Filed under: Children and Youth, Church Finances and Stewardship, Ordeals and Observations of Pastor Cranky not elsewhere classified, UUA General Assembly 2009 in Salt Lake City
At the 2009 UUMA Ministry Days I attended an excellent workshop by the Rev. Nate Walker, of 1st Unitarian Philadelphia, about our relationship with technology, especially emerging communication, presentation and social networking tools on the web. I made a last-minute decision to attend this one instead of my pre-registered choice, hoping that it would not make me feel bad about my slow adoption of new technologies and overwhelmed by all the new stuff coming out. His workshop met my hopes with grace and inspiration.
In the “introductions” segment, we all spoke about our relationship with tech as if it were a person. It helped to see the range of comfort levels and that as many of us are late adopters as are early adopters. He noted: we are all in this together.
He said we should not forget our spiritual natures, roles as spiritual leaders and commitment to spiritual practice. Given all the other things ministers must manage and navigate, we do have it in our power to have an intentional and not harmful relationship with new technologies.
Some people have a rule of not looking at email sooner than 12 hours since the last time they read or wrote emails. Before we knew what had happened, Nate swore all us ministers to give up email for Lent next year. We will need to alert and remind parishioners and colleagues well in advance of Ash Wednesday. This doesn’t mean we can’t phone people and ask them to phone us or to meet with us in person. (And, I might add, handwritten notes are still gratifying.) I’m writing it here so I can remember my commitment.
He gave examples of how he and his church have used YouTube for pastoral messages (as when he was out of state last July when news came of the shootings in the Knoxville UU church), as well as for worship and religious education presentations. They replaced their membership photo directory with an online directory (with Flicker, I think); this can be password protected as well as more easily updated.
The most exciting project: they provided video cameras and mikes to church children and youth, who conducted a series of interviews with church elders and other adults, asking questions like “What religion did you grow up in?” All the clips were brief, which kept every one interesting. This was a great tool for connecting children to adults in the congregation.
He showed us the opening scene from the movie “Crash,” which was used for a dialogue on race and ethnicity. Notable line: “We miss the touch so much tha twe crash into each other just to feel it.”
Of course, many churches now post and podcast sermons and other parts of worship services.
The Mail Chimp program shows who comes to the church web site and why. Google can track which pages of a web site are visited most frequently. First Unitarian gets visitors from all states as well as 77 other countries.
His own Netiquette guidelines:
Real life does apply online. Practice deep listening and loving speech, just as we try to do in person. No expectations for a timely response on email. Put out “flames” and do not participate in conflict by email. Recognize conflicts but don’t try to resolve them online unless there is no other way to reach someone or have a conversation with them. Respect people’s privacy. Avoid sarcasm.
We need to use the technology to help us enhance our ministries and not become slaves to technology for its own sake. Hence, he asked us to identify and articulate our own sense of purpose. When we are clear on that we can avoid being buffeted by all the new options and tools.
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Children and Youth, Family Ministry
I recommend this article from the June 26 Wall Street Journal. But here is a good summary from The Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty’s online “Sightings” column: Charlotte Hays in her “Houses of Worship” column reports on the decline in Sunday School attendance and the number of Sunday Schools nationally. Is this because God is dead? No— while boring experiences contribute, social factors are bigger. Parental divorces unsettle Sunday arrangements for the children’s schedules, and soccer wins out over Jesus almost always. Sunday sports and public celebrations are thus other phenomena which show that there are other sanctuaries for the “real religion” of millions.
My Reflections:
She notes that even when Protestant Sunday Schools were attended more regularly, they were unlikely to convey all the content and reflection necessary for a genuine formation in the faith. Indeed, the youth with the highest level of religious literacy (both Judeo-Christian and of other world faiths) are those (of any faith or of none) who have attended private Catholic schools.
I’m not sure that one year of a confirmation class (or Coming of Age in the UU faith) can make up for the absence of in-depth content and formation in all the other years of youth. Mormons instill loyalty and content by focusing on family life and making the family unit the basic one in the local church, or ward. By maintaining a “bubble” of Mormon life and ownership of the Mormon heritage. Jewish congregations have offered Sunday school Hebrew school or other courses for those preparing for their bar mitvah or bat mitzvah.
Yet there are promising developments, such as Spirit Play for UUs, which is based on Godly Play. It is a story-based method which does not depend on week-to-week continuity of attendance. It promotes spiritual reflection, love of ritual and community-building. Also, many congregations have done the hard work of promoting community across the generations–in worship attendance and leadership, in fellowship activities (i.e., fun), in social witness and service, and even in small group ministry. I believe this cultivates an identity as a beloved member of a faith community and provides cross-generational experiences for elders, children, and parents, many of whose own family members are far away.
Filed under: UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views, UUA General Assembly 2009 in Salt Lake City, UUA Presidential Campaigns
This is a press release that the UUA’s communications director just released. I was surprised at the margin and sad at my candidate’s loss, as were all the others at the thank-you party Satuday night after the Ware Lecture. Peter Morales is a dynamic and experienced leader, and both candidates have raised important issues in this energetic but respectful campaign between two accomplished ministers.
