Covenant Lost

While the concept of covenant goes back to the ancient Israelites, its relevance to Unitarian Universalist churches is rooted in two events. The first was the founding of Unitarianism in 16th century Transylvania when Francis David said, “We do not need to think alike, to love alike,” which recalled the words of Jesus and his call for a radical and transforming love as the basis for the kingdom of God. With those simple, but profound words, David said we will gather as religious communities based on love, not intellectual propositions; on covenant, not creed; on orthopraxy or right practice, not orthodoxy or right belief. The second event was the arrival of the Puritans in America in the 1630s, who organized their free churches around covenant, which we inherited.

The idea of covenant as the organizing principle for a church was and continues to be radical. Unfortunately, it was slowly lost by a series of circumstances as Alice Blair Wesley explains in her 2000-2001 Minns’ Lectures, entitled Our Covenant.

First, as the religious fervor of the Puritans, complete with ecstatic experiences, was not experienced by their children and grandchildren, the radical idea of covenant was replaced with the notion of a Half-way Covenant that did not require an ecstatic experience in order to make their descendants members of the church.

Second, as the idea of covenant got tangled up in New England with the notion of a divine contract, with some predicting the Second Coming of Christ, the idea of covenant began to disappear from liberal religious discourse.

Third, as the significance of what it meant to sign a covenant lost power and clarity over time and in practice, membership in a church became a matter of family connection and not a deliberate and free religious choice.

Fourth, the whole idea of conversion became controversial for liberals.

Fifth, young people no longer accepted the idea that they were of a low spiritual state because they had not experienced the religious hierarchy and persecution to which their parents or grandparents had been subjected to in Europe. The primacy of the need for salvation shifted along with their relationship to the liberal church.

Sixth, the liberal clergy who would become Unitarian ministers stopped forming new churches for some 40 years because they expected settlers to do it. This hiatus of church formation and growth of liberal churches caused the idea of covenant to be further marginalized.

Seventh, Unitarian ministers thought that our faith would grow as conservative churches became more liberal, such that they would embrace Unitarianism.

Eighth, the idea of progress that seized the liberal imagination led, suggests Alice Blair Wesley, lead to a “loss of urgency in the members’ sense of mission” as love itself came “to be taken as just natural, as needing no special communal focus or nurture.”

Ninth, the rise of the non-profit corporations in the early 1800s, in which many Unitarians became very involved, eliminated covenant as an organizing idea and ideal. As Wesley concludes, “Thus it came to be that, over time and with a curious inconsistency, when Unitarians turned their attention from governance of the local church to any good work beyond the walls of the local church, we took for granted the hierarchal structure of a nonprofit corporation, even for gathering new Unitarian churches!”

Tenth, in the 18th century, covenant became linked with “revivalism.” Thus, “19th century liberal churches kept the old, earliest covenants on their books—beautiful, simple promises to walk together in the ways of love, but the covenant was mostly not talked about, until the late 20th century.

We began talking about covenant again in the early to mid-1980s, but it has been a conversation among too few people. As Robert Latham noted in 1985, “We have forgotten that covenant is the keystone of our religious experience. This has resulted in diminishment of meaning in membership, confusion of identity, and distortion in gauging ministry effectiveness.”

Reclaiming covenant is a central task of Unitarian Universalist congregations if we are to be vibrant and powerful religious communities and agents of transformation.

From Covenant to Beloved Community

The problem in our churches is not the inevitable conflicts that emerge over time. The problem is that too many of us too easily forget our covenant and the obligations required if we are to be faithful. In a conflict, it would be far better for us to say to our opponents: “May all of your deepest desires be satisfied.” Such a wish would help remind us of their inherent worth and dignity and the other religious principles that inform our Unitarian Universalist faith.

Living in covenant takes compassion. It takes compassion to look at our own motives and behaviors in a conflict. How can it be that this person, with whom we have worshipped, broken bread, shared joys and sorrows, worked and played, has become the enemy? Objectively, it is beyond comprehension, but some understanding and clarity and reconciliation and forgiveness can emerge if we can look at our own anxiety, our own fear, and our own sense of powerlessness, and understand how we have contributed to the conflict.

Living in covenant takes courage. It takes courage to engage those involved in a conflict and ask or insist that they be accountable to the mutual obligations of our covenant. It takes courage to walk into the middle of a conflict determined to love and minister to all sides for the sake of the individuals involved, and the well-being and integrity of the beloved community. To be in covenant, suggests Tom Owen-Towle, means that we cannot remain spectators on the sidelines during a conflict, believing that we are answerable only for our own personal portion of congregational character.

Living in covenant also takes practice. M. Scott Peck suggests the beloved community emerges among “individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, making others’ conditions their own.’ ”

Too often, pseudo-community, as Peck calls it, masquerades as true community. In pseudo-community, people avoid conflicts, minimize the diversity that exists within the group, and communicate superficially because they rightly lack the trust to express their beliefs and feelings. The Beloved Community is not an accidental creation. It is the result of hard work.

