward the indigenous Burmese deeply impressed him. [CJW note: Epigram: “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom he destroys.”]

So he returned, determined to be a writer. He spent poverty-stricken years, first in Paris and then in England, seldom getting anything published. At first he was not a good writer – he had to learn his craft by keeping at it in spite of the growing pile of rejection slips.

In 1937, Orwell, still Eric Blair, went to Spain to write about the Civil War and stayed to take part, joining the Republican militia. At the time, Orwell preferred the Communist party. But he became thoroughly disillusioned. He found that the Communist party did not favor real revolution of the workers. Similarly he had nothing but contempt, horror, and disgust for the Franco forces, helped as they were by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

He had been wounded, shot in the throat in trenches dug for shorter men. He was 6’4” and neglected to duck down. His health, never very robust, was bad – the TB of which he was to die was in its early stages.

So he returned to England. In order to continue his so-far unsuccessful writing career, he was a part-time teacher, bookstore worker, and what not. There came some literary recognition. [CJW note: ardently against Nazism, tried to enlist – health] His stories of his Asian period, BURMESE DAYS, and THE STORY OF A HANGING, were published. In order not to embarrass his family, he took the pen name George Orwell. [CJW note: “such were the joys”]

But he remained an impoverished writer until his ANIMAL FARM was published. This is a savage parody of Stalinistic Communism and was a best-seller, particularly in the United States. You remember the famous phrase from that, “all are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

He was on his deathbed when 1984 became a best-seller. He never lived to enjoy the wealth from its huge sales, dying at the age of 46.

Such was the man who wrote 1984.

He remained true to his socialist beliefs, always insisting that both equality and liberty were not only possable, but essential. He feared dictatorships, based on his experiences in Burma and Spain as well as Nazism. In a review of a book on the Russian government, he wrote (BIO, p. 247):

“The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of ‘human nature,’ which as a matter of course, desired liberty. But we cannot be certain that ‘human nature’ is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press – censorship, standardized education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass suggestion is a science of the last 20 years, and we do not know yet how successful it will be.”

As a final quotation from Orwell, and pertinent to preparing for 1984, he said once in response to savage criticism from the Communist left on his ANIMAL FARM:

“Liberty is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Sermon Starts Here:

In my time there is no other literary work which has so grasped the horrors of total tyranny than George Orwell’s novel 1984. When it was first published in 1949, one reviewer wrote that it was “timely as the label on a poison bottle.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote “the most powerful and terrifying novel I have read in years, Orwell’s brilliant and despairing glimpse into the totalitarian future plumbs the depths of human pride and degradation more vividly than anything since Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.”

As we enter the early stages of 1983, I am taking a look at Orwell’s 1984. His despairing prophecies have proved inaccurate. The all-encompassing tyranny will not happen here – at least in 1984. But was he wrong only in dating the book prematurely? Re-reading 1984 has made me particularly sensitive to the values I believe most Unitarian Universalists hold as a priority – freedom and human dignity. Is 1984 a serious warning or Orwell’s foolish and fearful fantasy?

1984 is a dismal, totally oppressed world of food shortages, miserable housing, and continuous war. There are three superpowers in the world – Oceania (the British Isles and America), Eurasia (present Europe and the Soviet Union), and East Asia (China, Japan, Korea). [CJW note: neo-Bolshevism, obliteration of the self] Winston Smith, the central character of 1984, lives in London which is part of Ingsoc (English socialism), one of the provinces of Oceania. Oceania is at war always with Eurasia or East Asia. The war is always centered for control of what we know as the Near East – the Arabian countries and India.

The enemy changes without notice. One moment, Oceania is at war with Eurasia, next East Asia. As all information is strictly controlled, occasionally the thought occurs to Smith that there is no war at all. The war may be a propaganda device to justify cruel repression and severe shortages.

The population in Ingsoc is divided into the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proles – the Proletarians. The latter are little more than beasts of burden doing the heavy work. They are controlled by daily hate sessions against the enemy. They are also diverted from rebellious ideas by TV amusements, beer, football, and gambling.

The Inner Party controls completely. Big Brother is the ruler. He is constantly pictured on posters [and] the TV screen with the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you.” Big brother face is strong, dominating, attractive, a man in his late forties. But does he exist? Winston Smith wonders this, as no one seems to have ever seen Big Brother in person. Smith does not even know anyone in the Inner Party and does not inquire. No one inquires because the Thought Police are omnipresent, alert for the smallest signs of non-conformity. Non-conformity is thought crime and the penalty for thought crime is death, after excruciating torture.

The Party has three main slogans constantly drummed into the people:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Surveillance is constant. Every residence has a TV, even as we do, with one crucial difference. In 1984, the “telescreen” cannot be turned off and it is two-way. One never knows when one is being watched, when the telescreen is recording what one is reading or writing.

The government of Big Brother is divided into four ministries:

The Ministry of Truth – responsible for news (propaganda), entertainment, education, and the fine arts
The Ministry of Peace – which concerns itself with war
The Ministry of Love – which maintains law and order, thought control and administers torture, brainwashing, executions
The Ministry of Plenty – which is responsible for economic affairs and telling lies about the constant shortages of goods and services.

Winston Smith works for the Records department of the Ministry of Truth. He is one of thousands of minor bureaucrats whose task is to alter and revise events and history, to erase from the records someone whom the Inner Party has decided to make a non-person, to change all names and places when the Inner Party sends word that the war is with Eurasia, not East Asia, or vice versa. Any event may be revised:

“Who controls the past
Controls the future
Who controls the present
Controls the past.”

Winston Smith has memories of a different age, contrives to read forbidden books, and is betrayed by someone he thought sympathetic, but who actually was a member of the Thought Police.

In the end, after cruel torture and sophisticated and demonic mind control, Smith is brainwashed. The final lines of the book:

“He gazed up at the enormous face [of Big Brother]. Forty hears it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Now in titling this talk, “Preparing for 1984,” you may wonder if I fear that before 24 months have ticked off, Big Brother will rule our lives, actions, thoughts. No, I do not. No thought police have knocked on my door recently. I speak my thoughts freely and publicly as you do and may. We have press, TV, radio uncontrolled in its expressions by the government. Those who own the media may print, picture, and say whatever they choose. What they choose to communicate, however, is subject to other controls, overt and subtle – they are profit-making enterprises, except for PBS and NPR. Profit-making enterprises are concerned not only with reporting and editorials, but with circulation, advertising and their percent of the viewing audience. But that’s another story, and we do have available other sources of information if we choose to seek them out.

If we maintain our vigilance to halt inroads on the 1st Amendment that would limit our freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, then the horrors of Orwell’s 1984 will not happen in this country. Such vigilance is our task and responsibility.

A considerable obligation in such vigilance is not to go-along on programmed turnabouts of the meaning of words. Words and phrases mean what they indicate. I believe one of our most precious possessions is the English language. Freedom, liberty, parliament, representative democracy, the people’s right to choose are value words which should not be demeaned or bastardized to the end that they will fade into insignificance.

There is a lighter side to this. Watching some commercials and their claims, I never know whether to be hilariously amused or outraged.

