Dear President Obama

Dear President Obama,

At one point in your speech to the United Nations General Assembly from this past September, you quoted your predecessor Franklin Roosevelt, saying: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, one party, or one nation…. It cannot be a peace of large nations—or of small nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.” “The choice is ours,” you said over and over to representatives of the gathered nations of the world. “We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st; that put off hard choices, refused to look ahead, failed to keep pace because we defined ourselves by what we were against instead of what we were for. Or we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings….”

I hear this, and I can’t help but feel inspired. It’s the poem from your inauguration, where poet Elizabeth Alexander says,

What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light….

What if? We ask this as well, as Unitarian Universalists. What if more people affirmed the interdependent web of all existence, which applies as much to international affairs as to the natural world? What if more people affirmed the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all? Love, casting a widening pool of light. These are values of my own religious tradition that I am hearing in you, and I am inspired.

That’s why I’m celebrating the message you’ve been bringing to the world in the past eleven months. You remind me of one of our Unitarian Universalist ancestors: Adlai Stevenson, Ambassador to the United Nations during the JFK administration and also candidate for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956. (As a brief aside, it’s said that when the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed in 1961, Stevenson wrote to the Rev. Dana McLean Greeley, its first president, “Congratulations on your election as president. I know from hearsay how satisfying that can be.”) Despite not winning the Presidency, he was a great visionary who said that “It is no longer possible—if it ever was—for local communities to be more secure than the surrounding world. Our ultimate security therefore lies in making the world more and more into a community.” That’s what Adlai Stevenson said, and it’s your message too, over and over again. The mightiest word of love. Not unilateralism and militarism as a first resort, but multilateralism and diplomacy. Interdependence in world community.

Thank you for spreading values we Unitarian Universalists affirm. It’s why I think that Unitarian Universalists everywhere (whatever their party affiliations might be, whether Democratic or Republican or Independent) will have something to cheer when, on December 10th, you are in Oslo, Norway, receiving the prize—a prize which you have said you will accept as a call to all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. Warm congratulations to you!

I laughed when I heard about what happened right after you received the news. Your daughter Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it’s Bo’s birthday!” And then your other daughter Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.” Kids, helping keep things in perspective. Although it sounds like you are doing fine with this on your own. “To be honest,” you said to reporters, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by the prize.” This is what you said.

Of course, the Nobel Committee disagrees. In announcing that you are the recipient, it said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” “The question we have to ask,” said Nobel committee chair Thorbjorn Jagland, “is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world. And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

It’s a controversial question—whether you have accomplished enough. Already, you have plunged into the rough waters of multiple tough issues: prohibiting the use of torture by the United States; ordering the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed; working on finding effective ways of rooting out al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan; stopping terrorism at its roots by promoting human rights, economic opportunity, and security in countries that are hurting; partnering with Russia to substantially reduce nuclear warheads and launchers; advancing the cause of two states—Israel and Palestine—living side by side in peace and security so that justice for all in the Middle East can become a reality; moving America from a bystander to a leader in international climate change negotiations; helping coordinate an international response of over $2 trillion in stimulus to bring the global economy back from the brink; and re-engaging the United Nations, joining the Human Rights Council, bringing America back to the world table. To the United Nations, in September, you said, “I have been in office for just nine months—though some days it seems a lot longer.” I wonder why. Definitely, you are not putting off any of the hard choices required to create a better world. You are plunging right in.

But I do understand why you still think you don’t deserve the award. It is only the beginning. You have only just begun. The world is still in the midst of rough waters. The shoreline is still far off. And yet, perhaps the award was given not so much to honor past accomplishment as future promise. Perhaps, as Stanford University scholar Clarence B. Jones suggests, the award is about strengthening your resolve as you go forward, encouraging you to see your vision through all the way to the very end. He saw this with Martin Luther King Jr., when he received the Peace Prize. MLK Jr. had been struggling with what to say about the Vietnam War—this man who had already fought extraordinary fights for justice and peace—and the Peace Prize convicted his conscience, pressed him to break his silence and speak out. “Just knowing that hunk of metal was in his bureau drawer,” says Clarence B. Jones, “forced someone as strong as Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly comment in a way he might otherwise not.” I think the world wants you to continue making the hard choices that need to be made. I think it wants you to stay strong, and to finish this ironman race you’ve started. As the New York Times put it, “Americans elected Mr. Obama because they wanted him to restore American values and leadership—and because they believed he could. The Nobel Prize … shows how many people around the world want the same thing.”

