But, to those millworkers, most of them women, who earned less than nine dollars a week for a fifty-six hour work week, that thirty-two cents meant three loaves of bread that they desperately needed to feed their hungry families. Bread, beans and molasses were the staples of the millworkers diets, and the loss of money for three loaves of bread was more than they could bear.

Lawrence was a flourishing but deeply impoverished textile city that had been founded in 1845. With increased mechanization, the factory owners were able to eliminate many skilled workers and hire unskilled labor, mostly immigrants to work in the mills. The work itself was grueling and dangerous. Half the workers were under eighteen, many under the age of fourteen and they were expected to work fifty-six hours per week.

Workers and their families lived in crowded and dangerous conditions and the mortality rate for children under the age of six was fifty percent. One third of the women and men who worked in the mills died by the age of twenty-five. In Lawrence, like in other industrial cities, workers were divided along ethnic lines. The skilled jobs went to native-born people of English, Irish and German descent. The unskilled workforce was made of recent immigrants who were French Canadian, Italian, Portuguese, Syrian, and from the countries of Eastern Europe.

The strike was prompted by a reform that backfired. The Massachusetts State Legislature passed a bill that reduced the maximum work week from fifty-six to fifty four hours and the mill owners cut the workers’ pay accordingly.

Strikers were doused with fire hoses and the state militia was called in. There were mass arrests and severe sentences. A Boston lawyer was quoted as saying: “The strike should have been stopped in the first twenty-four hours. The militia should have been instructed to shoot. That is the way Napoleon did it.”

Joyce Kornbluh’s article titled “Bread and Roses: The 1912 Lawrence textile Strike” has been my reference for much of this material. In that article she writes that “less than a week after the strike started, the police found dynamite in three different places in Lawrence: in a tenement house, in an empty lot, and in a shoemaker’s shop next door to a print shop. . .The press and the police were quick to assign guilt to the strikers.

The I.W.W. claimed, however, that the BostonAmerican, a Hearst paper, was off the press and on sale in Lawrence with the details of the dynamite discovery before the sticks of dynamite were actually found. Soon after, John Breen, a local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board, was arrested and charged with planting the explosives in a plot to discredit the workers. He was fined $500 and released on bail. President Wood of the American Woolen Company was implicated, but cleared by the court although he could not explain why he had recently made a cash payment to Breen.”

There were protests throughout the country and a Committee in Congress held a hearing that took testimony from a group of strikers, some of them children. That hearing was attended by Helen Heron Taft, wife of President William Howard Taft. The President soon ordered an investigation of industrial working conditions throughout the nation.

The signs that some of the young female mill workers made had the words
“We want bread, and roses too.”
Kornbluh, Joyce, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, Charles H. Kerr Publishing, Chicago, 1988

We want bread and roses too. We want, through the labor of our hands to be able to nourish not only our bodies but our spirits as well. We want our work to be appreciated for whatever level of skill it takes. We want our work to be recognized as important, as creative, as necessary and fulfilling and compensated accordingly.

Dateline: August 2009
Housekeepers at the three Boston area Hyatt hotels were asked to train some new workers. These trainees, they were told, would be filling in during vacations. Then on August 31, all of the housekeepers were fired and told that these new trainees were employed by a Georgia based company to whom the hotel chain had outsourced their housekeeping services.

The fired employees earned an average of fifteen dollars an hour and had benefits. The new housekeepers would earn eight dollars an hour with no benefits. Who here can live on eight dollars an hour?

“(Wanda) Rosario has had to cut back on everything,” wrote Kevin Cullen. “She gave up her cellphone, which is no small thing because she’s never needed it more. After she was out of work for six months, she got a job at the Park Plaza Hotel. On the bright side, unlike the Hyatt, it’s a union shop, Local 26, and the hotel can’t just fire her on a whim. But she was number two on the seniority list at the Hyatt. She’s number 93 at the Park Plaza. It’s as if her 23 years of work history didn’t happen.

So she has to settle for irregular shifts, and she’s always on call. She’s happy to have a job, but lucky to get two shifts a week. And so she sits by the phone in her East Boston apartment, waiting, hoping for it to ring.”

