Category: adult faith development

Our “Compensation”, and Theirs…

It has been far too long since we have gathered in  our church building on Chestnut and Pine. We say: the church is not a building. The building is closed, the church is open. Yes. But. Our congregation, or its members then, made a decision to center its congregational life in a building, our building, and their decision has been reinforced over the years as we decided to decorate, build on, renovate, improve, and stay put. Some churches have sold their buildings and moved into less church-y quarters. We have not, so that building is ours, and being separated from it is a loss to us of something we have valued, something we have loved in common with those who came before us. As we live apart from it now, we can imagine what it would mean to live apart from it forever.  What, we may ask ourselves, do we want our sanctuary for? What does it mean to us? What did it mean to those who created it?

Separation from our church building is separation from church life as we have known it and as many, we hope, will come to know it again. Loss upon loss. And yet: even your grumpy Borrower Bee must admit to having Zoom-encountered new church friends she would probably never have met, and experienced the joy of outreach beyond what was usual in our ordinary church life. Events that one can be glad of in the moment and return to in grateful memory, and that would not have happened had things been normal. And that, kind reader, is an example of what R.W. Emerson meant in his essay “Compensation”, tucked into the dark southwest corner of our church, in the window dedicated to him.

Emerson’s window being placed in that darkest corner, and the naming there of that particular essay, has always been a bit of a puzzle for me. The windows on the western side of the church are mostly secular figures, but Emerson was an ordained minister and not especially gloomy.  The essay is not one of his most read today, and there are aspects of it that are deeply of their time and not of ours. The philosophy it offers, however, may help explain its physical place in the sanctuary. In it, Emerson offers what he calls a “natural history of calamity”:

The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth … The voice of the Almighty saith: ‘Up and onward for evermore!’ We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time…

Words of hope “amid the ruins” are well suited to our present congregational situation, and they were probably felt equally strongly by the congregation of a century ago, when the church interior took its present form. The decorating plan of the 1920s included, most obviously, our distinctive stained glass, but the culmination of the work was the dedication of an ornate decorative wooden frame around the altarpiece, which was, and is, a copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Since the dedication of the frame in 1927 gained a great deal of attention, and usually the frame, a triptych, is kept closed, we have tended to forget about the painting. However, in the 1920s in America, copies of famous paintings were often bought for display in a church, and copies could be highly valued in their own right. Our Last Supper was a work of this sort, and, far from having been acquired together with the triptych, it occupied its place of honor long before the triptych was made. Adding to the confusion, the woodwork bears a plaque, made much later, which focuses on a later re-dedication of the ensemble. Contemporary newspapers, however, report on the original dedication of the painting in 1921, on 25 March, which was Good Friday.

The painting was given to the church by Mrs M.T. Garvin to honor the memory of her daughter Mrs Lillian G. Ross; she had died on April 5, 1918. The death of this apparently healthy and still fairly young woman shocked everyone who had known her, because the death was not only sudden and untimely but also seemed to have had a trivial origin: a very minor scratch apparently ended within hours in her dying from “acute meningitis” (the cause of death stated on her death certificate).

The Last Supper in the chancel faces our copy of the Frieze of the Prophets at the north end of the sanctuary. The original of the Frieze of the Prophets was painted by John Singer Sargent for the Boston Public Library as part of his controversial and never-completed sequence The Triumph of Religion, which was projected to include ancient polytheistic as well as Jewish and Christian traditions. It was installed in Boston in 1895, and the Lancaster copy was dedicated in October 1920. The Lancaster dedication was accompanied by the singing of a hymn created for the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, itself, as its name suggests, a celebration of shared human spirituality. The Lancaster paintings were thus installed in a larger program contextualizing Christianity as a new stage in the historical progress of human religions.

