“On Poverty” – A Sermon for the Sunday after Thanksgiving

By The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger

First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Sunday, November 25, 2012

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we gather to examine poverty.  It is a difficult topic, fraught with shame and blame.  I remember during the 1950s when my father’s union was on strike our family received a big box of groceries to tide us over and my mother refused to go to the door to get it.  When I was in college, my young husband and I went on food stamps, and we tried to time our shopping when no one we knew would be at the store.  Recently when I attended the ground breaking for the new Unity for the Homeless building on Louisiana Avenue, several homeless people spoke in favor of the project; one man spoke almost apologetically, as though asking forgiveness for being homeless.

Unlike most injuries and illnesses (with the exception , poverty is a condition for which both those in it and those outside of it assess blame.  It is shameful to be poor for those who are, and it is common for those who are not to blame those who are.

And yet, there are millions of people in our country who are poor through no fault of their own.  So many elderly struggle to get by, so many people who are disabled in some way live in desperate circumstances, and so many little children are poor – here in our city, the highest concentration of the poor are children under the age of 12.  Is it their fault?  Should we blame them?

Some people are poor because it is necessary that they be so.  We live in an economic system that virtually requires some portion of the population to be poor.  If there were no poor people, then who would harvest crops, clean houses and hotel rooms, mow lawns, empty bedpans in nursing homes, and collect garbage?  Saudi Arabia, awash in petroleum wealth, actually imports poor people from Indonesia and the Philippines to do the kinds of work no Saudi will do – and to take the abuse that no Saudi would take.

Theologian Walter Brueggerman terms systems that feature great disparities of entitlement and poverty “Pharoah economies” and he says prophetically, “Wherever you live, it is probably Egypt.”  He points out that just as in ancient temples there was a courtyard for the common folk; a special inside area for the initiates; and then a holy of holies open only to the priests and the rulers -- so today are airline seats and healthcare apportioned the same way, in a 3-tier arrangement that favors a few, creates a small in-crowd, and leaves everyone else out in the cold.

The Pharoah economy is characterized by 3 elements, which all seem normal and right to those who benefit from it: accumulation of wealth; amassing of political, social, and military power; and the control of intelligence.  In such a society – and stop me if this sounds familiar – the rich get richer, hold more and more power, and control secret knowledge unavailable to the many.  It is a triad that spells poverty, disease and death to the 99%, while it ensures entitlement and privilege to the elite.

If we can free ourselves from the narcotic of materialism enough to dream, we can imagine a different world, a world organized on principles of equality and justice, a world without fabulous wealth and also without dire poverty.  As opposed to the Pharoah triad of wealth, power, and wisdom, that Walter Brueggerman calls “triad of death,” there could be, maybe ought to be a triad of justice, right relations, and loving-kindness, a triad of solidarity and equity, a triad of life.

Our meditation on poverty this morning might have been familiar to some of us here at some point in our lives; I know I recognize parts of it.  So many people live a daily struggle to make ends meet, to juggle this dire need and against that equally dire need, to fight against competing goods – pay the credit card bill or pay the car registration?  Gamble without health insurance or keep your child from all extracurricular activities that cost money?  Pay higher rent to live in a nicer neighborhood or pay lower rent and chance your child being in a bad environment?  None of these are easy choices, and each has its drawbacks.

It was academic for us this morning, to sit in meditation and make our imaginary decisions, but it is not a game to the nearly one-third of the citizens of New Orleans, over 74,000 men, women, and children, who live below the poverty line.  Who are they to us, these folks who are poor, who live in shabby neighborhoods with no grocery stores, in apartments and houses that the landlords won’t maintain, who deal with crime and gangs, whose children attend the worst schools in the city, and who receive the worst healthcare.  Who are they to us?

They are not the Enemy and not the Other and not Strangers; they are our sisters and brothers, our fellow New Orleanians.  They share our geography, our culture, our humanity.  As we are “our brother’s keeper,” they call us to responsibility and accountability.  The presence of so much poverty in the city we love reminds us of the necessity of the triad of life – justice, right relations, and compassion.
 

It is possible to dream of a world based on such principles, but is it practical?  Is it even fair to preach about eliminating poverty to a small congregation, one with its own deep financial challenges?  Isn’t it beyond even the larger numbers of 3 combined churches of the Greater New Orleans UU cluster?

Here is what I think – the seeming impossibility of the right thing to do is no reason not to do it.  If a thing is right, it is right even if it is difficult or impossible. 

We are a covenanted community – we have made certain promises to each other, some explicit and some implicit, about how we will be in the world, towards each other and towards all other human beings.  Basically what we have promised or covenanted is the same as the triad of life – justice, right relations, and loving-kindness.  This is what we owe each other and what we owe to all our fellow citizens.

Even in our present numbers and state of finances, there are things we can do, things we ought to do.  We can stand with our community partner organizations made up of poor folks and those who work with poor folks.  We can demand justice for wage theft, and press our city and state government to make real penalties for those who cheat their workers.  We can monitor and support our public schools, and volunteer to read to kindergarteners and help tutor young students in need.  We can work with Unity to end homelessness in New Orleans; we can lobby for more affordable housing units to replace the public housing that was demolished.

Yes, we are a small church, and yes, we are not a wealthy church.  But we have a certain amount of influence and power, if we choose to use it.  There are things we can do, things we can devise, to improve the lives of our sisters and brothers in New Orleans. 

