Thanks go especially to Ernie Guyton and Priscilla Dodds for their consistent leadership role at UUCA around our Habitat partnerships, and this fall especially as they are taking a leadership role in overseeing the build in the absence of Jan Swanson, who will be leading an interfaith tour in the Middle East over some of the weekends.

“You might be an overloaded liberal if … you hide the snack you brought to the playground for your five-year-old—even though it’s healthful and nonsugary—because, oh my God, you forgot you were supposed to boycott that food company.

“You might be an overloaded liberal if … you drive five miles out of your way and pay 30 percent more to buy a screwdriver at the little independent hardware store, just to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart.

“You might be an overloaded liberal if … you try to calculate your carbon emissions in driving that extra five miles, versus the carbon footprint you would cause by turning on your computer to order the same screwdriver online.

“You might be an overloaded liberal if … you stand in line for ten minutes debating whether to buy imported organic blueberries or local nonorganic.

“You might be an overloaded liberal if … you agonize over donating your old cell phone to someone in China, who will still get years of use out of it, because you worry it will end up in a garbage heap where kids will tear out its toxic parts for sale, breathing in poisonous fumes.”

“You might be an overloaded liberal:” sounds a little like Jeff Foxworthy material, but it comes from author Fran Hawthorne instead, in her excellent book, The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting, and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism. Fran Hawthorne is shining a spotlight on something that some or perhaps many of us here today have experienced personally: the challenges in breaking out of mindless consumerism—the complexities inherent in spending our dollars consciously in ways that serve sustainable living values. It’s an essential kind of labor, challenging though it may be; and we take a closer look at it today, on Labor Day Sunday.

Call it “lifestyle activism.” Almost two-thirds of America’s economic activity comes from consumer spending—what you and I do with our dollars in the marketplace. $8 trillion dollars annually. The sum total of countless little everyday choices, but the more they are in line with our values, the louder our values will speak, and politicians and business leaders will stand up and take notice. Government and business will do better in honoring the Sustainability “Big Four”: nature, social justice, personal wellbeing, the economy. If they forget one of these Big Four, we respond in such a way as to remind them that all four are required. Forget one, and you’re not building to last—you’re building on sand.

It’s lifestyle activism, and, as Fran Hawthorne points out, it’s been building over the last 60 years. “In the 1950s and 1960s,” she writes, “the bus boycotts and lunch-counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement proved that consumer power could be leveraged to tear down unfair laws. As the 1960s segued into the Me Generation of the 1970s and the 1980s, activism took a turn towards materialism, but it employed the same principle of consumer empowerment. Affinity cards and frequent flyer clubs taught shoppers to turn even the most mundane purchases into a twofer, first to buy the item at hand, then to rack up points toward another goal. Consumer power,” Fran Hawthorne continues, “exploded with the Internet a decade later. Information about corporate behavior, product ingredients, product availability, scientific warnings, investment returns, and international conflicts now was widely available, shared across the globe within seconds, making mass actions easier to organize.” Momentum has been building over 60 years, and today, perhaps the most visible success is that of environmentalism. The power of “green” in the marketplace is our power. Grassroots power. Lifestyle activism.

But the very mention of environmentalism takes us right back to the issue liberal overload. Complexity. Difficulty. Sometimes even agony.

For example, consider this story that Carroll Muffett tells. Carroll Muffett is deputy director of campaigns for the environmental group Greenpeace. He’s probably as green as you can get. The story is this: “One day, he and his family wanted to eat dinner with the family of his daughter’s best friend, whose father works for a labor union. ‘It was nearly impossible for us to have dinner together, outside of spaghetti or rice and beans,’ he says. ‘As an environmentalist, I can’t eat most kinds of fish, or beef, unless it’s local. They couldn’t eat grapes because of labor issues, or even some mushrooms. I’m pretty aware,’ he concludes, ‘but those are things I had no idea about.”

Ever been to a dinner party like this? The story puts its finger on a couple of the complications inherent in lifestyle activism, one of which is how labor issues are too frequently not on the liberal radar. Says Fran Hawthorne, “Among the issues we liberals juggle—the ingredients in the things we buy, the energy that was used to produce them, the companies that make them, the stores from which we buy them, the means by which we travel to those stores, the companies we invest in, the impact on the planet, the impact on animals, the impact on our bodies—we almost never think about the workers who manufacture, grow, fix, ship, and sell the stuff in our lives.” Is Fran Hawthorne right? Are we forgetting about Joe Hill? Is this what many liberals like you and I do? Two words: Whole Foods. For too many people, the fact that it is viciously anti-union is less irritating than the fact that it is so expensive. What’s up with that? Wal-Mart is right now setting up incredibly ambitious green goals, making this a selling point with the public, including no doubt the liberal public—even as it continues to be faced with major lawsuits alleging sex discrimination, together with illegally denying workers their mandatory breaks and forcing them to work without pay. Somehow, going green is seen as a more decisive selling point than going pro-labor. What’s up with that?

Perhaps the answer is that it appears impossible at times to juggle pro-environment and pro-labor values simultaneously. Far easier to juggle bowling balls and chainsaw. A clear example: “If you want to preserve natural resources and limit the use of fossil fuels, you should buy as few brand-new items as possible. The environmental mantra tells us to reduce, renew, recycle. However, workers (both in the United States and overseas) will lose their jobs if no one purchases their output. What’s more important, saving resources or saving jobs?”

Green jobs are one way of cutting through the Gordian knot, for sure—but that’s an economy of the future, a separate question of what we do now for the economy of the present, real jobs now. Sustainable living is about affirming the Big Four all together—yet the more you get into it, the more you see that the Big Four aren’t necessarily one big happy family, and you have to make choices. You build to last as best as you can, and there’s always gonna be some sand at the foundation.

Besides contradictions, the dinner party story also highlights problems around information: either not enough, or way too much, or general confusion. It’s going to a restaurant but the menu says nothing about which foods are local, or organic, or what farming methods were used. Unless, of course, you go to places like Farm Burger in Decatur (I mention this to get on my wife’s good side: she’s addicted to the place). Eating at most restaurants poses exactly this kind of problem. Not enough information to make a values-based decision.

Then there’s the opposite problem. I mean, it’s Carroll Muffett, deputy director of campaigns for the environmental group Greenpeace, saying, “I’m pretty aware, but those are things I had no idea about.” Too many balls to juggle, even for the experts. 100 Everyday Ways You Can Contribute to a Healthier Planet. 250 Tips for an Eco Lifestyle. 1001 Ways to Save the Earth. “Wait a second,” says Fran Hawthorne. “Am I supposed to do ONE HUNDRED or TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY or ONE THOUSAND AND ONE things just for the environment? And that’s not counting all the other causes I care about.” Can you relate? Don’t you just sometimes want to scream?

It’s overload. It’s Jessica Phillips at Trader Joe’s, staring at egg cartons. Jessica says, “One carton said organic free-range. One said organic cage-free. Some just said cage free with DHA. I asked the store’s customer service manager about the labels, but he could explain only some of them.” She ended up choosing the free-range. “I’m a vegetarian,” she says, “and it seemed to me that free-range meant a better treatment of animals.” But, a few days later, checking her refrigerator, Jessica realized that she had previously bought yet another carton of eggs, this one labeled cage-free and free-roaming. “There is only so much time you can spend on this,” she groaned.

There’s other dimensions to the overload we could go into here as well. A big one is cost. Is sustainable living only possible for people with money to afford it? And then there’s in-group dynamics. The smugness liberals can feel for living a purer lifestyle, looking down at those who shop at Wal-Mart for the (apparently) cheap prices, or because it’s an all-in-one store and they are simply too busy and too tired to go from one small independent retailer to another small independent retailer to another and yet another to get all they need. Looking down at these people, who are also us. They are us. Wal-Mart shoppers in our midst! Just like our video for today. You didn’t bring your re-usable shopping bags? Suddenly, you can feel all the upright liberal eyes upon you, judging you. “Paper or plastic?” The only way out, the only way to save face, is to turn the tables right around, on them. Shame them. It’s a vicious circle.

It can get ugly. Overload. But now, let’s apply what the Tao Te Ching calls “subtle perception.” If you want to get rid of something,” this classic of Taoism says, “you must first allow it to flourish.” Let the overload flourish—even if it happens just by reading Fran Hawthorne’s book yourself, and hearing all the stories she has to share—and this can put us on the path towards a place of greater clarity and empowerment. The only way out is through.

Of the many practical pieces of advice that Fran Hawthorne shares, here are a few to consider.

