Filed under: Adult Enrichment and Group Meetings, Comparative Religion, Comparative Religion, Graduate Theological school/PSR, International | Tags: animism, GTU, Maori, New Zealand history, religion
for HR4175, Cultural and Faith Traditions of Asia and Oceania
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
March 28, 2012
Introduction
Key aspects of Maori cosmology are the mythic origins of the universe, the relationship between human beings and supernatural powers, the cyclical nature of human life, and the importance of ancestral connections. Rapid Christianization altered the indigenous cosmology, and colonial exploitation led to Biblically-inspired prophets and resistance movements.
Background of Aotearoa New Zealand
New Zealand has nearly four million inhabitants on its North and South Islands, and several smaller ones. Since 1907 it has been a dominion of the United Kingdom, like Australia and Canada.
It was one of the last areas of the globe to be inhabited by human beings. The indigenous Maori arrived by canoe from other parts of Polynesia in the fourteenth century. Maori culture is based on land and kinship links, as is shown below.
Explorer Abel Tasman sighted it in 1642 and James Cook circumnavigated it 1769. English Christian missionary activity began early in the 1800. Now, 80 percent of Maori are Christian (but with Maori cultural influences) and the remainder hold to the traditional religion or other western sects. In 1840 England presented the Treaty of Waitangi to 35 Maori chiefs, making them British subjects and ostensibly granting them land rights. However, by deceitful translation of key words in the Maori version of the treaty, the English cheated the Maori out of their land rights. This led to expropriation, displacement, and alienation for the Maori. By 1850, the violence and imported diseases reduced the Maori population to equal that of the settler.
When the English arrived, the Maori population was 100,000. Now the Maori make up 10 percent of the population (approximately 400,000), mainly around Auckland and other North Island urban areas.[1] Land wars with colonial militias lasted from 1843 to 1872. Largely urban-based Maori protests took place in the 1970s and 80s for land and other tribal rights, resulting in a standing tribunal to investigate present violations of the treaty if not original ones. Four Parliament seats are reserved for Maori. The country’s official name is now Aotearoa New Zealand; the Maori word [pronounced Ao-te-a-roa ]means “land of the long white cloud.” Maps are at this link.
Cosmology
The German encyclopedia Religion Past and Present defines cosmology as “a specific culture’s orientation in space and time as conceived in words, images and rituals.” It continues: “Religious worldviews represent the complete order…. bringing the visible into agreement with the invisible.”[2] Myths and genealogies were handed down by oral tradition (but written down after colonization). The Maori worldview comprises myths, genealogies, and ritual practices and prohibitions.
Maori Cosmogony: Origins of the Universe
Moewa Callaghan, citing the authorities Marsden and Henare, explains the myth that the god Tane “ascended to the highest heaven … to obtain the three ‘baskets of knowledge.’ These baskets contained the knowledge of the creation of the cosmos, of the gods and of humanity.”[3] What Tane revealed was this: Te Po is the great void, a realm of darkness, and a source or process of growth and causation.
Callaghan summarizes origins this way: “Te Hau ora (the essence of life) begat shape, shape begat form, form begat space, space begat time, and time begat Rangi and Papa. Ranginui was the Great Sky, who impregnated Papatuanuki the Earth. These are the original parents of creation, including nature and the spiritual powers inherent in the world. Their son Tane pushed them apart to emerge from their mating embrace, and this opening led to the flourishing of creation. Humanity is the child of this god Tane and the “dawnmaid Hineahuone, who was formed … out of the red clay.”[4]
A mythic hero common to many Polynesian cultures is named Maui. New Zealand’s legendary origin is that Maui used a jawbone as a fishhook to draw the North Island out of the sea; its name, Te-Ika-a-Maui, means “fish-of-Maui.” The South Island is Maui’s ship.[5] He is too much of the earth to be worshipped as a god, but he is more than human, and is invoked in rituals for fishing and planting sweet potatoes.
Atuas, Mana and Tapu: The Supernatural Dwells in Nature
“Departmental gods” is the term scholars use to refer to divinities or powers whose influence is focused on particular aspects of nature or human life. For the Maori, atuas are the gods, spirit powers, and supernatural beings that imbue all of life and creation or, as Hanson says, are “frequent visitors to the physical world, where they [are] extremely active.” He notes the kinds of unexplained events that were attributed to atuas: weather, the growth of plants, physical or mental illnesses, menstruation, “the fear that gripped a normally brave warrior before battle, [and] the skill of an artist.”[6]
. “Maori do not acknowledge chance,” writes Callaghan.[7] Rather, they act in ways to manage, call upon, respond to, as well as avoid the atuas. James Irwin says: “[The] gods may be deceived but not overcome.”[8] The crucial factors for surviving and succeeding in such a spirit-filled world are mana and tapu. Mana is spiritual or supernatural power, available to chiefs, and invoked by or invested in the rituals of elders, often tribal chiefs or tohunga. For example, birth rituals known as tohi ora can confer mana on a person. On the other hand, Maori legend says that “an aborted fetus not given safe burial becomes a malicious spirit.”[9]
Mana is guarded (and ordinary people protected from it) by rituals and by sacred prohibitions and boundaries. Such restrictions are known as tapu. Hans Mol notes that tapu sets apart that which is sacred, powerful, significant, or dangerous, or forbidden. [10]
Tapu requirements pertain to food and limit contact with corpses, tribal chiefs, and warriors heading to battle. They guide the Maori away from offending the gods, lest “the demonic and chaotic would invade one’s world and disrupt personality or the group.”[11]
The concept and practice of tapu is widespread in Oceania, but it is from the Maori usage that scholars of religion coined the English word taboo.[12]
The blending of Christian theology and Maori cosmology began early. English missionaries translated God into Maori language as Atua, and heaven into the mythical sky-god’s name, Rangi. Irwin cites two Maori terms for sin: hara means harm brought by a “ritual failure” (the improper handling of mana), whereas he means an ethical failure, a wrong done to another person.[13]
Over generations, Maori poets and chiefs passed down various legends (not one version) of the origin of the universe and humanity, but after 1858 (when the Old Testament was published in Maori) they “redacted a more uniform version.” This version introduced a God similar to the Judeo-Christian Almighty, “a preexistent, supreme god, Io, whose essence fertilized the womb of potential being and set in motion the creation of the world.”[14]