And 57-year-old Wanda Rosario, at a time when she was just starting to think about retirement, had to start over and make due with far less. We were sitting in her apartment the other day when the phone rang and her son handed it to her. It was the Park Plaza, and she brightened because she thought it meant more work. In fact, it meant less. A scheduled shift fell through.             Kevin Cullen. Boston Globe, September 7, 2010

Before Serandou Kamara lost her job at the Hyatt Harborside, she was saving up to buy a home. Now she and her husband are using that money to help pay the rent on the cramped $950-a-month Chelsea apartment where they live with their four children. They rely on Kamara’s $717 bimonthly unemployment checks and her husband’s $13-an-hour salary as a home health aide.

“Everything went into the garbage,” said Kamara, 32, who was almost eight months pregnant when she got fired.

Kamara spent a recent morning at Child Care Choices of Boston trying to secure a voucher to pay a baby sitter so she could look for work. Afterward, she walked through Downtown Crossing to see whether any stores were hiring. At Payless, Macy’s, Tello’s, and the food court, the answer was the same: no.

“I want a job,” said Kamara, a native of Sierra Leone who is taking a computer class and an English as a second language course at Bunker Hill Community College. “Sitting down at home, it’s not good for me.” Katie Johnston Chase, Boston Globe, April 2, 2010

“I want a job.” Don’t we all want to be involved in something that has some meaning and fulfillment? What I wonder is how many Hyatt executives were willing to cut their pay in half and give up their benefits?

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws. When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

The article goes on to say how workers in China who assemble these devices “often labor in harsh conditions” and that the work environments have “serious – and sometimes deadly – safety problems.”

“Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.”

“More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.”
   Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad, New York Times, Jan 25, 2012

And on and on it goes. But, let me be clear. This is not about Apple or any specific manufacturer. This just happens to be the recent story that I found to illustrate my sermon. It could be some other electronics company. It could about toy manufacturers. This story could be coming from another part of the world. And, it could even be about garment workers, still, for the clothing that we wear today, that we have probably bought without knowing its origins, was likely made by people who didn’t earn a living wage and toiled in deplorable conditions, or at least, in conditions that we would never work in.

In the book “To Work and To Love,” which I excerpted as our reading, the authors offer a stinging critique of our capitalist system. They argue that through the work of our hands and our minds we are engaged in the work of creation that began, according to the Biblical book of Genesis, when God created the universe and pronounced that it was “Good.” That pronouncement refers not only to the outcome but also to the process of creation.

Whether we see ourselves as created in the image of God or made out of particles of dust from the stars and planets that fill the universe, it is equally true that we are called to further the work of the universe, the ongoing work of creation. Our labor is an important way that we participate with God, with the universe, in this co-creation.

Yes, here in the United States, working conditions have improved in the last hundred years. But we continue to participate in a system where the gift of human labor, of human creativity is not valued; a system where the bottom line and profit margin are what is most important.

If the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” is a principle that we are going to affirm and promote, then we will always need to think about how we use our own productivity, how we spend our resources, and how we stand with those whose labor is devalued in whatever way. If we can learn to see every person as having a role in the ongoing work of creation then we will build an economic system where all people and all labor are valued and adequately compensated.

We will always want and deserve “bread, and roses too,” resources to nourish both our bodies and spirits.

Amen, Blessed Be

It is one of the earliest pieces in the collection of silver owned by this church that was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York a week ago Friday. Precious metals like silver were a sign of wealth in pre-colonial times, and since the banking system in the 17th century was not well developed, silver and land were left to churches as a kind of endowment, a legacy to carry the church into the future.

This congregation did much soul searching over the last year or so and the decision to auction the collection, twenty-four pieces silver and three pieces of pewter, was not an easy one. They were part of our history, our legacy, yet they were kept at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston since the early part of the twentieth century. These pieces were no longer part of the life of this church. With the needs of our crumbling building and low endowment looming before us, you chose to sell the silver as a way to move the church’s mission forward into the twenty-first century.

In preparing for the auction, we have promised the court that we will educate ourselves about those who gave these magnificent silver vessels, hence this sermon, and we will erect some kind of a plaque that lists the donors of the silver and acknowledges their generous gifts. They are all part of the “Cloud of Witnesses” that surrounds us this morning and bids us forward on our journey.

Many of them were among the earliest British settlers that came here with a commitment to live more pure and simple lives and to seek God in a way that was more reflective without all the pomp and flourish of the established church.
What can we learn from them and their commitment to this church? Who was their God, I wonder, and what called them forward?

My favorite piece in the collection is a beautifully decorated, fairly large, two-handled cup given by Ebenezer Withington. There is a fluted design around the base of the cup and the handles are done in an “S” scroll and there are these tiny silver beads along the handles. The cup was made around 1710 and given to the church in his will in 1721.