A clipping I have is both amusing and instructive:

“A staffer at the World Council of Churches provided a glossary that is to be of help in bureaucracies, be they sacred or secular. It includes, “Potential for growth – You will be offered a low starting wage. Innovative – Can you straighten out the mess the last person left? To perform general duties – The coffee had better be good, and you may have to edit a magazine. Conscientious – Go easy on the photocopying machine. Ability to work in a team – The last person who held this job had a nervous breakdown. Willing to learn – You will be offered a low starting wage. Imaginative – Imagine that the job is terrific. Enthusiastic – The work would bore a chimpanzee.” (One World)

However, there is, in my view, a much more serious aspect. This talk began germinating in my thoughts when our President announced that he was re-naming the MX nuclear missile “The Peacekeeper.” Renaming does not change the reality that it is a nuclear weapon of war. Did you see the cartoon in THE LEDGER, Dec. 6th? [shows political cartoon of missile named Peacekeeper, submarine named Gandhi, tank named Plowshare, and fighter jet named Heavenly Messenger]

I have the uneasy feeling that chemical weapons may be renamed “angelic clouds” and germ warfare, “bacterial blessing.” After substituting “revenue enhancement” for tax increase and “user fee” for gasoline tax, the turnabouts in meaning seem endless. Two derivatives of Murphy’s Law can be recalled. First, Leahy’s Law: “If a thing is done wrong often enough, it becomes right.” Second, Maier’s Law: “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.”

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a donkey have? 5? No, 4 – calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg. (Lincoln - folk wisdom of a wiser and greater President).

One of the chilling events in George Orwell’s 1984 was the plan of the Inner party to replace English with what was named Newspeak. Orwell writes (p. 303), “the purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Much more necessary to us is the plain statement Jesus is reported to have said in the Sermon on the Mount, “But let your communication be ‘yea, yea’ or ‘nay, nay.’” (Matthew 5/37)

Or at greater length, the enduring advice Hamlet gave to the players (Act II, Sc. 2). Part of what Shakespeare put in Hamlet’s mouth:

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as Leif the town crier spoke my lines ....

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action ....

“And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.”

George Orwell was wrong in posting 1984 as a year in which totalitarian cruelty was entirely in command in Great Britain and the Americas. Many of the events he narrated in his novel did not happen. Writing in 1949, he predicted an atomic war in the 1950s – a war which led to 3 Super Powers, all totalitarian. Now it seems uncertain, rather, unlikely, that there could be enough survivors from a nuclear war to form even totalitarian states.

A French nobleman visiting Russia noted, “It is a government in which the government says what it pleases, because it alone has the right to speak.” That was in 1839. (See Hugh Thomas, HISTORY, p. 534). [CJW note: tradition – different]

But do not blithely assume that it can’t happen here. It can if we are docile, let “experts” in the Pentagon, White House, and conservative think tanks do our thinking for us and rest placidly under the assumption that government and military experts know best. From George Orwell’s biography, p. 265, Orwell’s diary entry:

“Stephen Spender said to me recently, ‘Don’t you feel that any time during the last ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?’ Where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events but in the power to grasp what KIND of world we are living in. At any rate, I have known since about 1931 that the future must be catastrophic.”

Unitarian Universalism has been called a religion of “words,” whereas orthodox Christianity is “The Word.” Well, if that’s a criticism, it’s one I accept gladly.

Thomas Paine’s words, Thomas Jefferson’s words, James Madison’s words, Abraham Lincoln’s words, were born of the struggle for freedom and the experience shaped those words and phrases. Our obligation is to maintain the values and do our best to prevent distortion of their meanings.

The Free Mind

1982
Lakeland

In order to seek the truth, the mind must be free. This summer I visited Monticello, Jefferson’s beloved home. I stood by the iron gates enclosing the cemetery near the tombstone. Chiseled on the stone were the two things he wanted [to be remembered for]: author of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of the University of Virginia. He wanted no mention of his being a 2-term President of the United States, Secretary of State, Ambassador to France, Governor of Virginia.

He wanted to be remembered for his unwavering belief in freedom; freedom requires the free mind. Jefferson, writing to a friend in 1820 concerning his difficult task of establishing the University of Virginia, said, “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left to combat it.” (Malone, SAGE OF MONTICELLO, pp. 17-18)

A few years earlier he had remarked, “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

That we believe. To maintain the free mind is more difficult than in Jefferson’s day. We face an overload of information plus considerable distraction. We have newspapers, radio, T.V., but still it is difficult to sort fact from fancy, to distinguish between press releases and authentic reporting. The distractions – sports, comedies, commercials. Griping is pointless – if the reading, viewing, listening public demanded more solid reporting at depth they would make that known in unmistakable ways.

No sterner demands are placed on those who value free inquiry. Among the many joys and benefits I have received as a life-long Unitarian Universalist is the exploration of serious ideas and issues to the end that free minds will become, increasingly, informed minds.

A sociologist, Baltzell (PURITAN BOSTON AND QUAKER PHILADELPHIA, p. 247) describes the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the best educated community the world has known before or since – “a thinking community.”

There are many ways in which we fall short, but if we do not relax our vigilance to keep the mind free and inquiry pursued, then we may qualify as a thinking community like our forebears in liberal religion.

Truth

Unitarian Universalists support the free and disciplined search for truth as a foundation of religious fellowship. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Most religions stake claim to all or at least part of the truth. These claims may be based on a holy book, or a divine savior, an infallible church or historic doctrine. But religions do not agree (never have) what the truth is or how we may discover it.

What is truth? How are we to distinguish truth from falsehood? There are guideposts. Protagoras of ancient Greece said in a famous maxim, “Man is the measure of all things.” I believe he meant that in all choices involving truth or falsehood, we have no guides but ourselves and our shared human experience past and present. Even if one may be convinced that the source of ideas is divinely super-natural, invariably these ideas are mediated through someone’s human experience, human expression, and human interpretation. Our values are human and must be. Our scales are human systems, inevitably.

There are tests and measures of truth:

What do we observe? Scientific measurements are accurate enough that they can be deemed precise. The readings on scales, dials, test tubes, and tools enable us to say this is so, or this is not so.

In another dimension of life, where no scientific instruments apply, we can observe relatedness. There is a moral or ethical relatedness. It is good to love and bad to hate. That is a truth we can observe in our own lives, the lives of those around us, and history confirms it.

Truth should be coherent. Does it cohere with what is real? There should be no unexplainable contradictions between two propositions, both of which are believed to be true.

We also affirm that truth is to be known. New truths constantly emerge. New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth. Of course that means that what we believe today may tomorrow prove to be untrue or a partial truth. Because of the incomplete nature of any claim to truth, we may have to alter our premises and conclusions. But the possibility of error should not dismay us. Someone remarked, “Last week I saw a wonderful man who had not made a mistake in 4000 years. He was a mummy in a glass case in a museum.”

Jesus: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

DeRougement: “Ye shall seek the truth and the quest shall make you free.”

Universality

If service is the test of religion, then the measures of creed and doctrine become secondary. There are many cultures, many religions, each with sacred books and holy men and women; each with ritual celebrations that may seem strange and bizarre to the outsider.

