… 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

Our Southwest Corner: Shadows, The Philosophers’ Window, and Mr Garvin’s View

One of the appealing things about our church is that it is small enough for newcomers to get to know people. It also means, unfortunately, that when our community loses people, we probably feel our loss even more. And in recent months, we have had our share. Which may make it a good moment to turn to one of our sanctuary windows, the one I think of as our “sad window”.

The southwest corner of the sanctuary isn’t really sad; it has both the organ and the piano, which make quite a joyful noise most of the time (I can’t quite remember why we were all dancing in the aisle before the service started a couple of weeks ago, but it clearly had something to do with Diane at the piano), — but still, it has the least sunlight of anywhere in the sanctuary, and it’s the home of the Philosophers’ Window, which, starting off with Socrates, isn’t all that jolly.

A Little Owl (Socrates’ window)





Philosophers’ Window: Socrates, Emerson, Milton

That corner of the church has other solemn associations. The second pew from the front on that side is the spot Mr. Garvin always occupied, and he’s still nearby: his ashes are in the west wall between the south and central windows. From his place in the pew he would have seen, above the wooden covering of the organ pipes, a wooden low-relief sculpture showing a small family group, and below it, the Psalm inscription: He setteth the solitary in families. The inscription must have been important for Mr. Garvin. The biographical sketches of him that appeared, with his co-operation, during his lifetime mention his growing up without his father. Actually, the youngster grew up mostly without his mother, too, since he lived on an aunt and uncle’s farm, while his mother moved away when she re-married. She had been widowed at the age of only seventeen, before her son was even born. Since that was right before the Civil War broke out, the Garvins’ situation was far from unique: it created a whole generation of widows and orphans. So Mr Garvin was quite familiar with what it meant, setting the solitary in families.

Where have we been?

Our congregation has been very busy transitioning, focusing on where we are headed in the twenty-first century. As we think about our future, your Borrower Bee has been wondering about how the future UUCL might be able to make use of our collective past. One of the most striking realities of our congregation is its physical home, a beautiful space purpose-built, for its then Unitarian congregation,  by a respected local architect (with family connections to our church?) and planned, and adorned, thanks especially to the financial and spiritual investments of one devoted leader, Milton T. Garvin. Our woodwork was executed by a woodcarver who was also an actor in the Oberammergau Passion play. Our wooden pulpit was commissioned by the Shippen family (of Lancaster, Philadelphia, and Meadville), one of whose members, Dr Eugene Rodman Shippen, was our minister;  in later years it was embellished with carvings representing, either as statuary or by name,  renowned faith leaders who literally or figuratively spoke from other pulpits. They led the ministries of congregations not only within the Unitarian traditions of America and Europe but also from other world religions: Mohammed, the Buddha, and Zoroaster make the list of names, and the figures include not only William Ellery Channing but also James Martineau, Theophilus Lindsey, and Michael Servetus. The minister’s chair is adorned with a likeness of William Tyndale, who gave the world its first English-language Bible, spoke out against abuses, and was martyred because of it. And, of course, our stained glass windows, representing famous men and, in the women’s parlor, famous women, whose actions and attitudes we take as exemplars today. And looking at all this, we may or may not think of the attitudes that made it possible to reconcile all these diverse contributions with one another – or of the attitudes that can make it possible to reconcile ourselves with the different kinds of faith that they represent, both in themselves and as embodiments of the Unitarian religion that was embraced by the people who placed these works of religious art where they now stand.

There is, after all, hardly a figure among all those depicted in our windows that we now think of the same way as the congregation did in the 1920s, when the windows were installed.  

  • Thomas Jefferson, who promoted religious freedom in his home state of Virginia – and owned, used, and abused human beings.
  • Christopher Columbus – who discovered a World New for Europeans, but well enough known to the people then living here, and who paid for his venture far more dearly than the government of Spain ever did.
  • Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations and the Balfour Declaration, which would establish Jews in Palestine, and not, he hoped, in America.

Our church, it turns out, can be viewed as a veritable museum of racial prejudice and imperial expansionism. It is helpful to know that someone can perceive our church like that even if we realize how distant that perception is from the intent of the people who created the windows or made them ours, a part of our congregational identity.  Thinking about that may turn us to our church covenant, with our agreement that we will  trust “good intentions”. In our UU religious world, intentions matter.

If we agree to trust the good intentions of one another in the congregation today, how much more should we trust the good intentions of those who gave us the church in which we gather, and how much more fully must we understand the limitations of our own vision, surely no less imperfect? The lessons we can learn from our historic church building include also the lesson that our history can also be our teacher, helping us recognize the dignity and worth of those who went before and hoping that those around us now and those who come after will view us with similar tolerance.

Shippen Pulpit, Martineau and Servetus

Shippen Pulpit: James Martineau and Michael Servetus