This cup did some traveling as it was given to the Church of the Unity in the Neponset section of Dorchester whey they were founded in the late 19th century and was later returned to this church when that one closed and its members and assets were incorporated into this one. This church used its people and resources to help found many churches both in Dorchester and south of here and the UU churches in Milton, Canton, Sharon and Stoughton are today among our daughter churches. Ebenezer Withington’s brother Philip also gave a silver cup to the church in his will.

We received a beautiful tankard from Elijah Danforth who was one of Dorchester’s earliest physicians and a justice of the peace. Elijah was able to get his education through the generosity of Governor William Stoughton, who left money in his will so that Elijah could study at Harvard. Elijah was also the son of John Danforth who served as minister of this church from 1682-1730.

There is another silver cup given by Esther Flint in 1730 and not much is known about her either. We did have a minister just before Danforth named Josiah Flint and I imagine that Esther was his daughter, or, perhaps his widow.

One of the pieces in the collection was made by Paul Revere, Sr., father of the patriot and a renowned silversmith himself. That tankard, made in 1745, was given to the church around 1800 by Sarah Preston Adams. Her family was well connected in the church and in the Dorchester community. Sarah or “Sally” as she was known, was married to Dr. Samuel Adams who served as a physician to the colonial army during the Revolutionary War. In fact, there is a collection of letters written by Dr. Adams to Sarah while they were courting during the war. Sarah also gave us a silver baptismal basin.

The Clapp family is very prominent in the history of Dorchester and of this church. The family patriarch, Roger Clapp sailed over on the Mary and John in 1630 and is one of our founders. Roger Clapp kept an intimate journal which is still being studied today for greater insight as to how people lived and what the religious practices were of those early settlers.

Roger’s journal describes the kind of extensive soul-searching that was part of the inner life of many Puritans as they examined themselves to be sure that they were in right relationship with their God. Two of Roger’s grandsons gave silver to our collection, a tulip shaped cup given by William Clap in 1735 and a tankard given by Deacon Hopestill Clap in 1748.

William Clap and his wife Elizabeth had no children and all of his brothers including a twin died in infancy, so the gift of the tulip shaped cup marked not only his legacy but also the end of that branch of the Clap family.

But as I reach back into history, I am reminded once again that history is complicated and the people who populate that history, the “Cloud of Witnesses” that surrounds us are only human, flawed as we are. We look back out of our own experience and with our own understanding of life and we might consider some of the things they did to be shocking or even repulsive.

One of our great benefactors whose complex story asks many questions of us is Governor William Stoughton the same one who provided for Elijah Danforth’s education in his will. He came to Dorchester with his family as a child. Though he went back to study at Oxford and served a church in England after his graduation from Harvard, he returned to Dorchester when he was forced to leave England because of his Puritan views. He was after that a long-time resident of Dorchester, whose house stood about one half mile from here on Pleasant Street, and he is buried in the old graveyard on the corner of Columbia Road and Stoughton Street.

He was never the minister of this church and according to our records declined the invitation to serve here as minister a number of times. But after he returned from England he became increasingly involved in politics and civic life. Among a number of political positions he was lieutenant governor and then Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. It was this role that made Stoughton most famous, or infamous as the case may be. In early 1692 the witch hunt had begun in Salem and Stoughton and six other men were sent to Salem to try the growing number of witchcraft cases.

In all but one of the twenty-six trials, Stoughton’s court deviated from traditional forms of testimony and evidence. “Spectral” evidence, or evidence based upon supernatural visions and dreams was accepted as was the appearance of suspicious moles and blemishes, known as “witch marks.” The Court also permitted the judges to converse in private with the accusers and witnesses. All twenty-six defendants were convicted.

Complaints started to arise and within six months the Special Court was dissolved by then Governor Phipps and eight convicted people who had not yet been executed, were pardoned. Over the next few years several judges and jurors publicly apologized for their participation in the trials and asked forgiveness. Stoughton did not at first, though he seems to have had a change of heart a bit later in his life. It is recorded that he “sent a note to the pulpit on Sunday desiring prayers for his pardon, if in any way he had sinned by his course in the trials.”
Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, History of the Town of Dorchester Massachusetts, 1859, p 273

William Stoughton went on to serve as governor of Massachusetts from 1694-1699 and died two years later in 1701. He never married and had no heirs and the bulk of his estate was given to Harvard. The beautifully crafted and engraved pair of standing cups that he bequeathed to this church were the principal pieces of our collection and sold for nine hundred thousand dollars, the highest price ever paid for colonial or pre-colonial church silver. But I wonder what it was about Stoughton and his time that made it so easy to get caught up in this frenzy that condemned and executed so many people on so little evidence? Or was an accusation of witchcraft more common in those early communities than we think?