The visible forms of religion are like fashions in clothing or styles in architecture. There are differences between north and south, near-East and far-East, Latin and Greek, Anglican and non-conformist, conservative and liberal.

Moslem children, squatting in the shade, monotonously chant the verses of the Koran until their teacher is sure that the sacred words are indelibly etched into their memories. This is religion.

Holy men wash their scrawny bodies in the water of the Ganges as they witness the eclipse of the sun. To them this is a cosmic struggle between supernatural beings. This is religion.

In Vatican Square thousands of devout Catholics gather to receive the blessing of the bishop they believe to be the Vicar of Christ. Millions of their fellow Roman Catholics believe it their duty to witness a miracle weekly: the miracle of the Mass. This is religion.

Quakers gather in rooms where bare furnishings are a sharp contrast to the ornaments and artistic splendor of the Cathedral or the Mosque. In Quaker worship, no priest chants a ritual, no host is given to the faithful, but this too is religion.

The American Indian stomps rhythmically in a ritual corn dance in Southwest United States. In the south-eastern mountains of our land, religions persons of Anglo-Saxon inheritance believe literally those words in the Gospel of Mark, (16/18), “They shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” So they handle rattlesnakes and drink poison in religious ecstasy.

These unlike expressions of religion are not true for me. But, when true for them, I have no quarrel, no wish to proselytize. The peoples of the earth are one human family. From a theological standpoint there are no damned; no special number saved.

The differing ceremonies deserve respect even when there is no acquiescence in belief. Never in history has any one religion been able to claim all the good people. Never have all the bad people been numbered in any one religion.

By whatever path another seeks the highest value or one’s God, he/she merits respect due the worth and dignity which is the birthright of every human under any sky and in every hall of worship.

All human beings deserve the right and privilege to choose their own path to the truth. All humankind are worth saving here on earth, no matter which gods, if any, they choose to worship.

Service

There is more needed than the search for truth and the free mind. The test of religion is service of human needs. Again, let me quote Jefferson. Writing to John Adams in the latter years of both of their lives, Jefferson mentioned that he considered his religion a private affair and that anyone who wanted to know about it must find evidence in the life he lived, saying “If that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which regulated it cannot be a bad one.”

However one may describe one’s religious doctrine or rituals, the test of that religion is service.

Two instances stimulated by the Good Samaritan parable – which tells us nothing about his religious beliefs or the beliefs of the wounded traveler.

The Good Samaritan acted as a nurse and the important matter was the care of the stricken man, not his religion. I’m reminded of two other nurses.

One was Florence Nightingale, a Unitarian. She was not particularly popular, but as her biographer, Woodham Smith, wrote, that in the course of the wretched Crimean War, two figures became transformed:

“Never again would the British soldier be ranked as a drunken brute, the scum of the earth. He was now a symbol of courage, loyalty, and endurance, not a disgrace, but a source of pride. Florence Nightingale taught officers to treat the soldiers as Christian men. Never again would the picture of a nurse on the battlefield be a tipsy, promiscuous harridan. Miss Nightingale had stamped the profession of nursing with her own image.”

Florence Nightingale feared she had been a failure, but the lady with the lamp brought about a revolution. She passed the test with high grades.

Another nurse was Clara Barton, a Universalist founder of the American Red Cross.

A New York Times book reviewer remarked, “Hell hath no future like a woman with an idea.” Clara Barton’s battlefield nursing in the Civil War, her determination to ease suffering and to alleviate the hardships caused by disaster need no re-telling this year. The long story of the struggles of the beginnings of the International Red Cross, and the American Red Cross, the wide range of its activities today ....

Clara Barton has been dead 65 years, yet her name is still honored. On the fields of her family homestead, near the lovely little Universalist church where she and her family worshiped, the Association of Universalist Women established the camps for diabetic children (now carried on by the UUWF). Years ago, children with diabetes did not have the years of life given to them that most of us have. Dr. Joslin’s case studies demonstrate that from 1897 to 1914, children nine years of age and under lived an average of fifteen months when they became afflicted with diabetes. Now, because of insulin, because of the regular program of balanced food, exercise, and testing which children learned at Clara Barton and Ellio Joslin Camps, and other camps all over the world which have been modeled on the successful example at Clara Barton birthplace, this life expectancy has been prolonged by twenty-fold. Each year sees a lengthening of precious time to the diabetic. This is the test of religion.

Countless persons, many of you, meet the test of religion by a helping hand in ways that will never be known. Also, we can play a part in the test of religion by our support of the UUSC or numerous other human need agencies which can perform service organizationally which we cannot achieve individually.

In 1917 the Universalist convention adopted a Declaration of social principles still pertinent: “While in no wise minimizing the responsibility of the individual for his own life, we denounce as superstition the teaching that men are led into sin by inherent depravity and by devils of an unseen world; but we hold it to be self-evident that mankind is led into sin by evil surroundings, by the evils of unjust social and economic conditions.... We conclude also that democracy is not only an inherent right, but also a divinely imposed duty. We find that none of us liveth or dieth to himself, and that true men and women should consider nothing foreign to them which is common to humanity.”

Service is the test of religion.

A Reminiscence of Cliches

1979 (but filed under 1982)
Lakeland

I am not sure [whether] I have coined an original collective noun in such a title. There is something about the collective noun which increases my delight with language:

an exultation of larks
a covey of quail
a pride of lions
a flight of eagles
a herd of cattle
a fleet of ships

A “reminiscence of cliches” has occurred to me during past few months when I have reflected from time to time that 1979 is the 50th anniversary of my graduation from high school.

When I was a high school student, one of the weekly routine events was the Monday morning assembly. All students of the upper three classes would walk wearily into the auditorium for 55 minutes of unsurprise. I use “unsurprise” because almost always the assembly program consisted of the vice-principal introducing a local or visiting clergyman who would consume most of the period exhorting us. Sometimes, but not always, the speech would be preceded by a musical selection rendered (I use the word advisedly) by our less-than-superior high school orchestra. I said we would wearily walk because we could count on those preachers to tell us to be good and have purpose. The striking and authentic differences of religious belief were usually smoothed over with a few superficial sentences. Then the speaker, with resonant voice and dramatic gestures, would tell us a story which, almost always, the previous week’s speaker had told. Sometimes we hadn’t heard the same story for two weeks. Politely, but painfully, we would listen to the morals and manners of the stone-masons and the cathedral, the boys and the hermit, and the sailors and the Amazon.

In order that you may share something of the ennui we felt so many years ago, let me regale you with three of these tales (although I have another reason than just to decorate our service with old chestnuts).

During the Middle Ages, when many European communities devoted centuries of labor to building the great Gothic cathedrals, a clerk approached three stone-masons separately, asking each the same question, “What are you doing here?”

The first stone mason answered, “I work from dawn to dusk so that I may buy bread to keep alive, and wine to help me forget how miserable life is.”

The second responded, “I work to provide my wife and children food to eat and a hut to live in.”

The third stone mason asserted, “I am building a cathedral.”