But this is not the first time that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has acted contrary to popular expectations. I was fascinated to learn that an early Peace Prize controversy had to do with whether non-governmental peace activists only should receive the prize, rather than heads of state and politicians. Before 1905, only private peace activists had received the award. And then came 1906. The recipient was none other than American President Theodore Roosevelt, for his efforts in helping to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Japan. People around the world screamed. What’s this? What’s this? they cried. Yet the Nobel Committee was ahead of the curve. It saw, after the turn of the century, how governments were increasingly promoting peaceful solutions for international disputes, and it wanted to encourage this even more. Private peace activists no longer owned the work exclusively. To ensure relevance for its prize, the committee risked changing with the times, together with the resulting wrath.

Today’s committee, I believe, took a similar risk. Said committee chair Thorbjorn Jagland, “Some people say—and I understand it—‘Isn’t it premature? Too early?’ Well, I’d say … that it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond—all of us.” American multilateralism and diplomacy can’t wait. America modeling the kind of leadership that needs to happen in every country around the world can’t wait. Hope can’t wait. The mightiest word of love has to happen now.

Clearly, honest confusion has surrounded this year’s award. But there’s been some real ugliness as well. I mean, it seems to me that when someone gets an amazing award like a Nobel Peace Prize, a reasonable response is delight. Good for you, President Obama! Good for you, America! Delight, even if people might not be sure exactly why you got the award. The not-knowing then becomes transformed into a positive curiosity to find out why—to discover just exactly what it is you have been saying and doing on the international scene that would merit such an award. Yet from some quarters you’ve seen the absolute opposite of curiosity and delight. New York Times columnist David Brooks, calling it a joke, saying, “Nobody cares what five Norwegian guys think”—demonstrating, regrettably, an arrogant disdain for the rest of the world that is part and parcel of ugly Americanism and cowboy diplomacy. Those five Norwegians (not all guys, by the way) see how you’ve single-handedly set a new tone throughout the world, and David Brooks thinks that this is a joke?

Reminds me of something I read in U. S. News and World Report a while back. An interview with Cullen Murphy, about his book entitled Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. For a time, comparisons with Rome had been positive ones: the Pax Romana living anew in the Pax Americana, providing worldwide cultural benefits and worldwide security. But now the dominant view worries about America’s decline and compares symptoms of this to what people saw in Rome’s decline. And so the interviewer at one point says to Cullen Murphy, “You say there was an almost fatal parochialism among the Romans. Are we in danger of duplicating it?” Here’s Murphy’s reply: “I was looking the other day at one of the new Pew Center polls about ‘what Americans know.’ Americans in general aren’t that interested in, or aware of, the outside world, and increasingly even our elites don’t seem to put much stock in that kind of knowledge either. We don’t have [enough] Arabic speakers; the number of foreign correspondents continues to shrink. Compared with the Greeks, the Romans were not passionately interested in the outside world. And they were often taken by surprise. The great disaster suffered by Varus in Germany in A.D. 9, when three entire Roman legions were annihilated, stemmed partly from ignorance about the tribes they were up against.”

It’s been called “Omphalos syndrome”: the misguided belief that one’s nation and way of life is at the center (or navel) of the world. Rome had it, and suffered for it. America has it too, and we are suffering. We need to start caring about what five Norwegians think. We really do.

Ugly Americanism has come up in connection with your receiving the Peace Prize, and so has an all-consuming ugly cynicism. Writer H. L. Mencken once said, “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” This is definitely what some people have been doing around your award. Looking around for that coffin. Some of it is just blatantly racist—the presumption that the Peace Prize committee gave you the award just because you are the first African American president. And then there’s the cynicism summed up in something that Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said: you won because of “star power.” The world has a crush on you. Things are just in the honeymoon phase. It’s all illusion, smoke and mirrors.