I am struck by what Albert Ruesga, of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, said in an interview with the Times-Picayune, that “history will not absolve us” if we allow post-Katrina New Orleans to be filled with the same inequities and injustices that existed before the Storm.  I suppose in a more orthodox church it might be said that God will not absolve us.  For Unitarian Universalists, I hope it’s enough to say that our consciences will not absolve us.

It may well be true, as Jesus is supposed to have said, that the poor will always be with us.  But that their circumstances should be so dire, so desperate, so painful and so difficult – that, I think, does not have to be.  On the Sunday after our national holiday of satiation, of napping with full stomachs, and of dining for days on delicious leftovers, let us resolve to dedicate ourselves to being allies of the poor in our city, to doing what we can to alleviate and improve the situation of our sisters and brothers struggling with poverty.  May this be so!  AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

 

SOME STATISTICS ON POVERTY IN NOLA

The Federal Poverty Income Level for 2012 for an individual is $11, 170; for a couple it’s $15,130.  For a family of three, it is $19,000, and for a family of four, it’s $23,050.  For each additional person in a family unit, add just under $4,000.

Based on 2010 Census information, 31.5% of New Orleans resident live on annual income below the federal poverty level, while only 22.7% of the residents of the state do.  11.6% of New Orleans residents have annual incomes below 50% of the federal poverty level, while only 7.2% of all Louisiana residents do.

52% of the male residents of New Orleans living below the poverty level are aged 5.  60.8% of the female residents of New Orleans living below the poverty level are aged 15 years.  Of those New Orleans residents living below the poverty level 61,868 are African-American and 12,357 are white.  The highest concentrations of poor New Orleanians are children under the age of 12:  25.9% are under 5; 26.4% are 5 years old; and 24.4% are aged 6-11 years.

The demolition of many of the city’s housing projects post-Katrina were supposed to lead to less concentration of poor residents in particular neighborhoods, but in a report published in March 2012, it was found that nearly 4 out of 10 children in New Orleans live in high-poverty neighborhoods. 

Researchers believe that concentrated poverty isolates poor residents from opportunity and services, leading to higher crime rates, joblessness, failing schools and ill health. Brookings Institution analysts call this a "double burden": Families with little money find their struggles exacerbated when they live in areas of concentrated poverty.

37% of all New Orleans households would not be able to survive for more than 3 months if their main source of income were disrupted.  Many would not last 3 months.  Researchers say it would take a minimum of $5,000 for a family of 3 to cover basic needs for 3 months.

Albert Ruesga, president and chief executive of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, said the data on local poverty are a "call to action" for foundations, nonprofits, churches, local governments, employers, and banks to find solutions on how to improve the financial security of local residents.  Ruesga said,

"History will not absolve us if we create in post-Katrina New Orleans the same disparities that existed before." 

Revisiting The Port Huron Statement at 50

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger

First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Sunday, August 12, 2012

In a funny scene in an even funnier movie, “The Big Lebowski,” the iconic “Dude,” portrayed by Jeff Bridges, tries to impress a woman by claiming to have been one of the authors of “the original Port Huron statement” and disavows any connection to what he disparagingly calls  “the compromised 2^nd draft.”  For millions of people, this is all they know of the Port Huron Statement, which marked its 50^th anniversary in June.  But I think we should remember the Port Huron Statement, remember that it was brave and prophetic and visionary, remember that despite its relative obscurity to the general public, it had a far-reaching effect on justice movements that followed it.  Learning the story can be an object lesson in how being effective in the long term can mean failing in the short term – something I believe that we religious liberals need to be reminded of from time to time.

It is difficult to look back now on the summer of 1962.  It was an almost impossibly innocent time, very different from today.  There was almost no campus unrest.  The only public protests were coming from disenfranchised African-Americans in the South and these were not yet highly publicized.  There had not been a political assassination of a national figure in this country since the shooting death of Huey Long in Louisiana in 1935.  The Cold War was raging, and many people feared nuclear Armageddon was imminent.  A proxy war was going on in a place called Vietnam, where American troop levels had recently tripled, but the war had not yet escalated, and American casualties had yet to become an issue.  There was no second-wave feminism, no American Indian movement, and no environmental movement (indeed, as shown on an episode of Mad Men, at this time many families routinely abandoned their trash at picnic sites).  Gay, lesbian, and transgender folks were deeply in the closet.  For the most part, people, especially white people, felt they could trust their government.  Most of it sounds almost comically foreign to today’s world.

And into this time of relative comfort, relative prosperity, and relative apathy, came a group of fewer than 100 university students, most of them white and middle class, for a convention at a run-down camp outside of Detroit owned by the AFL-CIO.  The group had already undergone an evolution:  begun as the Student League for Industrial Democracy back in 1905, it had been for generations the university arm of the organized labor movement.  In 1960, deciding that the name and the overt labor connection were not conducive to recruiting new members, a group at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor changed the name to Students for a Democratic Society, SDS for short.  A convention was called for June 1962 in Port Huron, Michigan, and students all over the country were invited.

To prime the pump, so to speak, a draft statement was written before the convention by recent graduate and fledgling journalist (later SDS president) Tom Hayden.  He worked on it from March until the convention began on June 11, citing diverse secular and religious philosophers, including Pope John XXIII (hard to imagine any so-called radical group today quoting a Catholic pope!), and drawing on the concept of “participatory democracy” espoused by his philosophy professor at Michigan, Arnold Kaufman.  This draft – hotly debated, edited, and revised – became what was released on the convention’s last day.  The copy I downloaded from the Internet runs to 40 pages and over 25,000 words.  

