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A few years ago, our historical consciousness received
a boost from the calendar, reminding us of the arrival
of a new millennium. There was high anxiety around
what might happen to systems of technology worldwide.
There was high anxiety around what some renegade
forces might do to disrupt travel and commerce.
There was high anxiety amid a time of high celebration.
My husband, Dan, and I needed an unconventional
New Year’s Eve to diffuse this high-decibel
crescendo. On the morning of December 31, we headed
to the Berkshires, to the farmland home of some
longtime friends from seminary who had invited us
to share this temporal turning point with them and
an intimate enclave of family and neighbors. The
day was clear and the night promised stars. We drove
north from our home in New Jersey, aptly attired
for this millennial rite of passage — jeans,
warm sweaters, and hiking boots. We arrived to the
warmest of welcomes.
Seminary alums and spouses are a curious crowd.
While the punch flowed and the wine was poured and
the appetizers were devoured, conversation grew
reflective. Our hosts had planned a millennial litany
as a mode for pondering our move through history
as mindful spiritual beings. It was a litany of
reverence for the life we shared.
Midnight drew near. While most lingered inside,
I knew where I needed to be. Together Dan and I
stepped outside, away from the banter of conversation
and calypso music, away from any notion that humanity
was turning a corner. Earlier that evening, the
teens and 20-somethings had retreated to a nearby
hillside to build a bonfire, a roaring sky-lapping
bonfire. We approached and stood silent in its flickering
shadows. I needed some star-glimmering assurance
that there was more, so much more, than my world,
than our world, than me, than us. What better than
the accompaniment of starlight and firelight to
remind me? Stars to lend perspective. Fire to kindle
my understanding that all Creation is dynamic. Within
our global confines, we were bidding farewell to
a millennium that did not flatter humankind. We
were tucking in a century that had been perhaps
the most violent of any century in the brief annals
of human history. What would the next millennium
bring? What would the next century hold? I needed
a sense of transcendence to ground me. I needed
to remind myself that humanity was not Creation’s
last act or its first, and that there was more to
the habitat of God than our hurting world spinning
so recklessly through it all.
Has it been easy since then? How about right here
and now? It’s easy, I believe, to be lulled
into benign beneficence in this place of beauty
that is Cohasset, but we’re all mindful that
we occupy a world and we inhabit an era that is
neither benign nor beneficent. Like those of us
who lived through earlier times marked by World
War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam
War, the most recent Civil Rights Movement, the
most recent Feminist Revolution, the First Gulf
War, the genocide in Rwanda, the horror of September
11, 2001, the genocide in the Sudan, the war in
Iraq, the elections of 2004, we are all recipients
of a dubious blessing, sometimes called a curse.
We live in interesting times.
We live in interesting times. The story behind
this saying opens a window to our time. It is, by
popular attribution, a Chinese dictum. What was
the source of this proverb? The issue arose on a
Jim Lehrer PBS News Hour. The response came from
Torrey Whitman, President of the China Institute
in New York City. Steeped in Classical Chinese and
the history of Chinese proverbs, Whitman proclaimed:
There is no such expression… in Chinese.
It is a non-Chinese creation, most probably American,
that has been around for at least 30 or 40 years.
… I speculate that whoever it was who first
coined it attempted to give the expression a mystique,
and so decided to attribute it to the Chinese.
Spin. Ah, yes! It’s a phenomenon that has
invaded our systems of information and technology,
our practice of politics and yes, our variable attempts
to practice democracy. So, we have inherited this
expression that is as American as apple pie at a
fast-food restaurant, this proverb so easily attributed
to an ancient Fortune cookie, this blessing which
nonetheless holds a face value credibility: We do
indeed live in interesting times.
We’re simply challenged to lift the fog of
spin and consider face to face what is—our
current reality with its tempestuous ingredients
of war and peace, of rampant viruses and medicinal
miracles, of global greed and communal compassion,
the wondrous and the unimaginable in dubious co-existence.
How challenged we are to bear historical witness
to the here and now.