Note how significant is the number of absentee votes as a fraction of all votes cast. In some past UUA elections the winner has “won” even before showing up at GA because his campaign has locked up so many absentee votes in advance. Note also the “transition” period–less than 24 hours from election results to installation! All other nominees were running in uncontested elections
Press release:(June 27, 2009 – Salt Lake City, Utah) – Rev. Peter Morales, senior
minister of Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden, Colorado, today was
elected to be the eighth president of the Unitarian Universalist
Association of Congregations (UUA) at the Association’s General Assembly
in Salt Lake City.
Morales received a total of 2061 votes, 1020 of which were cast as
absentee ballots. His opponent, Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, formerly senior
minister of the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas, received a
total of 1481 votes, 827 of which were absentee ballots. Morales’
margin of victory was 580 votes.
Speaking of his aspirations for Unitarian Universalism, Rev. Morales
said, “I want to grow our faith, to reach all those people who are
looking for non-dogmatic, liberal religious community. I look forward to
working with partners in many other progressive and justice-seeking
religious groups. There are tremendous issues that we’ll be facing in
the coming years and we’re going to need one another.”
Rev. Morales, the first Latino leader of the UUA, will be installed in a
ceremony which concludes the General Assembly, at 6:30 PM (MDT) on
Sunday, June 28. Rev. Morales will succeed Rev. William G. Sinkford who
has served two four-year terms as President of the UUA.
See http://www.uua.org/news/newssubmissions/144235.shtml for the
complete story on Morales’ election. For uuworld.org’s coverage of the
Morales election, see http://uuworld.org/news/ga
Filed under: Uncategorized, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views, UUA General Assembly 2009 in Salt Lake City
The first day of our UU Ministers Association meeting (Ministry Days) has been devoted to continuing education for about 25 years. That will change after this year, when UUMA ceases trying to pack so much into one day. The plan is to establish a series of residential retreats for several days each for in-depth work on a variety of ministerial themes; for example, a week at Asilomar near Monterey. This will involve a near doubling of UUMA dues, but the rate will be more progressive, based on one’s salary.
Our speaker for the morning was Sonia Sanchez, the African American poet, teacher, activist, now from Philadelphia. It was a rather stream-of-consciousness talk interspersed with poetry. Many colleagues resonated with her words, and I copied down a few choice sentences, but I left at the mid-morning coffee break.
In the afternoon I attended an excellent workshop called “iMinistry,” in which the Rev. Nate Walker, the new young minister from First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia (oldest Unitarian church established as such in America). We first spoke about our relationship with technology with regard to our ministries, and learned we were not alone–whether early adopters or those who need lots of hand holding, like me. He gave several great examples of the use of internet tools for pastoral care, all-ages community building, social witness, administration, and worship. But the point was that our ministry should use technology; we should not let the technology use us. As with any relationship, boundaries are important. As with all other aspects of a demanding occupation, spiritual practices are important to keep up.
More soon.
Filed under: Ordeals and Observations of Pastor Cranky not elsewhere classified, UUA General Assembly 2009 in Salt Lake City, UUA Presidential Campaigns
I am staying in a big old lovely house 2 miles from the downtown hotels and convention center. My former intern has always been resourceful, and she and her husband found this house to rent online and recruited several other ministers to stay here and share the cost. An added temptation is that she is a chef and maybe some day she will want to cook while we are here. There are two straight clergy couples and four other people. One couple is a mixed marriage: he went to Starr King School for the Ministry and she went to Meadville Lombard Theological School; he supports Peter Morales for UUA president and she supports Laurel Hallman.
Yesterday I went for a ride around Salt Lake City with collegial friends Barb and Bill, who served the South Valley UU Church till 2006. They showed me Salt Lake City’s century-old, New England-style First Unitarian Church (closer to where we are) as well as the neighborhood they used to live in. The church is in a capital campaign to raise a few million for an expansion. Sort of makes the small goal of $17,000 for the Entry Way Project back home seem very small, and quite doable.
Today, Tuesday, is the day for the continuing education programs of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. Gotta catch the bus!
Barb was invited once by a female state senator from SLC to give the opening blessing at the Utah legislature, thus being the first woman clergy person to do so. On top of that, the senator told her afterwards that it was the first time the words “gay and lesbian” had been spoken publicly in that chamber! Now there are at least two openly glbt legislators.
Filed under: Children and Youth, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views
Instead of the same old boring but free breakfast in the hostel kitchen (where you have to wash and rinse your dishes afterwards!) this breakfast was a special outing–to the corner Dunkin’ Donuts. I rose early enough to have the hostel’s fair trade (and cost free) coffee and cereal and a read of the Boston Globe. I met up with our card-playing or stone-staring pilgrims and the other two adult leaders at that popular and ubiquitous New England-based breakfast place.