One is to prioritize. Find a focus area that resonates with you. No one can juggle every ball that’s out there. But that’s doesn’t mean it’s OK to let all the balls drop. What’s your ball? For some, animal rights will be the core issue. For others, labor. Fran Hawthorne herself sees the environment as her number #1, and she explains why in her no-holds-barred, no-nonsense way: “[T]he earth and the human race will survive even if millions of people and animals lead miserable lives. It’s not so clear, however, whether the earth (and we humans) could survive the combined onslaught of climate change, deforestation, water and air pollution, soil depletion, rising ocean levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass species extinction. Before we can worry about the treatment of sweatshop workers, the pain of battery chickens, the pesticides in our children’s bodies, or the rights of women under shari’ah rule, let’s make sure those workers, chickens, children, and women have a planet to live on.” Blunt words from Fran Hawthorne, but definite food for thought. One thing she does add is the insight that environmentalism is a multifaceted cause, so very often you can find a way in that touches on several of the sustainability Big Four simultaneously—as in the case of green job creation, or incorporating meaningful outdoor experiences in the education of young children, which has been shown to lead to environmental concern and action as they grow up.

Another practical bit of advice relates to that classic dilemma: local vs. organic. What to do? Local is good because, in buying it, you reduce carbon emissions; less fossil fuel is used to transport it. You are also supporting small farmers and merchants. As for organic—that’s good too, since “organic” means no chemical pesticides and fertilizers are involved, thus maintaining the soil and preventing the further breeding of “superbugs.” But what happens when local and organic don’t coincide? Local is non-organic, and organic is from thousands of miles away?

To cut through the dilemma, keep in mind the insight that sometimes importing food from far away actually uses less over-all energy than buying local. I know it sounds counter-intuitive. However, it’s been shown that food transportation is responsible for only 11 percent of the total energy involved. 89 percent is related to non-transportation factors, like cooking and preparation, or processing. Or what’s involved in just growing the food: fertilizer, electric power for irrigation, heat and light for hothouses, and refrigeration. Fact is, a country three thousand miles away might—because its climate is more suitable, for example—might use far less energy in growing and producing a food than a local producer, and this, remember, relates to 89 percent of the energy we’re worried about. Local is not necessarily equivalent to a smaller carbon footprint.

Another way out of the dilemma is to consider that the majority of the small, local farmers at Farmer’s markets are organic or almost organic, even if the official USDA certification is lacking. They rotate their crops; they use pests as natural pesticides; they use compost instead of chemical fertilizer. Where it really counts, they are organic. However, they don’t go for official USDA certification because it’s extremely expensive and time consuming. A hurdle that they just don’t care to leap.

Local or organic? For Fran Hawthorne, if she has to choose, she goes for local everytime. It’s fresh, and it tastes better.

Lots of practical advice in her book: check it out. A great place to go if you’ve been engaged in lifestyle activism and it’s been wearing you down. A great place to go as well if you want to get started and learn about some pitfalls to avoid. Her last words: “All I can do is to try, and to care.”

Did I tell you, by the way, how I ended up buying this book? It was at General Assembly this past June. General Assembly is the annual business meeting of our Unitarian Universalist Association: thousands of religious liberals together, all so very busy, leading or attending programs on practically every congregational-related issue imaginable, including justice issues. I wandered around, caught up in the swirl of all the busyness, sensitive to all the things I do not know, shamed by all the things I am not doing. In the midst of all this, I found myself reflecting on our religious liberal roots.

Some of you may know that the two source traditions of our present faith were in important respects quite different. The Unitarian side—particularly in the 19^th century—used to have this slogan: “Salvation by character.” Salvation was something you earned by good works, including going to all the right schools, reading all the right books, making all the right friends, shopping at all the right places. Develop good character, said the Unitarians, and this is what will save you. If you don’t you will be condemned. Sounds elitist, doesn’t it? And it was. It was religion for the middle and upper classes of Boston.

On the other hand, you had the blue-collar, Wal-Mart-going Universalists. Not from Boston, but from the sticks. And their view was far more radical, far more egalitarian, given immortal expression by one of its finest thinkers, Hosea Ballou, who, in response to hearing about the Unitarian slogan “salvation by character,” wrote an article entitled “salvation irrespective of character.” Salvation was not something anyone could earn by works; salvation was a gift of a gracious God, a gracious universe in which every person has inherent worth and dignity no matter where they do their shopping. You do your best in life not because you’re trying to escape hell and trying to earning your right to deserve love (either here or in the hereafter) but because your actions, however frail and flawed, make life on earth better for all. All we can do is to try, and to care.

This is what I found myself reflecting on, as I was caught up in the swirl of activity at General Assembly, caught up in the swirl of my own sense of limitation and shame. Both of our ancestors account for why we religious liberals risk becoming overloaded, in service to our values. But, for me, only one gives the best answer. I think the real reason I bought Fran Hawthorne’s book—the deep reason that I am only now uncovering—is that, beyond all the practical pointers I was interested in learning, I was feeling so caught up in a Unitarian works mentality that I needed someone to help me remember that I am loved no matter how much or how little I do, that my ultimate self-worth and the worth of another is not about class. It’s not about organic vs. local. It’s not about any of that stuff. It’s about who you are, or, rather, whose you are: a child of the gracious universe, a child of God. “Let tomorrow come tomorrow,” says poet Wendell Berry. “Not by your will is the house carried through the night. The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health. Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.”

It was also an eventful summer in the larger world. We saw the worst offshore spill in U.S. history unfold before our eyes, and it broke our hearts. Finally, the BP well was plugged… and then in early August I was grateful to read a news article about the unexpected self-healing capacities of the affected marshes: “More than a dozen scientists interviewed by The Associated Press say the marsh here and across the Louisiana coast is healing itself, giving them hope delicate wetlands might weather the worst offshore spill in U.S. history better than they had feared.” Once again, I am reminded of the unquenchable resilience of life.

We also saw Justice Vaughn Walker’s determination that Proposition 8, California’s federal ban on same-sex marriage, violated the 14th Amendment. It was also, as the New York Times put it, “a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of path- breaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.” I celebrate this decision wholeheartedly and rejoice in Justice Walker’s good sense. I also know that there’s still much more work to be done.

Yet a third thing we saw this summer was Unitarian Universalists from around the nation gathering in Arizona to protest the scheduled implementation of Arizona’s Immigration Law. I’m so proud to say that our congregation was represented by my colleague, the Rev. Marti Keller— way to go, Marti! And, I’m so proud to know that our UU organizing efforts stood out as distinctive. Writes Kim Bobo in Religious Dispatches magazine, “Although most faith bodies and denominations have very strong statements on immigration reform, those same denominations did not activate people. With one glaring exception—the Unitarian Universalist Association. Of the several hundred religious leaders who showed up, only the Unitarian Universalist Association seriously committed staff, money, and organizing talent to the struggle.” We have much to be proud of—and, as with marriage equality, there is still much more to be done. As the year progresses, you’ll be hearing a lot more about immigration reform.

Lots going on this summer. Yet a fourth thing is the storm brewing around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg sees this “as important a test of the separation of Church and State as we may see in our lifetime.” On the other hand, there are those who view it as an “unnecessary provocation.” Still others see Islam as inherently anti- democratic and violent. A storm is brewing.

As I see it, the controversy in New York City is but a small example of how we’re struggling, as a nation, to claim our call to religious freedom. Mistrust and misunderstanding abound. I believe that one of the gifts we Unitarian Universalists can give to the world is clarity about how to live in a 21st century America that is multifaith and multicultural. We can model ways of celebrating our differences even as we discover common ground. We can learn how to separate the good from the bad and remind each other that the timeless call of all authentic spirituality is love.

In May of 2011, the Unitarian Universalist Association celebrates its Golden Anniversary. Fifty years ago, a new religion was born, even though its parent faiths (Unitarianism and Universalism) were themselves hundreds of years old. Ever since, this new religion has happily drawn from many religious traditions and many cultures as it has sought to empower people to live more richly and to create a more just world. Pluralism is in our DNA.

I’m excited about the year ahead for us. All year long, we’ll be exploring what it means to be Unitarian Universalist in an America that’s multireligious and multicultural. We’re going to recognize and celebrate the unique gifts that are ours to give. And we’re going to look at ways in which we can enhance those gifts and give them in ways that are more relevant and inspiring than ever. Our goal is not just to celebrate the past 50 years, but to envision who we may yet be in our next 50 years. Nothing less than that.

Blessings,
Rev. Anthony David, Senior Minister

Rev. Marti Keller and the UUCA Women’s Writers Group

Call To Worship – Laurie Renfro

As we spend time with each other and the great American classic by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, let us appreciate we are living in a time that welcomes all races to this place of worship.