Witness: it’s a term commonly used in a religious
context. For some among us, it’s comfortably
Christian; for others among us, it’s uncomfortably
Christian. We regularly use the term in Unitarian
Universalist parlance. The Unitarian Universalist
Association includes a Department of Advocacy and
Witness, an executive team whose focus is public
witness, a commission on which I serve called the
Commission on Social Witness. It’s not about
proselytizing. It’s about being accountable
for what we take in, for what we see and hear and
know in our bones to be the realities of our life
together, our life within our congregations, within
our communities, and within our body politic.
We inhabit times in which we need every spark of
energy from ancient bonfires, every ounce of humility
from starlight that shines from millions of light-years
away, to bear a witness of integrity to these times
we inhabit. There are choices to be made in this
country that carries perhaps the most promise of
any nation for honest and inclusive witness. Like
that New Year’s Eve of four years ago, we
are at a pivot point. There is the sharpest of divisions
in this land that we love. What an interesting time;
what a captivating season for promoting “the
right of conscience and the use of the democratic
process in our congregations and in society at large.”
Some of you may shake your heads about your minister
preaching on politics. That’s okay. If all
of you agree with me, I’ll simply assume that
I’ve said absolutely nothing worth remembering.
On politics and the pulpit, I ascribe to that notion
that politics without any trace of religion lacks
soul, and that religion that ignores politics is
irrelevant. I believe we are called by our faith
to pay close attention to our larger community and
to realize our faith on the larger Common.
A year or so ago, I had the pleasure of presiding
at a Sunday morning service with Rev. C. Welton
Gaddy, President of The Interfaith Alliance. Rev.
Gaddy is a Baptist minister from Monroe, Louisiana,
who speaks with a broad Southern flavor and who
deeply understands the cogence of convening an interfaith
alliance that is, by definition, pluralistic. Rev.
Gaddy contends that
“Preaching on politics is a religious
task that, like all other religious tasks, must
be performed by people who are not perfect.”
Me, for example.
Gaddy continues:
“….this work must be done with the
same assurances that we recognize in other realms
of ministry—mistakes can be excused; wrongs
can be forgiven. What is not excusable is failing
to speak to political issues at all.”
Interesting times produce choices. With relative
freedom to know and to act, to discover and to debate,
we exercise the tenets of our liberal faith--speaking
out for the inherent worth and dignity of every
person, committing ourselves to a free and responsible
search for truth and meaning, promoting but not
imposing the use of the democratic process. These
are not easy principles by which to live.
In 1947 after our world was shattered by war and
humanity’s capacity for evil was undeniable,
James Luther Adams, Unitarian theologian and professor,
observed that:
....The prophetic liberal church is the church
in which persons think and work together to interpret
the signs of the times in the light of their faith,
to make explicit through discussion the epochal
thinking that the times demand. The prophetic liberal
church is the church in which all members share
the common responsibility to attempt to foresee
the consequences of human behavior (both individual
and institutional), with the intention of making
history in place of merely being pushed around by
it.
How--in our lives as individuals and as creatures
of community--might we make history rather than
being pushed around by it? We rebel at the notion
that we are predestined for whatever. The alternative
is to be proactive, to give vent to the fullness
of our liberal religious imagination. We can carve
out choices and act upon them across the spectrum
of listening and learning to leveraging the power
that is ours to act and advocate, motivate and mobilize.
It is our choice to discover day by day what is
happening within and beyond us, interpreting it
all through the lens of our experience, our understanding
of history, our aesthetics, our realities of heart,
mind, and spirit. This very moment as it is lived
by all our fellow travelers embraces all that has
ever happened. It carries the sounds of harmony
and dissonance as they have reverberated throughout
history.
We witness miracles of joy and miracles of destruction,
acts of love and acts of terror. We participate
in decisions of wisdom and prudence and decisions
of folly. We are challenged to accept our “common
responsibility [for at least attempting] to foresee
the consequences of [our] human behavior.”
We are challenged to lift the fog of political spin
and promote clear thinking, clear seeing, and clear
compassion. We are challenged in these early hours
of the third millennium of the Common Era to make
history. We receive the gift of perspective as we
step outside, stand on the hillside, and take it
all in. We affirm the gift of participation as we
return, ready and willing to make our difference.
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