Now, my congregation is listening in on this letter, so I say this to them as much as to you: that our Unitarian Universalist values transcend political parties. We are doing the best we can to stand on the side of love, that mightiest word, and part of our job is bringing prophetic critique to the public sphere when necessary, whether that sphere is Democratic or Republican, because our Unitarian Universalist values demand it. To be faithful to our religious call, there must be independence from political parties; we must be able to speak from out of a higher point of view of shared values. Today I bring warm congratulations to you, but when your policies and actions go contrary to our values, expect a different kind of letter. And if ever doing this becomes not OK in a Unitarian Universalist congregation—when my religion becomes a mere adjunct of the Democratic Party, and there’s absolutely no room for Republicans, or others, then I am out of here.

So when I call what Michael Steele is saying as cynical, I’m not trying to win one for the Democrats. I’m doing the best I can to speak up for that love which is

beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light….

But the “star power” comment takes the love you are trying to spread and tries to make it an unworthy thing. He’s trying to rebuild his political party, while you are trying to lead America into a new chapter of international cooperation. He says it’s just all words, but, first of all, words are a kind of action too—words change things. As a preacher, I have to believe this. Second, you know very we’ll that words alone are not enough. That’s why, over and over again, you say that “the future will be forged by deeds and not simply words,” that “the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our actions.”

On the other hand, maybe some star power is exactly what we need right now. But here, I’m talking about power to forge international consensus and move the world’s conscience. It was something we saw lacking in the previous presidential administration—how President Bush squandered the world’s goodwill after 9/11. He started a war of choice with Iraq. On such critical global issues as arms control, torture, and climate change, he stepped back from the world table, disengaged, thumbed his nose at everyone. Unilateralism, cowboy diplomacy, Omphalos syndrome. But then came the genocide in Darfur, hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced in waves of violence that showed no signs of abating. President Bush spoke movingly to this in 2007, at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “It is evil we are now seeing in Sudan—and we’re not going to back down.” He was exactly right. Yet his call went nowhere. Multilateralism and diplomacy was what solving the problem in Darfur required and continues to require—yet this had not been the established practice of the Bush administration. It was like singing a completely different tune. And then there was the accumulated skepticism and distrust of the world that drowned him out, made it impossible for his absolutely worthy message to be heard.

But it’s a different time now. How you’ve turning things around, in just eleven months, is why you’ve been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The Committee wants you to see things through, this long journey you started. Your vision of four pillars, which are “fundamental to the future that we want for our children:” stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, pursuing peace, meeting the challenge of climate change, and the creation of a global economy that advances opportunity for all. “Now is the time,” you are saying, “for all of us to take our share of the responsibility for a global response to global challenges. […]The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments, are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people. They lead nations to act in opposition to the very goals that they claim to pursue…. They build up walls between us and the future that our people seek, and the time has come for those walls to come down.” The time has come. The choice is ours.

beyond marital, filial, national,
love casting a widening pool of light….

President Obama, I thank you for your inspired service, and I’ll be there with you in spirit when, on December 10th, you’re in Oslo receiving the prize. Thanks for asking What if? What if the mightiest word is love?

Sincerely,

Rev. Anthony David, Senior Minister
The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta

Planting Seeds of Soul: The Seed of Clear Thinking

I want to start out this morning by introducing you to a tongue-in-cheek syndrome called Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Meditation teacher Warren Lee Cohen talks about this, in his book Raising the Soul. “This is how AAADD manifests itself: I decide to wash my car. As I start towards the garage, I notice that there is mail on the hall table. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car. I lay my car keys down on the table, put the junk mail in the trash can under the table, and notice that the trash can is full. So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the trash first. But then I think, since I’m going to be near the mailbox when I take out the trash anyway, I may as well pay the bills first. I take my check book off the table, and see that there is only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go to my desk where I find the can of Coke that I had been drinking. I’m going to look for my checks, but first I need to move the can of Coke aside so that I don’t accidentally knock it over. I notice the Coke is getting warm and decide to put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold. As I head towards the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye. They need to be watered. I set the Coke down on the counter, and I discover my reading glasses that I’ve been searching for all morning. I decide I’d better put them back on my desk, but first I’m going to water the flowers. I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly I spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table. I realize that tonight when we want to watch TV, we’ll be looking for the remote, but nobody will remember that it’s on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs, but first I’ll water the flowers. As I pour water on the flowers, some of it spills on the floor. So, I set the remote back down on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill. Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do. At the end of the day,” concludes Warren Lee Cohen, “the car isn’t washed, the bills aren’t paid, the trash hasn’t been taken out, there is a warm can of Coke sitting on the counter, there is still only one check in my checkbook, I can’t find the remote, I can’t find my glasses, and I don’t remember what I did with the car keys. Then when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I’m really baffled because I know I was busy all day long, and I’m really tired, but now it’s time to check my email.”