Death and Eschatology
James Irwin writes that, absent Christianity, Maori religion has “no well defined eschatology. The dead either go to the ‘Above’ or the ‘Below’ and life in either place seems to be much as it is here….[with] no suggestion of reward or punishment.” [15]
Moeawa Callaghan explains: “Ancient Maori, who navigated such long distances did not believe in an end time. Life returns to Te Po [the realm of darkness] for re-creation and to Te Amo Amrama, the world of light and transformation.”[16] Hanson confirms that “death marked the return of the spirit to its point of origin.”[17]
More important for Christians to understand, Irwin says, is the Maori’s “solidarity with the ancestors… and the generations to come.” In the Maori Apostle’s Creed, he points out, the word for “communion of the saints” is Kotahitanga, meaning unity or oneness.[18]
Genealogies: Maori Ancestors in Canoes
The Maori do no think of themselves as part of the branches of a family tree, in the western sense, but “as descendants of the various crews of canoes which landed in New Zealand in the fourteenth century.”[19] This idea has mythic origins and a cosmic resonance: “[Where] Westerners see [the constellation] Pleiades in the sky, the Maoris saw the prow of a canoe…. The tail of the Scorpion is the canoe of Tama-rereti in which the star-children and their elders were placed in mythical times.”[20]
A canoe represents one’s family identity and tribal grouping; it symbolizes travel and recalls Maori origins, yet it also suggests instability and the possibility of relocation.[21] With such prominence in life and history, it is not surprising that the process of a woodworker fashioning a canoe (or builder making a house) is tapu. The atuas “animated [their] creative work.”[22]
Words of the ancestors provide guidance to the living as people recite proverbs and recount stories.[23] In particular, tribal recitations of a genealogy (whakapapa) connect people to their ancestors’ experiences and link them to cosmic origins. Given that identification with particular territory is key to ancestral connections and spiritual identity in general, the colonizers’ expropriation of Maori lands not only brought material hardships but provoked the spiritual disaster of alienation.
Colonialism: Theft of Land as Loss of Sacred Space
Missionary Samuel Marsden held the first Christian service in New Zealand on Christmas 1814. Mainly over the North Island, missions from the following traditions spread fast in the early nineteenth century: Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Wesleyan. (The largest denominations now are Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and Latter Day Saints.[24]) The indigenous Ratana church and smaller Ringatu church are important sects.
When Samuel Marsden raised the English flag in 1814, he did not know that “Maori tribes claimed unoccupied land by setting up a pole and kindling fires.”[25] In resistance to accelerated missionary conversions in the 1830s, Maori leaders cut down British flagstaffs.
Mana o te whenua means “power over the land.” According to Jean Rosenfeld, to deceive the 35 chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi, the British substituted another word for mana in order “to subvert the chiefs’ authority over their territories.” Her article is not clear if the substitution was in the English or Maori version of the treaty, but other sources confirm that the English misrepresented the agreement the Maori.[26]
The Maori waged war over the loss of their lands from 1843 to 1872. “In 1856, chiefs [of] tribes of the North Island and the South Island gathered around a flagstaff” to form common defense by granting “their mana over their combined territories to the first Maori king.”[27]
The Encyclopedia of Religion says: “Sacred space is a fundamental feature of Maori religion. A tribe’s land is marked by wahu tap, ‘sacred places’ named for what happened there and commemorated” in the telling of genealogies.
Land gave the Maori “a collective rather than individual knowledge of place, belonging. It was the place where the bones of one’s ancestors were buried.” Hence, the loss of land “meant the destruction of … hapu (subtribal cohesion)….[28]
A sacred space common to all tribes is the marae, an open place near the chief’s house on which the genealogy was recited, and where public gatherings still take place.[29] In the post-colonial context, the marae appears in tribal areas and urban gathering place. It has developed into an entire meeting and ritual complex, still under the charge of ritual leaders.
Prophetic Resistance, Maori Syncretism, and Accommodation
Much of the rapid conversion of the Maori took place before the majority of depredations and displacements brought by the colonizers. In reaction, some of the Maori rejected the missionaries.[30] Some Christian Maori left the faith for the Maori religion. Some chiefs and charismatic persons remade their new religion into a source of resistance.
For example, during the land wars against English militias, Maori fighters included “disciples of unconventional tohunga [chiefs] imbued with mana from the Holy Ghost, Gabriel and Michael, as well as the gods of their respective tribes.” Known as prophets (poropiti), many saw themselves in accounts of the Hebrews’ captivity, liberation and exodus toward the Promised Land.[31] Though they were Christian, they emphasized Old Testament stories and models for this reason; their leaders took on the role of Hebrew prophet.
In the 1860s, Maori warrior and preacher Te Kooti founded the Ringatu movement; the name means “upraised hand.” (During an exile he studied the Bible, especially Psalms, Judges and Joshua).[32] In the 1920s, the reformed alcoholic and visionary Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana founded his Ratana sect. (Smaller or less prominent groups arose also.) Among other leaders, the charismatic Ratana encouraged and practiced faith healing, recalling Biblical models but also responding to the real health crises of infection and mental anguish.
Conclusion
The striking natural places of New Zealand’s islands can make it understandable to even a casual tourist why the Maori saw the world imbued with powerful spirits of life and why the land and sea are the factors of humanity’s place in the cosmos. This makes the unjust colonial expropriations and dislocations even more tragic.
In contrast to the long colonization history of the Americas, New Zealand has become overwhelmingly western and Christian in a short time. Yet Maori culture and identity persist in–and shape–the dominant culture. This is the Maori religious heritage: honoring nature, human ancestry, a sense of place, and the sacredness of the ordinary. There is value for all of us in not only respecting this heritage but in heeding it.
