North Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Mass. (part one)

North Unitarian Church was established in 1894 by First Unitarian Church as a Unitarian mission, or settlement house, in the North end of New Bedford. Operating in rented space at first, First Unitariana built a building to house this mission in 1903. Beginning in 1920, it became a separate and legally incorporated institution under the name “The Unity Home Church,” although First Unitarian continued to own the building. The Unity Home Church included large numbers of immigrants and children of immigrants in its membership. North Unitarian Church merged back into First Unitarian c. 1971.

I’ve been doing some research into this small Unitarian church of immigrants, and I’m going to include some of the results of my research here in a series of posts. This first installment is an incomplete list of ministers who served the church…. Continue reading →

Miracle birth of Buddha

In an old Unitarian Universalist Sunday school curriculum called From Long Ago and Many Lands, religious educator Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote out three miracle birth stories for upper elementary children: the wonder stories of the birth of Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. I like to present these stories during the worship services leading up to Christmas, during the “story for all ages” (or “children’s sermon” or whatever your church calls it). Each of these stories tells of miraculous events that happen before the birth of these three great religious teachers. Children pick up on the parallels between the stories — angels and prophecies and miraculous animals — and it helps them to better understand the wondrous aspects of the two familiar birth stories of Jesus from the books of Matthew and Luke.

Problem is that Sophia Fahs’s stories are really too long to tell in a worship service — as written, they can last a good ten minutes. Each year, I edit them down by sticking little bits of Post-It notes over the parts I don’t want to read, and then I take the bits of Post-It notes out and forget about it until next Advent season, until I have to do it all over again. This year, I got smart and decided to write out a condensed version of Fahs’s “Birth of Buddha” story and keep it in my files. Then I also took out my copy of The Story of Gotama Buddha: Jataka-nidana, and from that I pieced together a short and fairly coherent narrative of Buddha’s birth.

And as long as I had done all this work, I figured I’d post both stories here, in case someone else might find them useful. Both stories should last a little over five minutes when read aloud. You’ll find the condensed Fahs story at the very end of this post, and my own version immediately below…. Continue reading →

Department of Cool UU Kids

Saba, my first-cousin-once-removed, goes to Sunday school at Unviersity Unitarian Church in Seattle. Except not this year, because her mom, Nancy (my cousin) is a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya. After the U.S. presidential elections, we got an email message from nancy which read in part: “Dr. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, invited Saba to plan a tree with her, for President-elect Obama!”

How cool is that?

Hymn by Hosea Ballou

Hosea Ballou is one of the theological giants of my religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism. Back in 1805, Ballou wrote A Treatise on Atonement, still the major exposition of North American Universalism (you can read it online here). Unfortunately, Ballou was not what you’d call a great writer. When trying to describe his writing style, the adjective “clunky” comes immediately to mind.

Because he was a mediocre writer, hardly anyone reads his Treatise any more, and hardly anyone bothers to sing any of the hundreds of hymns he wrote. This is unfortunate, because buried in Ballou’s clunky prose is a vision of a universe run by Love, where someday the power of Love is going to make everything turn out well.

I recently discovered that one of Ballou’s hymns is still in print — not in the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, but in The Sacred Harp, a songbook widely used by shape-note singers. It’s number 411 in The Sacred Harp, and it goes like this:

1. Come, let us raise our voices high,
And from a sacred song,
To him who rules the earth and sky,
And does our days prolong.
Who through the night gave us to rest,
This morning cheered our eyes;
And with the thousands of the blest,
In health made us to rise.

2. Early to God we’ll send our prayer,
Make hast to pray and praise,
That he may make our good his care,
And guide us all our days.
And when the night of death comes on,
And we shall end our days,
May his rich grace the theme prolong,
Of his eternal praise.

Hosea Ballou, 1808 (C.M.D.)

No, I’m not proposing that we include this hymn in the next edition of the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. In The Sacred Harp book, Ballou’s hymn is set to a fuguing tune, fairly complex music that is far beyond the singing ability of the average American congregation (though it might be fun for a church choir), and the hymn itself is not quite good enough for me to want to go to the trouble of finding another, easier, tune for it. But it’s nice to know that people still do sing this old Universalist hymn, even though most of those who sing it probably have no idea who Hosea Ballou was, or what Universalism might be.

“Palin pardon amid turkey butchery”

…is the headline of this BBC news story. I think the Brits obsess on Sarah Palin because she’s got the same last name as Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, and having two adbsurdist public figures (one intentionally absurd, the other not) is too good a coincidence for them to waste. Speaking of absurd, click the link above to see a photo of Sarah Palin smiling vapidly while behind her stands a man holding a bloody turkey carcass. There’s something almost metaphorical about that image… if I could just figure out the metaphor….

Beech nuts

Yesterday I wound up walking past the fast food joint at the corner of Elm and County. No, I didn’t go in to the fast food joint — even though I crave fatty food with the onset of cold weather, I’ve sworn off fast food for a while because of what it does to my digestive system (you don’t want to know). I walked under the old beech tree that grows along Elm Street across from the fast food joint, a big old tree that somehow survived the decline of the neighborhood. Its branches spread out over the sidewalk, and the sidewalk was almost entirely covered in beech nut shells. A fat Eastern Gray Squirrel idly hopped towards the tree, just out of my reach, keeping a weather on me the whole time. I thought, That’s what I should be doing for fatty food instead of fast food hamburger products, I should be eating nuts.