It is an interesting and idealistic, if dated, document.  In it, SDS criticizes big business AND organized labor; economic inequality and lack of jobs AND the arms race (for which it faults Russia and the United States equally); the Republican Party AND the Democratic Party.  It attacks racial discrimination and the idea that America is always virtuous.  It calls for increased worker involvement in decisions about their workplaces, and for an enlarged public sector with more protections for those at the bottom of society.  It promotes participatory democracy, with real participation by real people, as a solution to most of what it critiques about American society.

Presciently, the Port Huron Statement decries single-issue politics, and declares that all the problems it cites – racism, militarism, classism, colonialism, ethnocentrism, lack of jobs, corruption in big-city politics, urban blight, political apathy, and so on – are interrelated, and must be fought together.  This view of political and moral challenges being all-of-a-piece was definitely well ahead of its time and presaged the UU principle of the interconnected web by several years.

The statement was unabashedly spiritual in its focus, citing a “disillusion” in American values when faced with the hypocrisy of the arms race and the racial situation, and a “decline of hope” in the country, saying that to be idealistic was considered “deluded.” The authors declare the country to be in “stalemate” and its people “apathetic and manipulated,” living in a pervasive climate of fear.  They stared down materialism, and ringingly declared (in the original exclusive language):

Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today.  These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.

And this in a time when there weren‘t nearly the over-whelming amount and ubiquity of “gadgets” in society as there are today.  (Indeed, one even wonders exactly what gadgets the young adults of 1962 could have been so concerned about.)

A page earlier, the authors wrote movingly, with near-religious fervor (again in the exclusive language of its time), “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.”  A beautiful statement of faith in humanity, completely unscientific and unprovable and thus clearly in the realm of spirituality.

The Port Huron Statement went further and called for the arms race to be supplanted by a “peace race,” and declared that the country’s “principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced…by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation” – propositions which they admitted would be seen by “many” as “juvenile hallucination.”  But this also presaged another principle of Unitarian Universalism, that of “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”

The statement was ahead of its time in other important ways as well, decrying the plight of America’s great cities (which hadn’t even deteriorated in 1962 to the extent they have today), lack of mental health facilities and adequate pub-lic hospitals (ditto), prisons as “enforcers of misery,” the de-cline of American public education (this at a time that many today consider a “golden age” of public schools), “institutions and practices that stifle dissent,” and agricultural policies based on scarcity.  Who among us here today would argue with any of these points?  And who doesn’t feel a certain frisson of disappointment that the points and the suggestions made by the idealistic young people in the Port Huron Statement were not more widely shared and implemented?

Our Children’s Story this morning, adapted from one in “Tales for Little Rebels,” was first published in the early part of the 20^th century, 1912 to be exact.  It speaks of someone imprisoned behind walls, a place once comforting and nurturing, but growing to consciousness of confinement and constriction, and finally having to break out of quietness and apathy to break down the walls.  The young people of Students for a Democratic Society also came to consciousness of confinement and constriction, in a time of quietness and apathy, and decided that they too had to break down the walls.

It is not the place of this sermon to defend what happened later inside the SDS, nor to offer an apology for any actions taken in later years by disaffected former members.  My purpose was to lift up the content of the Port Huron Statement (to remember what it really said, and not what folks may think it said), and to salute the authors and signers for their prescient assessment of important political and moral issues, and their heart-felt endorsement of humanity with peace, equality, justice, freedom, and participatory democracy for all.  They were, at least for a time, on the side of the angels.  Their concerns are our concerns (or ought to be); their commitment to true democratic principles is our commitment; their religious faith in the potential of every human person is also ours. 

If I have piqued your interest, and stimulated you to read the statement in full, and/or to watch the SDS segment of the series on the 60s on the PBS website, or if this sermon just causes you to rethink your opinions in some way, then I will feel I have accomplished some small thing.  And if this sermon inspires you to get involved in the participatory democracy movements and justice issues of our time, so much the better.

So dedicated were these brave young prophets from Port Huron, now in their 70s, to collective action and non-hierarchical relations that we know very few of their names.  But we can still send out our grateful thanks for their ideas, their idealism, their dedication, and their spiritual grounding.  Whether consciously or not, the movements that followed them owe them no little debt, including the Occupy movement of today.

Let us rededicate ourselves, as the Port Huron Statement says, to “abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.”  May this be so!  AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

MY HYPHENATED THEOLOGY – AND MAYBE YOURS TOO

A Sermon for New Member Sunday

By The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger

First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Recently a First Churcher asked about my personal theology, and I realized that it was not a topic that we as a congregation have done much talking about.  Bringing in a Consulting Minister after a major disaster is not a situation that allows for a lot of congregational choice, and when that minister is a former member of the congregation, there may be a certain amount of “been there, done that” attitude.  But the minister's theology is a subject of much discussion when a congregation searches for a settled minister, and there’s usually a lot of questioning of the potential new minister about what that minister believes.  When I candidated for the ministries in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, there was a lot of lively conversation about my compound theology, and in the course of those exchanges, those congregations and I learned a lot about each other.  And over my years of being a UU, I’ve discovered that I am not alone in having a spirituality that is, as they say on Facebook, “complicated.”