Bibliography
Auffarth, Christolph. Cosmology. Vol. 3, in Religion Past and Present, 505-509. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Callaghan, Moeawa. Theology in the Context of Aotearoa New Zealand. MA thesis. Berkeley, CA: Graduate Theological Union, 1999.
de Bres, Pieter H. “The Maori Contribution.” In Religion in New Zealand Society, by Brian and Peter Donovan, editors Colless. Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark, 1980.
Irwin, James. “The Maui Myth Cycle.” Colloquium: The Australian and New Zealand Theological Review 14, no. 1 (October 1981): 40-45.
Hanson, F. Allan. Maori Religion [First Edition]. Vol. 8, in Encyclopedia of Religion, 5697-5682. 2005.
Mol, Hans. The Fixed and the Fickle: Religion and Identity in New Zealand. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfid Laurier University Press, 1982.
Orbell, Margaret. “Maori.” In Religion Past and Present, 37. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Rosenfeld, Jean E. Maori Religion [Further Considerations]. Vol. 8, in Encyclopedia of Religion, 5682-5685. 2005.
Notes
[1] (Rosenfeld), 5683.
[2] (Auffarth 2007).
[3] (Callaghan 1999), 81.
[4] (Callaghan 1999), 82.
[5] (Irwin 1981),41.
[6] (Hanson 2005), 5679.
[7] (Callaghan 1999),89.
[8] (Irwin 1981), 42.
[9] (Irwin 1981), 41.
[10] (Mol 1982), 8.
[11] (Mol 1982), 13.
[12] (Orbell 2007).
[13] (Irwin 1981), 43.
[14] (Rosenfeld 2005), 5683.
[15] (Irwin 1981), 45.
[16] (Callaghan 1999), 90.
[17] (Hanson 2005), 5679.
[18] (Irwin 1981), 45.
[19] (Mol 1982), 7.
[20] (Mol 1982), 7.
[21] (Mol 1982), 7.
[22] (Hanson 2005), 5682.
[23] (Callaghan 1999), 89.
[24] (Hanson 2005), 5682.
[25] (Rosenfeld 2005), 5682.
[26] Ibid.
[27] (Rosenfeld 2005), 5683.
[28] (Mol 1982), 8.
[29] (Rosenfeld 2005), 5682.
[30] (de Bres 1980), 32.
[31] (Rosenfeld 2005), 5683.
[32] (de Bres 1980), 35.
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Church Finances and Stewardship, Comparative Religion, Rituals, Prayers, Elements of Worship Services, Special Events, Stewardship & Finances | Tags: church community, generosity, liberal religion, science and religion, stewardship, welcoming congregation
Next Sunday morning is Celebration Sunday, when members and pledging friends will make their pledges of support for the upcoming budget year at our congregation. Each Sunday a member or friend has delivered a testimonial about their feelings about the congregation and their financial commitment to its ministries and programs, staff, upkeep and outreach. I have posted all of them on the blog. Here is the latest.
Hello and good morning,
My name is Jorge. About 8 years ago I started to attend this congregation ever since my partner, Ron, introduced me to the idea of Unitarian Universalism. I was born in a small town in western Panama and raised in strong catholic family environment. If my Father could see me now in a pulpit, he would fall on his knees shouting …. “ES UN MILAGRO….it’s a miracle.”
Growing up, I was the perfect catholic boy attending mass every Sunday, going to the confessionary and along with it, its corresponding hale Maries and Our Heavenly Fathers as penance for my previous week of mischievous acts. However, as I got older I started to get more curious about the natural world and wanted to learn more about Science. Something within me started to question some of the beliefs that I was taught in Catechism. My parents could not understand why I was being so stubborn asking such questions and now I can only imagine what went thru their minds…a heretic son! So surely, I started to drift away from the Church and ultimately walked away from all the mumbo-jumbo of incoherent ranting, homophobia among many others….the list is long!
Science ignited my mind and beliefs, and taught me to truly seek the truth and not just be a mindless automaton. I have followed that career truly applying the Scientific Method into my life.
And yet, here I am as a “friend of UUSS” as friend of this congregation speaking out why I support this institution.
I enjoy the camaraderie of peers who charm, challenge and comfort me — I am not alone. This congregation is indeed a SAFE HARBOR.
I am comfortable with the ongoing ceaseless ferment of ideas here. I align with the important work of social justice and the path that this UU has carved into our noble history.
I want to help sustain this community, a community for the stranger who may come thru that door next week, who may be seeking what UUs can give. And I hope, beyond my years on this planet, that such strangers will become like me, supporting this ongoing community. This place is truly a BEACON OF LOVE and JUSTICE.
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Church Finances and Stewardship, Religious Studies: History, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, Trends in Religion, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views | Tags: congregational history, liberal Christianity, liberal religion, religious humanist
Unitarian Universalist Society
Sacramento, CA
Hymns:
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing; Come, Sing a Song with Me;
For the Earth Forever Turning. Vocal music: Bright Morning Stars, duet by Eric and Emily
Prayer
The banners around the top of our sanctuary were created by artists and craftspersons in the congregation in 1982, near the conclusion of Theodore Webb’s ministry here. He served this congregation as minister from 1971 to 1983, and attends now as Minister Emeritus. These words of prayer, written by Ted, were published in a Meditation Manual by our denomination(1984), in which all the poems and prayers came from people of a Universalist heritage—those who had been Universalists prior to the Unitarian and Universalist merger of 1961.
(Read prayer page 45 from To Meet the Asking Years).
Reading
In Sacramento, the first public expressions of Unitarian theology in Sacramento took the form of public lectures in 1858 and 1860. In particular, on May 31 and June 6 of 1860, Thomas Star King came over from San Francisco to give lectures to benefit the Sacramento Library Association. A Universalist minister in Boston, Starr King had been called in 1860 to serve the Unitarian Church in the City, our first one on the West Coast. His preaching and political activism are credited with keeping California in the Union. His fundraising on the coast provided 1.25 million dollars during the Civil War for the founding of a national Sanitary Commission, which later became the Red Cross. This is from his May 31 lecture, “Substance and Show”:
[A] life-spirit inhabits every flower and shrub, and protects it against the prowling forces of destruction.