What we found through the research done on the silver was that there was a Dorchester woman, Alice Ireod Lake, who was accused of witchcraft and executed in 1648, just eighteen years after Dorchester’s founding and forty-four years before the witch trials in Salem. Alice was married to Henry Lake and bore him five children. One of those young children died and Alice, in her grief, reported that she saw and heard that child speaking to her. She was accused of witchcraft, tried and convicted.

It is reported that on the day of her execution, those prosecuting her tried to get her to recant and repent. She completely denied guilt to the crime of witchcraft but felt that her execution was justified because “she had when a single woman played the harlot, and being with child used means to destroy the fruit of her body to conceal her sin and shame.” John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, 1702

Alice’s husband, Henry Lake, left Dorchester after his wife’s confession and execution, probably in shame and embarrassment. He moved to Plymouth, Rhode Island, remarried and had a happy and successful life. But I wonder if continued to see his children here and communicate with them or did he just abandon them? We are not sure.

What we do know is that he left their four other children in the care of his brother, Thomas and his wife, who was also named Alice. They never had children and upon their deaths left the bulk of their estate to the children of Henry and Alice Lake, whom they had raised as their own.

In addition, they left to this church a pair of silver cups or beakers. These are the oldest pieces in our collection and were created by John Hull, the maker of the earliest surviving pieces of New England silver. Our Lake beakers sold at the Sotheby’s auction for three hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

But this story troubles me. I wonder again how common was the charge of witchcraft and how many other unnamed ancestors of ours were executed for not following the rigid precepts of Puritan society? How much, I wonder, is the charge of witchcraft connected to a kind of spirituality that is more connected to the forces of life and more often expressed by women?

But, I also wonder how often we do the same thing today. Though we may not shout, “witch,” we certainly have our ways of ostracizing, vilifying and even condemning people who don’t fit into whatever is our narrow ideas of acceptable thought and behavior. What will descendants of ours look back on in shock and embarrassment and say, “I can’t believe they did that to each other?”

We are today are surrounded by a “Cloud of Witnesses,” thousands of souls present in this room this morning. And as the biblical writer suggests, it is our task, I think, to grapple with their failings, so that we might learn from them and then look to our own lives and “lay aside every weight and sin that clings” to this legacy. It is our task to carry forth their mission, “the race that is set before us.” As we are embarking on a new chapter, it is my hope that our descendants will look back with pride on what we now do to transform our lives and make this church a central part of the life of this community.

Amen, Blessed Be

Laura was a journalist who worked for the Washington Post. She shares this story in her 2002 book, Revenge: a story of hope. She and her husband Baruch spend the year after their marriage living in Israel. She does some investigative work and learns that Omar is still in prison. She seeks out his family. She tells them that she is a reporter, that she is writing a book and that she wants to know their story. She never tells them that she is the daughter of the man Omar shot or that she is plotting some way to avenge the shooting of her father.

She starts writing letters to Omar that are smuggled to him in prison. In her obsession, she wants to know why he did it. She wants desperately for him to say that he is sorry. Many of the letters Omar writes back to her are filled with political rhetoric about the conflict between Palestinians and Jews. He says that what he did was not personal, that it was a necessary outcome of what he calls “the occupation” of Palestinian lands by Israel.

He also writes, though, of the many questions he as about what is going on in the Middle East. In the letters he claims that violence is not a part of his nature and says that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone again. Laura learns that he is taking correspondence courses in government and political science from a university so that he can have non-violent ways of pursuing his cause. As she and Omar correspond, as she gets to know the Khatib family, she begins to change. Her need for vengeance begins to soften as these people become more real to her. Being known becomes more of the focus of her obsession; knowing this family that is so different from her own. And she especially wants them to know her. She wants her father to have a human face, to be real to them as well, and not be just some Jew that got in the way of the Palestinian quest for liberation.