The paintings, windows, and other decorations in the Lancaster church collectively expand on ideas epitomized in Emerson’s “Compensation”: the church walls testify to the “natural history of calamity” while also evoking Emersonian confidence in spiritual progress, a “triumph of religion” albeit not exactly in the form that Sargent and probably the Garvins had in mind. In Emerson’s words: “Things refuse to be mismanaged long… Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear.” From this Emersonian perspective, for example, the men honored in the Presidents’ Window are memorialized not because of their singular virtues, but because they lent their strength to great causes in that constant process of destruction and renewal that Emerson characterizes as the “changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men”. All three of the American presidents honored were leaders in such times: Jefferson and the American Revolution, Lincoln and the Civil War, Wilson and the Great War. Of the three, only Jefferson saw the fruitful aftermath of the revolutionary calamity he had helped his society to endure and shape.

If the stained glass represents Emerson’s “natural history” on the level of institutions and societies, the other decorations in the church often hold more personal associations.  The woodwork in the southwest and southeast corners, for example, reminds us of Mr Garvin’s Quaker heritage and his and his wife’s personal histories of loss and renewal in the wake of the Civil War. The memory of Mrs Garvin’s daughter was honored in the chancel not only with the painting there but also with a small cross that is no longer regularly displayed.

It may strike us in retrospect, but only in retrospect, that Mrs Ross died just as the first of the three waves of “Spanish flu” was spreading across America.

The geographical source and the chronology of this first wave are disputed, because, since no one had seen anything like it before, the earliest cases were nearly always attributed to some different cause. “Ordinary” influenza occurred then as regularly as it does now, and then as now was only rarely lethal. The novel influenza did not present exactly the same way, but to the extent that no one knew of its existence, it naturally remained unnoticed. There are those who believe that in its first, mild, form, the “Spanish flu” may have been circulating as early as 1916, and several sources have suggested it started in North America. It certainly did not start in Spain; it got heavy journalistic coverage there, because thanks to the war, the Spanish press was the only uncensored press in Europe and so the only one for which an epidemic was not an unpublishable state secret. In the United States, the first diagnosis of the novel influenza virus was in January 1918; the doctor who diagnosed it published a warning to the US Public Health Service, but the warning was ignored. Most cases of the flu in the “spring wave” of 1918 were mild, and more serious and fatal cases were noticed mainly because the people who died had often been healthy individuals who succumbed very quickly. The first American influenza death recognized as such occurred in March on a Kansas military base; its being recorded there may simply mean that the military offered more systematic health monitoring than did civilian life. Within a week, the same influenza killed several people in Queens, in New York; although other cases became known elsewhere, and some health authorities began to issue warnings, the disease was still not widely understood as epidemic, let alone as a first wave. Although it seems to have been in abeyance in the summer, however, that was only the end of the beginning. Wartime conditions, notably massive movements of military personnel, complicated the geographic course of the epidemic’s transmission and made it harder to track; the war also probably increased transmission generally. In turn, the increased number of contacts may partly account for an increased number of mutations, which, in their turn, probably account in part for the increased lethality of the disease in its second and third waves of late summer and fall of 1918 and again in 1919.

The renovation and ornamentation of our church in Lancaster thus belongs not only to a post-war, or early interwar, period, but also to a time of recovery from a rampant disease that at first was hardly noticed and afterward, until recently, hardly even recollected – a post-epidemic period, as it were, or perhaps, given our present condition, an inter-epidemic one. In this new time of epidemic and loss, and of physical alienation from our church building, it may be helpful to contemplate and renew not only our spiritual interconnectedness among those of us who are more or less physically here right now, but also our gratitude to those who turned their personal griefs, in experiences not completely different from our own, into memorials that could become a place of worship, beauty, and sanctuary for later generations.

In this strange moment…

our UUCL community is reminded of how much more community means than just the building in which it comes together for worship. And yet. We do call our place of worship a sanctuary, and we crave sanctuary now. We need it for ourselves, we need it to hold together and repair the straining webs of all our different communities. Although our UUCL sanctuary raises up individual heroes, they all appear in groups, as leaders of communities that reach across time and space. Some of our heroes were heroes of religious faith in something approaching the way that phrase is used conventionally. Others are heroes who had no faith at all in the conventional religion of their day, and would not be revered in any church but our own sometimes rather peculiar one. As we think about the people memorialized in our windows, and why they are standing there grouped as they are, we are reminded that they and we have all been through a lot, sometimes certainly feeling alone but joined in hope and in faith that our communities will someday be repaired and healed. In the future, there will continue to be those who continue to work, as they worked, for the good of all. Some are working, even heroically, for it now.