And may we begin by greeting one another.

A Reflection on Harper Lee

By Rev. Marti Keller

August 15, 2010

In his introduction to Mockingbird, a portrait of  novelist Harper Lee, Charles J. Shields noted that her one and only published manuscript—To Kill a Mockingbird—was ranked in a Book of the Month Club survey conducted in 1991 as  second only to the Bible in “making a difference in people’s lives.” He writes that in the years following its publication—50 years ago this July—this book has drawn nearly a million readers annually. Over 30 million total copies sold, translated into 40 languages.

This novel, which won for its author a Pulitzer-Prize was instantly successful, becoming early on a classic of modern American literature and adapted into an Oscar-winning film in l962.

Despite her novel’s huge impact, Harper Lee’s writing life was brief and her off-page life intensely private, having only occasionally commented on the book itself, refusing any personal interviews since l964. She is not expected to make an appearance even in this year of multiple celebrations of the anniversary of her novel—with readings led off by Steven Colbert and other luminaries, and even a proposed Congressional resolution commemorating its publication—quashed at the last moment by a filibuster.

According to her biographer, Harper Lee has never appeared comfortable in the limelight. In fact, he writes that not only does she not solicit attention, she actively discourages it. In this era, he observes, of relentless and often prurient self- exposure by approval-hungry personalities, Lee prefers silence and self-respect.

She is not, however, a contemporary Emily Dickenson, a recluse. From accounts given him by friends and relations, she currently lives a normal life filled with community activities, many of them related to her church. She spends time in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama and some time in New York City, where she first moved as a young woman, working a clerical job with an airline, to be among writers, even lunching a few years back with Oprah Winfrey, who was unsuccessful in convincing her to come out of celebrity hiding.

She was born in l926 in the small Deep South town of around 750 residents, which had not changed much since the days of the Civil War when a Confederate soldier passing through was heard to say it was the most boring place in the world.

When the railroad arrived, things changed some—brick structures replacing sagging old wood buildings, new schools built—including the Alabama Girls Industrial School—  where dressmaking, laundering, and home nursing would not hold Harper’s attention.

There was a Home Café and the Simmons Hotel where families could eat a midday meal on Sunday, served boarding house style for 55 cents—chicken, mashed potatoes, okra, corn, gravy and cornbread and pie.

And in the center of the square and described as dominating everything by its size was the Monroe County courthouse, where Harper could watch her father perform the functions of a title lawyer.

This was Harper Lee’s small town Alabama childhood world—with a black housekeeper and a father who was by all accounts a proponent of racial segregation, where downtown was all white, where blacks couldn’t use the library or sit down and have a coke or ice cream. Where women and blacks could not serve on juries.

When you entered the sanctuary this morning, you may have been handed a sepia toned copy of a flier circulated at the time of what was a nationally known case—the so-called Scottsboro Boys Trials in l931-37. Nine black men were indicted for the alleged rape of two white girls on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis, and newspaper had a field day, boosting their circulation with headlines such as ‘ All Negroes Positively Identified by Girls and One White Boy Who Was Held Prisoner with Pistols and Knives  While Nine Black Fiends Committed Revolting Crimes.” The first jury found all of the defendants guilty. These events, most of which would have happened when Lee was about the same age as Scout, the young girl in To Kill a Mockingbird: the theme of racial injustice, the fear of miscegenation, the courage of two attorneys in that case in defending those wrongfully charged and all but one eventually released— had a deep impact on the 10 year old who would write a book called by some courageous and timeless in its exploration of racism, by others as a bloodless sugar coated myth of Alabama history.

But it seems more likely that the direct inspiration for the rape accusation and trial in her book came from much closer to home, that stately Monroe County courthouse which in l933 was the scene of the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. For whom the pressures of the trial and his initial death sentence by electrocution proved too much, landing him not in prison but in a Hospital for the Insane, where he remained for the rest of his brief life.

Out of this came To Kill a Mockingbird, and out of To Kill a Mockingbird this morning’s reflections, from some who lived parallel lives in parallel times and some who read it much later on – Euro women and African American women,  women writers with differing experiences and perspectives.

In doing so they have chosen to use language in places that was shocking then and still shocking now, but it was a careful and deliberate choice.

Their truths will move you.

COMMENTS ON TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD—FIFTY YEARS LATER

Bee Nahmias

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee shortly after it was published in 1960.  It was fortuitous timing to read about customs of the Southeast of the United States in the 1930s, since my husband and I, both fresh-baked physicians, had just put in two years in Atlanta. For us, coming from Washington, DC and New York, this move had been culture shock.  We loved the friendliness of the South, but had to adjust to other things. The Black/White relations seemed outrageous.

Grady Hospital was built in the shape of an H: there was a white wing and a black wing with a connecting corridor.  There were “white” drinking fountains and “colored” ones. We often got looks of suspicion on the road because our car had New York tags. Once I hosted a barbeque in the back of our apartment building and invited all the staff members of the Pulmonary Function Lab, including a young black female technician.  The next day a neighbor pulled me aside and said, “You know, we just don’t do that here.”

To Kill a Mockingbird widened my perception.  It confirmed what I had noticed already with my new Southern friends.  I could see that family was of the utmost importance; you were molded by your origins, either proud or resigned.  Blacks and Whites didn’t mingle socially. I also noticed that food preferences were limited and leaned toward fried and overcooked items. For my husband and me it was actually a second cultural learning experience. Both of us had immigrated to the States as teenagers and already had mastered a previous major cultural adjustment. One experience we cherished in Atlanta at that time was our membership in UUCA.

After our two years in Atlanta, from 1958 to 1960, we went on to Boston to finish our medical training.  When we heard of Atlanta’s miraculously smooth integration, we decided to come back because the opportunities for fast advancement were huge.

Re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird fifty years later has been illuminating. I found my old, tattered copy on the bookshelf and noted the paragraphs I’d marked in pencil before. This time, also, I marked portions that struck me now and they weren’t always the same. I took the book along on a visit to my daughter and her family in Shreveport, Louisiana.  And much to my surprise I found out that my grandson, Alex, had just finished studying the book in his freshman English class.  What a coincidence!  He educated me on the numerous study guides and quotes with comments that I could google.  But I didn’t do that until I finished choosing my own quotes and making my own analysis.

So what did I notice when I re-read the book?  I still admire the analogy between the innocence of a mockingbird and the innocence of Tom Robinson who is falsely accused of raping a white woman and will ultimately get the death sentence.

However, as a birder, I am appalled by the section of the book on which the title is based.  The children are told, “shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” No, no no—it’s NOT okay!  It’s amazing to see this being said by Atticus, the justice-loving defense lawyer, and by Miss Maudie.

I did admire again how Harper Lee managed to puncture the bubble of Southern snobbishness about family: Scout is speaking to her brother, “Well, Jem, I don’t know—Atticus told me one time that most of the Old Family stuff’s foolishness because everybody’s family’s just as old as everybody else’s.”

But then there’s this.  Atticus is saying, “…Miss Maudie can’t serve on a jury because she’s a woman…“ He goes on to say, “I doubt if we’d ever get a complete case tried—the ladies’d be interrupting to ask questions.”

Oh, oh, oh—there are so many concepts here that grate on me like fingernails on a blackboard.  First of all, of course, that women couldn’t serve on juries.  Scout, the alert and smart little girl, picks up on that right away. But Atticus spouts the usual lame excuses for sexism and tries to make a joke of it.  Little Scout is drawn in and laughs too.  And finally, Atticus says, “Our forefathers were wise.” What about our foreMOTHERS?

Now I understand that in 1960, when the book was published, the concepts of gender and racial injustice were just beginning to sweep the country.  I also understand that Harper Lee was describing perfectly the ideas of the 1930s.

But this is what really upsets me: My grandson told me that in his high school discussions nobody noticed or discussed the killing of the birds or the sexual discrimination.  And in my google research I note that these sections of the book are also slighted. We still have a way to go, it seems.

Today’s society has improved. Shooting bluejays is illegal.  Women have made great strides in equality. Racial and family status prejudice has much diminished.

Scout had it right when she said to Jem, “Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

I WILL BE READING THIS EXCERPT FROM TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

“Atticus,” I said one evening, “what exactly is a nigger-lover?”

Atticus’ face was grave. “Has somebody been calling you that?”

“No sir, Mrs. Dubose calls you that. She warms up every afternoon calling you that.  “Francis called me that last Christmas, that’s where I first heard it.”

“Is that the reason you jumped on him?” asked Atticus.

“Yes sir…”

“Then why are you asking me what it means?”