Can you relate? It’s Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Busy all day long, but nothing really gets done, because it’s hard to maintain undivided attention on the task at hand. Hard to focus on just one thing at a time and not allow ourselves to be distracted by additional problems that inevitably pop up along the way.

And if it’s this way with the things in our outer world, how is it with the inner world of our thoughts?

The careful, deliberate, reasoned search for truth is a cornerstone of our free faith. Says the father of Unitarianism in America, William Ellery Channing, “Without … inward spiritual freedom outward liberty is of little worth. What [does it matter] that I am crushed by no foreign yoke if, through ignorance and vice, through selfishness and fear, I want the command of my own mind? The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breast. The man who wants force of principle and purpose is a slave, however free the air he breathes. The mind, after all, is our only possession, or, in other words, we possess all through its energy and enlargement.” That’s what the father of Unitarianism says. A capacity to be principled and purposeful in our thinking is simply basic to our way of faith. Without it, as we sail on OUR passenger ship, we’re lost. We can’t reliably read the signs of the times, nor discover what to do next. As Channing says, we fall prey to “a narrow, dark, confused intellect, which sees everything as through a mist, gives to everything the color of its own feelings, confines itself to what coincides with its wishes, contents itself with superficial views, and thus perpetually falls into errors….” This is not free faith. This is not who we are.

This morning, we tend to our most intimate relationship: the one we have with our thoughts. What are some of the tyrants that can establish themselves in us and muddle our thinking? And how might we develop our thinking so that it can be clearer? Today’s sermon is the second installment of the “Planting Seeds of Soul” series, so remember what I said last month about “wax on/wax off.” We’re going to learn our second “wax on/wax off” exercise today, to raise Unitarian Universalist soul in this place. That’s the goal.

But first: tyrants. One that comes immediately to mind is fallacious reasoning, or patterns of thinking that are bad according to logical standards but nevertheless make an impression on people who don’t know any better. Here’s an example of what I mean. I opened my Atlanta Journal-Constitution from yesterday and read that Georgia Congressman Nathan Deal “wants the president to prove he is an American citizen.” The article clarifies: “In June 2008, Obama’s campaign office released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate … that shows he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug, 4, 1961. Government officials in Hawaii have verified that the document is official. Yet Deal and others say they still have doubts.”

In any introductory level logic class, you’d learn that this is an textbook example of an ad hominem fallacy in formation, which tries to discredit a person’s policies and viewpoints not by presenting genuine evidence against them but by attacking the person, rendering his or her character so disgusting that no matter how good the policies are, no matter how penetrating the viewpoint, no one’s paying attention, no one’s listening. This is what the Birther movement hopes for, as it continues to nurture doubts about Obama’s citizenship status even in the face of an official birth certificate….

It’s just been one ad hominem attack after another. Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, joking about the similarity of Barack Obama’s name to that of the terrorist Osama bin Laden—and using the machinery of his organization to spread the joke around until it becomes no joke. Tea Party participants, carrying signs that feature Obama’s face with a Hitler mustache. A Thomas Sowell article, where he says, “Recent videos of American children in school singing songs of praise for Barack Obama were a little much, especially for those of us old enough to remember pictures of children singing the praises of dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.” Do you see the steady building pattern of character assassination here? And too many Americans are completely persuaded by it, too many Americans vulnerable. The tyrant of fallacious reasoning, securing a place in our minds, and we don’t know any better. Not as a Democrat, but as an American, does this concern me, for how can I think about what President Obama is trying to do when psychological strings are being pulled and I can’t think straight? It’s horrible for democracy.