Then the speaker would elaborate considerably, each supplying different trimmings on the theme that life can be good, better, or best. It is good to be alone, even if one’s goals are but food and drink. It is better to think of others – one’s family and its needs. It is best when one not only has these values, but also a great cause for which to work – a cathedral to be built, a purpose beyond self and family.

That story was re-treaded, again, and again, and again.

In a mountain cave that overlooked a village on a plain lived an aged hermit, who was reputed to be the wisest of men. The villagers believed that the hermit could always give the right answer to any question.

A group of boys, knowing the reputation of the hermit, determined to ask a question to which the hermit would not be able to give the right answer. So they conspired among themselves: “We will catch a tiny bird. One of us will hold it cupped in his hands and concealed from view. Then we will ask the hermit, “tell us, wise man, whether what is in his hands is alive or dead?” The boys figured that if the hermit said “it is dead,” the boy would open his hands and the bird would fly away. If the hermit answered, “it is alive,” quickly the hands would squeeze, crushing the life from the bird, thus showing the hermit that his answer was wrong, that there was not life, but death.

So they caught a little bird and climbed the mountain. When the hermit greeted them, they pointed to the little boy with the bird concealed in his cupped hands and chorused, “Tell us, o seer, is it living or dead?” The wise hermit looked at their clever smiles and anticipatory glee; then after a long pause said to the boy who held the bird, “the answer is in your hands.”

Not only was this a well-worn story, trotted out in assemblies and young people’s meetings, but also years later when I arrived at theological school and went to chapel for preaching class, the student preaching concluded with the story of the boys, the bird, and the hermit.

And, God help me, I have used the story, although I make a tentative promise never to do so again.

Then there is that chestnut about the Amazon River, the mouth of which is so vast that it cannot be distinguished from the ocean.

A group of sailors whose ship had gone down in a storm had for many days been drifting in a life boat. Because drinking water had long since been consumed, the weakened survivors would soon die from thirst.

Then a vessel was sighted. Shirts were waived on the end of oars; they were seen and the vessel changed course to reach the lifeboat.

As soon as they were in earshot, the thirsty sailors shouted “help, help, we die from thirst!” And the captain shouted, “put down your buckets where you are.” They did and were wonderfully surprised to find the water fresh and sweet, for this was not the salt ocean, but the Amazon River. They had no need to suffer if they had just put down their buckets where they were.

This story was usually the prelude to the advice that we students did not need to travel thousands of miles to find new worlds to conquer, but could find rewards and satisfactions right where we were in our city, our school, our street.

I have other reminiscences of cliches – aged chestnuts which have a mellow patina - “The drunken tourist in the monastery,” or “the carpenter who fooled his boss.” But enough is enough. Too many chestnuts create digestion problems.

The illustration, captivating or corny, to make moral or theological points, is as old as the first preacher and predictably present in every sermon. Without illustration, poem, parable, anecdote, few speakers would have the resources to chew away at a topic for more than 10 minutes and keep their audience at all.

I’ll illustrate my point about illustrations with an illustration. One of the stories that circulates about the reputation of NYC (“Fun City”) is that a newcomer was advised that if he should happen to be in trouble he should yell “fire,” not “help.” A call for help could be ignored, but people flock to a fire in Fun City. Sometimes sermons too are better when making points by [misdirection].

Now this is not a short course in homiletics. If it were, you could say, “You need it, preacher – we don’t.”

But looking back, my “reminiscence of cliches,” stories stale and hackneyed, I became aware that these were all I recalled about those speeches. The stories remained; the abstract contents forgotten.

These old chestnuts had something in common which has, for me, increased in meaning through all these years. Cathedral builders and shipwrecked sailors, boys and hermit, were stories or parables centered in the human condition. Work, bread, survival, meaning, and responsibility – what can I believe about life? Why must I pursue clues to the meaning of existence? Because I am human, what must I do?

I have a clipping in my Halloween file. Answering the doorbell, the owner was greeted “trick or treat” by a little girl, beautifully costumed, but unmasked. As the child opened her paper sack to stow away the treat, her mask was seen in the bag. “Why don’t you wear it?” In a tiny voice, hardly bigger than she and with a trace of whimper, the tot confided, “I’m scared of it.”

Is that a parable of the human condition? We’re frightened by the masks we wear.

To me, there has always been zest in Unitarian Universalist religion – in the exhilaration which comes when one discards old belief patterns which usually were resented as well as disbelieved. But one of the burdens of a religion of search is that when as one learns more about the human condition, one becomes aware of its fantastic inconsistencies. Is it not amazing, if not appalling, that two types of large expenditures cause little controversy – the billions spent to make more efficient and deadlier weapons and the millions for medical research? Is there not a huge inconsistency? Is it because we are too much like the first two stone masons? Is it because we fail to put down our buckets where we are? Is it because we fail to be aware that the power of life and death is in our hands?

I don’t know how boring I have been with this reminiscence of cliches. But worn cliches or fresh creation, both the look backward and the forward vision provide past evidence and future prediction that none of us fully lives unless, frequently enough, he/she confronts honestly the nature of self, “Who am I?” and the nature of obligation within the human enterprise, “What must I do?” Cliches become stale, but without such identity and engagement, life itself will be stale and worn rather than fresh, energetic, and laced with hope.

Addendum

[Editor’s note: the following was to be inserted immediately prior to last paragraph, but it does seem to be a distinct line of thought]

Long ago, I clipped a poem by Victor Howe (Christian Science Monitor), “Lesson in Aerodynamics”:

“Wedging their way by wing, they are compelled
To learn the element they navigate,
To study air until they know it cold,
To gauge its power to the feather-weight.

“The air that both resists and sustains,
Gives discipline, demands economy,
Ensures they sign the sky with elegance
Form follows function as the wild geese fly.”

I believe the form of one’s religion may follow the way one functions in this human condition which is ours, and which we share, as time, relentless measure of our living, ticks its eventually conclusive rhythm.

Recognizing that every age is an age of transition, I believe the years approaching will register even more sweeping changes, changes not far ahead.

I was struck with a sense of identity when re-reading the words of Marius in Victor Hugo’s LES MISERABLES: “To be between religions, one which you have not yet abandoned, and another which you have not yet adopted, is insupportable, and twilight is pleasant only to bat-like souls.”

Similarly, we may feel unrest, uncertainty, anxiety, and consequently, an over-eagerness to settle for comfort rather than continue the search for an adequate religion of one’s own. But if there is one certainty I cherish, it is that the search for an adequate personal religion is more necessary than ever, for we need confidence in principles to behave with courage and wisdom in this difficult 1979 and perhaps a more perilous 1980. Think of the insight of the poet (“Lesson in Aerodynamics”) who recognized that air both resists and sustains. So our human condition with its fears and hopes, its joy and grief, its mystery and assurances – all these are the resistances and sustenances for the transition of religious belief or ethical action from that which was and is, to that which should be. It is the human condition which resists and sustains.

Unitarian Universalism And The Sense Of The Sacred

Undated (Filed under 1982)
Location Unknown (Probably Lakeland)

The Sense of the Sacred is this month’s emphasis as we deal with the heritage and principles of Unitarian Universalist religion. Sacraments and the sacred have been an ineradicable part of most religions of the human family. Both sacred and sacrament derive from the Latin “sacere” - to make holy.