But then when I was in the supermarket tonight, I forgot to buy a jar of nuts.

Autumn watch

Out, as usual at this time of year, about an hour before sundown. I went out behind our building to look at our little raised bed of Swiss chard. The cold snap of the past few days has pretty much conquered the chard. One or two plants were still standing up, but the rest had fallen over, and the leaves had a dull look, no longer the bright shiny yellow-green of early this week. I planted the seeds too late, and even though it stayed unseasonably warm up until a few days ago, there weren’t enough hours of daylight to allow the plants to flourish. They never got much bigger than three inches tall. Late last week, Carol said we could eat them even though they were small. Lulled by the weeks of warm weather, I decided to wait. And now the plants are pretty close to dead.

I got to the Fairhaven side of the harbor, and walked into the parking lot of the motel right off Route 6. I was walking towards a black pickup truck when I saw a small head peering over the hood at me. It was a Mute Swan. It had extended its neck all the way up, until it was nearly five feet high. When I got around to the other side of the truck, there was its plump white body waddling around on big black webbed feet; its neck, incredibly long when sticking straight up, accounted for about two thirds of its height. I walked past it quickly — Mute Swans can be aggressive, and I didn’t relish the idea of having an absurd-looking bird pecking me in the chest. I walked down to the edge of the parking lot, and there, squinting into the setting sun, I saw a flock of Buffleheads — the cold weather had finally driven some of the wintering waterfowl to the ocean.

On the way back, I walked through the park on Pope’s Island, startling a couple dozen gulls into flight. They settled down and fluffed out their feathers. As I passed the little playground in the park, there was a used condom lying on the ground, torn and disintegrating. I thought, What a hell of a place to have sex, so cold and bleak. Then I thought, Well maybe that condom has been there since summer when it was warm. Then I thought, Even if it was warm, it’s still a hell of a place to have sex. Much better to have sex in a nice comfortable bed.

I paused briefly to watch a reefer ship being unloaded at the Maritime Terminal. A couple of people were standing around, maybe on break, dressed in coveralls and hardhats. I remember those first really cold days of late fall, when you’re working an outdoors job — it was always tough for me to get used to it. Then after a few days you get accustomed to it, and it feels good. I miss working outside in winter. True, when it gets really cold, well below freezing, it wears you down. Even then, it’s better than sitting indoors all winter long, except for the hour you can steal to get outside and take a walk.

Morality and the color orange

Mr. Crankypants here, with some moral commentary about the political scene. Yes, campers, Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska for some 40 years lost his re-election bid and finally conceded defeat. This means we avoid the specter of an 85 year old convicted felon serving in the Senate. Which is probably a relief for Ted Stevens. What would he do, show up on the Senate floor in his orange jumpsuit, with officers from the Anchorage Correctional Complex standing guard over him? After all, he knows perfectly well orange is not a color that does anything for him. (And no snarky comments about how the only difference between Ted Stevens and some other U.S. Senators is merely that he’s a convicted felon.)

Did you notice that Ted Stevens almost won the election? No, that wasn’t one of Mr. Crankypants’s jokes — Mark Begich, the winner, beat Stevens by only about 4,000 votes. This means there are lots of voters in Alaska who think it’s OK to have a man convicted of corruption and crimes of moral turpitude representing them in Congress, a man who had to vote for himself (assuming he was stupid enough to vote for himself) on a “questioned ballot” because his legal voting status was in question. Either the brains of those Alaskan voters froze from the long winters up there, or they somehow think Ted Stevens would look good wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Humanity is notorious for putting foxes back into henhouses. We catch ’em with their hand in the cookie jar and we say, Hey guess you like cookies, well I’ll just leave that cookie jar right there on the counter for you. So what if all the hens are dead and the fox is picking chicken meat out of his teeth? –such a nice fox, and only doing what comes natural. We get all cranky an hour later when we find that the cookie jar is empty and there aren’t any eggs for breakfast.

Mr. Crankypants only wishes that he had been an Alaskan voter, so he could have voted for Ted Stevens. That’s right, campers, voted for Teddy Stevens. That way Mr. C. could have proved to everyone that Ted Stevens would not look good in an orange jumpsuit, because his skin tone is so wrong for orange. And this, dear friends, is the real moral issue to be addressed — as long as you look good, then all your moral turpitude should be forgiven.

Three pieces of trivia

This afternoon I went to talk with someone in hospice care, someone I just met, someone just a few years older than I am. I don’t know how to describe her except to say she is someone with real spiritual depth. I knew this because I could see how she made the nurses and health aides feel good just by being in her presence. She and I talked for nearly an hour, and though I couldn’t tell you what exactly we talked about, I still feel good from listening to her.

I took a walk down by the waterfront late this afternoon. It was already getting dark. A thought came to me as I was walking — I can only remember the shape of that thought, not any of its content except it was about something I saw and heard. My older sister, the writer, always carries a notebook around and would have written that thought down. But I didn’t write it down, and it got lost in all the mundane and even trivial thoughts about my job, about shopping, about how I don’t exercise enough.

My partner Carol read my blog the other day and gently mocked me for writing about trivia. She’s right, I do write about trivia. But that’s where I find the transcendent, that’s where my religious life unfolds. Some people need to see the face of a divine being, or have an out-of-body experience, but I’m fine just sitting at home doing nothing.