I tried to explain to Atticus that it wasn’t so much what Francis said that had infuriated me as the way he had said it. “It was like he’d said snot-nose or somethin’.”

“Scout,” said Atticus, “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don’t mean anything – like snot-nose. It’s hard to explain – ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.”

“You aren’t really a nigger-lover, then are you?”

“I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody….I’m hard put, sometimes–baby, it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you. So don’t let Mrs. Dubose get you down. She has enough troubles of her own.”

EMBRACING MEDITATION FOR AUGUST 15th

Led by Lisa Macy

This is a loving kindness meditation.  Close your eyes and let your attention

rest at your heart.  Just for the next few minutes drop any judgment,

criticism and analysis of yourself and just appreciate yourself.  Exactly as

you are this moment.  In this moment, there is nothing to change, nothing to

make different - just love you as you this moment.

Now expand that feeling in your heart.  Include people whose skin is a

different color than yours.  Include people whose hair is a different color

or texture than yours.  Include people whose holidays and culture are

different from yours.  Include people whose religions are different from

yours.  Even if they wouldn't include you in their circle, you go ahead and

include them in your heart.

Let them rest, with you, in your heart.

SEGREGATION IN THE DEEP SOUTH

Marceline Haver

I was born in 1928 in Florida. As a youngster, some things were easy to understand; some were confusing. Some people were dark; others light. The white people called the people with the dark skin; “darkies,” “colored,” or the “n” word. I didn’t know those words were bad, but I learned. One day when I came home, I told my father that my brother was playing with James, the “nigger,” I added. My father laid down his newspaper to counsel me. “Sister, they don’t want to be called “nigger” they want to be called “negro.”

I remember my father being angry when the Ku Klux Klan tied a poor white sharecropper to the Olustee Creek Bridge, beat him and left him there. They believed the sharecropper had stolen hams from smoke houses. Someone untied him and him and his whole family quickly moved away. Soon after that incident, the Deputy Sheriff and some other Ku Klux Klansmen knocked on a black man’s door in the middle of the night, demanding entrance. The black man got his gun, shot through the door and killed the Deputy Sheriff. The Klansmen fled and so did the black family.  It was a confusing and violent time.

My Uncle John was a Baptist preacher who had a man named Neilous, a black man, working for him sometimes. Instead of forcing him to eat lunch on the back doorsteps alone, Uncle John welcomed him to eat at the dining table with his family. He, Aunt Pearl and their daughter, Golde actually spent the night with Neilous one night during a terrible storm, fearing they wouldn’t make it home in their horse-drawn buggy. I hate to think what might have happened if the Klan found out about that.

Everything was segregated. Black people had to sit in the back of the Greyhound buses and drink water from fountains labeled “colored.”  The schools, churches and theatres were segregated. Black people entered a side door to the theatre and sat in the balcony – or rather half of the balcony. The other half, for white folks, was where my brother, sister and I sat as we listened to the blacks enjoying the movie, just like us. But, we were on the other side of a tall wall.

In 1956 when I was 28 years old, my husband, Bob, and I moved from Virginia to Americus, Georgia. Bob preached full-time in a fundamentalist church. Three days after we moved to Americus, a motorcade of Ku Klux Klansmen drove by an integrated cooperative community farm called Koinonia shooting guns at whomever they could. Merchants in Americus boycotted the people of Koinonia, refusing to sell to them, because they wanted de-segregation.

Bob and I had four children ages 5,4,2 and six months. I loved them but felt I wanted to do something more.  I went to the Thalean Elementary School and inquired about teaching private piano lessons one day a week. The principal supported that and then persuaded me to teach music to the entire school once a week. The school did without a janitor for that one day to pay me ten dollars. I rode the school bus to the school. Thalean had a modern school building with new books. Not like the school the black children attended, which was a crudely built, unpainted building. They learned with old, worn books white children had used.

The leader of the Ku Klux Klan actually sent his daughter to take piano lessons with me. There was tension in the school because some of the Koinonian children attended Thalean Elementary and their parents were afraid to attend the meetings or to get involved at the school because there was so much Klan activity amongst some of the parents

In spite of all this, I planned a musical for the entire school. The lead in my play, The Old Woman in the Shoe was a Koinonia girl who played her part well. Surprisingly, the Koinonia parents came to the musical! The second year, I presented, Pinocchio with costumes and lights, courtesy of both parents and teachers. That year the auditorium was overflowing with parents from both sides. It was a grand success!

That second year our oldest son entered the first grade and Bob was elected president of the PTA. The Koinonian parents were no longer afraid to attend the PTA meetings and things started to slowly change.

Segregation was everywhere in the South. When Bob later returned to teaching school he was assigned to Southwest High School in Atlanta.  We bought a house in the then, all-white community, Cascade Heights, in 1960. About three years later, in nearby Peyton Forest a house was sold to a black doctor.  The white residents panicked! Everyone wanted to sell. They even made signs offering Coca Colas or ice cream to lure buyers to look at their house! Folks in Cascade Heights were afraid blacks would move into their all-white community. The Mayor at the time, Ivan Allen, placed a barricade across Peyton Road to hinder access to Cascade Heights to contain the spread of blacks!

The blacks in Atlanta didn’t mind fighting injustice. There was an uproar amongst them and a judge ordered the mayor to have the barricade removed. And, he did. He even regretted his actions and went on to become one of the first Southern White leaders to sign the Open Housing Act. Slowly, hearts were opening.

Many of our black neighbors were more educated than many of the whites that were moving out. When our new neighbors, Charles and Delores moved in next door, we went over with a pitcher of lemonade to welcome them and their daughter, Chandra. Charles was working in advertising for the Butler Street YMCA and Delores was a professor at a black university in Atlanta. We became fast friends.

Some things were changing. Some were not. Some fundamentalist preachers quoted the bible to justify segregation. I heard one mother say, “God made the birds different colors and didn’t mean for them to mix.”

I was still teaching private piano lessons and my class gradually changed from all white to integrated. I entered my pupils in the National Piano Playing Auditions each year and they all did well.

The churches were still segregated. My church at the time, Cascade Heights Church of Christ, planned a revival and told the congregation to invite all their neighbors.  Each member of the church was assigned a row to fill.  Ours was the second row. We invited Charles and Delores. Delores declined; Charles agreed to attend.

When Bob and I walked down the aisle with our five children and our handsome black neighbor, there was a buzz. I overheard someone whispering, “Bob and Marci might be ready for this, but, we are not.”

To Kill a Mockingbird

Kim Green

“Besides nothing’s really scary except in books,” Scout said.

I read to Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the 8^th grade.  And, I was scared. So scared that I blocked it out, as if I had been hit in the head. I fell unconscious. Obviously, I had read To Kill a Mockingbird, but not until I held it in my hands this time did I realize that its contents were shamefully unfamiliar.

This book happened to me when I was worlds away from the Deep South.  I was in New York City’s, Upper East Side at an exclusive girls prep school. I was one of two black girls in the 8^th grade and one of five in the building. The building was filled with 395 other girls; blondes, brunettes and two red heads. I blame my literary amnesia on my fragile blackness, which had been torn and twisted like a fraying rope, for the eight years I had already been struggling in this foreign white world.

It’s all coming back to me now: that sinking feeling of being under the pressure of looks and stares burning through me as my classmates were directed to read from the text; a text peppered with the dreaded “N word” throughout. The “N” word that I could not bring myself to utter, even in private. I hated this book; I felt betrayed by my teacher.

“Nothing’s really scary except in books.” That line reaches out to me now and shakes me into realizing the power of stories; true or imagined.  In revisiting To Kill a Mockingbird, I mourn for the young me feeling the drama of being Black amongst whiteness as it crawled up my spine. I was a child being confronted with the universal irritation of skin; it’s color.

Unlike Scout, I never sought relief by seeking counsel from my father. Like her, I, too was a motherless daughter.  I avoided the topic at home because I didn’t want to hit my father with the same assault weapon that had knocked me out. Those weeks of reading in school felt like years as we wrung all of the pulp out of the pages. My class read and re-read. We analyzed and discussed. We underlined, highlighted and made notes in the margins. We wrote essays, we answered questions, we even had quizzes. I’m sure we did… because that’s what we always did at my school. But it’s as if, I wasn’t even there.

I never brought the discussion home because I didn’t want my father to be faced with the task of wallowing in the messy truths of our skin’s hue. I didn’t want to hear all of the ugly stuff that we were sure we had escaped. After all, we were in New York City, up North, free from the “nigger”days.  I watched my father live as torn and tormented as Harper Lee’s characters; full of love and hate in the same breaths. Although, my father acted satisfied with our seeming inclusion in the mainstream, he lived until he died, distrustful of “them.” He always warned that “they” would hurt me someday when their parents would whisper in their ears, that I was not quite their equal.  My father was comfortable with saying, “Kim, that’s just how the world works.”