Today’s service of welcoming new members is the perfect time for sharing about what I believe and what is my spiritual practice (or what ARE my spiritual practiceS), because one thing I’ve learned in nearly 20 years of UU ministry is that I am not alone in crafting together my own individual theology.  Most contemporary UUs have put together more than one strand of our Living Tradition as their personal brand of spirituality, and it’s good for our newest members to hear about this practice and begin to incorporate this understanding into their way of being Unitarian Universalist.

What’s really interesting to me is that if you go online to look up the topic, you discover that other religious denominations also speak of “hyphenated theology,” but they mean something different than what I’m talking about here.  When other faiths say “hyphenated theology,” they are usually referring to cultural or ethnic identity coupled with Christianity, such as, African-American-Christian or Korean-Christian, or they mean putting together two different Christian denominations, such as a Methodist-Lutheran or a Presbyterian-Baptist.

When I or another UU says "hyphenated theology" we mean something completely different.  For example, take me.  Ask me about my theology, and I'll answer, "I'm a Buddhist-Christian-Pagan- Humanist." I usually add, "not always in that order."  One of the main reasons I'm a UU -- and a UU minister -- is that there is no other faith that would allow me to be all of who I am.  I hope that at least portions of my religious journey resonate with yours.

I was raised Roman Catholic, but not completely.  By that I mean, I was baptized a Catholic, was sent to parochial school, and took the sacraments, but it was not our family faith.  For various reasons, our parents did not attend church with us, and since neither my mother nor my father were knowledgable about Catholicism, they could not answer any questions or help us to deepen our practice.  I learned about Jesus and Catholic doctrine in school, and while I liked and admired Jesus And his stories, I was always iffy about points of Catholic teaching.  I couldn't make myself believe in hell, and I certainly couldn't believe that good people of non-Christian religions were all going there.  (I was a Universalist before I knew there was a word for it.). It didn't help matters that I felt drawn to the priesthood -- a fact I learned quite early to keep to myself.  As soon as I was given the choice, I stopped stopped attending Mass.  I experimented for a while with the short-lived Catholic community movement, where I had my first experiences with designing liturgy and preaching a homily -- but in the end I felt the Catholic Church had rejected me.

After that I turned to what you might call the religion of my father:  a compassionate, engaged, activist humanism.  My father once explained to me how he had first gotten involved in organized labor and civil rights by saying, "I couldn't stand how they treated people," which may be as good and succinct way to describe humanism as there is.  Humanism is the honoring of what is human, our reason, our intelligence, our instincts, our emotions.  Humanism is caring for other people; it is the very life expression of being humane.  For my father as for many other humanists of his generation, humanism was not merely a rejection of conventional religion and orthodox doctrine, it was also a call to action wherever there might be injustice.  My father's humanism drew him to work for justice for workers and for people of color; I added to that the great justice issues of my time, the Viet Nam war, feminism and equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersexed people.  I got involved in anti-war protests, the Equal Rights Amendment, Dutch Morial's campaign to become the first black mayor of New Orleans, against nuclear power, and healthcare accessibility issues for people of color. 

I did not think I needed religion -- justice was my theology, and the people engaged with me in all this good work were my community, my congregation.  If I had any lingering yearnings for the way I sometimes felt during prayer or in the Mass, I kept that a secret even to myself.  There were times in my work for justice when I felt a wave of transporting, transcendent emotion -- like on the night Dutch was elected -- but on the whole I thought I was doing just fine without religion.

During this period I married and had a child.  It's funny now to look back and see how I unknowingly turned pregnancy into a spiritual practice.  I who never execised went regularly to fitness classes for expectant moms; I who never cared what I ate went on a special high-protein good-for-the-baby diet.  From my healthcare activism, I knew too much about what could go wrong with childbirth in a hospital, and so I found and worked with a midwife to do a home birth, complete with birthing classes.  Without knowing I was doing so, I entered into a readiness for feminist spirituality, with its honoring of the physical functions and capabilities of women's bodies, its treatment of birth and nursing as sacraments, its cloistered precincts dominated by women.  When my son Stephen was born, I felt powerfully connected through time and space to all women who had ever given birth, and to a nameless and faceless Goddess who also gave birth and nurtured.

It was having the baby that brought me to Unitarian Universalism.  By whatever conventional reasoning, we thought the baby needed a church -- needed some kind of religious education to help give our child answers to Life's big questions (hopefully answers that the baby's father and I wouldn't gag at).  After a very short search, we ended up one summer Sunday in this congregation, in the building at 1800 Jefferson.  And here I found the religion I thought I had made up in my head.  I was so relieved, and so sorry I hadn't found this faith earlier, I wept.

So here I was, with my activist humanism, my New Orleans Catholic background, and my nascent yearnings toward feminist theology.  If you believe in coincidence, you won't be surprised to hear that soon after I became a UU, in the early 1980s, the UUA published the adult curricula "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven" and through taking that course I finally learned of the pagan origins of Catholic rituals I missed, and heard the stories of the great Mother Goddesses who had been worshiped before the advent of Christianity. The ground was prepared and the seeds took root, and I became an enthusiastic pagan, helping to found this congregation's first pagan group, and joining the Covenant of UU Pagans, the denominational gathering of UUs around the world, where over time I have served in several leadership roles.  I soon incorporated into my new pagan practice the customs of folk Voodoo, many of which had been familiar to me since childhood, such as devotional visits to the tomb of Marie LaVeau (who in her day had been both Voodoo high priestess and a devout Catholic) and making gris-gris.  (I have never been trained or joined a Voodoo group, but my research and practice on my own have been important to me.)

