Wanna see a video of a chase scene, where a giant apple chases after a huge snack cake? C’mon, you know you do! OK, the video is pretty goofy, the chase climaxes in a fight scene with a few disgusting moments, and of course it’s for a good political cause. In spite of all that, it’s worth it just to see the apple roll over the hood of a car, and to see the snack cake blind the apple with a UPC scanner.
The “Farm Bill Food Battle” video.
Thanks to Carol.
We were driving back from the supermarket. “Here’s a totally random memory,” I said. “Fairly pointless, too.”
“Good,” said Carol. “I like pointless memories.”
“So when we were little, Jean and I — and maybe we were old enough that Abby was in the car seat — Mom used to take us food shopping at least once a week at Stop and Shop in Concord,” I said. Carol and I lived together in Concord for seven years, so she knew which supermarket I meant; Jean is my older sister, and Abby is my younger sister. “We’d drive down Liberty Street so Mom could avoid driving through Concord center, which meant we went right by the visitor’s center for Minuteman National Park….”
“OK,” said Carol, mentally picturing the route my mother had once driven, all those years ago. “I know what you mean.”
“So for some reason,” I continued, “when we got to the parking lot at the visitor’s center, Jean and I would start chanting, ‘Go through the park, go through the park,’ and Mom would drive us through the parking lot at the national park visitor’s center. I have no idea why we always wanted to go through the park, it was just one of those things that got started and then we always did it.”
“Oh, that’s sweet!” said Carol. “You probably wanted to go through and see all the cars there.”
“Yeah, I think at one point I was really into finding out-of-state license plates,” I said. “That’s probably what started it.”
“That’s really sweet,” she said again. “Those were more innocent times.”
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t think they were more innocent. When we got to the supermarket, we used to see this young woman who was anorexic. She’d always be there with her parents. Later, we found out the reason she was anorexic was that her parents were beating her.”
“How’d you find that out?” said Carol.
“When I was housemates with D—-,” I said, “D—-‘s sister was just married, and she and her husband rented a little house from them. The parents and the anorexic daughter lived in the big house, and D—-‘s sister rented what used to be the servants’ house. D—-‘s sister and her husband would hear the anorexic woman screaming when her parents beat her. She must have been thirty-five years old by then.” I paused, thinking about D—-‘s sister. “Not a great way to begin your married life,” I coninuted, Carol following my logical leap. “They moved out as quickly as they could. Anyway, I don’t think those times were more innocent.”
That was the end of those random memories. When Carol couldn’t remember if she had picked up the business card of the woman whom we had met earlier in the evening while sitting at the bar of our neighborhood watering hole, our conversation moved on to other things.
The church office went back on regular office hours today. I spent the morning in meetings and reading mail; I spent the afternoon doing pastoral calls and returning phone calls; I hadn’t a moment to relax between nine in the morning and six at night. In other words, summer’s over and I’m back in the regular rhythm of the church year.
This will be my third year at First Unitarian in New Bedford, and everything is going much more smoothly. Over and over again, I hear about the “honeymoon year” — in popular imagination, the first year a minister spends at a new congregation is the “honeymoon year,” when supposedly the new minister can do no wrong and everyone is happy and joyful. I’ve never experienced such a honeymoon year — the first year in a congregation is when you do things wrong (“Umm, knocking the candle over is not the way we usually do the Christmas eve service…”), step on people’s toes (“Umm, Eliza Hubbard always chairs the Holiday Fair Committee, and she’s really peeved that you suggested that someone else chair it this year…”), and generally flail around trying to figure out a new order of service, a new filing system, a new everything.
If you survive that first year (assuming the congregation is relatively tolerant of your flailing about), I suppose the second year could be more relaxing. Although that wasn’t the case for me here last year, however, because last year our new Director of Religious Education resigned the week before Sunday school was to start, and that came on top of three deaths in the congregation in September, and I never quite got caught up again for the rest of the year.
What I hear over and over again from ministers is that the third year is when the congregation and the minister have gotten to know each other pretty well and some real trust starts to develop, and that’s when things can start to happen (or, sometimes, the trust doesn’t develop on one side or the other and the ministry starts to unravel, but that’s another story). And the church experts tell us that it really takes five years for trust to develop, so if there is a honeymoon year in ministry, it probably takes place in that fifth year.
The first year of a ministry, a honeymoon year? I think that’s just a myth.
The sun is setting noticeably earlier every day now.
I left the church just before six and headed to the natural foods store in the West End. As I drove west on Union Street, the sun was almost directly in my eyes, its glare drowning out anything in the shadows of the trees. I drove more slowly than usual, trying to figure out which cross street I was passing, when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw the four-way stop sign that I didn’t stop for; the car waiting at the cross street gave a little toot on its horn as if to say to me, “Wake up!”; I felt stupid, but I really hadn’t seen the stop sign in the glare of the sun.