I still wince at To Kill a Mockingbird. It makes me sad to think that by simply having my heart beat inside this brown suit that houses my heart, I am historically deplored by those of a lighter shade.  I read To Kill a Mockingbird depressed by life’s absurdities all over again. I am awed by the courage of Harper Lee to put these difficult thoughts into words and put these mangled ideas down on paper.  She masterfully held the mirror to our faces.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an ugly but beautiful book. Like Lee’s, Boo Radley, racism still lurks around, scaring us and making us look at the bedlam we’ve created. Like Boo, racism peeks from the strangest places and when everyone has had their fill, it skulks back into the darkness, where it belongs.

After 50 years, it intrigues me that the world is actually celebrating this book. This book has been called life-changing by some, and forgettable by others.  I won’t identify which group feels which way…I leave that to you…

As I stand on the sidelines of the To Kill a Mockingbird parade, I wonder how I can feel love for this cruel book, and I do. I guess the colorless side of me, the writer side of me, sees the grace in every word and feels the weight of being human.

I have awakened from my slumber now and have come to understand that this book touches me underneath the skin; pushing and prodding me down the winding road of being a writer.  This book moves me to give people that look like me a voice and stories of our own making.

I often wonder why we are a culture that loves to remember and celebrate the unkind. Southerners still romanticize the confederacy, without thinking how it makes their Black neighbors feel. We live in a peculiar world where hate groups still exist and new ones are forming everyday. We seem to love to linger on the days when we weren’t our best selves. It strangles me to understand how we’ve gotten so tangled.

Like Maycomb County’s Sheriff Tate, I, too, wrangle and fidget with the truth, hoping for peace. He said, “There’s a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it’s dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.”

I say, if only we would.

In West Virginia, where I was born in the 1930s, I lived next door to the church where my father was the pastor.  The church had a tiny hewn out of rock deep, dark hole beneath the Sunday School Room floor where run-a-way slaves were hidden during the Civil War.  And I remember as a small child playing a game called “help the run-a-way slaves outfox the bounty hunters.”  It was like Hide and Go Seek, but more complex. I also remember studying the “Civil War” in the 5^th grade in West Virginia, and “The War Between The States” in middle Mississippi, the following year—hardly recognizable as the same war.  This proved to be my first big “aha” in life, as I learned that one couldn’t take everything written in text books as absolute—or even accurate.

Now please join hands as you are able and willing for the Benediction

In the weeks to come, may we all be motivated to seek the truth of people and not just believe what we are told about them. Remember what you heard today from Harper Lee and the UUCA women writers. Remember the anguish, injustice and hate caused by prejudice to its victims and its onlookers.

And now we have this moment–this moment in which we are physically connected: hand to hand—one to another.

So no matter what the coming days bring, may the remembrances of this shared hour remind us that we are all alike.  As members of a liberal faith, let us go forth by demanding of ourselves and others, the peace of justice.

Amen and . . .  Awoman.

Benediction 120 words

Rev. Marti  Keller

August 8, 2010

At the end of May, I flew off to Trumansburg New York via Syracuse on a narrow aisled 50 seater plane, landing in a  Spartan airport with just a sports bar,  a pizza stand and a candy, gum and mass paperback  bookstore. I got off that small, bumpy plane, entered that mini terminal and went down the one escalator to the baggage claim, suddenly panicking that I had landed in the wrong place—perhaps I should have flown to Rochester or Schenectady, and that Lisa, my second college roommate in Stern Hall, UC Berkeley, would not be there to greet me.

And even if I was in the right city, I would not be able to find her, let alone recognize her, having only seen a tiny Facebook portrait of her recently.

After all we had not been with each other in the flesh since shortly after I turned 21.

Lisa started school a couple of quarters late, straight from Southern California, Newport Beach it turns out, though at the time we roomed together all I knew ( or remember that I knew) was that her dad was a physics professor at the university in Irvine, and that shortly after she moved in she started spending a lot of time away from that retro all women’s dorm with the mandatory dress code and  sign out sheet curfew with her grown-up, off campus boyfriend.

She would flee regularly down to the flats, away from the walnut and brown sugar coffee cake Sunday breakfasts and the confinement of our shared quarters  to a peeling bungalow a few miles away on a street smelling of bay water( and probably some illegal substances).

My world then seemed smaller—and larger. Besides classes, the up and down hill trek to Eschleman  Hall, the sixth floor Daily Californian headquarters, where there were manual typewriters and rimmed copy desks, seniors smoking cigarettes, editing half sheets of cheap beige paper, me, as a newbie, an underling, assigned to put together the calendar with colloquium and underground foreign film screenings.

In an article I wrote for the alumni magazine ten years after I graduated—“When We Were Young and Gassed,” I recalled that there had been an almost unbroken series of dramatic clashes since I started as a cub reporter on that nationally known paper: the December l966 student strike, following an attempt to move Navy ROTC out of the student union, anti-draft rallies, sit-ins, mill-ins, and a Third World Liberation Front strike.

At one point there was an anonymous piece printed in the arts section suggesting that in view of the current situation on campus, the following proposal is offered—that future riots be scheduled ahead of time and they be held in the Greek Theatre, where no windows will be broken and there’s plenty of fresh air to disperse the gas, and seats for those who wish to watch.

Those reporters I interviewed for the retrospective piece collectively remembered about working on the paper in those years was that there were days that the editorial offices were so dirty, so charged, so filled with noxious fumes and fatigue that normal life, or what we imagined was normal life, seemed just a happy dream.

Lisa, who was then and is now a gifted artist and a nurturer of children and other living things, recalls that when we met she felt unformed, and that when she found me, perched on the edge of my narrow single bed, almost folded in on myself at a moment of rare respite from the activities and stresses of my life at that time, that she thought that my life seemed passionate and real. I thought from the moment we met that her life was passionate and real.

From this first meeting came a relationship that has been, after the few months we roomed together and the times we got together while we still lived in the same quarter of the universe as she liked to describe it, almost entirely created and maintained through letters and occasional calls.

Letters that waxed and waned: letters handwritten on onion skin typing paper, yellow lined paper, handmade and drugstore note cards, cheap and then better quality computer paper, and most recently cyber space.

Given the distance, the geographic distance between us, this was the only way.

I graduated and stayed in the Bay Area for more than twenty years after we last saw each other.

She moved in with and then moved away with her slightly older, paving crew and construction working, brilliant guy, traveling in Europe, and then gravitating back East, nearer to his family, to upstate New York where they eventually built their own house on an unpaved rural road, where where she raised goats and made cheese, became a Montessori teacher, did her batiks.

I had children early and first, naming my daughter for her, writing a poem that became a recorded folk song, with a chorus that described the difference between my life and the life of her namesake, my life friend: Alisha, I want you to know you were named for the journey I did not make into dairy land in sandals, with farming books, a harp and a loom and a backpack full of dreams.

The letters we mailed to each other were filled with stories about our personal lives: musing about whether, post-graduation, we would be working in the same pancake house with our fancy degrees; how Lisa and John, who eventually became her husband, had to live with a 60 year old widow in a giant Victorian house, exchanging room and board for being maid and butler, housecleaner and handyman, confidants and surrogate children- eating spaghetti and butter with a side of macadamia nuts–  how I tried to fit in my journalism and my poetry with sick children, housekeeping, and city vegetable gardening. How glad we were both were to see the 1970’s decade end— how peculiar it was, how we were tumbling into the Eighties with more hope. How I decided to divorce, how she decided to have children. The years when the correspondence trickled on one side or the other, one year me apologizing, telling her “ there is no excuse for not having written, except a badly broken foot, a car arson, a move, a wedding. “Please write soon we would both sign off. Take care.

It wasn’t until 1991, 20 years after we probably last saw each other, that either one of us mentioned the extraordinary ( or what we thought were extraordinary) outside events that surrounded our young adult years, Lisa writing me that her daughter, who was in the eighth grade had watched a PBS series on the Sixties and found it compelling, reminding her of when we first met and what she viewed as my daring journalistic ventures on campus.

Only in the first decade of this new millennium did the name or names of presidents, liked and detested, appear on the pages of our letters of two women who are not indifferent to the goings on in the larger world.  The nature of our relationship, the texture of our friendship, has been more like mutual touchstones: always there, sources of nourishment and revival in times of drought and celebration in times of abundance and joy.

As Beth Kephart write in her wonderful memoir about these special relationships, friendships succor us, they fill in the blanks, they give us a purpose. Because, she reminds us, all friendships are finally mirrors, they provide proof that we do exist, that we are.  They give us a reason to laugh as well, to just laugh at life, flat out and keep going.