But becoming a pagan did not make me any less a humanist -- being non-literal about religion, caring for people, and being active in justice work and politics were all still very important to me.  I guess it helped that, like my father, I had never been an "anti-god" humanist.  I remember one time my father giving money to my sister who going to  St. Louis Cathedral, telling her to light candles for his parents and siblings who had died.  My sister said incredulously, "But Daddy, you don't believe in all that stuff!" and him replying quietly, "No, but they did." I learned from him to respect the beliefs of others, even when I didn't share those beliefs.

So I guess you might say I was a UU Humanist-Pagan when I attended my first UUA General Assembly in the mid-1980s, and got unexpectedly blown away by a worship service led by two UU Christian ministers.  I didn't even know there was such a thing as a UU Christian, let alone a UU Christian minister!  I was amazed at the different, liberal, non-literal way they interpreted familiar stories from the Bible, and it felt wonderful to be hearing again about good ol' Jesus, but without the oppression of so much forced doctrine.  I learned that liberal Christians don't have to believe Jesus was God, and that was SO incredibly freeing.  At that GA, I participated in communion for the first time since Dutch Morial's funeral, and I felt connected to all the people throughout two millennia who had shared that riual meal and remembered Jesus.  Once again in a UU worship service, I cried.  I joined the UU Christian Fellowship, and served that organization in several leadership roles. I guess I had become a UU Humanist-Pagan-Christian.

By the late 1980s, I had stopped trying to forget that I had once aspired to the priesthood, and followed my call to ministry into seminary -- which in my case was the Loyola University Institute for Ministry.  In seminary, I met the Jesuit priest who was only half jokingly called "Zen Ben Wren" and learned about Buddhism and meditation practice and the conscious effort to "be here now." For me, with my near-frantic planning and looking ahead and anxieties about what might or might not happen in the near and far future, Buddhism was a great gift.  I practiced mindfulness while riding the streetcar, while washing dishes, while walking to pick up my son at school.  In a way that might sound strange to you but not to me, I found that Buddhism deepened my pagan and Christian spiritualities.

And so over the course of time I became what I am today and what only a Unitarian Universalist can be:  my own personal spiritual and theological blend of Christian-Pagan-Humanist-Buddhist, not always in that order.  I pray, sometimes to God and sometimes to Goddess; I meditate and practice mindfulness; I use the Voodoo tarot given to me as an ordination gift for guidance and divination (and sometimes for fun); I take communion with UUs whenever I can; I visit Marie LaVeau's tomb and ask for help (and while I'm there, I throw in a request to guide the city to her next-door neighbor, Dutch Morial). 

Sure, there are times when I am more one theology than the others, but there are never times when I feel ONLY one. And there has never been a time when I felt I would better fit in some other church or religion.  After all, who would take me?

On this New Member Sunday, I want to challenge all of you:  What's YOUR hyphenate?  How has your life experience conjugated your spirituality?  Are you a Mystical Humanist?  A Buddhist-Christian or a Zen Atheist?  A Jewish-Pagan?  A Voodoo UU?  Don't be fooled into thinking, as some other religions teach, that in order to be UU you have to give up whatever you loved from your religious journey.  As religious liberals, we have both the freedom and the responsibility to "build our own theology" out of the lumber of our lives and experiences and learnings.  While it may be a little more challenging than the faiths that tell what you have to believe in order to belong, it sure is a lot more interesting, and sometimes, fun. To our newest members, I say, We are glad that you've joined us on this quest.  May we honor each other's journeys, and learn from them.  So might this be!  AMEN -- ASHé -- SHALOM -- SALAAM -- NAMASTE -- BLESSED BE!

Easter Sunday 2012

READING BEFORE SERMON, EASTER SUNDAY 2012
taken from an essay by the late Rev. Suzanne Meyer, from when she was serving First UU Church, New Orleans

Lover of the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

This Easter I encourage you to practice resurrection. Note, I did not say, “believe in resurrection,” I said practice it! For the poet Wendell Berry, practicing resurrection doesn't refer to a metaphysical act or a theological proposition. For Berry, the art and science of resurrection is found in those countless disciplined acts of resistance to all of the forces in modern life that dehumanize, oppress, and reduce precious individuals to robots. Don’t let your mind be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer -- wage a guerilla campaign on behalf of love, justice, and joy. Practice resurrection!

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit, they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.

In the springtime, in the greening time, as life is renewed, we must renew our opposition to all the forces that crush the spirit, erode the soul, stifle freedom. We must place our hope in the things that endure. For this is eternal life. Berry says: “Invest in the millennium -- plant sequoias.” In what he calls his “Manifesto,” Berry encourages us to

Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.

Practicing resurrection means expanding the sense of self outward from the rather arbitrary borders of our own skins, becoming so large and expansive that death no longer has any dominion. Buddhist Joanna Macy writes: “The way we define and delimit the self is arbitrary.”

Berry shares Macy’s expanded sense of the self. His theology is juicy, erotic, rebellious, some would say mad. He is a heretic because he refuses to believe that resurrection was a one time only, one-person only event. We are the living dead buried under all of the flotsam and jetsam of modern living, seduced by the false promises of secular materialism. We are cut off from the earth, the soil, the humus, the natural cycles of life and death. Life is an innately spiritual experience; and we have lost touch with that. Much of Western religion has been necrophilic -- death loving, world renouncing. But we have it within ourselves to rise, to become biophilic -- life loving, world embracing. Resist! Refuse! Recycle! Resurrection happens! So practice resurrection. So ends the reading.