You know, we all have these boundaries in our head of what constitutes an accepted circle of community, of what we are comfortable with as opposed to what might confuse, disturb, or frighten us. Everything that fits into what is acceptable, we include in the circle of what we embrace in life. What we embrace becomes part of the “we” and “us.” What is outside of our circle becomes the “theys” and “thems,” the “Other” with a capital “O”. They are often those we don’t understand and maybe don’t want to understand. There is no sense of knowing and being known here.

This is the remnant of our more primitive tribal nature. At the beginning of human history, our early ancestors organized themselves into small family and tribal clusters. Everything inside of that family or tribal circle was safe. Everything outside was “Other,” was foreign, was an opponent, was a competitor for resources and was therefore bad and had to be fought, outwitted or eradicated.

As the world grew more complex and we became more secure, our circle grew larger. Different tribes came together for mutual support and defense against a larger neighbor. We began to see that the hated “Other” was not so bad after all and we might even have things in common. And we found that we might actually be able to learn something from this hated “Other,” and might actually grow to know them and to appreciate and admire them.

In early Biblical history, the Hebrew people were a series of twelve tribes, a small close knit circle joined, more or less, by blood, culture, and religious belief. They were growing past that tribal stage as they left Egypt and were forming their fledgling state. Among the laws they wrote at that time is the one that states:
“Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is
the injury to be suffered.” Leviticus 24: 19-20

That seems rather barbaric to us but morally it is a step up from a more primitive code. When we or our loved ones have been hurt, when we seek vengeance, the tendency is to cause more damage, more pain and suffering to the offender than what had been done to us. This biblical code limits the judgment and punishment to the exact nature of the offense. It actually helps to set limits and put our rage in check.

Then Jesus comes along and offers a whole new ethic, turning the other cheek, an ethic of non-violent resistance that was further developed in recent times by Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tribes grew into nations, but as we have recently seen in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, and other places; we still carry some of the tribal nature within us. When we are frightened or feel threatened, we can easily revert to tribal thinking. We can easily close the doors, circle the wagons and obliterate the hated “Other.”

The next phase of our social and psychological evolution is to get to the place where there is no “Other,” no “Them,” the place where we are radically inclusive, the place where we are inspired to be curious about what frightens us rather than being defensive and violent. This is the inclusive vision that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of and lived throughout his life. This is why we honor him and celebrate his life and ministry this weekend. But how do we get there?

Leymah Gbowee is a peace activist from Liberia who was one of the three women honored with the Nobel Peace Prize this year. She has been writing and speaking much these days about the difficult process of reconciliation that needs to take place in her country that has been ravaged by decades of war. Thousands of people were killed, mutilated and raped. Survivors now live in the same villages with former perpetrators. How do they ever reach across what is now dividing them?

Recently one of the women she works with asked for her help to solve a dilemma. “My son was killed during the war,” she said, “and my daughter fled to a refugee camp. Ten years have now passed and my daughter has found me. She is now married to a pastor and they have two children. I was so thrilled to hear from her that I asked her to send pictures of her family.”

“When I saw the pictures my heart sank. The man my daughter has married is the same man that killed my son. I’m sure neither of them know this about each other. My grandchildren are very close to their father. I’ve asked around and have heard that he is reformed. They are supposed to leave the refugee camp and come and live in my house. What do I do? Should I tell my daughter that her husband is the one who murdered her brother? Or should I keep this in my heart and take it to my grave?”

The specifics of this story may be about Liberia but this is also happening right here in Dorchester. There are perpetrators of violence living in the same neighborhoods with victims. We are all sometimes hateful to friends and neighbors, co-workers and family members. On multiple levels we mistreat and scam each other all of the time. We become jaded, uncomfortable, even frightened and our tendency is toward fight or flight, we are drawn to become our more primitive selves.

Yet as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, in paraphrasing Ghandi, reminds us, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and soon we shall all be eyeless and toothless.”
In 1985 Gordon Dragt came to serve as the minister of Middle Collegiate Church, a Presbyterian congregation in New York City’s East Village. Founded in 1628, they’re a couple of years older than us and are, after Plymouth, the oldest worshiping community in the United States. The East Village is a vibrant and diverse neighborhood. Yet, on the first Sunday that Gordon lead worship at Middle Collegiate there were barely twenty people in the congregation, mostly Ukrainian and Polish. He was dismayed.

After the service he went to a bakery across the street. He sat there looking at his church, a magnificent stone building constructed in 1839. He longed to create a church community that reflected the diversity of the neighborhood. He began to imagine that all of these large stones were actually doors, portals, through which many diverse people could enter the building and feel welcomed. Encouraged by this vision of an inclusive church community he committed himself to make it happen.

