September 12, 2004
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
Let us gather in this renewing fellowship to know the freedom of life fully lived. Let us be filled with the courage to meet the fears that come our way. May we be grateful for this free fellowship of goodly folk.
We take into our hearts the joys and sorrows which our friends have shared this hour. We treasure the successes of family living, the hopes of overcoming health crises. We hold to the truths of those who have suffered great loss.
Our hearts expand to embrace all hopes and fears. We hold in our thoughts those families who suffered losses three years ago on 9/11. We offer our hopes for those who suffer in battle in Iraq. We join with all people of good will seeking to overcome an antiquated approach offering division and despair to humanity concerns.
Gladly we renew our hearts and dreams to bravely walk the path of each day. We open our hearts and minds to the hopes of our free faith and offer it to all who would see clearly the high joys and deep meaning of everyday life.
It’s good to see you
all back from the summer. I suppose many of you wish you were still on vacation.
Perhaps even part of your mind is still on vacation, savoring... What do we
savor of vacation? .... Let us call it ..., let us call it... freedom. On vacation
we are much freer to do what we wish.
Jackie and I spent some of our vacation visiting some of the ancient Indian
mounds in Ohio: Fort Ancient up I-71, Mound City in Chillicothe. For me one
of the most remarkable was our visit to the mounds in Newark, Ohio.
The Earthworks, as they are called in Newark, were built between 100 BC and
500 AD. These great Circle Earthworks are among the largest ancient sites in
the world. A circle of earth about 1,200 feet in diameter with walls 8 to 14
feet high surrounds a small mound in the very center. Exploring the Circle,
I stood on this small mound in the center. I imagined it was where the shaman
stood in some rite of initiation; a place where they told stories of emergence,
such as I told to the children earlier. It is hard to express how large that
circle is for the walls of the mound seemed to disappear in the distance. Standing
at the center, I sensed its still vital spiritual power, I cannot say exactly
what I felt, but it was something like realizing that I was at the center of
the universe and thinking that was not a good idea. It was like the coming together
of two awarenesses: one of seeing all, yet also small and seen by all.
Coming home I read that the great early 20th century architect, Louis Sullivan, meditated upon these mounds. Sullivan was in Newark for short period of time in 1915 to design and build a bank there about a mile from the great Circle. Local legend in Newark has it that every evening Sullivan would walk out from the Main Street site and enter the Circle. Sullivan brooded upon that experience and wrote:
These simple forms of ancient discovery and use were given esoteric meaning and occult powers by the men of that day, in an effort to control, by means of formulas and secret ritual, the destiny of Man amidst the powers of Nature. (Kennedy, 269]
The meaning of freedom for all cultures and societies are found in those words of humanity struggling with its destiny. Freedom is not just about doing what you want, it is about accepting what our lives have given us and then seeking to realize our inner truths. Another way of thinking about it is the remark that life is not about the cards you were dealt, but about how you play them. Freedom is the balancing the hand we have been given and realizing our truth. It is about growth in understanding of who we are as much as about doing what we want. Freedom is tasting the sweetness of life without forgetting our mortality. Again with Sullivan, controlling the destiny of humanity amidst the powers of Nature.
In our reading this morning, Emerson put this balancing this way: “It is easy to live in the world after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” (Essays 150) True freedom is not about the easy way, the way of doing what you want on your own. It is about being true to yourself in the midst of the crowd. As Jonathan Schell writes in his latest book, “We call that person free who, in disregard of force and fear, acts in accord with what his soul prompts him to love.” (229)
The poet William Ernest Henley put it this way:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
When I speak then of a free faith for a free people, I am not using the word freedom as merely a battle cry, or a word to bludgeon people with. It is a word which asks you to stop and reflect upon your lives. This is ensconced at the center of our faith. If we look at the Principles and Purposes of the UUA in the front of the hymnal, we read there we affirm and promote “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;” This is the very core of our UU faith and why I am a UU. I will not abide anyone telling me what I am supposed to believe, and I assume you will not either. If I am invited to explore some aspect of spirituality, that is one thing. But that I have to believe this, or do that, not for me. I am thankful for unconquerable soul.
This often degenerates into the remark that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything we want. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I’d like to believe I can fly, be a bird and fly away. But such would be a fatal error. Recall my experience at the ancient Earthworks in Newark: Freedom is about being both in some sense at the center, but knowing that is very risky. Freedom is about the intersection of finite and infinite. We all want to settle just with the infinite, of doing whatever we please. Such is arrogance, pure foolishness.
Freedom can be painful. In his book THE HEART OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING, Thich Nhat Hanh gives us spiritual insight into freedom:
Letting go is an ongoing practice, one that can bring us a lot of happiness. When a Vietnamese woman who escaped her country by boat was robbed on the high seas of all her gold, she was so distraught that she contemplated suicide. But on shore, she met a man who had been robbed of even his clothes, and it helped her very much to see him smiling. He had truly let go. Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If in our heart, we still cling to anything – anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free. (78)
Freedom is great, but it isn’t easy. All religions celebrate freedom at there core. The goal in Buddhism is liberation. Judaism recalls the flight from Egyptian tyranny. Dr. King had written on his grave stone, “Free at last, free at last”. Freedom is awesome, but easy it isn’t. The American poet and director of the American propaganda effort during World War II knew that. Archibald MacLeish reminds us, “The dissenter is every human being at those moments in his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.” (Lapham, page 1) Thinking for ourselves is a primary UU value, but how often do we emerge momentarily from the herd to do it? Freedom is absolute, but not easy.