Look at a full-sized oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields. Judging by your senses and by the scales, you would say that the substance of the noble tree was its bulk of bark and bough and branch and leaves and sap, the cords of woody and moist matter that compose it and make it heavy.
But really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs and clothes its twigs with digestive leaves and sucks up nutriment from the soil continually, and makes the roots clench the ground with their fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm wind, and at last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and wrath of gravitation, and swings its … arms in triumph over the globe and in defiance of the gale.
Were it not for this energetic essence that crouches in the acorn and stretches its limbs every year, there would be no oak….
Sermon
The sermon today covers the first century of the life of this congregation—its life and near-death experiences. Next month I’ll speak about the last half century of UUSS, a time which many of our members can remember. I’ve been here for only the past four years, but I’ve read our church histories, written by Rodney Cobb and Irma West, and combined and published a few years ago by three of our current members.
Given that the Board of Trustees has scheduled a meeting for the members to vote on calling me as a settled associate minister, it seemed important for me to think about the identity of this congregation, to understand who we are by asking the question: How did we get here?
The Unitarian minister Arnold Crompton attributed the growth of Unitarianism on the West Coast to several factors. First, Unitarians came to the West Coast when other Americans did: after the Gold Rush began in 1849, and after the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad made it easier to get here. These “transplanted” New England Unitarians wanted a church like those back home.
Also, the tightening of the lines of [religious] orthodoxy [made liberal Christians seek out others like them]. In the larger society, scientific challenges to traditional theology also boosted the appeal of religious liberalism.
Another factor was that “great ministers… by their preaching, their leadership, and their lives attracted people to their churches and denomination.” The first Unitarian church on this Coast was founded in 1850, in San Francisco. Thomas Starr King, a Universalist from Boston, came to serve it from 1860 to 1864. Then he died of tuberculosis at age 39. His successor, and other Unitarian clergymen from the East, led important churches in the major West Coast cities.
And there was a missionary outreach. Indeed, in 1865, the American Unitarian Association raised $100,000 for the spread of Unitarianism in the West. Energetic ministers and agents of the denomination “established churches or planted seeds of future churches.” One of these men, the Reverend Charles Gordon Ames preached on Sundays in San Jose and in Watsonville, and in 1867, he added Sacramento to his schedule, coming up here in his horse and buggy to preach for us.[i] His tireless ministry led to regular meetings of religious liberals in Sacramento.
Our first minister was Henry W. Brown, who arrived from the East and gave his first sermon on a Sunday evening in December 1867, at the Metropolitan Theater. Three months later, on March 29, a group of people signed an “article of agreement” to “associate ourselves in a body corporate, to be know as the First Unitarian Church of Sacramento.” The purpose of the church was “the worship of God and the service of Men.” With 17 families, the newly gathered congregation established bylaws. Progressive for the time, the bylaws allowed that of the seven trustees of the church, three of them could be women. (p. 14 of In Good Times and Bad, the UUSS history)
Then, about five years later, the church disappeared. This was in the nation’s financial panic of 1873, when banks were closing. Reverend Brown returned to Boston and nothing (apparently) happened for 14 years.
In 1887, a new congregation was established (or re-established). The next minister was was Charles P. Massey, a businessman from Philadelphia. Services were held in various meeting halls downtown, such as Pioneer Hall, and later at a new meeting hall named the Pythian Castle at 9th and I streets.
Another financial panic ensued in 1893. This led the Board to release the minister. Church records show minimal activity until 1911, when Board meetings again took place. But the congregation may have had money saved for a building program, for six months later it bought land at 27th Street between N and O streets. In 1915, the congregation built a church on 27th Street. An article in the Sacramento Bee said it was “constructed of cedar shakes, with brown stained woodwork. The windows are of amber glass in simple leaded patterns…. The structure cost $8,000.” So in 1915, we had our first home, and our first visible symbol in the community, since our founding in 1868. Prior to this, our church history says, the visible symbol of Unitarianism in the community was a person—not its ministers, but a lay leader, Dr. Henry L. Nichols. A charter member, he held one or another elected position in the church for 47 years. Imagine being on the Board for 47 years! A transplant from Maine, Nichols was a leader in Sacramento, one of the organizers of the local Medical Society. He was a crusader for pure drinking water in the city and served as president of our Board of Supervisors, and as California Secretary of State. Another founder of the Medical Society, Dr. Alexander Nixon, was also a Unitarian.
When the church was built on 27th Street, the Reverend Charles Pease was our minister, serving for five years. In the midst of rising inflation, an insufficient salary made it hard for him to stay, and he left in 1918. Later, the denomination sent out an extension minister who served the church for a year.
Then came Berkeley B. Blake. He was a local attorney who was a member of our board. He had run the Sunday School when Charles Pease was minister, and he had some seminary training. The church ordained him, and in 1922, Blake began serving as the part-time minister for two congregations—ours, and the one in Woodland, about 20 miles west of downtown. (It no longer exists.) During Blake’s five years in our ministry, he and the Rabbi of Temple B’Nai Israel held a joint Thanksgiving Day service. This began a long tradition of yearly activities between the two congregations.
Blake moved on to the Bay Area, to serve in the denomination’s regional office.
In 1927 a young minister came to us by the name of Robert E. Starkey. Starkey’s burdens in ministry included religious and political tensions about the 1928 presidential election, between a Roman Catholic Democrat, and a Quaker Republican, who was Herbert Hoover. Then began the Great Depression, late in 1929. Spending declined in the church, and attendance was erratic. In 1931, Berkeley Blake, our former minister and now a denominational official, learned that some of the church’s board members were unhappy with Reverend Starkey. They were planning to meet with him. Blake advised Starkey to recognize his “lack of success” and submit his resignation, for the good of the church. He did resign, to the dismay and protest of many church members. So the Board called a congregational meeting to let members vote on whether to accept Starkey’s resignation. The vote supported his continued ministry, but Starkey left anyway. He moved his family to Berkeley. Six years later, suffering mental anguish and about to be divorced by his wife, he took his life. The crew of a boat pulled him from the water near the newly constructed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, “his clothing torn to shreds.” Starkey was the first suicide from that bridge.