It’s definitely been horrible for reasoned debate about health care reform. Ad hominem fallacies one after another, together with others kind of fallacies. How about this one. I spotted it in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution just a few days ago: “Opponents Rally Against Health Care Bill”: 35 year-old David Seward, saying, “I think health care is expensive, but I like it and I’m scared to death of the government running it … I’m worried about the bureaucracy of the federal government getting involved.” This is what he says, and besides his completely ignoring the fact that government-run Medicare is a great success, do you see the underlying false dichotomy? It’s either big government or small government, and no other alternatives are possible…. Yet the issue is not so much big government vs. small government as the right amount of government really needed to solve the problem, to cut through the greed and the waste of the third-party payer medical-industrial complex. Big government vs. small government doesn’t tell the whole truth about how to solve this problem.

I could go on and on—all the kinds of fallacious thinking that have muddied up the debate around health care reform. Rep. Candace Miller from Michigan, commenting on yesterday’s passage of the health care bill in the House, saying, “We are going to have a complete government takeover of our health care system faster than you can say, `this is making me sick,’” adding that Democrats are intent on passing “a jobs-killing, tax-hiking, deficit-exploding” bill. Sounds like a classic slippery-slope argument to me, one that says that if government takes action to reform the health care system, if it sets a public option side-by-side with multiple private options and enables some REAL competition to take place, then all of a sudden, down the slippery-slope slide we go, and all sorts of horrible, fateful consequences are sure to follow. A classic appeal to fear. I don’t care what political party you belong to. I don’t care which president is in the White House. To me, manipulative language—Republican or Democratic—doesn’t help to create a great country. “Civil institutions,” said William Ellery Channing, “are to be estimated by the free and pure minds to which they give birth.” But our institutions are not being civil, and our minds must struggle against great odds to be free and pure. What would Channing say, if he could see what we see today?

This leads us to a second inner tyrant to become aware of. Besides the tyrant of fallacious reasoning, there is the tyrant of hyperconnectedness in our interactive, digital world. Here, we become experts in skimming and scanning as we flit from Facebook to text message to email to video game—and this can leave our ability to bring a full attention to one thing at a time severely underdeveloped. It can make us unfit to think great thoughts.

Marilee Sprenger talks about this in her wonderful article entitled “Focusing the Digital Brain.” “Let’s look,” she says, “at what happens in the brain of Emily, an average teenager, as she thinks she is focusing on a homework assignment. Emily sits in front of her laptop. Her iPod is playing music by Coldplay. She has three windows open on her computer screen: her Web browser through America Online, MSN Messenger for sending instant messages and e-mail, and her word processing program. Her homework is to write about five causes of the U.S. Civil War.

As Emily is putting her heading on her paper, her cell phone rings. She quickly picks up her phone and a picture of her friend Ivy appears on the screen. ‘Hi Ivy, what’s up?’

‘You’re not going to believe who texted me,’ Ivy says. Emily squeals as she hears the name of someone Ivy is interested in dating. Just then Emily’s computer flashes, ‘You’ve got mail!’ The executive part of her brain drops the conversation with Ivy as she reads a new e-mail from another classmate asking for the homework assignment. Emily answers the e-mail as Ivy rambles on, but she realizes she should get back to work. ‘I’ll text you later, Ivy. I have to get some work done.’

Emily shifts her attention back to the word processing screen. Let’s see, where was I? Her brain must let the snippets of social conversation drop out of her working memory. Attending to the assignment causes Emily’s brain to retrieve long-term memories of her readings and lectures on the Civil War. As she begins to think about the differences between the North and the South before the Civil War, her mind drifts to picturing Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.

Refocusing takes several seconds as she remembers what Mr. Montgomery told them in class about slavery. Emily types ‘causes of the Civil War’ into Google. Immediately, 12,900,000 hits come up. She clicks on the first link, realizes it doesn’t have any information she is looking for, and tries the next Web site.

Immersed in her search, she is startled by a jangle from her Blackberry. Emily sees Jackson’s text message ‘What r u doing?’ Jackson is Emily’s new love interest, so her brain floods with pleasurable chemicals as she types her reply—these chemicals make it hard to return to homework.

So it goes among the net generation. Multitasking? Not many tasks are getting done.”

Now, I quote Marilee Sprenger at length not to pick on the net generation—after all, I openly confess that I myself have a serious case of Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. In fact, whatever generation we happen to be in—whatever degree of proficiency is ours in up-to-date communication technologies—it seems that the general tenor of the times is rush and gush. Continuous partial attention. How are we going to do the deeply spiritual work of thinking clearly when we have a limited capacity for patience to follow a chain of thoughts from beginning to end—to resist interruption—to focus on one thing and allow it to unfold its secrets?

