Category: social categories and personal identity

… 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

How Does It Feel … ?

The borrower bee doesn’t always follow the news, but today she turned on the radio to hear about immigration chaos in Texas, followed by news of someone tweeting about it, followed by … and oddly enough it reminded her of the first chapter of a book in our own Behrens library, called How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?, by Moustafa Bayoumi. The title is taken from W.E.B. du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk, and racism directed against black people in the United States is a recurrent theme in the book, but a minor one. Mostly the book presents what its subtitle says: Being Young and Arab in America. It is an expansive book, but engaging, well-researched, well written and well-constructed. We have the book in our library because the author gave a lecture at UUCL (March 2018), but the book was first published in 2008. It won several prizes then and our edition is a later edition that offers additional materials, including questions for discussion.  What has struck me, to my regret, is how well the book continues to speak to current events and provide useful background. Each chapter presents the story of one person, and the stories are arranged in a way that, among other things, starts at what you might think of as the beginning, namely with an experience of an immigrant family’s detention. They were not, however, detained as they were entering  the United States, but instead after  they had been living here for years and without having done anything whatever that ought to have led to their detention, except for being Arab in Brooklyn in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The chapter (called “Rasha”, for its heroine) is helpful for us today, in at least two ways. First, Bayoumi provides historical background and statistics about immigration detention in the United States. Although September 11 provided special impetus, the system, with much of its physical manifestation and its financial incentives for abuse, had been in place long before. And, second, thanks to his ability to transform narrative into art, Bayoumi shows what this experience meant for the young woman whose life he is writing about. Since the issue of detaining entire families in immigration facilities (or other facilities into which they are off-loaded) is sometimes treated as new, this opening chapter in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? is a good introduction for those of us who are fortunate enough not to have needed to think about it deeply before. Highly recommended.


… and we’ve got some new ones, too.

Even an expansive church library will still be different from a general public library: we offer resources for our ministries and also serve as a repository of materials that can remind us of our history. That doesn’t mean all our books will be about religion or how we practice our faith. There is also space on our shelves and in our hearts for writing that looks at the foundations of our faith and of our identity. Faith, identity, and the tension between individuality and social connection are all pretty fraught these days, and sometimes we get tired and confused and don’t ever want to hear those words again. And that’s a good time to pick up the latest of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s books on ethics, social categories, and identity. Until recently a philosophy professor, Appiah is known both for his approachable style (he writes a popular newspaper column “The Ethicist”, dealing with readers’ daily-life dilemmas) and for his nuanced response to what may seem like cut-and-dried situations. He views religion not only or even mainly as a matter of belief but also as shared behavior: what people do together as their shared spiritual practice — an approach well known among anthropologists but in the world of the Christian faithful, not so much. Since Appiah’s approach to religion chimes so well with our own UU faith, readers at UUCL can take pleasure in Appiah’s nuanced exposition as he lays out his evidence for how world religions actually work.

In addition to the one on religion, other chapters in The Lies That Bind discuss race, class, country, and culture. Perhaps most important, the book will surely interest anyone concerned about how societies try to make sense of sexual and gender complexities. The first chapter takes up sexuality as the leading example of how categorizing people works, and how it fails, while later chapters offer abundant discussion of the rich varieties of human sex and gender expression. One of the appealing aspects of Appiah’s writing is that, while appealing to a vast range of information about many different world cultures and subcultures, he often starts from the complexities of his own situation: he is Ghanaian but has never held Ghanaian citizenship, he is both English and American, the pairing of his British accent with his milk-chocolate complexion startles taxicab drivers in the United States, and he is gay and married. His parents’ marriage created a family scandal not because it was biracial but because the bride was Anglican and her bridegroom Methodist. He writes with verve and good cheer, no small thing in a time when everybody seems to be angry with everyone else and people often rightly worry about their place in society if they don’t fit in the suffocating categories their little worlds assign. Read this book! You’ll feel better!