Though it’s not a surprise that funding declined in the Depression, our congregation had always had a struggle with money. From its early years, it had never been self-sustaining. In the words of our historian, the congregation was “shy about raising money and soliciting members.” The Unitarian Society appealed many times for help to the American Unitarian Association, in Boston. This help came in the form of subsidies for ministers and grants for meeting space. For example, though there was no activity here from 1895 to 1911, there is evidence that Board members applied to the denomination for money in 1901. Money from Boston covered $6,000 of the $8,000 cost of our new 1915 church building (75). In the 1920s, the denomination gave us $2,000 toward Berkeley Blake’s yearly salary of $2,400. By 1927, Blake’s pay was a whopping $3,000 a year, and then he left for the regional job. Our history shows, also, that a number of church families often came to the rescue as financial angels (27).
In 1932, without a minister, we held services at night, so Bay Area ministers could make it here after finishing their services at home. The Depression lasted nearly a decade, during which modest levels of support came from Boston. Our leaders complained that Boston had always sent us ministers who were young and inexperienced. The church needed a skilled minster, and for this it asked for a large increase in aid… for just one year. This is all it would take for us to become self-supporting! The denomination said no. So, in 1935, the 20 remaining members halted Sunday services and rented out our building to a Unity church.
However, the Women’s Alliance continued to meet–twice a month. In fact, during all those ups and downs of church operation over the years, the Alliance met continuously since 1889. It provided literary and artistic programs for the benefit of the city, and raised funds to give to the congregation and other causes. Often, it was the Alliance that kept us afloat. In 1922, the Alliance had 241 dues paying members. The church had only 47. Though women had been limited to only three seats on the Board, they had represented 2/3 of the church’s membership. It was through the Alliance that women expressed their leadership and their power. One of its leaders was Julia Bray, who had joined the church in 1913. She taught in public schools here for 31 years, and passed away in 1949. The first fund created by the congregation for memorial gifts was the Julia Bray Fund for religious education.
For nine years, from 1936 to 1945, the church down in Stockton shared its minister with us. He was Arthur Foote II. He and his wife lived in Stockton. In 1945, the Footes left California for a large church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Along with changes in leadership and membership numbers, our first 100 years included theological changes, reflecting those of many Unitarian churches. From its early days the Sacramento Society identified itself as a liberal Christian church. Liberal means not only non-Trinitarian, but non-dogmatic and inclusive. Our sermons dealt with the nature of the Divine, the human nature of Jesus, and the importance of his ideals. How inclusive was this Christianity? Well, Charles Massey preached these words:
[there is] a need for religious sentiment with which to meet the emotions of awe, of wonder, of terror, of love, of delight arising from the mystery by which we feel ourselves eternally surrounded. These emotions belonging to such gifted souls as Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mohammed and Jesus have been regarded as revelation.
He said this in 1889! And all of us, he said, even “the humblest among us,” have the ability to test such revelations by our own experience. (17)
The church bylaws in the late 1800s said that the members gathered “in the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth for the purpose of sustaining liberal Christian worship.” In 1913, the church removed that phrase. In its place, they added this: “We, whose names are here subscribed, associate ourselves together as a Religious Society for mutual helpfulness in right living and for advancement of sound morals and liberal religion in the community; and we … pledge ourselves to bear our part in common cause and to care for the welfare and influence of the Society.” (23, emphasis added)
In the 1920s, divisions arose in many Unitarian congregations—including this one—as religious humanism emerged to challenge theistic beliefs of the liberal as well as the orthodox variety. Humanism affirmed reason, intellect and science, and showed faith in the inevitable, never-ending improvement of humanity. Sometimes humanism saw science as our salvation. The majority of members who identified themselves as holding more “traditional Unitarian” ideas may have felt threatened by humanism. According to our historian, such divisions may have added to the stress on Robert Starkey’s troubled ministry with us in the late 1920s.
In the mid-1940s, however, it was clear that religious humanism was dominant in this congregation. It was also clear that the church was poised for growth in the years after World War Two. Sacramento itself was growing at 1,000 people per month. People were moving to California, and the Baby Boom was booming. Our next minister was Theodore Abell. He had gone to a Methodist college in Ohio and become a Methodist minister. At age 30, he was expelled for his lack of belief in church doctrine. In Southern California, Ted Abell was introduced to Unitarianism and Humanism. He founded and led the Hollywood Humanist Society, and hosted a radio program. He came up to Sacramento and served in the State welfare department as a social worker. He began working for us part time, until the church could raise enough money to pay him full-time. He served us for 15 pivotal years.
His efforts included raising the proportion of men involved in the church from 1/3 to close to 50%, typing a mimeograph for a monthly newsletter and ensuring the retention of it and other records for archival purposes, and encouraging the congregation to pay its own way and stop relying on the denomination for subsidies. This reliance didn’t end until 1951. In particular, Ted Abell urged us to pay for facilities that would be adequate for our needs.
In 1950, Sunday school attendance shot up from 20 to 79 children. The church bought a house next to out building on 27th street, and built a religious education building on the lot. Money still being a challenge, they built it themselves. The chair of the building committee, Wayne Perkins, worked hard on it, even though he no longer had young children. He said he was doing it “for other people’s children” (67). On Easter Sunday in 1951, 200 people attended, our largest crowd ever to that date. In 1953, we held a Big Rally to wipe out the mortgage debt and start a new building fund. In the 1950s, most American congregations were thriving and bursting at the seams, including ours. Soon we would have 200 children.
In 1956, Society members voted to buy a farm of almost six acres, out here, four miles from our Midtown site. Again, members did much of the construction work themselves. This included making the hexagonal molds for the windows in the poured-concrete walls of this Main Hall and the Religious Education building. We raised money in a capital campaign, took out a 10-year bank loan and a smaller loan from the denomination. The first event in this completed church was a strawberry social in June of 1960.