The central windows of the sanctuary memorialize our country’s founders, and, opposite, national leaders in time of wrenching change. William Penn occupies the center panel of the east central window, and opposite him, Abraham Lincoln. The west central window, with its three panels, is generally referred to as “The Presidents’ Window”, as Lincoln is flanked by Thomas Jefferson (south panel) and Woodrow Wilson (north).

The choice of Lincoln seems obvious, since other panels, notably the one dedicated to Theodore Parker, focus on the issues of freedom and justice eventually joined in Lincoln’s presidency. Jefferson’s presence is usually said, in our church literature, to be motivated by his role in establishing freedom of religion in his home state of Virginia, and little if anything is made of the window thus juxtaposing Lincoln with a slaveholder. In general, it was part of the way the church ornamentation was planned, that people of different times and places should be represented together, to show how their different achievements contribute to progress shared along one or another specific trajectory, for example, science (in the northwest window) or philosophy (in the southwest). Yet we cannot help wondering how freedom of religion in Virginia is to be celebrated if the religion people were free to believe in supported their simultaneous belief in the superiority of white men and their inherent right to own people who were not white. No one, after all, would suggest we memorialize freedom of religion for people who consider it their sacred duty to tear out the heart of their eldest son and cast it into a burning pyre.

We sometimes think that the “Jefferson problem” has only been noticed in recent years, but then we think “noticed by whom, exactly?”.  

Sarah Hemings’s descendants will have noticed long ago, and public notice is nearly as old as the republic. A hint of this may perhaps explain a peculiarity of the Jefferson window. Like other windows in our church, the diamond panes are occasionally interrupted by small round ones, mostly plain frosted glass. Only a few have any interior lead seams, and among them, there is  one in the  Jefferson window that has so many seams it seems hardly to hold together. These are not repairs, but belong to the original design.We do not know why W.H. Ritter, the architect, designed the window that way, but one may wonder if it was not a sign of the “Jefferson problem”, especially since we know that in the neighboring Lincoln window, the crack in the Stars and Stripes can only refer to the crack in the Union, while the essay named in Emerson’s window, “Compensation”, is the source of his famous statement: there is a crack in everything God has made. Isn’t there just.

Yet the most problematic of the three panes in the Presidents’ Window is the third, the northernmost, dedicated to Woodrow Wilson. It deserves a separate small place in our thoughts, so we will return to it, God willing, tomorrow.

… remembering where we came from …

In our service memorializing the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the long history of the generations who worked to make it a reality, we noticed that Unitarians and Universalists were sometimes working with allies in other movements and sometimes working at cross purposes. We also noticed how easy it is to narrow our focus, seeing most clearly the achievements that we identify ourselves with. But why? Maybe we should look at it from the other end of the telescope: is our UU identity so limited? Are we really heirs only to those New England Congregationalists we keep on (and on and on) talking about? Our own congregation has connections not only to Boston but also to Northumberland and Philadelphia, for example, and, good Pennsylvanians as we are, let us not forget that our congregation and the building in which we meet was shaped, literally, by a man, Mr Garvin, born into the group of Quakers known as Hicksites, often accused, and often rightly, of being unitarian in their beliefs. It was one of the things that got them in trouble, and their suspect theology and arguments about it led to divisions and weaknesses in American Quakerism. As we heard in Reverend Barbara’s sermon on Sunday, Susan B. Anthony was also from a Hicksite Quaker background, from the time when the Great Separation, as it came to be known, was just bubbling up and cracking her denomination wide open. And the Philadelphia Unitarian congregation was enriched by new Hicksite membership when the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting disowned the Hicksites there.

