May 1, 2010

Dear Members and Friends,

Henry David Thoreau enriched our language with his statement, “I march to the beat of a different drummer.”  Certainly he was different from his fellow citizens in Concord.  His metaphor has stayed in our language and is used frequently by many who do not know its source.  Now in this darkening time, we need people who will hear their own different drummers and act accordingly.  Many conservative school boards have won control of curricula and text books.  This means that uneducated people, incapable of critical thinking, can mold the minds of children in false or distorted knowledge which they will vote on election day.

This means an erosion of our democracy until we become a fascist state, complete with secret police carrying the threat of violence.  Every state has violence imbedded in it.  Only the state can kill with impunity, the “terror that stalks at noonday.”

Are we to have another Scopes trial with no Clarence Darrow at hand?  Remember the film?  How have we gone so far astray that we produce doctors who assist in torture and lawyers who deliberately distort language and the Constitution to enable a heartless president to invade two countries with trumped up lies and distortions.  I do not even mention the evil designs of bankers and the real estate industry.

The crisis in health care reform brings the evil to light in those who wish to destroy the public school system in the hope of making this a Christian nation, where no one will be free to think and criticize the “holy” state.  Fear will rule as it did under the McCarthy witch hunt.

In spite of our president’s promise to reform education, the forces arrayed against him are so powerful and rich that they can buy politicians to do their will, and the Supreme Court by its recent decision to allow corporate money to flow to candidates without limit.  How can common people stand against this power?

If you remember my homily at the service for Kate Fuller, I spoke of her intelligent heart and passionate mind.  It takes a free country to educate strong supporters of democracy.  What is the role of our church in voiding a theocracy whose hallmark is ignorance?  The Tea Party is a real threat!  For a beginning we could establish forums on how to reform the public school system before it is destroyed and the darkness makes it impossible to produce people with intelligent hearts and passionate minds.  We are all too at ease as Zion’s “cows of Bashan,” we who concentrate only on our own small worlds where we always come first.  We need people who will march to the beat of a very different drummer.  We can help each other by “lending our minds out,” as Browning suggests in his poem about Fra Lippo Lippi.

May the greening of our earth in April put us in a resurrection mode for the saving of our experiment in building a sane and thoughtful nation.

Love,

April 1, 2010

Dear Members and Friends,

Napoleon once said to a Cardinal, “Are you aware, Your Eminence, that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?”  The Cardinal replied, “Your Excellency, the clergy has been trying to destroy the Church for a thousand years, and they have failed, and so will you!”  I attended mass in a Catholic Church in Florida recently, the fifth Sunday in Lent, and hoped for a good homily.  The Gospel lesson for the day was the raising of Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha, from the dead after having been dead for four days.  The liturgist had read the story very well.  The priest read it again, very poorly in a monotone.  Then I thought he would come up with some interpretation which would appeal to a modern congregation.  Instead he retold the story in very poor English, and continued to cook soup on a nail, giving neither insight nor explanation of how this myth was included in the canon.  The congregation of one thousand left as ignorant as when they entered.  Catholics are not the only priests who fail in this way.  There are many religious groups who try just as hard to keep their people ignorant.  I am reminded of Milton’s words, “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”  Now the Catholic Church faces its greatest challenge since Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg.

It is not only the Church that is failing in its educational task.  It is the educational establishment with its union-bound teachers, often lacking in imagination and passion, who keep dumbing down the profession, no matter how well-funded.  There seems to be a concerted effort to destroy the public school system with alternate schools and programs often with a barely concealed agenda to insist on teaching creationism, Biblical inerrancy, a fear of Darwinian evolution, and a paranoia about socialism, the latest bogeyman to frighten and mislead.

How can a democratic society respond to these challenges?

They will be important issues in the next election.  With the loss of our own Unitarian Supreme Court Justice, we have cause to worry.  Where is the next strong liberal voice?  I look to our church as a denomination to speak clearly to the nation through our churches to give people the courage to speak up for a public school system which teaches critical thinking so that students do not simply accept what is taught them.  Some modern high school history texts devote only one page to the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!  These texts do not even mention the incarceration of thousands of Japanese-American citizens, who waited many years for reparations to be paid them until the dollar had lost its 1945 value.  Think on these things, speak up and speak out!  Your faith demands it.  May Spring's bursting greenness resurrect in us our passion for justice.  We are not alone!

Love,