While all that work was taking place, controversy brought a tragic air to our success. Six months earlier, a congregational meeting considered a bylaws amendment that would make a compulsory retirement age of 68 for any minister. Ted Abell was already 68. Voting members balked at this amendment. They revised the amendment to apply only to future ministers, and to raise the age to 70. They passed a resolution praising Ted Abell’s ministry and asking him to stay, but only by a vote of 93 to 40. Hurt by all this, and hoping for unity for the congregation’s future, Abell resigned.
His last day in the pulpit was June 19, 1960. Members thanked him and his wife for their service with a gift of a new 1960 Plymouth Valiant. Yet he was no longer our minister by July 10, when we held our first service here in this space. Why did we have such an awkward way of urging the minister to quit? I’m not sure. Perhaps lay leaders noted a decline in his behavior and his cognitive abilities. Indeed, one or two members had noted behaviors, which later would be understood as symptoms of a brain tumor. By September he was very sick, and on November 22, Ted Abel passed away.
I can scarcely imagine a more dramatic time in the life of a congregation. Well, times got better here, and they became difficult again. Awkward struggle and brilliant success are woven through our history, as they are through most institutions and indeed through most nations, throughout human history. Failures and new starts, heartache and hope are part of our story.
This is our story. It seems to me that those who came before us were doing the best that they knew how. This is all that we can try to do—the best that we can. They did so much work, not only for themselves and their children, but for us and for our children.
They of did so much work not only for their own ambitions and needs, but for us, for all of us who have come after them. It is good to say thank you, and to continue doing the best that we know how. So may it be.
[i] Arnold Crompton, Unitarianism on the Pacific Coast (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Comparative Religion, Inspiration, Religious Studies: History, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views
January 22, 2012 Sacramento, CA
Hymns: We Are Children of the Earth, Spirit of Life/Fuente de Amor, We Would Be One.
Reading: #444, This House, by Kenneth L. Patton.
Choral Music: Love Is the Spirit of this Church, James Vila Blake & Jason Shelton.
Sermon
Online computer dating sites invite you to identify your faith, as well as listing your occupation, income, hobbies, hair color, height and weight. In the religion category of the sites I have seen, the most commonly used label is not a denomination’s name, and not Christian, Catholic or Protestant. It’s “Spiritual but Not Religious.” Many people say this also in casual conversation–“I’m spiritual but not religious.” There is no authoritative definition of what people mean by this. I have not read of any study or survey. My guess is that they wish to identify as having a spiritual outlook on life, or a spiritual practice, or a relationship with God. Perhaps they feel humility toward life, or an attitude of gratitude for the gifts of life. Maybe it means they like to hike in the mountains, read poetry, sing gospel songs, hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor, or visit old cathedrals—just not when there’s a church service going on.
When people say “I’m not religious,” they may be thinking of dogmas and creeds; rules and commandments; lifeless theologizing; hypocrisy and abuses of power, and preaching that’s dull. And let us not forget religious intolerance, repression and violence. Religions have done terrible things. People have done terrible things, acting in the names of religions.
Living in the fourteenth century, Hafiz was an Islamic poet of the Sufi tradition. He wrote this:
The
Great religions are the
Ships,
Poets the life
Boats.
Every sane person I know has jumped
Overboard.[i]
A friend of mine is retired from the Christian ministry in a Mainline, moderate denomination. He’s a radical environmentalist and a veteran of Civil Rights demonstrations. He’s respectful of other faiths and knowledgeable about them. And he has no patience for the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” To hold this attitude, he says, is to cut yourself off from history, to be rootless, to be unaware of the source of the modes of spirituality that you hasten to claim. It is to risk falling for the newest fads and latest fashions, he says, to see spirituality as a catalogue item instead of a heritage. My friend writes:
[A man tells me] that he attended a Baptist revival once when he was thirteen and didn’t like all the shouting about sin so he never again has had anything to do with Christianity. Well, once I attended a junior high art show when I was thirteen and didn’t like the pictures there, so I never again have looked at art. [He goes on, asking whether he should] stop having anything to do with any college or university because six hundred years ago all their astronomy faculties taught that the sun revolved around the earth, and one hundred years ago all their anthropology faculties taught that blacks were genetically inferior [to whites], and fifty years ago almost all … were segregated. What enlightened person wants to be associated with such institutions?
My friend can recount the bad stories from religious history, as well as the contributions made by religions. He notes that religious traditions can change, evolve, and even improve. Those of us who choose to identify with a faith tradition have a duty to make it better, to reform and revive it. We have a duty to embody the values and virtues our tradition espouses.
American Unitarians of the nineteenth century took on this duty. I’d like to tell you about three of them. In fact, our big three: William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. You could say they were the inventors of “spiritual but not religious.” To them, religion was not a set of creeds and rules to follow, it was your way of life.
The first generation of Unitarian ministers in the United States were liberal Christians in Boston-area Congregationalist churches. Their faith was Bible-based, yet they said we should use our God-given ability to reason when studying Scriptures. To them, “reason was the friend, not the enemy of faith.”[ii] Their leader was William Ellery Channing. You can see a statue of him in Boston’s Public Garden, across from the church he served.
Orthodox Calvinists believed that all human beings were depraved and fallen, and could do nothing to avoid the fire-y fate in hell that awaited all but an elect few. Channing and the liberals said no. They believed that all people are created in the likeness of God. Hence, all could grow toward God’s goodness and perfection, as Jesus had modeled for us. Channing did not want to fight over points of theology with conservative ministers. That was a distraction from teaching religion as a way of life. Yet as the orthodox ministers continued attacking them as heretics, the Unitarians stood up for themselves. Channing led the charge, giving a sermon as the manifesto of Unitarian Christianity in 1819.
Those liberal ministers got organized in 1825. They grew in number and influence. To them, to be religious was to live sincerely and virtuously. To be religious meant examining your own heart–not for evil, but for the goodness that lives there. It meant showing the goodness in your actions, words, and commitments. Those early Unitarians believed every one of us can cultivate our divine potential. The term used for this approach then was “self-culture.” Nowadays people call this “spiritual growth.”