“Gordon told stories to Middle Church both in the language of tradition, or old-time religion, and in the language of innovation, or vision . . . He is consistent, warm, open, affirming and intentional in welcoming all of the people who come to Middle, just as they are. He opens doors through a ministry of humor and surprise. He preaches the gospel through the arts in worship and through social action and outreach.”
Jacqueline J. Lewis, The Power of Stories, p 77

Throughout his life Gordon had developed a radical acceptance of the other and preached a prophetic commitment to radical inclusion and diversity. He learned how to create partnerships with people within the congregation and out in the community.

And everything was brought back to be celebrated in worship. Middle Collegiate Church is now held up throughout the country as an inclusive community that transcends the boundaries that usually separate people. I see it as a model for us and I will be attending the service there next Sunday.

Laura Blumenfeld, as she came to know Omar and the Khatib family, she became more curious about what was frightening to her than vengeful. There is an upcoming court hearing to determine if Omar can be paroled because of his deteriorating health in the damp, crowded prison and she decides to accompany the family.

She insists on addressing the court and faces the three-judge panel to speak in favor of Omar’s release. To the shock of everyone present she announces that she is the daughter of Omar’s victim. She then turns to face Omar. She locks eyes with him. In a hard and unforgiving voice she says, “And you promised me you would never hurt anyone again.” Revenge, A Story of Hope, by Laura Blumenfeld, Simon & Schuster, 2002

Laura can be a model for all of us of what “turning the other cheek” truly means. It is not a powerless, defeated stance, but one of strength and determination, of holding fast to real human values and rejecting violence and simplistic answers. Hatred and violence in all of their forms are always the easy answer. Coming to know, accept and understand people for who they are is hard work, but is also the way of peace and reconciliation.

As Jesus and Gandhi and Dr. King and so many other spiritual teachers have said, it is love that makes it all happen. Love can heal our wounds. Love, in all of its forms is the path toward peace. Love is the place where we know and are known. Love is where we come together in all of our complex and different lives. Love is where we heal our wounds and bridge all that divides us.

I would suggest to the woman in Liberia that first she must talk with and get to know her son-in-law, and then make peace with him. This kind of openness, curiosity and radical hospitality are what fuels the community at Middle Collegiate Church and what also brought healing and reconciliation for Laura Blumenfeld and Omar Khatib. For them and for all of us, this is the only hope for the world. Let us, as Dr. King’s legacy, live with that hope and that love in our hearts.

Amen, Ashe, Blessed Be

I often have to look at my cell phone to find out what time it is, which, if you think about it, is fairly bizarre. When before in the history of timekeeping has your phone or communication device been the thing you look at to accurately give you the time of the day?

This whole episode reminded me a little bit of something that happened several summers ago when I went to visit a friend who had just bought a cottage in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I had never spent much time there before. We were sitting out on his porch the afternoon I arrived and I could hear the chimes in the church tower. At 4 pm, four double chimes sounded (ding ding, ding ding, ding ding, ding ding). Then at 5 pm there was just one double chime, ding ding, and that was all.

I turned to my friend and said, “There were four double chimes at 4, shouldn’t there be five double chimes at 5. I only heard 1.” It seemed perfectly logical to me. He laughed and informed me that the church tower in Wellfleet was the only place left in the country and perhaps in the world that still keeps maritime time, a way of marking time that was developed for mariners and seafarers. According to this system, everything is on a four hour cycle rather than the twelve hour cycle we are used to.

So the clock rings a double chime at 1, 2 double chimes at 2, 3 double chimes at 3, 4 double chimes at 4, and then it starts all over again till you get to 4 double chimes at 8. And then it starts all over again. So, if you hear one double chime coming from the clock tower, it might be 1, 5, or 9, am or pm. You’ve got 6 choices there. Are you confused yet? It disoriented me for days until I got used to it and was able to tell time from the chimes in that clock tower.

But, apparently for mariners and seafarers of old, men and some women who were so in touch with the cycles of the sun and moon; well they knew from the light in the sky what time of day it was when they heard the chime. So if we were going by maritime time here, we would have rung three double bells for the start of our service at 11am and confused everyone in the neighborhood.

We are so used to our clocks, our watches, and now our electronic devices to help us keep track of time that we have lost the ability to read the cycles of morning and night, the cycles of the day.