For Mr Garvin, Unitarian activism was in no way at odds with his Quaker advocacy for peace. He was born, after all, in a border area in the months before the Civil War started, and his family lived on both sides of the Mason Dixon Line. He talked about growing up without a father, but he also grew up mostly without his mother as well, and in a war zone, and he seems not to have left much of a record of how he remembered that. He did, however, revisit the people and places in Maryland where he had spent his childhood, and he restored what he could of the places, in memory of the people there. In 1933 a visitor studying the Quaker meeting houses of the area contacted Mr Garvin about his family’s former meeting house, and Mr. Garvin responded:

‘I am sorry I have not a copy of the history written by Belle McSparran on the occasion of the dedication of a smaller meeting house, which my uncle and I erected there in 1911. The old, log meeting house, which was built in 1826, had been unused for some years, and was beginning to fall apart, in fact, had about fallen down, and the graveyard was in a wretched condition. My grandparents, Thomas and Tobitha Garvin, are buried there, and so we had the place cleaned up and a fence put around. Then we decided it would be possible to put up a chapel there for the use of the neighborhood, of any denomination, or no denomination. This present chapel was dedicated June 9, 1912, and since that time, it has been much used for many purposes. A First Day School was conducted for several years and was largely attended, but that has passed away. There has been less demand for the chapel during the last four or five years than had existed previously.’

The letter is quoted from a manuscript notebook compiled by T.C. Matlack, which is also the source of the photograph of the Octoraro Meeting House. These materials are used with the kind permission of the Quaker and Special Collections of Haverford College Library.

So things pass away when the demand is less. Quakers often did not even mark the graves of their deceased, and the old meeting house, the Octoraro Meeting House as it was called, was never more than a small building used by a few families too far from the larger community to get to meetings there. The Meeting House fell into disuse, Mr Garvin rebuilt it, it fell into disuse again, and hardly anyone nearby remembered anything about it even within Mr Garvin’s lifetime.

And so our congregation derived much of its early strength from someone who had a superfluity of it to give, from a source we have little attended. When we identify ourselves as a UU congregation, we can be proud of the richness of all our sources, because our UU movement has been the place where so many and so diverse a range of people have chosen to build their shared home. And we can honor the memory of all our ancestors, as they have worked to honor the memory of those who went before them.

Octoraro Meeting House

Don’t hit the books! They’re the good guys! Or: Some thoughts on diversity in books and in sermons

Well, it’s been awhile, eh? UU churches are known to estivate, and your Borrower Bee has been estivating to beat the band. She’s been dropping by the library occasionally, putting up a few signs, sorting donations, and being glad to spend time in our nice, cool basement, with the books. In these troubling times, books set a good example. They come in all sizes, all ages, and every color of the rainbow, and they espouse different points of view; yet they sit together on the shelf, rubbing shoulders amicably enough, and thereby make up our library, a modest but useful contribution that none of them could make alone.

If only people could negotiate differences so easily! Our library, in fact, attests to how many different and often incompatible viewpoints have at one time or another concerned people in our congregation. Evident in a number of ways, diversity is especially noticeable in our collections that document some of the great spiritual paths that humanity has embarked on: early Christian thought (and a few shelves on the other Abrahamic religions), the history of the Amish, Buddhism (Zen and Tibetan), Taoism, Native American, atheism, humanism … As in every congregation, some parts of our UU background are widely represented in the congregation, others less so.