Sitting in the pews of Channing’s church, and nourished by his preaching, was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a young man whose father had been a Unitarian minister. Waldo’s parents had died when he was a child, and he was shaped intellectually and spiritually by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Channing tutored Waldo privately before the young man entered Harvard’s divinity school. For its day, it was a liberal school, as Unitarians had already taken over its faculty. But for Emerson, the divinity school was lifeless.
He entered parish ministry but didn’t enjoy it. After his first wife died of tuberculosis, at age 19, he withdrew from his colleagues. Then he resigned his pulpit. The stated reason was that he did not wish to officiate at the Lord’s Supper, or communion. He saw it to be an empty ritual. But for him the whole church thing was empty and cold.
Emerson began lecturing and writing essays. He was on fire, and brimming with inspiration. Around him gathered an intellectual circle known as the Transcendentalists. Most of these people were Unitarians, or had been. They said it is not necessary to be Christian to be religious. It isn’t necessary to believe in a supernatural deity to be religious. They emphasized the use of reason, but they celebrated personal intuition more. They tossed out the Holy Bible, or tossed out the idea that the Bible was the primary source of religious truth. The primary sources must be your personal experience, your own soul, and the world around you. They said the word of God is too plentiful and fresh to be bound in one book for all time.
Emerson preached not a religion of the church, but “religion of the soul,” in the words of my colleague Jay Deacon. Instead of a remote God, Emerson felt and imagined a Power that connects us all, and which comes from within each of us. He said that in each of us is “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle equally related; the eternal One.”[iii]
In 1838 the graduating divinity school class at Harvard invited Emerson to give the commencement address, and he accepted. To these new ministers, the ex-minister recounted the corruptions of the Christian church over the centuries, and those of their own church. Conventional Unitarians still accepted the New Testament accounts of the miracles of Jesus as true—to them the miracles were evidence that Jesus was a messenger of God. Emerson condemned this as a monstrous idea. Supernatural tricks have nothing to do with miracle. A miracle is a flower blowing in the wind, or the roaring ocean waves.
Emerson said we can’t rely on others to tell us what God is, or who we are. Everyone must get acquainted “first hand” with the Spirit of Life. He urged the students: Have your own experience of God, and be brave enough to tell your congregations about it. Preach a new message, speak your own gospel. Don’t rely on old ways or old words of theologians and preachers, even the ones you admire.
He meant only to challenge the complacency of the students and their professors. According to scholar Gary Dorrien, Emerson meant to light a fire. Instead he caused a “firestorm.” One Harvard professor called his address “the latest form of infidelity.” The scandal of it gave orthodox critics one more weapon with which to attack the Unitarians.
Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for 27 years. Yet he continued to shape the religious life of the Unitarian churches—and of the nation–as “students, and ministers and throngs of laypeople were reading his essays and going to hear his lectures.”[iv]
Sitting in the audience for the Divinity School Address was the new graduate Theodore Parker. In his journal that night, he wrote that Emerson’s “picture of the faults of the church” was “so beautiful, so just, so true.” Parker took from Emerson the call to a wider circle of religious concern, and he took it further. Parker is famous in our history for his radical abolitionism against American slavery and his opposition to the Mexican War and the government’s mistreatment of Native American tribes.[v]
In his day, Parker became infamous after giving an address called “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” This was 1840, 11 years after Emerson’s address, and 21 years after Channing’s Unitarian Christianity sermon. Emerson had celebrated Jesus as a spiritual teacher, just not the only spiritual teacher. Parker now said that Jesus was a great soul, to be sure. But what mattered was not Jesus himself, but the lessons he taught, the spiritual and moral principles he embodied. Those principles are timeless. They would be just as good if they had come from a mathematician in Athens as from Jesus of Nazareth.
We need no church, we need no Jesus, to tell us what is good. We know from our intuition and reason what values are true and lasting, Parker said. The rituals and forms of Christianity are transient; they will fall apart. The true spirit will persist. Rebellious words, for Boston in 1840!
Since Channing’s day, conservatives had been calling the Unitarian church “a halfway house to infidelity.” Now, orthodox ministers used Parker’s heresy to embarrass the Unitarians. Under this pressure, many of Parker’s colleagues avoided him, refusing pulpit exchanges with him, some not even speaking to him.[vi]
Consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation as a halfway house now. What’s our program? What do we offer? I think as a halfway house we try to show the way beyond separateness and spiritual isolation, the way to true connection, authentic fellowship, and a sense of belonging. We encourage every person to self-knowledge and self-expression. We strive to offer, and we seek to receive, the courage to find our personal calling and purpose in the world, and the courage to live out that purpose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson compared each human life to a ship starting on a journey. He asked: “Why should each new soul that is launched out of God into Nature be wrecked at the beginning of the voyage by following the charts of its mates instead [of] the compass, the stars, and the continents?”
For Emerson’s time of stale conformity, rigid social rules and unoriginal thinking, it was good advice. It still is good advice. Yet looking at my own life as a journey on the sea, I wonder what I’d be without the wisdom of other people’s experience from their journeys. Where would I be without the friends who taught the stars to me, the mentors who showed me how to use a compass, the travelers who brought news of continents worth exploring. Where would I be without, the sailboat skipper who said, “Here, take the wheel,” and then stood by me as I tried it out? Where and who would I be without them?
I believe the best way to find courage and a sense of connection is by joining with others, joining by our own free will, making our own decision. In community, we practice our values. We find that living by our values can take work. We need support, and the good examples of other good people who come seeking their own purpose and their own sense of connection.
Moral principles and ethical values matter. Yet values must be embodied for them to make a difference in our world. Values need structures and platforms. It is by institutions that values are carried from generation to generation. Such institutions are families, homes and schools; businesses, governments and unions; congregations and voluntary membership associations of all kinds. People do challenge their institutions, call them to account, and reform them. People will even found new institutions to replace the outworn and lifeless ones. Institutions carry values from one generation to the next. For better and for worse, religious institutions also embody values and carry principles forward. Together, here, let us decide to make it for the better. For the better! Amen.