Green line train to Park Street, Red Line all the way to Alewife, end of the line. Wait for a 62 or 76 bus, ride through the lush, green countryside (suburbs) and get off at the Museum of the National Heritage, a free museum in Lexington, run by the Masons (a fraternal service organization with lots of dead presidents as members). Some of us went to a clock exhibit, some to a flag exhibit, some to “Lexington and the Revolutionary War.” David and I saw a traveling National Archives photo exhibit about work and workers in America, including mostly black and white pictures.
There were a few from ca. 1900 by Lewis Hine, who celebrated the image of laboring men but also documented the atrocities of child labor in the US, leading to controversy and legislation for reform. There was a picture of the near completion of the US Capitol dome in Washington, 1863. It had begun in the 850s. The caption said the man who engineered the placement of the statue on top of the dome (whose name escapes me) was a slave; the statue is called Freedom. There were shots of color- and sex-segregated 1940 US census workers typing (or punching computer cards–but maybe I’m mixing up two of them).
A charming picture: a man sitting in a chair just over the heads of men rolling cigars. He had a newspaper in one hand and cigar in the other. Spanish-speaking immigrant workers in Florida and Eastern European immigrants working in NYC would pool their money to hire one of their own to read to them as they rolled cigars. They would read newspapers and political tracts.
We hopped a tourist trolley to see Lexington and Concord and had a lively, fast paced narration by the period-costumed Marsha (“Masha, like Sasha,” she joked). As we gave her the tickets in the driveway, she became ebullient on finding out we were UUs. “There are so many Unitarians and Unitarian sites in this tour,” she said, “and nobody knows what it is. It’s so great to have Unitarians here!” She was so happy she told the folks on the trolley this good news. An older, straight white couple was sitting in the front row; the wife said, “What’s that?” Marsha gave a quick historical summary, making reference to “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” and saying the Unitarians had read the Bible and didn’t agree with that. “They said God is one.” The woman huffed: “I believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit!” Marsha said, “That’s great. And I’m Jewish and others have their beliefs. I love the differences. That’s what America is!”
We learned about Paul Revere and William Dawes (who alerted individual people, and did not shout it out from horseback that the Regulars were marching). We heard about the central role taverns in the towns and about the stored munitions that the Red Coats were hoping to seize Concord. We passed the Emerson house and heard a bit about Emerson’s history and Transcendentalism. All three of our stately white churches in the area (2 in Lexington, 1 in Concord) looked very nice in the gentle rain as we passed by.
Marsha explained the unplanned, inadvertent battle at the Lexington green and then took us to Concord’s battle site, where the head of the militia did in fact order “fire!” to kill and chase away the Red Coats on the other side of the little bridge; his order to fire made this second battle the shot heard round the world, as Waldo wrote and as the monument there reads. As Marsha read the words aloud by heart and I looked over the bridge I got choked up at all this heritage. It was also quite moving to hear her speak with compassion for the beleaguered Red Coats–Welsh, Scots, Irish, English troops of the King; their hard, poor lives back home made the cranky colonists’ lives look pretty nice in comparison.
An hour later, Marsha and I were walking together, away from the rude bridge that arched the flood, toward the trolley. “Can you believe it?” she asked, noting that the Trinitarian couple had never looked her in the eye after that theological moment and the woman had seemed upset as she talked to her husband. Later, when the couple got off at their stop, Marsha said goodbye and wished them safe travel, urged them to come back, etc. and she got nary a nod or a word from them. She looked back at me and we grinned. (Of course I had already become familiar with that kind of non-look, non-word response from our youth, even though they are not Trinitarians.)
Tina and I made a side trip to the Alcott family’s “Orchard House” while the rest strolled into downtown Concord for window shopping–but first I made them come and look at the replica of the shack Thoreau had built for his retreat of two years and two months at Walden Pond, just a couple of miles away (the pond, not the replica, which is at the museum).
I had forgotten that Bronson Alcott (Louisa’s dad) asked children in his classes what they thought, using dialogue instead of lectures, and using more questions instead of corporal punishment for an unruly child. The idealistic, sometimes utopian Bronson introduced the use of child-sized furniture in his own home as well as in his teaching; he cut down the legs of the school benches so each child’s feet could touch the ground. This got him fired–again! (The Catholic educator Maria Montessori, M.D., born in Italy in 1870, also introduced the concept of child-sized furniture and child-eye-level conversations in her progressive teaching methods. Our UU Spirit Play method in Sunday School has its origins in Montessori’s method and philosophy.)
The Alcott family moved 20 times in 22 years, avoiding home ownership to avoid foreclosure for debts and to find new work after Bronson lost his teaching jobs. They had little money and Louisa’s successful writing career was a great help to her family. She died of mercury poisoning after it was used to treat an infection.
I had never known that Louisa’s sister, May, was the first American female artist to be invited to show a painting in a French salon. She was an art teacher in Massachusetts; her students included a boy who started by carving a sculpture in a turnip and who later on would make the Concord Minute Man statue and the Abraham Lincoln statue for the memorial in Washington–Daniel Chester French was her student! She took her art toinsane asylum patients, thereby practicing art therapy before it had a title.