Obviously Unitarian Universalism is hardly a ritualistic religion in any usual sense. Our plain services do not commemorate the Lord’s Supper although there are some – but not many – who continue the tradition. Baptism of infants is seldom a ritual, and then with no doctrinal meaning. We do not believe children are born carrying original sin – therefore there is no sin to wash away. When we have a service dedicating a child, it is for the purpose of welcoming the child to our religious community, to express our love and support to the parents who are responsible for rearing that child in decency and dignity and cultivating those values and customs which will tend to make that child a growing person, happy in himself or herself, as well as a productive addition to the human family.

In looking at the sacred and the sacraments, particularly as found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we must be aware of a reality: one person’s sacrament is another’s superstition. Looked at from historical or psychological perspectives, a sacrament, or a sense of the sacred, is quite different from that of a believer, who whole-heartedly [and] with a sense of awe, participates in the sacrament. [CJW note: Roszak: “To study is not to be, to appreciate is not to belong.”]

In his PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION, Erwin Goodenough (p. 144) illustrates this when he wrote, “Many years ago, a physician, member or sect which puts extreme emphasis on immersion in baptism, said to me of the rite, ‘It was a business proposition. I knew when I stood on one side of the baptismal pool that I was damned to hell, but that, if I went down in to the water and was baptized, I would be saved in heaven. It was a business proposition; I went in.’” Dr. Goodenough went on, “Theologians rarely use such unvarnished language to describe a sacrament as having efficacy, but the doctor’s words express exactly the function and appeal of sacraments and symbols. I once repeated the story of the doctor’s baptism to a Catholic priest with whom I happened to ride on a train. He chuckled at it, waved his hand deprecatingly, and said, ‘Superstition, superstition,’ and then added, ‘But I know exactly how he felt.’”

When checking the definitions of the word sacrament, I immediately decided not to dwell on definition #6, “the oath of allegiance taken by a Roman soldier.” But others:

1)religious acts or ceremonies which are visible means by which divine grace is sought.
2)memory, sign, seal, or symbol of religious experience or profession.
3)mystery – a thing secret or of secret meaning.

Ambrose Bierce (an iconoclastic skeptic with a slashing and irreverent wit) defines sacrament in THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY:

sacrament: n. A solemn religious ceremony to which several degrees of authority and significance are attached. Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity. Some of the smaller sects have no sacraments at all – for which mean economy they will indubitably be damned.

sacred: adj. Dedicated to some religious purpose; having a divine character; inspiring solemn thoughts and emotions; as, the Dalai Lama of Tibet; the Moogum of M’bwango; the temple of apes in Ceylon; the Cow in India; the Crocodile, the Cat, and the Onion of ancient Egypt; the Mufti of Moosh; the hair of the dog that bit Noah, etc.

It is not necessary to tell how large a place the sacred has occupied in religions pre-historic and historic. Frazer’s classic GOLDEN BOUGH is replete with examples of the sacred, the practice of sacraments, the force of taboos. The Druid priest who with a golden sickle cut the mistletoe from the oak at mid-winter solstice was dealing with the sacred. [CJW note: the grove of oak trees was sacred.]

“Sacred cow” has become vernacular in our language – but the cow is sacred to believing Hindus. For many tribal cultures, the time of puberty for boys and girls was a sacred time requiring trying, secret rituals, and disciplines.

The sense of the sacred penetrates our Judeo-Christian heritage. Today is among the closing days of the Jewish observation of Hanukkah, which commemorates the Jewish nation’s successful struggle against Antiochus IV, who tried to impose Greek ways and customs on the Jews. Led by Mattathias, an elderly priest, and later by his son Judah the Maccabee, bands of Jewish guerrilla fighters fought valiantly and successfully. In the early winter of 165 B.C.E., Judah Maccabeus led his warriors into Jerusalem. First, he sought to cleanse the Temple which had been profaned by Antiochus and his Greek/Syrian soldiers. A single undefiled cruse of oil was found. It alone was used. Jewish tradition has it that this single flask provided enough oil to burn not for one, but for eight days.

Ever since, the Jews have celebrated that victory and the miraculous oil. For eight days there is celebration and gift-giving. Candles are lit, one the first night, two the second – until finally eight are kindled on the last night.

Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover are the holy days in the Jewish tradition.

When considering the Christian part of our tradition there is a wide difference between the two main dimensions in Christianity:

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches observe seven sacraments (or mysteries, as they are sometimes called): baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist (or Holy Communion), penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and marriage.

The Protestant churches observe the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Communion). On the whole, Protestants believe that only two sacraments were instituted by Jesus in the New Testament. With their view of the Bible as the Word of God, they see no authority for more than these two sacraments.

The belief about the Lord’s Supper differs between Roman Catholics and Protestants. In the Eucharist of the Roman Catholic, the bread and wine are the real body and blood of Christ offered daily in every Roman Catholic church to God for the sins of mankind.

In the Protestant view, the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus, a re-reading of the story of the Last Supper. The bread and wine or bread and water are symbolic – tokens of their Savior.

Unitarians and Universalists are offshoots of this tradition. Although observing Communion as a remembrance of Jesus has largely faded away, I still remember as a boy growing up in Unitarian Universalist churches how communion was observed on Maundy Thursday – but the occasion became less and less a re-enactment of the Last Supper and increasingly was a remembering of service not only for the life and teachings of Jesus but also other human saviors, ancient and modern; and a time to remember specifically those persons of the church who had died during the year. It was a service of memory and hope. But from the time I was able to think about it, I never perceived it as a sacrament in the way that I sensed that Protestants and Catholics experienced the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist as sacred.

Have we Unitarian Universalists no sense of the sacred? In terms of historic rituals that evoke awe? No. Do we have worship formulas to put us in a direct connection with God? Not that I know of.

In the mid 19th century, Brook Farm in Massachusetts was a rather short-lived communal experiment largely composed of Unitarian transcendentalists. They scorned rituals. One Sunday some of them arrived at the [West Roxbury Unitarian Church] with their lunch baskets. After the service (and to the shock of the staid church members), they marched to [the] platform (or altar) and proceeded to have their picnic there. I believe they were making the point that no place or time is any holier or more sacred than any other.

In varying degrees and usually under less traumatic circumstances, this represents a prevailing attitude among Unitarian Universalists. Are we missing something vital? Perhaps. In an article in VOGUE (I read an extended review), novelist Francine DuPlessix Gray said, “I belonged to that last generation which could blindly believe that salvation lies in an accelerated rationalization and secularization of society, in the hastened improvement of scientific method ... our expressions of joy, sorrow, hope, and particularly our need to honor some form of transcendence will always seek ritual channels if our psychic balance is to survive.”

There is a civilizing force in ritual. Take heed of the great Jewish proverb which says “Today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish. By your fidelity to the historic female need to safeguard the past, you will ... preserve the quality of quality.”