Of course we have a good selection of works by and about UU ministers and other distinguished leaders in our own tradition. It is especially rewarding, though, when we have a chance to encounter viewpoints we usually hear less about. Your Bee has no idea how we came to invite the guest who preached yesterday’s sermon, but she appreciated the opportunity to learn something about Islam from Dr Muqtedar Khan, a professor of political science and scholar of Islam, the religion he practices. Among other heartening aspects of his sermon, Dr Khan spoke of the connection between the words for “worship” and “service” in Arabic, a connection we also have in our English-language notion of a “worship service”. Dr Khan’s focus on serving humanity as a way of serving God, and his attention to the language of his texts, reminded me of a Biblical passage that we in our congregation may be more familiar with: Abraham’s response to three angels that he sees but doesn’t recognize as angels, right outside his tent (Genesis 18). We all remember that Abraham offers them hospitality. Less well remembered is something else. Before he sees the three newcomers, Abraham has already noticed that he is being visited by God himself — and with God right there, he hurries from his tent to take care of his other visitors. The Christian Bible at this point has Abraham now address the “gentlemen” (adonai), inviting them to stop for refreshment. In contrast, the Jewish tradition reads the text as Abraham’s turning to the Lord God (Adonai) to ask him to wait while he attends to the visitors’ needs. Both meanings are contained in the Hebrew text, but the English language insists that we take one way out or the other. For whatever reason, Jewish tradition favors asking God to wait. The Christian translation tradition seems more neutral, making God a kind of witness or divine authority whose presence sanctions the angelic mission. The Christian version of Abraham in no way asserts himself in relation to God, nor, in the Christian tradition, would he be expected to: for Christians of course God is specifically “the Father”. Perhaps the rich pictorial tradition of Christianity contributes to the substantiality of the connection between God and family hierarchy, while Judaism, like Islam, is more tentative about religious images. Our description of the Six Sources of our faith lists “Jewish and Christian teachings” as one source, a vestigial elision of two different religions into a single “Judeo-Christian tradition”.  Hearing a thoughtful sermon by a Muslim faith leader reminds us of the diversity of our heritage, and both smooths and broadens the path we choose to walk together, and the paths on which we can hope to meet our neighbors. It can also remind us that when we remember our stories, it’s a good idea to read the texts – and we have quite a few of them (notes your librarian) in our Behrens Library.

… and their use in our church life

Besides the slim volume on the Fellowship Movement, also of note among our new books is the current edition of a well-known book by John A. Buehrens, Universalists and Unitarians in America: A People’s History.

Behrens Library also has several copies of slightly earlier editions, and the book is highly recommended reading for the course on UU History and Heritage currently underway at UUCL. The course is taught by our developmental minister, Rev. Barbara Coeyman, with course meetings on Tuesday nights, from 7 to 9, at UUCL. The course is free but registration is required.

Among our newer acquisitions …

We don’t spend all our time shuffling old books around. Sometimes we add new ones! We have a surprising range of topics, but today I’d like to point out a couple of newish goodies that fit neatly into our core UU mission. They’re mostly, in fact, from either Skinner or Beacon, the UU publishing lines. Among the books that appear in the blog picture, one book  is in an area that isn’t directly connected to our own congregational history but highlights an interesting aspect of the history of UU-ism, namely the Fellowship movement. Fellowships have sometimes been formed by liberal religious groups too small or too isolated to become fully-fledged church congregations, and there was a moment in our history when forming fellowships was a very active way of supporting liberal religion. Even now many UU congregations are small and always have been, and some small congregations have no interest in getting bigger, even if it is hard to keep them going, or, in some cases, even if anyone who wants to locate them needs a really, really good map. The book we have just acquired on The Fellowship Movement discusses the movement in full and serious historical context, but my favorite bits are the stories about, literally, wandering country roads with a torch trying to find some of our more elusive co-religionists. There is also some pretty wry commentary on UU congregations too small to support a minister, and on the fact that some of them think they would rather not have a minister, thank you very much, as well as colorful  descriptions of why some ministers probably wouldn’t want them either.  And this, of course, is just the American story. One of my favorite readings in the sober British Unitarian press of the early 20th century discusses the Unitarian Religious Revival. The point of the article seems to have been to raise the question of whether there was one and whether one was wanted. The answer seems to have been ‘no’, on both counts. But being British, of course, the discussion was very polite and one was so glad the question had been raised. The issues of congregational size and the formation of new congregations continue to be important, of course, and they have direct connection to current questions of the covenantal relationships that exist among congregations and congregational polity. For the history of those issues in American UU-ism, you can check out the Minns lectures by Alice Blair Wesley.