This Time, Fear Struck Out

Hatred is a commodity sold daily to desperate people who somehow believe that hate will justify their existence, that hate will heal the hole in their soul, that hate will provide emotional and spiritual compensation for the manifold ways in which they feel that they have been cheated by life. They believe that somehow their hate will affect those whom they hate, while having no affect on them. To paraphrase the Buddha: Holding on to hatred is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else as it burns your hand.

The other commodity that media personalities like Glen Beck, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Lou Dobbs deal in is fear. In the end, those opposed to health care reform used fear as a bludgeon day-in and day-out to mobilize public opinion, which is why the display of moral courage yesterday by House Democrats was as rare as it was welcome.

On Saturday, March 20, 2010, President Obama met with House Democrats and said: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made…. And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine.”

In his column today, Paul Krugman, who shared the above quote, called the vote oh healthcare “a victory for America’s soul.” He concluded, “In the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This time, fear struck out.”

So what do you believe and why?

So what do you believe and why?

This is an essential question in the religious quest, a question that the Transcendentalists would have taken very seriously. In this regard, I love these words by Charles Stephens, Jr. who wrote, “I wish for you the thrill of knowing who you are, where you stand, and why. Especially why.” In conversation, we may learn what each other believes, but we seldom learn why. And the why makes all the difference.

This dynamic was revealed to me recently in an unexpected way. I was talking to someone about the charter school that I helped to start. This K-8 school, Global Village Academy in Aurora, Colorado, offers an international curriculum and language immersion in Mandarin, Spanish, and French.

The person asked me why I was so passionate about it. I said it was because of my daughters, both adopted from China. I want them to continue to learn Mandarin so that they do not forget the country or the language of their birth. As adults, they may choose to never speak Mandarin again, but I want them to have that choice. I don’t want them to feel excluded when other Chinese-Americans are speaking Mandarin. I want them to have a deep and abiding sense of who they are as Chinese and as Americans, especially when they are discriminated against, as they surely will be. I did this because I wanted them to attend a school that reflected the ethnic and cultural diversity of the America that is being born before our eyes.

These answers were enough to explain my passion, but I then stumbled on something else that hadn’t been obvious to me. I was also doing if for the child that I had been. When my mother and father divorced when I was four, my mother tried to make it on her own, renting a small apartment above a cleaning store. We lived there for a few months, but, in the end, she couldn’t make it work financially. So we moved in with my grandmother and uncle in a tiny five room house.

I grew up in a working class family, held above abject poverty by the fact that all three adults in the family worked. The house was run down and much later it would be condemned and torn down. This was the context in which I attended Crescent Elementary School in Pittsburgh for five years, a school that was over 90% African American. We were all at-risk students. Some of my teachers taught my mother and uncle when they were young.

I don’t remember being a very good student, but each year I did better. Looking back, there is no question that education saved my life. Without the care of those teachers, my life today would have been very different. The same is true for at-risk children today. Without a good school, the challenges are often insurmountable. As radio commentator Paul Harvey was so fond of saying, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

Now you know the why of my passion. Without the why you can’t connect the dots. Without the why you can’t make sense of the what. Still, that doesn’t keep us from assuming that we understand another’s why. But that understanding is our own story, our own reason for why we would do it and not the other person’s reasons. May we have the wisdom to listen to both the what and the why of another person’s life.

What Astonishes You?

Although we will have more snow in Colorado, I have been smitten once again by the promise of springtime. Always I am astonished by its arrival.

What astonishes you? Synonyms for the word offer clues to the intensity of its meaning: amaze, surprise, shock, startle, stun. The word is derived from a Latin root that means “to thunder.” If we take the root meaning literally, it may suggest that to be astonished is to be startled into awareness, to be forcibly awakened from our sleep. We may miss the lightning, looking in the wrong direction at exactly the wrong time, but some seconds later [...one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi] our very being will be shaken by the crack and roll of the sound of thunder.

In various mythologies, thunder is associated with a particular god: Thor in Norse mythology; Jupiter in the Roman pantheon; the African God Obumo; Sucellos, the Celtic God; and Rudra, the Hindu god of nature and the ruler of the Maruts, the storm gods. This association makes sense for the divine is always trying to get our attention, yet we resist. The purpose, I believe, of this season of spring is to get our attention. Elizabeth Bowen wrote, “It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth’s almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.” What astonishes you?

I remember vividly a springtime thunderstorm when I was eight or nine years old. I stood on my grandmother’s front porch as the clouds rolled in bringing daylight to an abrupt end. This drama had four characters: wind, rain, lightning, and thunder and they each struggled to take the lead role.

With each flash of lightning, I counted how many seconds it took for the sound of the thunder to reach my ears. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, boom. I’ve never again seen it rain as hard. This conspicuous spectacle lasted for over two hours. I watched transfixed, astonished, moved by the beauty of the storm and by its terrifying power. In the aftermath of the storm, the air had a sweet, clean smell, as if the world had been washed clean. Perhaps this was the moment that I first realized that I am perpetually astonished by life itself, this improbable, imponderable gift.