Does she speak to us, who, perhaps have relied too much on rational discourse and attempts at logical thinking? Yes, and this has been recognized as we seek to touch our emotions as well as our minds. We have no set of historic sacraments either of Judaism or Christianity. When our minds cannot accept what another’s sacrament proclaims as eternal truth, we can observe respectfully or attempt to appreciate, but we cannot feel the profundity of those who have unquestioning faith. [CJW note: “to appreciate is not to belong.”]

However, as many of you know, we do seek the enduring – our celebrating Thanksgiving as gratitude for the harvest of the fields through sharing fruit, bread, nuts, cider, in common worship.

We celebrate the Winter Solstice, not as primary Christian worship, but seek its deeper roots in the lengthening of the light, the rebirth of hope, the holding high of the idea that every night a child is born is a holy night. [CJW note: We celebrate the best yearnings of the human family.] We try to develop a ritual for Earth Day – recognizing our utter dependence on, and our persisting obligation to, the Holy Earth.

We do not always do these rituals excellently, but the continuing effort will be there.

However, beyond all that, I would suggest to you that confining sacraments, the sacred, [and] the sense of the Holy only to rituals within any religious institution is to miss the mark. Paul Tillich, alluding to the endless symbolism in religions, wrote, “Nothing is prevented from becoming a sacred thing.” One’s sense of the sacred may dawn like the morning sun unexpectedly, in various times, places, and human relationship[s]: an introspective moment in solitude, or the experience of both finitude and eternity as the crashing surf of the eternal sea registers on our consciousness and plumbs the unconscious; or most of all, the full acknowledgment that primacy of persons in one’s scale of values and actions gives a sense of the sacred that is unsurpassed.

The greatest religious prophets have always known this. The person of Jesus is the foundation of Christian sacraments. But unless I sadly misread the New Testament literature, the celebrating of formal rituals meant little or nothing to him. Consider what he said in Matthew (5/23 ff; Phillips) “so that if you are offering your gift at the altar, you should remember that your brother has something against you, you must leave your gift before the altar and go away. Make your peace with your brother first, then come and offer your gift.”

Was he not saying “what makes the sacred sacred is one’s relationship to fellow men and women” ?

After the Gotama Buddha’s religious experience under the Bo-tree, he left all that he had to teach by example and precept the primary task of alleviating human suffering. That was his sense of the sacred.

Or consider Amos, the earliest of the prophets of social justice. Rituals as rituals were an abomination to him (5/21): “I hate, I despise your feasts and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt-offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

Thus, the sense of the sacred cannot be confined to a ritual or a place, even though celebrations of joyous and poignant human experiences can be observed in a church, fellowship, temple, or shrine. But ... as Tillich wrote, when there is confusion between the symbols and that to which they point – that is idolatry. To worship the symbol alone, no matter how holy it is proclaimed, is to be profane.

We will differ in our experiences of the holy, the sacred, but there is no need to be fearful or angry at our differences as long as we have some sense of the holiness of all existence and the sacredness of persons.

I like what Theodore Roszak wrote (PERSON/PLANET, p. 167):

“We meet as strangers, each carrying a mystery within us. I cannot say who you are; I may never know you completely. But I trust that you are a person in your own right, possessed of a beauty and value that are the world’s richest resources. So I make this promise to you: I will impose no identities on you, but will invite you to become yourself, without shame or fear. I will defend your right to find an authentic vocation. For as long as your search takes, you have my loyalty.”

Religion and Community

January 17, 1982
Lakeland

Two weeks ago I spoke of the inevitable tension that exists between individuality and dependence. Last week in his illuminating talk, Harold searched out the way to health – our inner selves provide the signposts, directing us to accept ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to project self-worth, not self-hatred. The poet said that which we project onto others comes back to our own. Today, I would have you consider that the balance between individuality and necessary dependence on social institutions is the healthy community. This is the Yang and Yin of the good life.

Free, unfettered individuality can be unhealthy. There is an old Hasidic tale where a pious man dies after a lifetime of losing interest in the people and life about him, all for the sake of God. A day or two after he reached Paradise, they threw him out. He could not understand or enjoy anything of what was going on (see CONTEXT, 3/1/81).

Or from the Christian tradition of the 4th century Simeon Stylites. He, allegedly for the sake of penitence and the glory of God, lived 37 years on top of a pillar. He became encrusted with filth and vermin, occasionally sending letters which were regarded as authoritative. “Kings and emperors crouched at the feet of the pillar, cherishing, as if precious pearls, ‘the worms that dropped from his body.’” (THE EVOLUTION OF MONASTICISM, p. 41ff). For his uncompromising, self-torturing individual piety, the Church called him a saint. Frankly I think he was a nut as well as a stunning example of perverted individuality.

In our times, Clarence Darrow, the nonconformist lawyer, defender of radical and unpopular causes, was possessed of considerable personal vanity and egotism. When asked by Lincoln Steffens how he (Darrow) was getting along with his wife, Ruby, Darrow answered, “Fine, because Ruby and me, we both love Darrow.”

But just as there can be distorted individuality, so can there be sick communities. The history of dictatorships, monarchies, monopolies, oppressive regimes of many varieties provides ample evidence.

The historian Hugh Thomas (HISTORY OF THE WORLD, p. 461), compared a concert by the Emperor Nero “to a public speech in the days of Stalin. ‘No one was allowed to leave the theatre,’ wrote Suetonius, ‘during the emperor’s recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored from the music that they shammed dead and were carried away for burial.’” Solzhenitsyn tells of a speech made by Stalin at which all the hearers are afraid to be the first to stop clapping. All looked around despairingly and clapped on, sweat standing out on their foreheads, exhaustion stealing over them.

Is it not also true (see HUMAN SCALE, p. 278) that “the larger the meeting, each person has smaller influence on it – fewer opportunities for participation and response except for a few, who for a variety of reasons, good and bad, exert a more dominating influence.”

Then, too, it is a commonplace that there is more violence, abuse, crimes of passion among relatives, that is, the family community.

Healthy community is achieved by a delicate balance between order and anarchy, between detachment and unquestioning loyalty.

There is dramatic illustration in the movie, REDS, which tells the intertwining stories of the hectic romance between Louise Bryant, the writer, and John Reed, the radical journalist, who became a thorough believer in the Bolshevik Revolution. The actor playing the role of Max Eastman, the radical editor, tells Louise that the difference between the couple is that for her the revolution is to be observed; for Reed it is a religion.

In that context, “religion” meant obedience without question. After some hesitancy, Reed went along; allowed his speeches and writings to be altered to conform to the party line. In his famed book, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, Reed wrote, “I have seen the future and it works.” He might have asked himself, “it works, how? By what means?”

The healthy community, family, religious national strives to achieve that delicate balance between freedom, community responsibility; between uninvolved detachment and blind loyalty; between cold reason and hot passion. The late Sam Levenson, wise, humorous writer and lecturer, once said, “You can’t sit at two weddings as the same time with one fanny.” [CJW note: Yet that is the posture we must seek.]

In the Torah (Deuteronomy 12), there is an ancient illustrative tale. As a prelude to the children of Israel occupying the land of Canaan, there is imposed upon the people a lengthy list of ordinances and laws to govern behavior, diet, ritual practice, human relations. According to the legend, when the people were nomads in the land of Moab, “each man did what was right in his own eyes.” However, in a new land, with large problems to be dealt with, hostile foes to be encountered, a more complex series of ordinances was instituted. It was a modified framework for the relationship of the individual and the community in a strikingly different social situation.