This came up for me just a week or so ago, when I flew again, this time to Phoenix, to participate in the Standing on the Side of Love actions in support of immigration  reform .

This time I was picked up at the airport by another longtime friend, Susan, who used to be married to my husband’s cousin. While sympathetic, deeply empathetic, to the cause which brought me in the middle of the summer to the heat of Arizona for a show of  support for those concerned about the human rights of undocumented immigrants and the injustice of racial profiling, she let me know that her first concern was for me: whether, as she always puts it, I was properly fed and “fluffed.”  Which for her means and meant making me scrambled eggs, grinding coffee, providing a water bottle and a cooling scarf for my neck for the march and demonstration in the hot desert sun. Transporting me and a fellow congregant from the actions downtown to the Phoenix UU congregation. Pouring me wine at the end of the day, insisting that I take a swim.That was the role she chose to play, as energy and health limitations prevented her from entering the fray.

In the midst of all this caretaking, was the most nourishing element— the constant talk, part-idle chatter, part soul sharing, the conversations that started 26 years ago and have continued, intermittently , ever since. Because, in general, as Beth Kephart notes, adult friendships are not the same among women as among men: women talk, the cliché says, while men revel in mutual doing.

Certainly this has seemed so for the men in my life, at least as I have observed them.

My first husband had a would be friend who died suddenly and young from a heart attack, leading me to write a poem, observing that “ they might have been friends in the way men befriend each other, across the lunch table, slipping a private tale or two between the manila folders of their attaché  cases, marking a column for personal accounting… not loosed tongued between clotheslines, but circling each other in an ancient ceremony of pride and territory… “

Friendships in bowling allies, on basketball courts, on hiking trails. Shared activities. According to  Geoffrey Greif, author of “Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships”, while women may enjoy getting together over lunch. men are usually comfortable meeting over a shared activity. When men meet, he says, they may not share anything personal at all.

He tells the joke that a man goes over to his friend’s house for a couple of hours and comes home and his wife asks him about his friend’s divorce, and the man says- ‘it never came up.’

We are told that friendships between men and women are different than same sex ones,  and no one like the other. We have circles of friends, from our religious communities, our neighborhoods, mothers and fathers of our children’s friends—some longer lived and more significant than others. As the reading from this morning reminds us, we adopt them, we celebrate them, and claim they are part of us and suddenly they are gone.

Because inevitably there are friends for a particular moment, a life stage—friends like Joann and Dee, the athletic, bright but not intellectual girls I would have felt so threatened by in high school and college, more comfortable on the tennis court, swimming, jogging and hiking—or in  wet weather, sewing and other handwork that always brought me to frustrated tears. Yet I gained  much  from them as young mothers and wives whose concerns at a time were so like mine and yet whose backgrounds, even inner lives were so different.

The health-saving benefits of friendship has been the subject of increased scientific scrutiny. In an article published last year in the New York Times by Tamara Parker-Pope, she reported that in the quest for better health, many people turn to doctors, self-help books or herbal supplements, overlooking “ a powerful weapon that might help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life—their friends.”

She cited a ten year study in Australia that found older people with a larger circle of friends were markedly less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large study a few years back showed an increase of more than 60 percent in the risk of obesity among people whose friends gained weight—and jumped 170 percent if a close  friend was significantly overweight.  In the same piece, the reporter cited a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer which found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends-.And it didn’t make any difference how close these friends lived or how much contact—the friendships themselves were protective.

While much of the research has focused on the friendships between women, some research has shown that men can benefit too—reducing the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease, lowering blood sugar and blood pressure levels, releasing mood elevating hormones.

Out of this data has come a plethora of practical, how to advice about how to find friends: getting busy, getting out : joining  fitness centers and dinner clubs, adult education or community volunteering; reaching out, extending invitations to dinner or a movie, phone calls, online messaging, support groups, neighborhood strolls. Getting a dog to walk.  Moving to co-housing communities where the chance of social isolation is hopefully less likely.

Making the connection between substance abuse prevention and recovery, and sounder mental health,  the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued a self-help guide on making and keeping friends,  including building skills that enhance friendships, qualities that make friendships richer and stronger, including being independent and self-sufficient, being positive, upbeat and warm, doing your share of both the talking and the listening, being non-judgmental, giving the other person plenty of “space.”

Why this growth industry for guides to true friendship in the 21^st century?  As Unitarian Universalist Association President The Reverend Peter Morales commented in his sermon delivered to the 2010 General Assembly in Minneapolis, the people to whom we must minister are the most disconnected people who have ever lived. What supreme irony, he said. We who have smart phones, we who have instant messaging, tweets, email, voicemail, and  zillions of friends on Facebook, are by objective measure, emotionally isolated—exchanging more messages than ever but, he told us, at the price of true intimacy and real community.

He talked about a major survey of interpersonal relationships published 25 years ago in the American Sociological Review, the leading journal of sociology, repeated five years ago in order to measure the changes  that had taken place in a generation.

Rev. Morales found the results stunning. One of the key questions asked participants how many people they knew with whom they felt they could confide personal information, a marker of a level of intimacy. Respondents could give an answer from zero to 10 or more.

In l985, the answer most frequently given was three—about 25 percent.

In 2004, the answer most frequently given was zero, that for around a quarter of the respondents, there was no one.

Another quarter answered only one, and that answer was almost always a life partner.

What that means, he emphasized, was that only half of all Americans have a close relationship outside their household.

In the short time since that repeat study in 2004 that internet communication vehicles like My Space and Facebook have been created and taken off, has this had any impact on these findings—are we more deeply, intimately connected as a result of the names , the “friends” we have added to our pages?

Essayist William Deresiewicz, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education last year about what he maintains is faux friendship says we live in a time when friendship has become all and  yet nothing  at all— so-called BFFs and parents who befriend their children ,and teachers, clergy and even bosses who, he maintains, seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends.

We are on a first name basis with everyone—and yet, he asks, in our brave new world, what is the nature of these friendships we claim?

Friendship in ancient times, he tells us, which was far from ordinary and universal, in fact rare, precious and hard won, described in some classic literature as more wondrous than romantic love. From this sort of preciousness, this special relationship has become, from his perspective,  universalized to the point where our friendship circles have “ expanded to engulf the whole of the social world,” giving us not actual connections, but a false sense of intimacy.

As we post to our average of 130 Facebook friends, with quite a few of us having many more than that, we are not asked to participate in real friendship as one blogger pointed out. We need not, she asserted, know anything about each other, let alone care about each other. We do not have the obligation or opportunity to tell and listen to each other’s stories, which takes probing and questioning, and the luxury of time: whether through 10 page missives, three hour conversations, a walk around a lake, or some other form of sustained contact. And the scale of friendship, given its requirements—time and little distraction, mutuality, nurturance—is necessarily bounded, as one writer said.

In a newspaper article titled “Are 5,001 Friends Too Many?”, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained ( read friends) is 150, which flies in the face of the practice of a Facebook friends roster growing like Kudzu, which may provide business and social networking activities, but fail to substitute for actual human contact on a manageable scale and the cultivation of real friendship.

Peter Morales in his keynote sermon was asking UU congregations to  look at how we promote genuine special relationships—friendships where people can go deep in a trusting context. Robert Hill in his classic guide to small group ministry in our religious communities suggested that besides being an effective way to grow our congregations in numbers, providing sustainable meaningful programs—these covenant groups are places to find others to talk with without barriers or reservations,  to be totally and openly ourselves.

Consider the possibilities here.

When I finally found my friend Lisa at the bottom of the escalator in the Syracuse airport, the exact right place I was supposed to meet her, the decades slipped away. We spent the next three days walking her country roads, now paved and named—looking for egrets—drinking cups of tea,   drinking in the joy of being in each other’s company, the sense of being made whole.

In the words of poet and spiritual teacher Andrew Harvey, coming to experience and celebrate the holiness of sacred friendship and to be grateful for the wisdom of your friends increases your faith in life and your capacity for skillful action.

And from the poet Rumi: Whatever fires the heart is a ray from my Friend.

How many of you know Hildegarde Grey?   She’s a long time member of our congregation.  She couldn’t be here this Sunday, so to make sure you know who I’m talking about, here’s her picture.

She looks a lot like me, doesn’t she?  By a show of hands, how many of you think this is Hildegarde Grey?  Not very many of you.  Well let me explain why you’re wrong.