“Coming Back from the Dead” A Homily for Easter
by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, April 8, 2012

There is a rather famous Easter story that is supposed to have occurred in a New England Universalist church some 60-odd years ago. One Easter Sunday, the choir was processing down the center aisle, singing an old Universalist hymn entitled, “Up From the Grave He Rose.” There was a hot air register in the middle of the aisle and the last soprano got her high heel caught in the grating. She kept on singing, stepped out of her shoe, and kept on walking. The man behind her, thinking he was doing her a favor, picked up the shoe -- and the whole grate came with it.

Nobody missed a beat. The man walked on with the shoe and the grate in his hand, and, still in tune and still in step, the man right behind him fell into the open register and dropped from sight. As the choir sang the final “Allelulia! He arose!” the congregation was startled -- to say the least -- when a shout came from the hole in the floor: “You'd better all be out of the way, because I'm coming up!”

I’m told that the man emerged from the netherworld of the crawl space, as the choir burst into the second Easter hymn, and the whole congregation cheered. Resurrection took place in a Universalist church that Easter, and everyone shared in it.

One of the biggest differences between Unitarian Universalists and our sisters and brothers of more traditional faiths, as Suzanne Meyer points out, is that most of them believe that resurrection was a one-time-only event for one-person-only, with the rest of us promised resurrection only after we die and only if we're good enough, while we religious liberals realize how often such events as rebirth and resurrection occur in each and every one of our lives. We all share in them.

The story of Jesus is not the earliest one we have of a godlike figure dying and rising again. It seems that humans have always needed to be reminded of the possibility and hope of renewal and that is why Easter-type stories of rebirth and resurrection are part of human religious history. (Interestingly, the majority of these early figures are female.) The first deity to die, enter the underworld, and return to the living was the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who was seeking answers and more power. The second was likely the Egyptian goddess Isis, who was seeking her lost love, Osiris. The ancient Greeks had Persephone, who either went willingly or was kidnapped, depending on which version of the myth you choose to go by. Our own name for this holiday, Easter, comes from the name of the Indo-European dawn goddess of the east whose special celebrations always took place at the vernal equinox. In different regions, she was known as Eostre, Astarte, Ashera, Aurora. (Another item of interest is the fact that many scholars believe the Jewish heroine-queen Esther whose holiday, Purim, is also celebrated at the spring equinox, is a manifestation of the Canaanite version of this same goddess.)

The rituals of the springtime dawn goddess varied with the culture and region, but usually included baskets of flowers and spring greenery, a dawn service, and baby animals such as lambs, goats, rabbits. Eggs, symbols of the goddess's sacred womb of rebirth and of the fertility of the spring season, were also part of the holiday in many places. Children were honored as embodiments of new life. (Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.)

Whether ancient peoples believed in the stories told about their various goddesses literally or metaphorically we will never really know, and it doesn't matter. We religious liberals in the 21st century are free to view them as useful and beautiful symbols, without fretting over historic or scientific accuracy, which is not the point anyway. Rebirth and resurrection are necessary to being human; they are needs from deep within us. We especially seem to feel it at this time of year.

Spring itself feels like a rebirth and resurrection of our earth, the Japanese magnolias and redbuds and forsythias and all the soft new green, lifting our spirits with their beauty and their scent (even when they also irritate our sinuses).

•There's the rebirth and resurrection of finding a religious home where you can be yourself, with all your doubts and questions and life experiences, after you had given up hope that there could be a church for you.
•There's the rebirth and resurrection of finding love when you feel you didn't “earn” it or that you don't “deserve” it. (It's lucky for all of us that love isn’t apportioned that way, because so few of us would get any.)
•There's the rebirth and resurrection of rising again after dealing with addictions and substance abuse, and discovering you can go, one day at a time, into a life of sobriety.
•There’s the rebirth and resurrection of finding a way to keep on keeping on after a tragedy or disaster. (Now, there’s a resurrection First Churchers and other New Orleanians know about first-hand!)
•There's the rebirth and resurrection of finding friends when you need them the most, when an illness or a death or a catastrophe has put you in the tomb-like darkness of despair and alienation. All of these rebirths and resurrections can be celebrated as signs that renewal is always possible, even in a world like ours, dominated by death and tragedy and cynicism and pain.

In Rev. Suzanne’s essay, poet Wendell Berry reminds us that the forces of the tomb are always out there, ready to lay to rest all the mystery and juice and beauty of life in exchange for the mess of pottage that is secular materialism. Believing in rebirth and resurrection means placing our hopes in what endures: love, compassion, the things of the earth, the natural cycles of loss and return.

My colleague Maureen Killoran of our church in Asheville, North Carolina, writes that

[r]esurrection literally means "to rise again," to rise up from the ashes of destruction and, like the phoenix, set forth anew upon the path of life. Each of us, by virtue of being alive, has fallen. Resurrection means to come back from those deaths both large and small, our times of imprisonment in the tomb of the soul. Resurrection means to triumph over opposition, and each of us has, at one time or another, faced [our] fear and moved beyond.