There is some analogy in that old story to the present-day Unitarian Universalist community. Conrad Wright of the Harvard faculty and historian of our Unitarian Universalist movement in his paper, “Individualism in Historical Perspective” discusses Jefferson and Emerson, in particular.

Jefferson was an outstanding example of those who believe religion to be a private affair. “I inquire after no man’s religious opinion and trouble none with mine.” As Wright pointed out, “... there was nothing in Jefferson’s understanding of religion that required people to form religious communities or explain by they persistently seek religious fellowship – nothing derived from the laws of human nature, let alone any commandment from God. ... for Jefferson, religion remains a private possession, because there was nothing in his understanding of it that suggests that religious fellowship has any value, or that there is anything in human nature that needs religious community.” (p. 5)

Emerson differs from Jefferson philosophically. For Emerson a full reliance on reason is a mistake. For Emerson, the intuition, the sense of the soul being an integral part of a greater whole, the Oversoul that is to be in touch with what is real. He contrasted the church, the religious community, with the soul. For him, “the life of the soul lived in all its fullness makes the Church unnecessary. (p. 7)

“The individual is the world,” wrote Emerson (p. 8). Without doubt, this individualism, this privatization of religion has marked our religious heritage.

Wright points out how social and economic conditions of Emerson’s time encouraged and stimulated the individual impulse. The frontiers of this continent were almost unlimited, there was bright opportunity for the confident individual, the optimistic individual, the individual who believed his efforts would bring abundant personal return and gain. This ebullience and individual pride – arrogance, really – is splendidly illustrated by a joke told 150 years or so ago by Fields, a Boston publisher, one of the many individuals who were part of the Flowering of New England as an intellectual, religious, literary peak that was compared to the great classical period of ancient Athens.

There was a Boston man who read Shakespeare late in life, was enthused and found Shakespeare’s poetry, wisdom, insights into human character far beyond expectations. Paying tribute to Shakespeare, or so he thought, [he opined,] “There are not twenty men in Boston who could have written these plays.”

But gone are the frontier opportunities that sparked and nurtured such confidence and the belief in unlimited growth under the leadership of reasonable persons. We believe in the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. Today such unfettered optimism seems strikingly naïve.

Conrad Wright makes a generalization (p. 14) that many of us will find disagreeable. Yet it is a formidable proposition: “Individualism thrives as one moves from a steady state into the period of growth; and that individualism becomes dysfunctional as limits to growth come into play. When one moves from an era of abundance to the threat of scarcity, individualism can no longer be the guiding principle in social relationships. ... If some sort of civilized existence is to survive, the individualism of the phase of growth will become vestigial. That a new doctrine of individualism may emerge, relevant to the new situation, is of course a possibility. But it will not be the Lockean, Jeffersonian, Emersonian kind.”

Wright suggests that given the situations, he outlines some suggestions for the Unitarian Universalist religious communities:

1)The religious community will require both commitment and discipline.
2)Rediscover worship as a corporate act ... one in which the liturgical preferences held individually by the members of the group can never be wholly accommodated.
3)Individualism is a critical principle [that] must be re-examined when the locus of constructive power has gone elsewhere.

Rather than criticizing or affirming those suggestions abstractly, today, I choose to hold before you more specific ways to achieve healthy community.

We can share our stories. Our lives are hectic and calendar-consumed and other cultures have wisdom to share. The Kalahari Bushmen, living in a difficult environment, worked 1 to 3 days a week for food. The rest of the time they spent talking and visiting relatives. Community was more important than luxury.

We can share our lives more than we do. A Christian chaplain assigned to Africa conducted a funeral service. The funeral service lasted for several hours and was attended by almost 1000 people. He writes, “noticing bedrolls, cots, mattresses, and blankets scattered around.” He inquired and found that “it is the tradition (there) when news of a death comes, for friends and relatives to stay overnight, sleeping about the compound on the ground, many staying for as long as a week after the funeral as an expression of solidarity with the family.”

The writer continues with other examples of this strong community spent among Africans. He says, “Africans know they belong to each other; they believe that life is not whole unless it is connected to the community, even in death.”

We cannot import such customs; they are not ours. Yet that sharing and solidarity are authentic expressions of religion in community.

We can share our lives in stories. The Rabbinic tradition is a splendid example. Some have said, “Ask a Rabbi a question, and he will not answer it; he will tell you a story.”

Truth and insight are contained in parable or metaphor. I like this Rabbinic story about the choice of site for the first temple:

“Time before time, when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill, each night dividing evenly the grain they had ground together during the day. One brother lived alone; the other had a wife and a large family. Now, the single brother thought to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed.’ So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother’s granary to see that he was never without. But the married brother said to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one. What will he do when he’s old?’ So every night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother’s granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

“Then one night they met each other halfway between their two houses, suddenly realized what had been happening, and embraced each other in love. The legend is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, ‘This is a holy place – a place of love – and here it is that my temple shall be built.’ And so it was. The First Temple is said to have been constructed on that very site. The holy place, where God is made known to his people, is the place where human beings discover each other in love. The absolute is known in the personal.”

Religion and community spirit? I have tried to balance the tension between the individual and the community. Sociologists have studies the subject and I could have quarried out their abstractions – primary and secondary relationships, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, etc. But the essence of community is not only the ways we develop free and open religious organization, but also, and at a level deeper than abstractions, how we share our stories; how we share our lives; our common efforts, our dreams, our disappointments, our hopes.

There is the focused place where the great temples are built – great not in soaring architecture, although that is sometimes the case, but great in the quality of relationship: self – others, self-esteem – respect for others.

Nuclear Freeze – Hopes, Doubts, Convictions

October 17, 1982
Lakeland

My purpose today is to emphasize my belief that the accumulation of nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of all living beings on this planet, either by accident or malicious design. I am glad that our General Assembly in June declared support for a “mutually verifiable, bi-lateral nuclear freeze as the first stage of world-wide, balanced, general disarmament.”

Many of you are aware that convictions about nuclear freeze are not new. Some of us, months ago, signed petitions and wrote letters urging such action. But the trickle can become a stream and the stream a strong river to an ocean of peace if convictions are strengthened and made known, again and again and again.

Observing a nova (an exploding star), a scientist remarked, “there goes another planet where they found out how to do it.” The late Aldous Huxley (Bio, p. 455), commenting on the prospects for peace with nuclear weapons overhead like the sword of Damocles, hanging by a thread, said the great powers were like delinquent boys of 14 with the physical power of God.

We are horrified and rightly so when a person or persons poisons Tylenol capsules and eight persons die. Tylenol is removed from the shelves to prevent further victims. Why are we not as deeply concerned when a fool, criminal, or lunatic persons or group could push the buttons causing the death of everyone through a nuclear blast, radiation sickness, and the many plagues which would follow? Why do we let nuclear weapons remain on the active shelves?