Hildegarde is a former president of our congregation and a former chair of the Board of Trustees of the Mountain, our UU camp and conference center in Highlands, North Carolina—–which is where I got to know her.  I was serving on the Mountain board during the time Hildegarde was its chair.  And actually, I didn’t just get to know her at the Mountain, I got to be her, which is why I can, with a little creative leeway, claim this is a picture of Hildegarde Grey.

I got to be Hildegarde on another one of those occasions when she couldn’t be present.  She’s a very busy lady.  And on that particular occasion, she was busy being a grandmother.

How many of you think this is Hildegarde’s granddaughter?  Show of hands, please.

We’ll it’s not.  This is a picture of my granddaughter.  Beautiful, isn’t she?  She sure is.  Since Hildegarde and I can kind of shift identities, I thought I’d pass my granddaughter off for Hildegarde’s, just for a few minutes.  Just go with me here—-just imagine that this beautiful kid was being born on that day and consequently Hildegarde couldn’t be at the Mountain for a very special event.

It was the 20^th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Mountain.  An auspicious occasion, and one on which as chair, Hildegarde was expected to give a speech.  Since Hildegarde couldn’t be there, she asked me to read her speech for her.  I said sure.  Why not?  I knew Hildegarde to be well-spoken and I was certain it would be a good speech.  And if it wasn’t, it would be her fault and not mine.  After all, I wasn’t writing the speech, I was only delivering it.  So why should I worry?

Well I admit that I got rather busy.  I didn’t actually read her speech ahead of time.  I just trusted her ability to write a good speech and my ability to do a good job spontaneously interpreting it for an audience.  So the anniversary of the Mountain came, and there I was, a bearded black man, standing at the podium—–much like I am today——-looking at a room of about 200 people.

Standing there, I took in the busy professional camera crew and the scurrying professional photographer that the Mountain had hired just for this occasion.  Andy Warhol’s words about everyone getting 15 minutes of fame flashed through my mind.  I know that’s kind of grandiose, but I’m not on camera very often.  I’m not exactly a television personality.  So it seemed like maybe, maybe this was my 15 minutes of fame.  It suddenly became important to me to do a good job.  How could I know whether I would ever get any more such minutes of attention and notoriety.

So standing at the podium, I acknowledged and waited for the applause to die down.  Just to set the mood, let me have some applause.  Please.  Very good.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  So, I acknowledged and waited for the applause to die down.  And when it did, I folded my hands atop the podium and began to speak the words that Hildegarde had written with the kind of solenm dignity that was appropriate for this auspicious moment in the Mountain’s history, and appropriate for my personal 15 minutes of fame.

“Good morning,” I said looking directly into the camera, “ I am very pleased to be with you, and I’m  Hildegarde Grey.”

I got a somewhat different reaction from them.  It was mostly just stunned silence.  But you see, in a way—–in a way, I did become Hildegarde Grey.  And that’s why your vote was wrong.

Now this is Hildegarde’s real picture of course.  She looks much lovelier than I do.  But, my point is, identities are complex.  Indeed, identities can be messy.  Now I showed you a picture of my beautiful granddaughter.  In fairness, I must show you a picture of Hildegarde’s grandkids as well.

Great looking kids.  Almost as beautiful as mine.

Part of our collective identity as a faith movement is that we are democratic.  That is part of who we are.  And our democratic spirit highlights the messiness of our broader identity.  There was a democratic vote taken at the most recent General Assembly of our denomination.  At issue was whether we should hold our 2012 General Assembly in Phoenix, Arizona as it is currently scheduled, or whether we should join the many other liberal organizations—-both secular and religious—-that are boycotting Arizona over its recently passed anti-immigration legislation.  The vote didn’t go as I expected.  The vote was to go forward with our meeting in Arizona in 2012.

Now I’m not going to rehash the pros and cons of this decision, nor the creative ways in which we will turn General Assembly into a protest of the ugliness Arizona is attempting to write into law.  I only want to point out this morning, what this vote says about the complexity, the messiness of identity.  We are, to the best of my knowledge, the only major faith movement in the United States with an elected Hispanic American as its leader.  And we are, paradoxically, the only liberal faith movement on record as opposing anti-immigration legislation, that is also going to hold its major annual meeting in Arizona.  Whether this decision is right or wrong, whether you agree or disagree with it, you have to admit it points to the complexity, the messiness of identity.

So I’m going to ask you to take another vote.  Not on Arizona, but on this picture.  Now this very stately elderly woman, named Laura, belongs either to me, or to Hildegarde.  By a show of hands, how many of you think this is a picture of Hildegarde Grey’s Grandmother Laura?  How many of you think this is a picture of my Grandmother Laura?

Good, you’re learning.  This is my Grandmother Laura.  The woman who helped raise me and the woman who first taught me the importance of identity.  You see, my grandmother, despite all outward appearances, was fiercely, I would say even defiantly, proud—-of being a black woman.  Though she would have said “a Negro woman.”

My Grandmother Laura owed her existence to an act of violence.  The rape of her mother—–not an uncommon occurrence in the slave south, nor even in the years after manumission.  Even after the Civil War, a black woman’s rape garnered no investigation and risked no punishment.  Raping black women was a white, male privilege.  My Grandmother Laura, in her youth, a grey-eyed, fair-skinned woman, with straight, coal black hair, was a product of that privilege, and of that violence.

Her mother’s rapist, and her would-be father, seeing that my Grandmother Laura could easily pass for white, made up his mind to take her to raise within his own family.  And he would have done so had Laura’s mother not refused to give up her white-appearing child.  Though raised within a Negro family, my grandmother had many opportunities to enter the white community and pretend to be one of its own.  She never availed herself of those opportunities.  To her death at age 93, she was proudly, indeed fiercely, a black woman.  Though she would have said “Negro.”

Identities are complex, and they are messy.  My grandmother’s defiance of superficial appearance in order to claim an identity she found more essential, put me—–I believe—–on a determined path to know and understand my own heritage and identity.   That identity, however, got a shock.

A few years ago I discovered that I am not who I thought I was.  Now, I have long been aware of my personal contradictions.  I am a clinician who at least sometimes craves for days when I don’t have to see patients, a scientist who sometimes would rather be writing a sermon than a research paper, an aging political radical with an occasional twinge of conservatism, an atheist who keeps getting poked in the eye by God.  When it comes to identity, I am admittedly something of a mess.  But some things about my identity I thought I knew for sure.  Then I found out about my mutation.

The mutation is present in my mitochondrial DNA.  You may remember from high school biology, that mitochondria are like tiny power plants inside our cells.  They liberate chemical energy for use by the cell and are essential to our survival.  One of the most amazing things about mitochondria is that they have their own DNA and they undergo their own form of reproduction.  Mitochondria are, in fact, thought to have once been a completely different species of life—–a type of bacteria that invaded the cells of animals, found it a hospitable place to live, and decided to stay.  Mitochondria live within us in symbiosis.  We supply the mitochondria with a safe place to live, a consistent supply of the raw materials they need, and in return they give us the chemical energy that drives every single thing our bodies do.  It’s a pretty good deal for both them and for us.

But it’s also a little spooky to think of ourselves as a colony.  To think of ourselves as not just one species of life evolving on this planet, but as two distinct species of life engaged in a cooperative evolution—–a co-evolution.  Each of us does, as Walt Whitman proclaimed, contain multitudes, though perhaps in a different way than he meant.

Our DNA lies in the nucleus of our cells and we inherit half of our DNA from each parent through sexual reproduction.  Mitochondria, on the other hand, never learned about the birds and the bees.  They have their own DNA, and they have no need for sex.  To make more mitochondria, they simply make a copy of their DNA and divide.  And they’re done.  Not very romantic, but certainly efficient.

And as more proof that evolution is all about women, mitochondria dispense with any need for a man.  We get our mitochondria exclusively from our mothers.  Our mothers’ egg cells are the only sources of mitochondria.  We get none from our fathers.  So quite literally, each of us, as a human colony, as a fusion of two life forms, is the product of two types of reproduction—–one sexual that combines DNA from our mothers and our fathers, and one asexual that brings us DNA solely from the mitochondria of our mothers.  So it is from my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother, and all the mothers that came before, that I have inherited my genetic mutation.

And what is this mutation that has so upended my life and changed my perspective on who I am.  It is a mutation that I share with most of you in this sanctuary.  It is one of the mutations that defines most of you, and now apparently me, as white.  That’s right, courtesy of the science of human genetics, and despite all evidence to the contrary, I learned a few years ago that I’m Caucasian.  Who knew?  I even have a certificate proclaiming my new racial identity.