Our path as Unitarian Universalists was set upon this way of being a free people of a free faith early on in the 19th century. The Christians of the time, the Calvinists had as a central doctrine the notion of original sin. They believed in predestination. God decided at the moment of creation who amongst us is going to hell, and which of us would go to heaven to watch the sufferings of our fellows in hell. Original sin meant that however much we thought we were free, our actions only hasten our perdition.
William Ellery Channing was a child of the American Revolution. He blazed a way through the gloomy forest of original sin. He said “I call that mind free which... recognizes its own reality and greatness.” (HYMNAL # 592) Channing set us on the path of freedom, just as Moses set the Hebrew people on the path of liberation from Pharaoh. Channing lifted up human dignity. It is the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” which is the first of our Unitarian Universalist Principles. Dignity? What is that? Dignity is the infinite potential of human growth, the promise which we each are. Dignity and worth, the signs of a free person!
In the next generation, Channing’s protege, Ralph Waldo Emerson lead the way of freedom for us His essay ‘Self-Reliance” which provided our reading this morning is not just a Unitarian classic. It is one of the great American classics. If you don’t know Emerson, you don’t know America.
What is interesting to me as a scholar of our Unitarian Universalist history is that there are leading Unitarian historians who bash Emerson, who lift him up – or rather put him down – as our great obstacle. They ask, how can you build a community around freedom? Not Emerson, but Bellows they call for. Henry Whitney Bellows was a great American, a great organizer, who worked closely with Lincoln to provide medical services on Civil War battlefields. After the Civil War, Bellows cast about for someone else to organize. Being a Unitarian minister in New York City, he quickly settled upon organizing Unitarians.
And so the debate in Unitarian history over the past thirty years as been Emerson versus Bellows, or, freedom versus community.
But, I ask, how can we get along with only one or the other, don’t we need both? Why not both freedom and community? So there is a logical inconsistency between the abstract values of freedom and community. But it was Emerson who wrote, in the same essay “Self-Reliance,” that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I for one need both freedom and community, if that be inconsistent, so be it. Let’s go to a Unitarian Universalist church!
We should note something here in this debate of Emerson versus Bellows, freedom versus community. Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance” well before the War between the States. Reverend Bellows set out to organize Unitarians after the Civil War. The Civil War was the time of a great mental shift in these United States. A shift from a more individualist spirit to a more corporate mentality. Both Emerson and Bellows made this shift. The tipping point, the time when both freedom and community were in exact balance here in America was on the battlefield at Gettysburg. We often take Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as sentimental Americana and no longer linger over its mystic resonances. But it is a mystical document. Lincoln seeks to weld together both these two things, At Gettysburg he said,
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Lincoln knew well that a nation dedicated to liberty verges on being an oxymoron. Yet he was dedicated to it, and he knew that he dedicated the cemetery of those who also believed in it. As it says on the Great Seal of our nation, “Out of the Many, One.” That, I submit, is about as mystical as you can get, it is the necessary foundation of a free community, of a free people.
We gather as a free people, celebrating a free faith, a faith that urges us to explore our lives and unearth its meanings knowing we need one another to do that. Let me leave you with too examples of what being a free person in community means. The first comes from the Muslim tradition, the second from our own free faith..
You will recall several weeks ago the standoff in Iraq in the holy city of Najaf at the tomb of the Imam Ali, the most sacred site in Shi’a Islam. For three weeks the armed forces of a young Shia cleric faced off with the armed forces of the Interim government of Iraq and the United Sates. After three weeks, a holy man, the Ayatollah al-Sistani arose from his hospital bed in London. He returned home to Najaf. Did he pick up a gun? Did he hurl threats and intimidations? No, He called on his followers to join him at the holy mosque of Imam Ali. From all over Iraq, the people heeded the call of this man. It was a moment of non-violence worthy of a Gandhi or Dr. King. I call this man free, speaking his own truth and his people’s.
From our own tradition, permit me mention the night Henry David Thoreau spent in jail. Thoreau was in jail because he refused to pay taxes to support the Mexican War, begun on a deceptive basis to extend slavery. His mentor and patron, Ralph Waldo Emerson, showed up at the jail. Emerson wagged his finger through the jail bars, saying “Henry David, what are you doing in there?” To which Henry David responded, “Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?”
Who do you think was the freer person?
Our free faith we accept as a free people, ever deepening our quest for meaning in the vicissitudes of life, ever urging us to grow as we seek to be true to ourselves in the turmoil of our days.
As together we take up a
new season, let us be joyful in our liberating faith.
George M. Fredrickson, THE INNER CIVIL WAR, Univ. Of Illinois Press, 1993
Thich Nhat Hanh, THE HEART OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING, New York, Broadway Books, 1998.
Roger G. Kennedy, HIDDEN CITIES, Free Press, New York, 1994.
Jonathan Schell, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD, New York, Henry Holt & Co, 2003.
Susan L. Woodward and Jerry N McDonald, INDIAN MOUNDS OF THE MIDDLE OHIO VALLEY, Blacksburg, Virginia, 2002.