Back to Boston, for an early dinner at Legal Seafood near the Harbor. It was expensive but delicious and it was our last night out, so Cruise Director David let us all have more than a cuppa chowda for dinna. I tied Tina’s lobster bib on her as she wondered what to name the cute and red main course.
After dinner we took another trolley tour–Ghosts and Gravestones–a corny and campy ride through the North End and Beacon Hill with Minerva, a buxom but long-dead opera singer. In one burying ground we met her ghost friend, Seamus, who told us ghost stories about the cemetery and the Athenaeum (library). Parts of the tour were unsettling to me, given the campy and fun backdrop. We learned about the Boston Strangler, who may not have been caught after all (DNA testing showed no connection between the confessed and asylum-committed killer and the last victim). We learned that 1 in 10 of burials in times past may have involved people who were not dead but only seemed so; the exhumed coffins of some people have shown the signs of frantic agony when they had come briefly back to consciousness underground. We learned of long-ago hangings in the Boston Common, and saw how a longer knot could avoid snapping the neck of the condemned, so the crowds could have the fun of watching him or her strangle for up to an hour, and how a shorter knot could decapitate the person, also a crowd-pleaser. This kind of stuff is not creepy in a ghost-story way–to me it’s ugly, unsettling and disheartening, and it takes the fun out of the jokes in the other parts of the tour.
Curfew in the UUSS hostel rooms was 11 PM, as we had to get up at 4:30 AM for a 6:30 flight. We had gotten great mileage out of our $15 MBTA weekly passes, but we couldn’t get to the airport in time, since the T doesn’t start till 5:15. Did I say Boston’s is the first Subway in America?
Before bed I did some haggling in the hostel’s lively lobby with an independent shuttle van driver; five weeks in India taught me that the starting price almost never is the final price. When I told him it was a morning ride, he said he didn’t work the morning shift but said it was nice to meet me anyway. Shortly he got a friend on his phone and quoted me $60 for us all. He translated into Arabic for his friend, to whom I offered $50. “Let’s call it even and make it $55” was the reply. I said two taxi cabs would be cheaper than that! H said no, “Not from here to the airport.” I decided to chance it, and was happy this morning to see I was right about the taxi fares.
It was a rainy but short ride to Logan. Inside the TSA security-line employees as well as the US Airways’ gate agent showed themselves to unused to hearing or replying to the phrases “thank you” and “good morning.” This gave me some perspective on the youthful silences that I had been taking so personally near the end of the trip.
The youth were even less talkative at the airport and on the plane than usual, if that is possible, and most of them slept a ton on the 5 1/2 hour flight to Phoenix; they were livelier on the connecting flight. The parents were glad to see them and us back home, and vice versa.
Thus ended the pilgrimage; thus did we spend the revenues of four Sunday bake sales and an all-ages talent show, the gifts of several church benefactors, a grant from the endowment trust, and family contributions. Thank you all!
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Children and Youth, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views | Tags: Blue Man Group, Cambridge, classism, crypt, elitism, Harvard Divinity School, Holy Communion, King's Chapel, Paul Revere's silver, sexism, Sumner, Unitarian Christianity
The young men did not bound out of their bunks at 7:00 AM and I merely stumbled out. But I fortified myself in the hostel’s kitchen with two mugs of coffee. Most everyone made it down to eat but one was missing. I ran up to grab my jacket and found a towel-clad member of our room sitting in the common room nearby, waiting for one of us to show up and let him in. He had left his key-card in the room, something I have feared doing in the middle of the night every time I stay in a hostel.
We took the MBTA Red Line train across the beautiful (thanks to sunny and clear skies) Charles River and arrived at Harvard Square. We met our generous guide, Gloria, a UU lay leader from First Parish Cambridge and librarian at the Divinity School’s Andover-Harvard Library.
First stop was her church, founded in the 1600s as Puritan Congregational church so students at the college could worship and hear Christian preaching, and Unitarian since the 1830s. In 1648 the parish hosted a conference of churches at which they adopted the Cambridge Platform, establishing the form of polity (governance) as congregational (i.e., autonomous and not subject to a denominational hierarchy); this is why UU churches have congregational governance. The college (then university) held commencement in the church till there was not enough room.
Across the street is a large statue of Charles Sumner, a non-Unitarian and the most abolitionist US Senator of his day, who was beaten by a colleague with a cane on the Senate floor and disabled. Yesterday we saw a standing sculpture of Sumner in the Public Garden. There had been a contest for a statue to commemorate this great man. The judges selected the seated statue but then discovered that the sculptor was a woman (Unitarian, I think). It was inappropriate for a lady to sculpt a man’s legs, they thought, so the runner-up statue was the one placed in Boston’s Public Garden, and Cambridge got the real winner.