By the time I got back home, it was half past six, and I realized that if I wanted to take a long walk, I had better leave now, before I cooked dinner. At the end of my hour-long walk, the sun had already dipped below New Bedford’s sky line.
Did you know that a recent poll shows 69% of United States residents believe in hell? Maybe it’s time to dust off some of those old Universalist beliefs — you know, those old beliefs that there is no hell and that each person is of infinite value. This is a longish video — 9:56 — so set aside some time to relax and enjoy it.
Note: I think Web videos should feel like you’re having a one-on-one conversation with someone. Most of the sermons I’ve watched online have been pretty unsatisfactory because they show the preacher talking to a big crowd — not to me personally — and because they’re too long. This video is my attempt at presenting this Sunday’s sermon in a shorter and more personal form. However, I admit that it’s an experiment I won’t repeat very often, because it took three hours to rewrite the sermon and to shoot and edit this ten-minute video.
Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.
Mother’s Day sermons can get pretty saccharin, so this year when I was looking for readings for Mother’s Day, I turned to Grace Paley. No one could write about motherhood with less sentimentality, or with more humanity, than Grace Paley. Nobody could write about people with such a depth of humanity. I love her stories. Nothing happens in them, but they sound like real life to me. The characters are people I know, and they do things I can imagine doing myself. I can’t think of any other short story writer whom I like as much.
She died on Wednesday, at age 84. She called herself a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” If there were an afterlife (which she and I doubt very much), she would organize protests in the afterlife, just as her characters organize protests and political action in her stories….
A group of mothers from our neighborhood went downtown to the Board of Estimate Hearing and sang a song. They had contributed the facts and the tunes, but the idea for that kind of political action came from the clever head of a media man floating on the ebbtide of our lower west side culture because of the housing shortage. He was from the far middle plains and loved our well-known tribal organization. He said it was the coming thing. Oh, how he loved our old moldy pot New York.
…The first mother stood up… when the clerk called her name. She smiled, said excuse me, jammed past the knees of her neighbors and walked proudly down the aisle of the hearing room. Then she sang, according to some sad melody learned in her mother’s kitchen, the following lament requesting better playground facilities….
will someone please put a high fence up
around the children’s playground
they are playing a game and have only
one more year of childhood. won’t the city come…
to keep the bums and
the tramps out of the yard they are too
little now to have the old men … feeling their
knees … can’t the cardinal
keep all these creeps outShe bowed her head and stepped back modestly to allow the recitative for which all the women rose, wherever in the hearing room they happened to be. They said a lovely statement in chorus:
The junkies with smiles can be stopped by intelligent reorganization of government functions….
from Grace Paley’s story “Politics”
The best way to remember Grace Paley would be to engage in that kind of cooperative creative political action, of a combatively pacifist nature.
Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif., 2007) takes some of its inspiration from the 2000 Beacon Press book Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which argued in part that the Atlantic slave trade could be used as a way to understand other slave trades. The editors of Many Middle Passages felt that the Atlantic slave trade’s infamous middle passage — the disorientation, the violence, the occasional resistance — could help us understand other slave trades, in other parts of the world and in other eras. Eleven independent essays explore this idea further.
In “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” Edward A. Alpers sheds some light on the lesser-known slave trade on the other side of the African continent. Alpers raises the obvious point that “it is a mistake to restrict analyses of the middle passage only to oceanic passages, assuming that enslaved Africans embarked from the African coast as if they were leaving their native country, when in fact their passage from freedom into slavery actually began with the moment they were swept up by the economic forces that drove the slave trade deep into the African interior.” [p. 21] Based on this assumption, Alpers traces the Indian Ocean slave trade into the interior of Africa. Relying primarily on freed-slave narratives, Alpers presents us with the horrors of the slave trade on land and by sea. The ocean passages were as horrible on the Indian Ocean as they were on the Atlantic Ocean, with the same high mortality rates and the same dehumanizing conditions. The commodification of human beings seems to take similar forms no matter where it springs up.
In “‘The Slave Trade Is Merciful Compared to This’: Slave Traders, Convict Transportation, and the Abolitionists,” Emma Christopher examines how England transported the earliest convicts to Australia. Some captains of the early ships that carried convicts to the penal colony in Australia had been slave traders previously. As slave traders, they had some financial incentive to keep as many slaves alive as possible. On the trip to Australia, however, there was no financial incentive to keep the convicts alive: “the captains could actually gain financially from the death of the convicts, as the food of the deceased was saved and could be sold once the ship reached its destination.” [p. 110]
Emma Christopher quotes from a letter sent to England by a soldier stationed in Australia at the time who said, “the slave trade is merciful compared to what I have seen in this fleet.” She then goes on to point out that whereas the incredible suffering on slave traders resulted from the commoditization of human beings, the absence of financial incentives helped create the incredible suffering on the convict transports: “Inured to the kind of cruelty that pervaded the trade in slaves, and with no financial incentive to check their behavior, [the ship’s officers] cared little for their charges.” [p. 122] Once back in England, the ship’s officers were tried and quickly acquitted, yet pressure from abolitionists and others forced the government to make sure the convicts were treated better thereafter. The real point, left unspoken, is that it would have been better if we hadn’t commodified human beings to begin with.