We’ve, of course, been somewhat spoiled by our way of keeping time. In our world the day has been divided into 24 hour cycles for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. But in the not too distant past the specific hour and minute were not so accurately denoted and each state or region had its own “time zone,” if you will, it’s own determination of when it was noon or midnight or anything in between.

People who were working in the fields or working in their own individual shops didn’t need to know that it is now 11:52, they just needed to know that it was late morning. I imagine there was a more timeless less regimented feel to things and besides all the churches and most public buildings had large clock towers and bell towers that rang the hour.

It wasn’t until the industrial revolution and especially the expansion of the railroads that there became a need to standardize time. In order to organize people who were working in factories, time had to become more regimented and there needed to be a definite start and ending time to the workday. The railroad was a new form of transportation that gave the opportunity for many people to travel at once, making several stops along the route. If you wanted to be on the train, you had to know exactly when it was going to come and the time kept at your station needed to be synchronized with the previous station, and then next one, and so on.

So, the system of time zones we use today was developed where large swaths of the country and the world share the exact same time and when it is 11 am here in the Eastern time zone, it is 10 am in the central time zone not, say, 9:22. This system of organizing time has made life easier in many ways. But this way of organizing time has also enslaved us to the clock, to be somewhere or do something down to the specific minute and second even.

A sense of timelessness is rarely something I feel, and I imagine it is the same for many of you. I have difficulty thinking of time as abundant, as something that I will never run out of. My days are often so full that I seem to be running out of time all of the time. There never seem to be enough hours in the day and I sometimes feel overwhelmed and lost.

“If you’re lost you can look—and you will find me, time after time.
If you fall, I will catch you—I will be waiting, time after time.”

We, human beings have restless spirits and we are always searching, longing, questing for something. We’re rarely satisfied for very long. That might be part of how we’re made and, I think, our enslavement to time, to the clock gives us little space to explore some of the deeper questions that we are asking.

What or who are we looking for when we feel lost?
When we’re lost, what are we hoping to find and who might be there to catch us when we fall, or fall behind?

“If you’re lost you can look—and you will find me, time after time.
If you fall, I will catch you—I will be waiting, time after time.”

The answers here are many and might be as varied as the number of people in this room or the current circumstances of our lives. Some might answer that love is the void in their lives that they are hoping to fill. Some might say it’s a sense of spiritual and psychological well-being. Others might describe the object of their quest as some kind of meaning and purpose in their lives.

Others might say that their quest is more universal and might name peace and an end to violence, or living in deeper harmony with the earth, or a greater sense of justice and equality among people as what they are most looking for in life. Someone else might say that they’re looking for God, or some all encompassing spiritual source that they can turn to for comfort in times of great struggle or for reassurance when feeling lost.

There is book about a philosophy of Unitarian Universalism titled, To Re-Enchant the World, by Richard Grigg. He reminds us that the way of telling time that we are used to is chronological time. We often find ourselves caught in a losing battle to somehow master chronological time in our all too busy world. But there is another way of knowing time that he names “multi-faceted sacred time.” His language is fairly dense so rather than quoting him, I am going to try to explain what he is talking about.

First, he wants us to remember that our non-creedal faith is uniquely poised to help us deal some of these questions, some of this longing and searching that we find ourselves in the midst of. In Unitarian Universalism, we value the questions, the search, the journey and help and encourage each other as we journey together. We’re the religious tradition that has the unending quest for truth and meaning as part of its theological foundation.

This, according to Grigg, offers us a framework to look at time differently, to move away from a more self-centered and self-focused need that we have to master the clock and the calendar. Within our current framework time becomes something that controls us, something that we have to respond to, something that is always nipping at our heels as we move through the day.

What if we had a deeper sense of timelessness? What if the time that counted most was the quality time that we spent with others, others who are on similar journeys and asking similar questions, others who acknowledge the importance of spiritual and human connection as central to the wholeness of life?

Our connection in community with our fellow travelers, our fellow questers helps us give birth to a deeper understanding of life and meaning, helps us find the answers to our questions, helps us feel less alone in our journey, help us engage together with multiple issues that are important to us.

Grigg also uses the phrase “redemptive re-narration.” Human beings love to tell and hear stories, especially stories about things that happened to us, that we encountered, perhaps stories that changed us, and stories of what we are searching for. If this telling and retelling of our stories is done in a loving and supportive community, it can be healing and life-giving for us. As we tell and re-tell our stories we imagine the story of the personal and collective future, a future that we are building for ourselves, our families, our community and our world.