Gloria walked us to Harvard Yard (where we rubbed the bronze shoe of the “John Harvard, Founder” statue, though the likeness is of one of John’s relatives (nobody knows what John looked like) and he was not the founder, just the donor of Harvard College’s first library books. We visited Memorial Church, the campus church whose current Preacher is Peter Gomes, the liberal Christian scholar and author. Plaques commemorate alumni lost in the Civil War.
We saw three buildings of the Divinity School and entered two of them, Divinity Hall, the original building. Inside and upstairs is a small chapel where the 1838 graduating class invited recently-resigned minister Ralph Waldo Emerson to give the Address. (The students and faculty were all Unitarian Christians by that time, as the Orthodox Christians had built their own school after losing control of the faculty). His challenge to the staid and stale church scandalized the faculty and the community; the faculty felt the need to distance themselves from him in order to assert their own Christian bona fides.
Gloria took us in the library and into an archives room where a major current project is the cataloguing and digitizing of the records of the Unitarian Service Committee, especially its early work in helping to rescue European refugees of the Nazis, even before WW II was officially declared. We saw many black and white pictures, including those of children in orphanages. the youth seemed to be most interested in a display of a few pages from a Medieval illuminated manuscript of a Catholic order of Mass.
Gloria was so generous with her time, and so enthusiastic and informative, and it was great to meet her. She sent us off toward a burrito place for quick lunch, as we were headed to a 12:15 worship service in King’s Chapel back over in Boston. We made it just in time for the flute and organ prelude and slipped into two of the pew boxes. It was established by King James II in 1686 as an Anglican Church, but things got heated as the Empire became more oppressive. King George’s Governor General sat in one pew box and Paul Revere sat nearby, as did George Washington when he was worshipping there. After the colonists won the War of Independence the church lost half its members, the loyalists. They hired James Freeman to be their minister and wanted to ordain him; he was a Congregationalist and theologically a unitarian, and the Anglican clergy and bishops refused to participate in his ordination. This drove the church fully out of Anglicanism and on its way to Unitarian Christianity. Freeman revised the Book of Common Prayer (the worship manual), taking out prayers for the King and inserting prayers for the U.S. Congress, and taking out references to Jesus as God rather than as God’s holy prophet. But that manual hasn’t been revised much since the 1780s, and its language is a bit antique and beautiful (though hardly gender inclusive).
Without us and an Episcopal youth group from Dallas, there would have been about 15 people at the the half-hour service. A hospital chaplain and church member gave a short homily on the Pentecost reading from the Acts of the Apostles, and spoke directly to the youth present at one point, hoping that they honor the spirit within each of them and nurture it. I was pleasantly surprised that the youth were engaged in the hymn singing and responsive readings (“versicles”). Today is the third Wednesday, so it was the day for communion at the end of the service; of course this is a ritual meal “in remembrance of Christ,” not in assertion of his divinity. I had told our group in advance that I likely would get in line for communion and most of them went up too. Most of us knelt together against the communion rail and received it together. It was only later, during our personal tour, that we learned that Paul Revere had made that communion silver for this church–his church. He had also melted down and recast its bell after a crack, making it the largest bell in Boston. Kristin, tour director, gave us a fabulous history of the church and some of its famous and/or colorful members, not hiding the fact that it had been a socially elite congregation for much of its history. Indeed, it was only in the 1970s that the church ended the family ownership and inheritance of box pews, and it did this through a buy-back program. Also, there are plaques on the inside front wall commemorating 14 of the 16 members lost in the Civil War. One of the missing (unmemorialized) members is Col. Robert Gould Shaw, of “Glory” fame, whose 54th Regiment is sculpted in bronze relief by Saint Gaudens on a wall in the Boston Common. She said that his family had not given enough money to the church for him to score a mention on the plaque. How embarrassing it must have been when he became so noted for having led the first African American army regiment.
Kristin showed us the downstairs crypt (which non-UU tourists can’t visit), including one with a brick out, and we could see an adult coffin, a child coffin, and a collapsed coffin and some famous person’s femur and pelvis. I think it was Thomas Bullfinch, of Bullfinch’s Mythology.
We headed out to the burying ground afterwards; it was established in 1630, and part of it was encroached upon in the 1680s when the Chapel was built. It holds the remains of the English colony’s first governor, John Winthrop and a bunch of his descendants, as well as Elizabeth Pain, the wife of a sea merchant. She was one of the two women who inspired the character of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s Boston-set novel The Scarlet Letter. Incredible serendipity: Tina had just begun reading the book on the plane, having just picked it up Sunday in our church’s used book store. This cemetery is smaller and down the street from the one that holds Paul Revere and Ben Franklin.
After a shopping/wandering spree (which I spent napping on a park bench in the Common) the group re-grouped at the Chapel, headed back to the hostel and then out for dinner (Wendy’s for some, Thai for others). Then we headed to the theater district to see the Blue Man Group, a long running and lively show of multi-media performance art, cultural commentary and music, audience participation, and craziness. Well worth seeing, if you haven’t yet. It’s been around the US for at least 15 years and I never had. We all loved it and nobody got sprayed on (by paint or twinkies), but Nate did get recruited to come and do one task, which was to shut off the circuit breaker and cut the power.