For us as religious liberals, coming back from the dead does not occur when an angel, or some other supernatural being, appears after 3 days or 3 weeks or 3 years to roll away the stones upon our hearts. We come back from the dead when courage and hope reach through our despair and pain; we come back from the dead when we engage the world not as a threat, not as a monster, not even as a necessary evil, but as a delightful challenge. We come back from the dead when we are realistic about what we can accomplish and yet let our sense of mirth and play help us to determine where to draw the line.

On this beautiful Easter day, I invite you to take a moment to reflect on the times in your life when you have been in the dark of the tomb of the soul. It may have been a disappointment so great that you tried to insulate yourself from the world. Or it may have been a loss of someone or something so beloved that you felt abandoned and alone. Whatever it was, each one of us has felt it -- that feeling of fear, dark and cold, like being shut away in a tomb.

From there, I ask you to remember what it was that brought you "back from the dead" -- the person or community that supported, comforted, and encouraged you, who made you feel alive once more. Something or someone came to us when we were locked in a cave in our souls and rolled away the stone, revealing a deeper dimension of hope and connection. This Easter, I encourage you to practice rebirth and resurrection by recalling to mind your own times of hopeful renewal.

Rebirth and resurrection -- they're not unique, legendary, supernatural events, but the stuff of life, your life and mine. And there may be no better time to contemplate all that renews and returns than glorious Springtime. May this Eastertide find us heartened and challenged by our own times of rebirth and resurrection in the midst of the darkness of our times: deception, meaningless, materialism, despair. May we daily find the miracles of hope we need to truly live, instead of merely surviving. So might this be! AMEN –ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE.

Jazz Fest Service: "Rhythm Saved the World"

A Service by The Reverend Melanie Morel-Ensminger

First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Sunday, April 29, 2012

“Rhythm Saved the World” 

According to Pops Armstrong, rhythm has played a part in all justice movements, going back to Joshua’s trumpet at Jericho.  In honor of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this weekend, this service pulls some hymns out of our UU hymnals and looks at how they came to be written during what great social  justice movement in history. 

Some of what you learn today you might already know, but other information may be new to you.  Either way, knowing how these songs were first used and what they originally meant will enrich our experience of them.  We on the Worship Team hope you enjoy this service and that it sends you off to  Jazz Fest in the right spirit.  (And if you’re not going to Jazz Fest today, that it gives you a great musical feeling anyway.)

“Bread and Roses”

The slogan "Bread and Roses" originated in a poem of that name by James Oppenheim, published in The American Magazine in December 1911, which attributed it to "the women in the West." It is commonly associated with a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts during January–March 1912, now often known as the "Bread and Roses strike".

The 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, which united dozens of immigrant communities under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World, was led to a large extent by women. The popular mythology of the strike includes signs being carried by women reading "We want bread, but we want roses, too!", though the image is probably ahistorical.

A 1915 labor anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair, is the first known source to attribute the phrase to the Lawrence strikers.  A republication of Oppenheim's poem in 1912, following the strike, attributed it to "Chicago Women Trade Unionists". To circumvent an injunction against loitering in front of the mills, the strikers formed the first moving picket line in the US.[3][4]

The strike was settled on March 14, 1912 on terms generally favorable to the workers. The workers won pay increases, time-and-a-quarter pay for overtime, and a promise of no discrimination against strikers.

The slogan appeals for both fair wages and dignified conditions.

“Spirit of Life”

As a UU World magazine article put it back in 2007, ‘Spirit of Life” holds a unique place in the spiritual lives of UUs around the world.  In six short lines “Spirit of Life” touches so much that is central to our faith—compassion, justice, community, freedom, reverence for nature, and the mystery of life. It finds the common ground held by humanists and theists, pagans and Christians, Buddhists and Jews, gay and straight among us.

Written in the early 1980’s, by feminist and UU sympathizer Carolyn McDade, it was inspired by a late-night meeting at a college over solidarity with oppressed people in Central America.  She scribbled the words and a simple melody line on a piece of paper, and gave copies of it to be used in mimeographed songbooks for women’s groups and groups  working for justice.  It circulated that way for years, and in the early ‘90’s, the UU Hymnbook Commission asked permission to include it in what we know now as the gray hymnal.  At First, McDade didn’t want it to be printed as a hymn, because she didn’t think of it as a hymn.  But the commission members told her that if “Spirit of Life” was not in the new hymnal, they feared they would all be killed by angry UUs!  She relented and it was enshrined as #123, perhaps the best-known and most beloved of all UU songs.

“We Shall Overcome”

“We Shall Overcome” began its life as an early gospel, originally called “I’ll Overcome Someday,” written by African-American composer Charles Albert Tindley in 1901.  It underwent a slight transformation in lyrics at the famous training school for labor and civil rights activists, Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, where my father trained before World War II and where Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. later attended.  At Highlander, Zilphia Horton, wife of Highlander co-founder Myles Horton, who was serving as Highlander’s music director (don’t you find it interesting that a social justice training center had to have a music director?), reworked the hymn for use by organizers, with help from Highlander alum Pete Seeger  and others.  It was published in 1947 as “We Will Overcome” by Pete Seeger’s People's Songs. 

The song was taught to countless organizers, who brought the song to countless other people. The Highlander version was first recorded by folk singer Joe Glazer, in 1950.  It quickly became the civil rights movement's unofficial anthem.