The poet Mary Oliver speaks of her fierce desire to be perpetually astonished. She writes,
“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled –
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”

What astonishes you?

How Can I Keep From Singing!

You may be familiar with the song How Can I Keep from Singing (#108 in Singing the Living Tradition with the title My Life Flows on in Endless Song). Its origin is obscure with words attributed to the Quakers and music to an American Gospel tune. The song entered Unitarian Universalism in 1969 when it was included in Songs of Faith in Man, published by the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. Pete Seeger had sent it to the church for the songbook. He had discovered the song during the Christmas season in 1956 and immediately added it to his repertoire, recording it several times during his career. Seeger learned the song from Doris Plenn, who had learned it from her grandmother, a North Carolina Quaker. It was her grandmother’s favorite song, supposedly written 250 years earlier. Plenn put her mark on the song by writing an additional verse during the McCarthy era to protest the jailing of her friends for their political beliefs. Those words, slightly altered, form the third verse in Singing the Living Tradition.

When the song was published in Sing Out, a folk music magazine founded by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, the magazine’s editors were only able to find one published version of the song. It had appeared in Ira Sankey’s 1894 collection of Gospel Hymns with a tune written by Sankey. That tune was less compelling than the one Seeger had learned. The author of the text, which reflected 19th century church tradition, was listed as anonymous. It was not until 1998 that the origins of the song were clarified, which involved considerable research on my part to uncover “the rest of the story.”

How Can I Keep from Singing first appeared in an 1869 collection of Sunday School songs, entitled Bright Jewels. The Rev. Robert Lowry had written the music, as popularized by Seeger. The words were not attributed, but Lowry did that with about half of his hymns. Anna Bartlett Warner (1827-1915) had, in fact, written unattributed words to another of Lowry’s hymns in that same collection, One More Day’s Work for Jesus. That hymn was, along with How Can I Keep from Singing, two of some ten hymns for which Lowry had become famous. It is believed that Anna Bartlett Warner, who used the pen name Amy Lothrop, wrote the original words to How Can I Keep from Singing. (The song has also been attributed to her sister, Susan Warner, but with less conviction.) Anna also wrote the words to the well-loved Sunday School song that begins, “Jesus loves me, this I know . . . “

While the bones of Anna’s verses have survived, some words were changed. The phrases “the Lord my Savior” and “Christ is Lord” were replaced with the words “truth” and “love.” Those who were responsible for the revisions are unknown, but the "metaphors" used are interesting. In the end, the song comes to us, not directly from Christian hymnody, but by way of the American folk music tradition. Nonetheless, both the words and the music were always intended to be engaging and energizing. As H. Wiley Hitchcock wrote, “. . . the gospel hymn was a product of the northern urban revivals, organized and attended mostly by whites . . . Gospel hymnodists like . . . Sankey . . . , and the Rev. Robert Lowery cannily adopted the early revival hymn’s infectious pattern of a verse followed by a catchy, and usually thunderous, refrain. . . . The result, at its best, was a kind of religious pop art almost irresistible in its visceral appeal.” This song’s irresistibility is captured in the refrain, “How can I keep from singing!” This is not a question. It is both explanation and exclamation!

Having shared the background of this song, let me suggest that as Unitarian Universalists, knowing our history is important. And this song is becoming part of our history. It is particularly important to know our history when any woman’s voice is lost either by being ignored or, perhaps worse, being labeled anonymous, as was the case with Anna Bartlett Warner.

Biographical Note: Anna’s father was Henry Warner, a wealthy New York City lawyer, who lost most of his fortune in the 1837 depression. The family moved to their summer home (Good Craig) on Constitution Island in the Hudson River. It was there that Anna and her sister Susan began writing books and hymns to earn money. They also conducted Bible classes for cadets at the Military Academy at West Point, which was nearby.

What gift do you choose?

As the vernal equinox approaches, followed by Earth Day in April, I’m reading to my younger daughter the book, Earth Day Birthday, by Pattie Schnetzler. Using the twelve days of Christmas format, she recounts gifts from the world, including eight cranes a dancing. What gift from the earth do you most value? I choose the violets along the edge of the woodland path.

“I choose fresh snow in the early morning (that no one's walked in yet).” Blythe Barnhill

“... the green buds on a tree that are about to burst open with renewed life in springtime.” Jennifer Forker

“The smell of grass, and of freshly turned earth.” Kristin Satterlee

“A rolling river that provides food, tranquility and recreation.” Arthur Fitt

“The sound of Meadowlarks on the fence behind our house.” Rhiannon Gallagher

“I love a misty, foggy, cool day! Aaahhh - they're the best!” Misty Dupuis

“Water, clean and flowing, bringing life.” Ali Hoover

“How to stand in an abundant world and choose one? Today I choose the smell of the earth thawing.” Susan Kinne

“The endless sky buttressed by the snow top mountains that call us into now” Rusty Robison

What gift from the earth do you choose?