It took place in the Charles Playhouse, a theater that was built in 1839 by “renowned architect Asher Benjamin” as the Fifth Universalist Church! In 1864 it became the first Synagogue in Boston and during the Prohibition era it was a speakeasy.
Thursday morning we head to Lexington and Concord and at night we go on a Ghosts and Graveyards tour of Boston.
Okay, now go back to the link above and and read the Divinity School Address!
Filed under: Uncategorized
The young men did not bound out of their bunks at 7:00 AM and I merely stumbled out. But I fortified myself in the hostel’s kitchen with two mugs of coffee. Most everyone made it down to eat but one was missing. I ran up to grab my jacket and found a towel-clad member of our room sitting in the common room nearby, waiting for one of us to show up and let him in. He had left his key-card in the room, something I have feared doing in the middle of the night every time I stay in a hostel.
We took the MBTA Red Line train across the beautiful (thanks to sunny and clear skies) Charles River and arrived at Harvard Square. We met our generous guide, Gloria, a UU lay leader from First Parish Cambridge and librarian at the Divinity School’s Andover-Harvard Library.
First stop was her church, founded in the 1600s as Puritan Congregational church so students at the college could worship and hear Christian preaching, and Unitarian since the 1830s. In 1648 the parish hosted a conference of churches at which they adopted the Cambridge Platform, establishing the form of polity (governance) as congregational (i.e., autonomous and not subject to a denominational hierarchy); this is why UU churches have congregational governance. The college (then university) held commencement in the church till there was not enough room.
Across the street is a large statue of Charles Sumner, a non-Unitarian and the most abolitionist US Senator of his day, who was beaten by a colleague with a cane on the Senate floor and disabled. Yesterday we saw a standing sculpture of Sumner in the Public Garden. There had been a contest for a statue to commemorate this great man. The judges selected the seated statue but then discovered that the sculptor was a woman (Unitarian, I think). It was inappropriate for a lady to sculpt a man’s legs, they thought, so the runner-up statue was the one placed in Boston’s Public Garden, and Cambridge got the real winner.
Gloria walked us to Harvard Yard (where we rubbed the bronze shoe of the “John Harvard, Founder” statue, though the likeness is of one of John’s relatives (nobody knows what John looked like) and he was not the founder, just the donor of Harvard College’s first library books. We visited Memorial Church, the campus church whose current Preacher is Peter Gomes, the liberal Christian scholar and author. Plaques commemorate alumni lost in the Civil War.
We saw three buildings of the Divinity School and entered two of them, Divinity Hall, the original building. Inside and upstairs is a small chapel where the 1838 graduating class invited recently-resigned minister Ralph Waldo Emerson to give the Address. (The students and faculty were all Unitarian Christians by that time, as the Orthodox Christians had built their own school after losing control of the faculty). His challenge to the staid and stale church scandalized the faculty and the community; the faculty felt the need to distance themselves from him in order to assert their own Christian bona fides.
Gloria took us in the library and into an archives room where a major current project is the cataloguing and digitizing of the records of the Unitarian Service Committee, especially its early work in helping to rescue European refugees of the Nazis, even before WW II was officially declared. We saw many black and white pictures, including those of children in orphanages. the youth seemed to be most interested in a display of a few pages from a Medieval illuminated manuscript of a Catholic order of Mass.
Gloria was so generous with her time, and so enthusiastic and informative, and it was great to meet her. She sent us off toward a burrito place for quick lunch, as we were headed to a 12:15 worship service in King’s Chapel back over in Boston. We made it just in time for the flute and organ prelude and slipped into two of the pew boxes. It was established by King James II in 1686 as an Anglican Church, but things got heated as the Empire became more oppressive. King George’s Governor General sat in one pew box and Paul Revere sat nearby, as did George Washington when he was worshipping there. After the colonists won the War of Independence the church lost half its members, the loyalists. They hired James Freeman to be their minister and wanted to ordain him; he was a Congregationalist and theologically a unitarian, and the Anglican clergy and bishops refused to participate in his ordination. This drove the church fully out of Anglicanism and on its way to Unitarian Christianity. Freeman revised the Book of Common Prayer (the worship manual), taking out prayers for the King and inserting prayers for the U.S. Congress, and taking out references to Jesus as God rather than as God’s holy prophet. But that manual hasn’t been revised much since the 1780s, and its language is a bit antique and beautiful (though hardly gender inclusive).