The first 150,000 years of human evolution took place in Africa.  But some 50,000 years ago, groups of early humans perhaps motivated by climate change, began traveling along the eastern coast of Africa.  Always hugging the coastline, they made their way from Africa into Europe and Asia.  And from Europe and Asia they made it into the Americas.  At each spot along the way, some people settled and remained, but others kept moving on, or their children moved on, until over the millennia every major land mass on the planet became populated by humans and our human mitochondria.  Those that stayed put, at each location along this journey, provide a genetic signature of that place in the world.  In attempting to trace a person’s ancestry, the geneticist matches DNA with the genetic signature of each of these stops along the human journey.

Since publication of Alex Haley’s book Roots, and the airing of the television series based on that book, tracing one’s family tree has been extraordinarily popular within the black American community.  Because of slavery, few of us, can do what Haley did.  The absence of any record of slave births, marriages, and deaths, the systematic dismantling of black families when spouses or children were sold away for profit, has left most black Americans with no paper trail to follow their roots back to mother Africa.  So many black Americans, including myself, have turned to genetic testing as a way to penetrate the veil of slavery in order to get a glimpse of what lay before.

I understood well the limitations of genetic testing for purposes of determining ancestry.  The technique provides palpable proof of one of the many ugly secrets of the slave era.  Black female slaves were raped by their white owners in numbers too large to imagine.  Numbers so large that 30 percent of the time a black person’s nuclear DNA—–the DNA that we inherit equally from fathers and mothers——-cannot be used to trace African ancestry.  A third of black Americans alive today have European ancestry evident in their DNA.  Consequently, for a third of black Americans, it is only the mitochondrial DNA—–the DNA that comes to us exclusively from our mothers, that reliably traces back to Africa.  I knew from my family’s history, and my grandmother’s portrait, that I was in this one-third.

My grandmother’s fierce pride in being a black woman, despite her outward appearance, is legendary in my family.  So while I was certain that because of my grandmother’s provenance, any attempt to trace my African ancestry was doomed to failure using my nuclear DNA—-that is, the DNA that includes what my family inherited from a rapist——I was equally sure that my mitochondrial DNA—–the DNA that comes to me exclusively from the women in my family—–would give me a glimpse of my African ancestry.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Even in my mitochondrial DNA, I am more akin to people in Europe than I am to anyone in Africa.  I contain multitudes, whether I wish to or not.

Perhaps anticipating my disappointment, the geneticist reassured me that my test results didn’t mean that I don’t have any African ancestry.  No, they don’t.  They just mean I don’t have enough to find the African forebears I was seeking.  They’ve kind of disappeared in those multitudes.

So what does it mean now that I’ve learned my ancestry isn’t exactly what I thought it was?  If you think about it, the ramifications are mind-boggling.  First of all, I’ve screwed up the national census.  39.9 million African Americans don’t live in the United States, it’s actually 39.8 and some odd hundred-thousand.  Sorry about that.  I didn’t mean to mark the wrong box.  I just didn’t know.

I’ve also apparently perjured myself on all those jury surveys I’ve filled out for Dekalb County.  Should I confess being white and turn myself in?  While ignorance is no excuse when breaking the law, I’ve never actually been selected for jury duty, so perhaps the judge will be lenient with me.

And what about white privilege?  Can any of you who have been Caucasian for longer than I have, tell me where I go, with my genetic certificate, to claim my white privilege?  Will my certificate get me a better deal on my next car purchase?  Will it motivate my realtor to show me houses in better neighborhoods?  Will it get me a better raise next year?  There has got to be some way for me to cash in on being Caucasian.

But more seriously, what this does mean is that there is more than I will ever know about even my mother’s side of the family.  One of the women on that side of my family was European.  I’ll never know who she was, or what circumstances drew her into my black family tree, during the time of slavery.  But she is now a part of me.  A part of her floats in every cell of my body.  She is part of the multitude.

And even more seriously, I have been reminded of the intellectual bankruptcy of race as a biological concept.  It has no meaning, it has no biological significance.  Culturally I will always be proudly, even fiercely African American.  Racially, I don’t know what I will call myself.  Perhaps I’ll start leaving that question blank when I fill out those census or jury survey forms.  I am African American.  But I am a mosaic.  I contain multitudes.

And so do you.  Even more importantly, so does our country. Sarah Palin may not like it.  The Tea Party may not like it.  But it’s true.  We are a mosaic.  We can declare English the official language and Christianity the sole religion of the land, but we will still be a mosaic.  We can stop eating tacos and felafel.  We can stop listening to Raggae and dancing to Salsa, but we will still be a mosaic.  We can close our borders and criminalize people who come here for the same reason most of our forebears did—–simply seeking a better chance in life.  But we will still be a mosaic.

Unitarian Universalists went to Arizona this past week, and we will go to Arizona in 2012 and do what we did in 1912 and 1812, and all the times before in the messy history of our country.  We will be neither confused, blinded, nor deterred by differences in race, sex, sexuality, nation of origin, or belief.  We will stand on the side of faith, of love, and of welcome.  Sarah Palin will not like it.  The Tea Party will not like it.  But we will be a mosaic.  Even in Arizona.  Amen.

That was what the buzz was among those UUCA members and staff who traveled to Minneapolis last month to attend the annual General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA). For some of us self-confessed GA junkies who have been going for quite a while, these gatherings of a small, by most denominational standards, tribe of liberal religious folk from all over the country (with guests from around the world), are always amazing.

To be in the company of several thousand other UUs, many of them in the same convention center coffee lines, for us, is itself a wonder. To be part of the amazing worship services, the banner parade, the bazaar of chalice art and books, the conversations about common congregational successes and challenges, is always worth the trip, whether it be in the center of our movement in Boston, or the relative sparseness of Utah. But this year, this particular year, as UUCAer and UUA Board of Trustees member from the Mid South District Nancy Bartlett put it, she felt “a sea change” in the way our business was conducted in that big, chilly hall where the plenary sessions were held: sessions with significant votes taken, including finally passing a Peacemaking resolution that was inclusive of those who are opposed to all wars and those for whom there are just wars; those who work in the military and those who have actively opposed the draft and military funding.

We had work to do, deep listening, as we voted on which congregational study action issue to work on for the next four years, with competing and compelling proposals from an examination of the state of our American democracy, to slavery in the 21st century, to the one overwhelmingly selected: immigration as a moral issue. And there was much trepidation about what the nature of the debate would be when we had to grapple with a UUA Board- proposed business resolution to move our GA in 2012 out of Phoenix in response to the passage of a law (SB1070) in Arizona giving much broader powers to local policing authorities to proactively check immigration status, with great fears of even more prevalent and punitive racial profiling.

Moderator Ginny Courter led us in a process of reflection by prominent ministers and prayer and song before the discussion even started. The eventual vote supported an alternative, no business as usual “Justice” General Assembly there, rather than a full-out boycott, with a renewed commitment to working on the safety and accessibility of our gatherings for people with “historically marginalized” identities and opposition to systemic racism. The cheers that went up when the result of the vote was announced were not just for the content of the resolution. It was for the sense of collective decorum, dignity, respect, and yes, love as well.

You should have been there, our UUCA delegates agree, for this achievement in civil discourse, for exemplary democratic processes, for the model set by the UUA Board, our YAYA (youth and young adult) caucuses, by the leadership of DRUUMM (diverse revolutionary UU multicultural ministries).

You should have been there, I want to add proudly, to see our own UUCA delegates in action, from the first time they sat together at the Mid-South ingathering there; to that night during the display of banners, this year ours carried by Tim Atkins; to the ways in which they stayed connected, even when scattered throughout the massive convention center. It was a large and impressive showing. On behalf of Rev. David and myself, I want to personally thank our delegates: Lynne Anderson, Tim Atkins, Barbara Burnham, Marjorie Girth, Oreon Mann, Marshall Orson, Karen Reagle, Howard Rees, David Yamashita, and Julie Weisberg, many of whom played other important roles there. And of course your staff, including Chance Hunter and Pat Kahn, who participated in significant ways as well.

You all did us proud, and we have much to be proud of. You should have been there. Consider being there in Charlotte for the next General Assembly in June 2011.

Note: In addition to passing the business resolution about the Phoenix GA 2012, a call went out in Minneapolis for Unitarian Universalists to go to Phoenix from July 28-30 2010 to be part of the National Day of Compliance with SB1070, the day the law goes into effect, or whether or not the law takes effect that day, as a demonstration of our opposition to this kind of legislation, proposed now all over the country, including here in Georgia. A special request was made that clergy come and support this human rights movement on the ground in Arizona. Along with at least two of my Mid-South ministerial colleagues Revs. Fred Hammond and Jeff Jones, I will be there. Look for reports from the field.

Sincerely,
Rev. Marti Keller, Minister