There are hopes. There is a rising consciousness of nuclear peril. The nuclear freeze movement is gathering political momentum. [CJW notes: 693 resolutions passed by state, city, and town meetings, resolutions urging an end to use and development of nuclear ....]. On November 2, eight states (CA, AZ, OR, ND, MT, MI, RI, NJ), the District of Columbia, and Chicago will vote on nuclear freeze initiatives. There are additional straws in the wind, not only religious organizations, but also Common Cause, the American Public Health Association, the National Education Association, the United Auto Workers, and others, support a freeze, as well as may members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat. [CJW note: Sen. Cranston: “The American people are far ahead of their leaders in demanding an end to the nuclear arms race.”]

In addition, there is pressure from abroad, particularly from our ally, the United Kingdom. The Church of England, this summer, urged Britain “to unilaterally abandon nuclear weapons ... the UK should cancel the Trident middle order and phase out Polaris missiles and submarines.” The London Times front-paged a report of the Pentagon document, drawn up on orders of President Reagan and presented to the National Security Council, [that stated] “the U.S. could win a protracted nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” The Manchester Guardian said of this and [another] Pentagon report, “They are crazy. No one who draws up these documents can have the slightest imagination of what nuclear war would be like. They are stupid extrapolations from the Battle of Waterloo, in which at the end of a hard day’s pounding, the two sides survey the ground and decide whether to carry on.” All through Europe, the peace movement is strong with its roots in the everyday women and men who are conscious, more than governments are aware, that any use of nuclear weapons has an inevitable fatal conclusion for the human family.

Another hopeful sign was the awarding this week of the Nobel Peace prize to Alva Myrdal of Sweden and Alfonso Garcia Robles of Mexico. Both have been strong advocates of nuclear disarmament. Norwegian foreign minister Svenn Stray said the Nobel selection was “a handshake to peace opinion that has been growing, especially in the Western world.” Each made a statement that may not be pleasing to our policy makers. Mrs. Myrdal reiterated criticism of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, saying, “Every step they have taken since the beginning of the 1960s has been unnecessary.” Mr. Robles criticized the U.S., saying it “bears the greatest responsibility for the deadlock in efforts to negotiate a total ban on nuclear testing.” (Ledger, 10/14).

Yes, there are reasons to hope that there will be sufficient citizen pressure to secure a freeze on nuclear weapons followed by successive steps of disarmament.

But in all candor, there are doubts. Jefferson once used the phrase, “the wolf by the ears.” If one has the wolf by the ears, one can’t let go, or the wolf will go for the jugular. Yet one can’t hang on to the wolf’s ears forever. Jefferson was referring to his dilemma about slavery. On principle, he detested the institution of slavery, but he and his class were dependent on slavery for economic survival, personal comfort and civil order. Of course, the wolf got loose – our Civil War with its terrible price of blood and its long-lasting heritage of hate, ignorance, and social conflict.

Similarly, our government and the USSR have the nuclear wolf by the ears – [each] seemingly can’t let go, but can’t hang on forever. Unless the peoples’ pursuit of peace succeeds, the wolf will be loose.

The nuclear freeze movement has been gaining strength in numbers, but can enough people be convinced? Doubts exist. Faced with too much horror, too many terrible fears, a process of psychic numbing seems to set in. Remember the story of the ancient king who executed the messengers who brought him bad news? Have you ever felt, or said, “If it’s bad news, don’t tell me, I can’t take it.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott, in the article from which I read, also said, “America’s leaders also practice psychic numbing. During the SALT hearings, they talked about how many bombs the Russians have and how many more we need to counter them. They sound like nine-year-old boys, a little like my younger son.

“I called the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and asked, ‘Why hasn’t anybody testified about the medical consequences of thermonuclear war?’

“They said, ‘The Senators don’t like to hear that sort of thing, it makes them feel uncomfortable.’”

This has a likeness to not wanting to think of or talk about our own death. Those are thoughts we do run away from, even though every one of us has an appointment in Samarra.

T.S. Eliot wrote in BURNT NORTON, “humankind cannot bear much reality.” But unless we do confront the reality of what nuclear war means, we won’t have the moral energy to maintain a position of disarmament.

I have doubts, too, about how many will persist in the face of name-calling that has already begun. President Reagan has started the labeling process, saying “some who want the weakening of America were manipulating honest people and sincere people.” There’s no substance to that charge, but it does raise the question of who is manipulating whom. Did you see the cartoon where the “Great Communicator” is invoking the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, pointing to peace advocates, saying, “Now ask them if they have ever been, and why they are now, communist pinko subversives.” Can freeze advocates persist in the face of that slander which is sure to continue?

Then, too, I know that when advocating a nuclear freeze, always the statement is made, “You can’t trust the Russians.” True – they can’t trust us either. Ample reasons for both cases can be made. As Sidney Lens wrote in an article for The Nation (9/11/82), “There is one overriding issue on which the interests (of Washington and Moscow) converge – survival of the human species. Whether we do or do not trust the Kremlin leadership, the U.S. cannot continue to exist as a nation (nor can the Soviet Union, nor can any other nation) unless it joins with the rest of the world to eliminate the threat of nuclear incineration.”

From these remarks you may conclude that I believe in a nuclear freeze now.

In spite of what you may hear from the Oval Office or the Pentagon, the USSR does not have nuclear superiority. There may be equality, but we have superiorities in certain ways. When asked, no U.S. military authority was willing to swap our weapons and technologies for the Soviet’s (which tells us something).

Verifiable testing procedures now exist – satellites, sensors, particularly each side is agreeable to on-the-spot inspection.

A verifiable nuclear freeze is a necessity and it is practical. If you share that conviction, let your public officials know – or if you did write them a few months ago – write or call again, as I will. They will know it is an issue we have not forgotten.

Instead of weakening, a nuclear freeze will strengthen our country, morally, politically, and technically. To do that we must not be awe-struck with pronouncements from the Oval Office or the shiny Pentagon medals and uniforms. The historian Arnold Toynbee, in his essay on “The Death of Sovereignty”, wrote, “Far from being divine, states are nothing but man-made public utilities. They are as unsuitable as gas-works and water-works for being made into objects of worship and into focuses of emotion.”

Now I respect, even revere, our Constitution, but any given person or party in power is as subject to criticism and protest as is a rise in the cost of utilities.

One thing more, I personally take a more advanced position than verifiable nuclear freeze. I believe that the U.S. should not only freeze nuclear weapons unilaterally but begin now – unilateral disarmament ... beginning perhaps with our land-based ICBMs. Now, is he nuts, you may ask. Or, more politely, Don Quixote rides again.

This is not the bubble-headed notion you may immediately surmise.

Geo. Kennan, p. 101-102
[CJW note, Institute for Advanced Studies, “Cease This Madness”, diplomat]

Now, if one is a rational person, and I hope I am one at times, if 20% of our present nuclear capability is enough to wipe out the Soviet cities and their people, why do we need to build such an overkill? The balance of the 1.28 trillion dollar war budget in the next 5 years could be turned to housing, food, human care, providing initiatives for the poor, hungry, and sick in other parts of the world (or, if you will, balance the budget). Is there a better way to begin to turn swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and that we will learn war no more?