[i] Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master. New York: Penguin Compass, 1999, p. 177. Quoted and cited by Jay Deacon.
[ii] Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001, p. 31.
[iii] Jay Deacon, Magnificent Journey: Religion As a Lock on the Past or Engine of Evolution. Westminster, MA: Ground Wave Publishing, 2011, p. 62.
[iv] Deacon, p. 72.
[v] Deacon, p. 65.
[vi] Dorrien, p. 88.
Filed under: International, Religious Studies: History, Travels, Trends in Religion, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views | Tags: ICUU, international Unitarian Universalism
Greetings from another day of the biennial meeting of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, in Dumaguete City, Philippines.
Make your own guesses before reading further. The answers are buried in the paragraph below.
Each member group to the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists has voting delegates depending on how large its membership is. Each group also pays annual dues to the ICUU based on the group’s own count of its members. Groups from developed countries pay 50 cents (US currency) per member. Groups from less developed countries pay 5 cents per member. The Unitarian Universalist Association (USA) pays the largest share of support, about $60,000 a year. This is less than our calculated dues, which would be about $20,000 more. The answers to the above question: The USA has the largest number of adult members, 163,000. The second largest denomination is the 450-year old Unitarian Church of Transylvania (which is a Hungarian speaking province of Romania), with 45,000 members. The third largest is the church in Hungary, with 25,000. I understand that the Hungarians and Transylvanians will merge into one Hungarian-speaking Unitarian denomination in the near future, returning to their historic relationship. India (mostly in the Khasi Hills of the far Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya) has 10,000. Canada has 5,000 adult Unitarians. The liberal religious community of the Netherlands, recognized as our newest member at the February 7 ICUU Council meeting, has 4,300 members. United Kingdom has 3,700, but some great old church buildings.
UU Church of the Philippines has 2,000 adult members (and tons of kids!) Our newest “emerging group,” the UUs from Kenya, counts itself with 476 members. For now, I’m leaving off other. smaller or emerging groups from the developing world (and some of the shrinking European groups).
To read more about the council meeting, visit the Faith without Borders weblog: http://uuwithoutborders.blogspot.com/
Filed under: Adult Enrichment and Group Meetings, Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Comparative Religion, Comparative Religion, Graduate Theological school/PSR, International, Religious Studies: History, Trends in Religion, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views
Appendix III: Is It Christian? Historical Details on American Unitarianism
This question has been a source of conflict within our movement, especially on the Unitarian side of our history. It was a dispute about how far liberalism in religion could go and still resemble its original form—and still resemble a religious movement. In the 1800s, as ministers and other Unitarians moved west and gathered new congregations, many claimed the label Unitarian but not the label Christian. They spoke of “ethical religion.” They argued that attempts to describe the movement as Christian were infringements on spiritual freedom and the liberty of religious conscience. Unitarians who led the denomination in Boston and those who lived closer to Boston than to the Midwest argued that we would risk losing our roots and sense of identity if we did not, as whole, describe our movement as a liberal form of Christianity.
Points in history often identified as the departure from considering ourselves Christian include the Transcendentalist Movement of the 1830s to 1850s (a literary, philosophical and spiritual movement led by resigned Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson and other intellectuals, most of whom had grown up as Unitarians).
Other factors included the Free Religious Association (founded in 1867 by radical Unitarians unhappy with a sole Christian focus), and the Western Unitarian Conference (founded by radicals to recruit ministers and plant churches in order to spread Unitarianism to what is now the Middle West). In 1887, this Conference adopted a document entitled “The Things Most Commonly Believed Today Among Us.” Written by William Channing Gannett, it allows for the presence of non-Christian Unitarian beliefs.
A document called the Humanist Manifesto, was published as a magazine article in 1929 calling for a reform of religions so they serve human needs rather than restricting the full flourishing of human life for adherence to disputable doctrines. IT carried the signatures of 15 Unitarian ministers, 17 college professors (primarily in philosophy) and one Universalist minister.[1] All of the signers were white men. During much of the twentieth century, many Unitarians (and, since 1961, UUs) have referred to themselves, and often to their whole congregations, as Humanists. For many, this has meant agnostic or even atheist.
To an outside visitor, a typical UU church service in much of the twentieth century might have seemed like a long lecture with a few pieces of classical music, a song or two, and announcements about life in the church and local community. However, since the early 1980s, many UU ministers and lay members have “rediscovered” spirituality: the importance of personal spiritual practice, study of the Bible and other scriptures, and exploration of one’s religious background, including Jewish, Christian or other traditional rituals in families. Perhaps the recent openness to fellowship with indigenous Unitarians or Universalists in other countries is a reflection of our recent rediscovery of spiritual expressiveness.
For more information: “Unitarianism,” by Mark Harris, The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, Daniel Patte, ed. (Cambridge, 2010: Cambridge University Press), 1263-4.
Filed under: Comparative Religion, International, Ordeals and Observations of Pastor Cranky not elsewhere classified, Special Events, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views
Saturday I fly from SFO to Tokyo and then to Manila. Two days later I fly to Dumaguete City, on Negros Island, where the UU Church of the Philippines has its HQ. They will be hosting the conference of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists.
Assuming little turbulence, I like flying in a plane.
I get a lot of reading done. Few interruptions–except for the beverage cart and the food cart (on international flights). I also catch up on my popular culture with the little TV screen on the seat back in front of me.
Getting on a plane is a way for me to MAKE MYSELF take a break. Since adding some administrative and managerial duties to my portfolio (which I enjoy) and starting part-time doctoral studies, I’ve been busy. I thought January would be easier. School was not to start till January 31. I have done a lot but many things remain unfinished, not even started! Except for travel to Tucson on MLK Weekend, I have not taken a full day off during any week since Sunday, January 1.
I will be doing UU business, with liberal religious friends new and old from nearly every continent, so it’s not really a vacation. But it’s a change of pace, change of venue, change of perspective. That’s what Sabbath is supposed to provide. It starts on the jumbo jet.
Amen!