We need each other to help answer our questions, to work out the stories that we tell and to create the story of the future. This offers us a more timeless framework that is interconnected, interwoven and interdependent.

This clock that I stand under this morning; if we wound it, it might be the most accurate timepiece in the building. Yet its value to us is more timeless. It’s a work of art and craftsmanship that we don’t often see these days. It’s a connection to our history and the history of Dorchester. If it could speak, it would tell some amazing stories about what it has seen in its 240 plus years hanging not only in this hall, but in the Dorchester Town Hall in Codman Square when Dorchester was its own city, and in the building that replaced the town hall that we now call the Great Hall. It represents far more than a timepiece.

Perhaps we don’t need a ten thousand year clock to help break the stranglehold that time has taken over our lives. Perhaps we don’t need a ten thousand year clock to give us a more timeless feeling and help us appreciate the time we have with each other.

Perhaps in this new year we can appreciate a time that has fewer definitive markers and feel time’s presence in every cell of the universe. Perhaps in this new year we can renew our connections with each other and those we love and remember that time is a resource that is infinite and abundant.

Amen
Blessed Be

 At first I thought the male bird had a harem because it appeared as if he always arrived with two females. Looking more closely I realized that one of the other birds was a juvenile, a young bird, most likely the offspring of the other two. It was this younger bird that came up to the sliding glass door where I was standing, cocked its head to one side and paused for a moment to examine me.

 Now most of the other birds, including this one’s parents, fly away and scatter when they detect the presence of a human nearby. Not this cardinal. It seems more bold and daring than the others, more curious perhaps. Isn’t it the young among us who have more of a capacity for adventure? Isn’t it the young among us who do bold, and sometimes dangerous things because they are so filled with life that they see themselves as impervious to pain. Maybe they just don’t know any better.

 Those of us who have been around for awhile have had our hearts and our bodies broken on too many occasions. So we become more cautious, more wary, more vigilant. But for us it can also go the other way. We can be so cautious that we become stuck, unable to experiment or try something new. We may become angry and bitter over our losses and unable to open our eyes and our hearts to people and experiences that might bring us joy and wonder. Maybe that little cardinal has something to teach us about taking a few chances to discover something new.

For example, when I think of the rash of shootings in our neighborhood in the last couple of weeks, I feel so sad and angry and I am sickened by the thought of so many families dealing with this violence. Violence has happened over the years in so many poor and immigrant communities and I wonder not only when it will stop, but also what can I, what can we as a church community do to stop the violence and bring peace and compassion to our streets.

One solution is to get involved. There are weekly meetings for community leaders that I will start attending next week. There is a Town Hall meeting scheduled for tomorrow (Sunday) at noon that I will not be able to attend. It would be great if someone from the church could be there. I think it’s being held at St. Peter’s and there should be fliers for it at FPC. There is also a Peace Vigil Walk through the neighborhood scheduled for Friday, July 22, at 6 pm, followed by a barbecue. I hope some of you can join me for this as well. Practicing peace and compassion begins in the places that are closest to our hearts and our homes.

All great sages and teachers thought of compassion as something that was attainable not as some “impractical dream.” They can teach us to get out of our narrow self-centered lives and take a more active role in healing a broken world.

1. to have a battery of blood tests to see if my blood clots normally
2. to have a ultrasound duplex study of my legs to look for clots (I have a problem with varicose veins in my legs and that could lead to excessive clotting)
3. to see an endocrinologist because my thyroid is enlarged

 The chest x-ray that was done this afternoon looks great and I am feeling well. Most of my lung capacity has returned and I have at least 2/3 of my energy level. So the healing and recovery process are going well. I thank everyone for your thoughts and prayers and many thanks to those who have brought food.

 One of the books I have been reading during my convalescence is Be the Change, a collection of writings by UU minister Stephen Shick. The above quote comes from one of his pieces and has stuck with me. We human beings pride ourselves on our intellectual and emotional capacity, yet these often get in the way of knowing what to do. We think of ourselves as a higher form of life, yet we often lack the capacity to live life to its fullest. We laud our ability to love, yet we are often unable to love simply and unconditionally. As we approach this season of spring, Easter and rebirth, I wonder what it would take for love of each other and love of life to be reborn in each of us without all of the intellectual and emotional trappings that get in our way?

 In Peace, Art