There is a story that is told about a Unitarian summer camp at Highlander that was raided late one night by the Tennessee State Police.  As the frightened youth and their counselors were rousted from their tents in the dark by angry state troupers, the story goes, one Unitarian girl began to quietly sing, “We are not afraid” and all the campers and the adult chaperones took it up.  And that is how that stanza came to be part of “We Shall Overcome.”  I do not know if that story is completely true.  I know there were Unitarian summer camps at Highlander, and I know that one night they were raided by state police.  I don’t know if a Unitarian girl began to sing – but I like to think that she did.

One of the most moving times I shared this song was during my 1998 trip to  India with the UUA Holdeen India Program, where a group of UUs took turns singing with a group of untouchable and lower caste workers organized by a Holdeen partner organization.  The UUs sang in English; the workers and organizers sang in Hindi, Marati, and Urdu, and I felt our group surrounded by a mighty cloud of witnesses of those justice-seekers who had sung the song before us and were spiritually singing it with us in the present.  It was a powerful moment.

 “Amazing Grace”

"Amazing Grace" is a Christian hymn with lyrics written by Englishman John Newton (1725–1807), published in 1779. With a message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of the sins people commit and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, "Amazing Grace" is one of the most recognizable and most famous songs in the English-speaking world.

Newton wrote the words from personal experience. He grew up without any particular religious conviction but his life's path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often put into motion by his recalcitrant insubordination. He was pressed into the Royal Navy and became a sailor, eventually participating in the slave trade. One night a terrible storm battered his vessel so severely that he became frightened enough to call out to God for mercy, a moment that marked the beginning of his spiritual conversion. His career in slave trading lasted a few years more until he quit going to sea altogether and began studying theology.

Ordained in the Church of England in 1764, Newton became a pastor in  Buckinghamshire, where he began to write hymns with poet William Cowper. "Amazing Grace" was written to illustrate a sermon on New Year's Day of 1773. It is unknown if there was any music accompanying the verses, and it may have been chanted by the congregation without music. It has been associated with more than 20 melodies, but in 1835 it was joined to a tune named "New Britain" to which it is most frequently sung today.  It can also be sung to be the tune of “House of the Rising Sun,” as First Church has done many times in the past.

“I Heard the Bells”

"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" is a strange hybrid – it is an anti-war Christmas carol.  The original poem was written in 1864 by American poet and Unitarian Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during the Civil War.  The song tells of the narrator's despair, upon hearing Christmas bells, that "hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, to all good will" and concludes with the bells carrying renewed hope for peace among humankind.

Longfellow's oldest son Charles joined the Union army without informing his father.  Longfellow found out by a letter dated March 14, 1863, after Charles had already left.  In November, Charles was severely wounded in Virginia.  Already grieving the recent loss of his wife Frances, Longfellow was inspired to write "I Heard the Bells" on Christmas Day in 1864.  It was not until 1872 that the poem is known to have been set to music.

It is not Christmas, but our country is at war yet again, and we need all the encouragement we can get toward hope for peace on earth, good will to all.

“We Are a Gentle,  Angry People”

Activist singer-songwriter Holly Near is the author of this song, listed on her albums as “Singing for Our Lives.”  She wrote the song in 1978, immediately after the horrific hate-crime killings of San Francisco  Mayor George Mosconi and Supervisor Harvey Milk.  Since then, it has been translated into many languages, new verses have been added, and it has been sung an uncountable protests and rallies.

“Steal Away”

Many if not most of what we now know as African-American spirituals had more than one purpose.  Of course, they are what they seem to be – religious songs, derived from hymns taught by slave masters or missionaries, based on stories and passages in the Bible.  But the songs also carried coded hidden messages about escaping to freedom, such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd” to follow the stars of the Big Dipper to freedom, and “Steal Away” and “Wade in the Water” to avoid the bloodhounds, and disguised gibes at slave holders, such as “Everybody Talkin’ ‘Bout Heaven Ain’t Going There” and “Let My People Go.”  

Under the guise of religious services and entertainment, the enslaved people were able to send each other signals about reaching freedom and what guides to look for.  They were empowering songs of hope and self-liberation in a time of despair and enslavement.

“Siyahamba”/”We Are Marching in the Light of God”

"Siyahamba" originated in South Africa, originally composed around 1950 by Andries van Tonder, an elder of Afrikaans Christian denomination; it was sung in this version in Afrikaans.

It was later translated into Zulu by Thabo Mkize, sometime during the 1960’s.  After that, it was used defiantly and joyously for anti-apartheid protests.

In the late 1970’s, a Swedish choral group heard the song being sung by a girls’ school in Natal.  The choral director recorded the song and transcribed it, and from there, “Siyahamba” went around the world.

It has been translated into many languages, and several denominations, including ours, have a version in their hymnals.  It is also used in schools internationally.

The first time I heard it sung at UUA General  Assembly, it brought tears to my eyes.  Let’s sing it with feeling, and put our bodies into it.

“If I Had a Hammer”

Pete Seeger and Lee Hays co-wrote the song in honor of Progressive political and social movements in 1949, and first performed it publicly on June 3, 1949 in New York City at a testimonial dinner for the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States, who were then on trial in federal court, charged with violating the Smith Act by advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.  I guess you can figure why it didn’t become a big hit at that time and in that context.

In 1962, the song was covered by Peter, Paul and Mary and became a Top 10 hit.  It has since been recorded by dozens of other artists, in several languages.  To many people, it has become divorced from its origin as a protest/justice song, but remember the next time you sing it that it really is “the hammer of justice, the bell of freedom, and the song about the love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land.”