Without us and an Episcopal youth group from Dallas, there would have been about 15 people at the the half-hour service. A hospital chaplain and church member gave a short homily on the Pentecost reading from the Acts of the Apostles, and spoke directly to the youth present at one point, hoping that they honor the spirit within each of them and nurture it. I was pleasantly surprised that the youth were engaged in the hymn singing and responsive readings (“versicles”). Today is the third Wednesday, so it was the day for communion at the end of the service; of course this is a ritual meal “in remembrance of Christ,” not in assertion of his divinity. I had told our group in advance that I likely would get in line for communion and most of them went up too. Most of us knelt together against the communion rail and received it together. It was only later, during our personal tour, that we learned that Paul Revere had made that communion silver for this church–his church. He had also melted down and recast its bell after a crack, making it the largest bell in Boston. Kristin, tour director, gave us a fabulous history of the church and some of its famous and/or colorful members, not hiding the fact that it had been a socially elite congregation for much of its history. Indeed, it was only in the 1970s that the church ended the family ownership and inheritance of box pews, and it did this through a buy-back program. Also, there are plaques on the inside front wall commemorating 14 of the 16 members lost in the Civil War. One of the missing (unmemorialized) members is Col. Robert Gould Shaw, of “Glory” fame, whose 54th Regiment is sculpted in bronze relief by Saint Gaudens on a wall in the Boston Common. She said that his family had not given enough money to the church for him to score a mention on the plaque. How embarrassing it must have been when he became so noted for having led the first African American army regiment.
Kristin showed us the downstairs crypt (which non-UU tourists can’t visit), including one with a brick out, and we could see an adult coffin, a child coffin, and a collapsed coffin and some famous person’s femur and pelvis. I think it was Thomas Bullfinch, of Bullfinch’s Mythology.
We headed out to the burying ground afterwards; it was established in 1630, and part of it was encroached upon in the 1680s when the Chapel was built. It holds the remains of the English colony’s first governor, John Winthrop and a bunch of his descendants, as well as Elizabeth Pain, the wife of a sea merchant. She was one of the two women who inspired the character of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s Boston-set novel The Scarlet Letter. Incredible serendipity: Tina had just begun reading the book on the plane, having just picked it up Sunday in our church’s used book store. This cemetery is smaller and down the street from the one that holds Paul Revere and Ben Franklin.
After a shopping/wandering spree (which I spent napping on a park bench in the Common) the group re-grouped at the Chapel, headed back to the hostel and then out for dinner (Wendy’s for some, Thai for others). Then we headed to the theater district to see the Blue Man Group, a long running and lively show of multi-media performance art, cultural commentary and music, audience participation, and craziness. Well worth seeing, if you haven’t yet. It’s been around the US for at least 15 years and I never had. We all loved it and nobody got sprayed on (by paint or twinkies), but Nate did get recruited to come and do one task, which was to shut off the circuit breaker and cut the power.
It took place in the Charles Playhouse, a theater that was built in 1839 by “renowned architect Asher Benjamin” as the Fifth Universalist Church! In 1864 it became the first Synagogue in Boston and during the Prohibition era it was a speakeasy.
Thursday morning we head to Lexington and Concord and at night we go on a Ghosts and Graveyards tour of Boston.
Okay, now go back to the link above and and read the Divinity School Address!
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Children and Youth, Ordeals and Observations of Pastor Cranky not elsewhere classified, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views, UUA Presidential Campaigns
Lights out at 1 AM–no exceptions! That was last night, after an all-day flight. Even though it was only 10 PM in our bodies, all 5 of us guys slept quite well in 2 sets of bunk beds plus one twin bed in a 12 x 12 room. I assume it was roomier for the ladies, since there were only 3 of them. Everybody got up by 7:30, cleaned up and headed down to the youth hostel’s kitchen to make ourselves bagels and fruit loops. None of the kids drank any coffee, which makes it more amazing that they followed me all over and listened to me drone on about the history of the place. We strolled Boston Common (the oldest public park in the US, originally where Puritans grazed their cattle and hanged Quakers and other heretics), the Public Garden (adjacent to the Common but established 2 centuries later with gorgeous landscaping: trees, blooming flowers, a lagoon with swan paddle boat rides and real swans too, and monuments to famous Unitarians like Edward Everett Hale and other notable Americans, to the protestors who died in the 1770 Boston Massacre (all five of them), to those with family or other Massachusetts connections who perished on Sept. 11, 2001, on one of the planes that took off from here or from their crashes in NYC and DC).
On Beacon Hill we visited the main building of UUA Headquarters at 25 Beacon Street, right next to the gold-domed State House (where I pointed out bronzes of Daniel Webster, President Kennedy, Unitarian Horace Mann). In the UUA we saw the William Ellery Channing landing and his portrait, among those of other 19th century notables) and the Dana McLean Greely library, commemorating the 1st president of the newly merged UUA (1961 to 1968, spanning the most violent and triumphant years of the Civil Rights Movement), and the Eliot Chapel, where a bronze relief commemorated Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young black civil rights worker killed by police in Selma during a march while trying to protect his grandmother; Viola Liuzzo, a white Unitarian from Detroit who transported black men in her car between Selma and Montgomery and was murdered by the KKK, and the Rev. James Reeb, a young Boston minister who went down to Selma for the Voting Rights March to Montgomery with other UU clergy–the night before the march they were attacked by whites after dining in a black restaurant, and Reeb died from the blows.
