Category: Meditations

Rosy-fingered dawn
appeared in the east
to find neither bird
nor beast yet awake.
Last night’s candle still
burned, small and steady,
in the window, there
to guide something home.
I yawned, listened
to the holiday
stillness, felt the cold,
put on the teapot.
I’m pessimistic:
I don’t believe that
peace on earth, good will,
or even much love
will ever come to
this generation,
nor to their children;
just wars and hatred.
But still it happens:
Rosy-fingered dawn
comes again, starts us
on another day.

Outside

Once when the sky
burst open and down
came creatures, twisting,
screaming, wings outstretched,
falling, falling,

a poet looked
up. He tried to turn
away, but could not.
Falling, writhing, down,
out of his sight.

He felt the need
to tell a tale of
what he had just seen:
the creatures, the screams,
the fall, the fall.

The creatures were
angels — he became
convinced of this fact —
falling from heaven,
exiles. Exiled.

They were rebels.
Hate-filled, overweening,
ambitious. God had
exiled them, forced them
out of heaven.

He turned away,
went inside to write.
Outside, flawless sky
and fertile warm earth,
perfect and still.

 

The day that lived in infamy

Seventy years ago today, U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor were bombed by Japanese military forces. President Franklin Roosevelt said it was a day that would live in infamy. Yet Pearl Harbor Day feels increasingly distant in time, and decreasingly important to most U.S. citizens. There are fewer people alive who remember December 11, 1941; for example, this will be the last year that Pearl Harbor survivors gather, since there are no longer enough of them left to keep on organizing the annual gatherings. That attack on Pearl Harbor almost seems to have happened to a different country: Pearl Harbor was followed by a military draft, rationing, tax rates of 94% by 1944 — all of which were politically inconceivable following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. The terrorist attack of September 11 now looms far larger in our collective memory than Pearl Harbor Day: I’m willing to bet that the majority of Unitarian Universalist congregations won’t bother to recognize Pearl Harbor Day this coming Sunday, yet probably most Unitarian Universalist congregations recognized the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attack.

Thinking about this has put me in an Ecclesiastes mood: “There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” And then I think about all the ancient battles that were fought by cultures around the world, and those who survived those battles said that their memory should live forever, and now those memories are gone. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”

The real revolution is not over

Gil Scott-Heron said:

“A lot of times people see battles and skirmishes on TV and they say, ‘Ah ha, the revolution is being televised.’ No: the results of the revolution are being televised.

“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.

“What you see later on is the results of that; but the revolution, that change that takes place, will not be televised.” [recorded in 1982 at the Wax Museum, Washington, D.C., for the film Gil Scott-Heron: Black Wax.]

I once thought that first revolution, the one in my mind, would happen once, and then I would be done. But it hasn’t worked out that way. I keep seeing that there is another way of looking at things than the way I was shown: consumer goods are not so good; the free market is not free, it is both expensive and restrictive; media are called that because they mediate, they get in between you and the world; and the ultimate goal in life is not to be contented.

The poem that you like best

A friend writes:
Which poem do you like best?
And he mentions Ezra Pound, who
said that less
is more.

I guess I
like the shorter one the best.
I want to sense the holes in
existence.
Less, less:

pare away
words, thoughts, images, and sounds.
Pare away feelings, and the
self, go well
past Pound.

Pare away
until nothing is left but
truth. And if truth is gone too,
nothingness
is fine.

I wrote back:
I like the shortest
one best.

An item of concern

For the past decade or so, I’ve been most concerned with the institutional health of liberal religion: there are human values which are carried best by human institutions, and without a strong institutional structure those values seem likely to wither like a plant without water and adequate soil.

But recently I have become increasingly concerned about the spiritual health of liberal religion in general, and Unitarian Universalism in particular. We religious liberals spend so much time on social justice — and there is indeed an overwhelming amount of social justice work to be done — and we spend so much time on the health of our institutions — and again, there is indeed an overwhelming amount of institutional work to be done — that it has come to seem to me that we are slighting our spiritual well-being.

Along with that, we have come to understand “spiritual well-being” in such individualistic terms that the phrase has almost no meaning within the context of institutional Unitarian Universalism. In the past month or so, I have heard the following mentioned, and even glorified, as activities that foster spiritual well-being: yoga; Zen retreats; shamanic training; dream work; walking the labyrinth; meditation that is rooted in non-Western practices. These are either highly individualistic practices, or practices rooted in another spiritual community; or both.

Yet I rarely hear religious liberals speak lovingly of the core practices that lie at the center of our own liberal religious tradition. Those core liberal religious practices include the following: Continue reading “An item of concern”

People are (mostly) thoughtful

Not everyone is thoughtful — there are plenty of people who are selfish or just plain mean-spirited — but a great many people are thoughtful. One of the guests who has been staying at Hotel de Zink, the 15-bed rotating homeless shelter that our church has been hosting this month, stopped by this afternoon. She had noticed that some of the other guests had no sheets, so she went out and found some sheets, and walked here to the church to drop them off. Of course we had to lock them up so no one would steal or vandalize them (being aware of the fact that not everyone is thoughtful). But still — it’s nice when thoughtful people look out for those around them.

Yet another set of 9/11 memories

Somehow I had managed to arrange to take a day off on a Tuesday. I was going to theological school half time while working three-quarters time as a director of religious education at First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts. Late summer is always a busy time for religious educators — kids are back in school, they’re coming back to Sunday school and youth group, and you have to take care of a thousand and one details before they return. I had been working non-stop for quite a few days, but finally on that Tuesday I had managed to schedule a day off.

I slept late. It must have been nine o’clock when the phone rang. I came immediately awake, my heart pounding from adrenalin; my mother had died twenty-two months before that, after a long illness, and I still dreaded phone calls that came while I was asleep. “Hello?” I said.

It was Ellen, the assistant minister at First Parish. “Hello,” she said, and paused. “Have you seen the news yet?”

“What?” I said. “No.”

“A plane hit the World Trade Center in New York,” she said. We turned immediately to business. The senior minister was out of town, and Ellen thought we should have a candlelight vigil that night. Continue reading “Yet another set of 9/11 memories”