In “La Traite des Jaunes: Trafficking in Women and Children across the China Sea,” Julia Martinez studies the trade in sex slaves in and around the China Sea. This slave trade came to prominence in the late 19th C., peaked in the first half of the 20th C., and continues today. Many of the victims of this trade were children — some from destitute families who may even have sold their children out of desperation, but some kidnapped from prosperous families. The children sere sold as young as eight years old, and girls would be forced into selling sex at about age thirteen; they might be released from “debt bondage” at age eighteen [p. 214]; it is horrible to think that children treated as commodities, not as human beings, even if they were eventually released from bondage.
The China Sea sex slave trade was partially repressed through the middle 20th C., but there was a resurgence in the 1980’s as the times brought increased prosperity to the region. The sex slave trade continues today throughout the region. The final chapter of the book, titled “Afterword: ‘All of It Is Now'”, points out that more people are enslaved today (27 million) than at any previous point in history. The good news is that a smaller percentage of the world’s population is enslaved now than in earlier centuries, and that slavery is now illegal everywhere. But still — there are 27 million people enslaved even as I write this.
I was expecting this to be the usual boring academic book, but it wasn’t. Not all of the eleven essays were as powerful as the ones I have discussed, but all the essays are worth reading. The subject matter is so shocking and fascinating (in a horrible kind of way) that it overcomes even the occasional turgid academic prose. And the book is particularly compelling because several of the writers go out of the way to provide lengthy excerpts from first-person freed-slave narratives, so we get to hear the voices of slaves firsthand — at least, we get to hear the voices of those lucky slaves who somehow made it to freedom.
While researching this week’s sermon, I came across this paragraph in Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement (1805):
To say God’s revealed will is contrary to his eternal and unrevealed will, would in me be blasphemy of the first magnitude; yet I do not doubt the sincerity of those who frequently say it. But is it not in a direct sense charging God with hypocrisy? However shocking it may seem, I know of no other light in which to view it. [link]
Isn’t this vaguely reminiscent of Theodore Parker’s distinction between permanent religions, and transient religion? In Parker’s famous sermon, “The Transient and Permanent in Religion” (1841), he writes:
Looking at the Word of Jesus, at real Christianity, the pure religion he taught, nothing appears more fixed and certain. Its influence widens as light extends; it deepens as the nations grow more wise. But, looking at the history of what men call Christianity, nothing seems more uncertain and perishable. While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, in each man that feels it, the Christianity of the Pulpit, which is the religion taught; the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands, except only in name. The difference between what is called Christianity by the Unitarians in our times, and that of some ages past, is greater than the difference between Mahomet and the messiah.[link to full text]
Obviously, Parker and Ballou are making somewhat different arguments, for somewhat different purposes. Ballou distinguishes between God’s “eternal and unrevealed will” and (conventional) revealed religion. Ballou’s purpose is quite specific:– to support his argument that, in contradiction to then-current Christian tradition, eternal damnation does not exist. Parker wants to show how religion as we experience it in day-to-day life changes and evolves. Parker’s purpose is more general:– he makes a general distinction between historically situated religion, and eternal permanent religion. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see this parallel between two 19th C. religious liberals.
At last night’s meeting of the church’s board, Bill asked if any of us could help out in the soup kitchen the next morning (which is to say, this morning). First Unitarian sends a crew to make lunch on the third Wednesday of every month, but two of the five regulars were away on vacation, another two were down with some kind of virus, and one of the two replacements Bill had recruited to fill in had called to say she was sick.
Of course, most of the people at the Board meeting either had to go to work, or had already made other plans. But Maggi said she’d come right at nine to prepare food. I said I’d show up at nine thirty to help out, and I called Carol to see if she would be free — she was, and Bill had most of his crew.
This to me is one of the signs of a healthy congregation:– when something goes wrong, and you need volunteers at the last minute, enough people step forward to take care of whatever commitment needs to be taken care of. I don’t base this on any grand theory; all I know is that when this happens, the church feels like a real community to me.
By the time Carol and I showed up at nine-thirty, Bill, Maggi, and Maryellen (who had felt better and showed up to work) had already made most of the sandwiches and made up the desserts. Bill said Maggi and Maryellen couldn’t stay to serve the food, so Carol and I slipped home and worked for a couple of hours (fortunately, we both had flexible schedules today), and went back at eleven thirty to help serve lunch. There were a lot of people to serve. Bill said they usually serve 150 people on the third Wednesday, but today we served about 190, including some families with children. By noon, Bill was madly making more sandwiches while Carol and I served people. Finally, we ran out of sandwich meat and had to serve bread and butter. At least it was something to eat.
My carefully planned work schedule for today was completely disrupted. But sometimes volunteer work really is more important than anything else.