We met some young staffers–one from the UUA Office of Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Concerns, who spoke to us about the Welcoming Congregation program, which our congregation had entered several years ago, and two college-age interns from the UUA Youth Programs Office. The highlight of the day (at least for the 3 adults) was to attend the UUA staff chapel, which happens every Tuesday at 11:30 AM. Today’s preacher with the Rev. William Sinkford, giving his farewell homily to the staff as he looks forward to leaving office next week when we elect a new president at General Assembly. Bill completes two 4-year terms. It was an emotional time for him and many colleagues in the room and those field staff who were watching and participating by phone and internet through Persony (they even sent Joys and Sorrows for the Boston colleagues to hear and light a candle).
We had lunch at a deli and wandered by the old City Hall which originally was the site of the Boston Latin School (which Ben Franklin dropped out of at age 11). Now it holds several eateries, stores and offices. After lunch I took them down to the plaza which faces the Old South Meeting House, where Sam Adams and 5,000 other colonists began protesting the British Crown’s tax on tea imports to America and effectively began the Revolution in 1773. But the striking thing was a memorial to the victims of The Great Hunger, which is what Irish called the potato famine of 1845-50. Of 8.5 million in Ireland, 1 million starved to death and 2 million fled across the sea to America, but many of them died at sea in crowded and unworthy ships. Why the famine? A fungal infestation of crops, English colonial control and absentee landlords in England, who demanded and received rental payment in grain while the peasants died of hunger. In Boston the early immigrants lived in damp, dirty, crowded conditions near the waterfront and where many infant and other lives were lost. Help Wanted signs in store windows said Irish Need Not Apply. The memorial bronze sculptures depict three haggard and agonizing peasants on one side and a group of proud, upstanding Irish Americans, having finally attained inclusion and power. President Kennedy was descended from refugees from the Great Hunger.
After a gift-shop and Starbucks stop, we went back to the Garden and rested till our 90 minute tour at Arlington Street Church, across from which stands a bronze statue of its founding minister, William Ellery Channing, the “father of American Unitarianism.” The church is based on an Anglican church design and features family pew boxes with doors throughout the sanctuary main floor (paid pew boxes were originally passed down the generations of a family but eventually democratized by church leaders (not without controversy), becoming first-come, first-served pew boxes). Louis Comfort Tiffany’s factory made about 13 gorgeous, green-blue-and-white stained glass windows (featuring New Testament scenes but none of the miracles of Christ. This was in the late 1800s but the glassmakers went out of business before finishing the job, according to our guide. (But he also said that Channing’s famous Baltimore Sermon was 2 decades later than it was, so I’m not sure.) This politically conservative but spiritually radical church did also become a politically radical one in the 1900s: Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Reproductive Rights, El Salvadoran political-refugee sanctuary programs, GLBT Rights. Notable was the Vietnam-era ceremony inviting young men to burn their draft cards together in protest, after which the church gave them extended sanctuary so they could avoid arrest, our guide told us. Openly lesbian minister KIm Crawford Harvie, known for her charismatic preaching, has been serving ASC 20 years.
This is all build-up to the highlights of the day, and I don’t mean dinner at the bar made famous by the Cheers TV series in the 1980s-90s, which the youth liked even though they had never heard of it and didn’t know the names of any of the stars.
No…our ASC guide took us to the organ and choir loft, where Nate tried his hand at the powerful pipe organ’s keyboard, improvising nicely, after which Jessica played Fur Elise. They were only briefly perplexed by the many pedals beneath their feet, since organ pedals play notes, unlike the two piano pedals (or so I think). The youth also got to stand in the enormous high pulpit of Dr. Channing (moved from the original church building when the congregation moved to this one).
Surely the highlight was the trip up the creaky steps (ladders nailed down, really) up into the steeple, stopping in the bell tower. About 14 ropes came through pulleys and were fastened to a board with numbers. Each rope, when pulled hard, would ring a bell with a particular note, in a room up higher in the tower. He took us up to see the bells themselves but a bout of vertigo caused me to stop half way and descend tremblingly back to the room with the ropes. The others came down after enjoying the priceless views and the youth randomly rang different bell ropes, causing a cacophony that must have had the upscale neighbors scratching or shaking their heads. Then each of us was told to grab a numbered rope. The guide called out a series of numbers and we pulled as we heard ours. The tune was Morning Has Broken, but the numbers came too slowly for it to sound familiar. Then Tina took over and read us our numbers fast enough so that Cat Stevens or any self-respecting Welsh person walking down Boylston Street would have recognized it.
After the Cheers pub food, this crowd of pilgrims with weary limbs and aching feet made its way back to this bunk-bed United Nations of youth. It’s 12:30 AM and I am the oldest of all the reading, typing, surfing and chattering lodgers in this kitchen (except for Larry King on the TV set), and I am going to turn in.
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Children and Youth, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views | Tags: Coming of Age, mentors, travel, UU heritage, youth group
Youth and Mentors in SMF Airport Ready for Boston
Ironicschmoozer's Weblog 