“[H]onesty of mind,” says William Ellery Channing, “bears an exact proportion to the patience, steadiness, and resolution with which we inquire.” And that’s exactly what we turn to now. Developing this patience, this steadiness, this resolution. How?

Our wax-on/wax off spiritual exercise for this month—for those of you who choose to practice it with me—is “about learning how to cultivate interest in even the most mundane object and by maintaining your undivided attention on it to increase your ability to focus on anything. This is a step in learning how to give your attention freely and completely, whatever and whenever you should choose.” (Warren Lee Cohen).

Four steps:

Step one: Choose a simple, human-made object—an object manufactured rather than one found in nature, like a cup, or a pencil, a pin, a pair of chopsticks. Warren Lee Cohen, the source of this and all the other exercises, says that the less interesting your object appears at first, the more powerful the effects of deliberately focusing on it.

Also be clear on how many objects you’ll focus on over the course of the upcoming month, and for how long each session will be. I’d recommend one object per week, for around 5 to 10 minutes, at the same time every day. Make the decision, and lay out your plan clearly in your journal. Warren Lee Cohen tells the story of a man who spent 20 years contemplating the same pair of wooden chopsticks. Each and every day, he was able to find something new and interesting to think about; and clearly, it wasn’t the chopsticks that were changing—it was him, the quality of attention he was bringing to them. If he can contemplate the same pair of chopsticks for 20 years, surely we can contemplate the same object for a week, at 10 minutes a pop….

That’s step one. Step two is when you’re actually ready to do the exercise. Situate yourself in a comfortable place, and prepare yourself for the exercise by relaxing your body, calming your mind, just like an athlete stretching before a workout, or a musician tuning up an instrument.

Step three is to place before your mind this object that you have chosen to contemplate. This object that, initially, appears boring: A cup, a pencil, a pin. Train your thinking exclusively on this object in a clear and factual way. Focus on one fact and then link it to the next—in step by step fashion, follow your thinking as you deepen your understanding and interest in this simple, ordinary, human-made thing.

For example, say you choose to focus on a pencil. (Thoreau would like that—he was a pencil maker, you know…) You might start by describe how the pencil appears and of what materials it’s made. Then you might go on to describe how these materials were processed to get them into this form—to think through all the stages of manufacture. Then you might go on to consider how the object is used. Then you might think about who invented it, and how its invention is connected with the invention of other similar things. And so on—inquire with patience, steadiness, and resolution….

Notice that in this approach, you just jump right in. But there are alternative approaches to keep in mind. Do the one that works best for you. One alternative is to do a little research about your object first, before you start thinking about it. Another alternative is to do no research in advance but to develop questions naturally through the course of your own thought processes and then, when the time feels right, seek out answers through research. Enriched by that, return to the object and keep on thinking about it, keep on going deeper.

Finally, there’s step four. When your five or ten minutes is done, review the general direction of your thinking. What was the initial fact that grabbed your attention? Where did you go from there?

And this is the exercise. Do it along with the “review of the day” that I introduced last month. “Even if you cannot slow down the pace of your life,” says Warren Lee Cohen, “you can create regular moments of slowness or concentration each day. These can then become seeds, essential reminders of the qualities you would like to cultivate more in life.” That’s right. We’re planting seeds of soul. They look small—focusing on a boring-looking object for 10 minutes seems small—but if we do the exercises faithfully, the results will be big. Will strengthen our minds against manipulation. Will counteract Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder and counterbalance the continuous partial attention of the digital brain. “The mind, after all, is our only possession,” says William Ellery Channing; “we possess all through its energy and enlargement.” So let us energize and enlarge it. Make Channing proud!

Remarks at a Healthcare Reform Prayer Rally, sponsored by Atlantans Building Leadership for Empowerment (ABLE)

“Of all forms of inequality,” said Martin Luther King, “injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” We need a world that works better for all, not just some. And I know that the way there involves figuring out so many details. But this is not a time to peck our vision of a better America to death with an endless number of “how” questions. How this, how that. You can stall anything by demanding to know every detail up front. In the case of health care reform, the answer to how is YES. We need to take advantage of this historic opportunity to create real change to the status quo. The answer is YES.

But we face tremendous obstacles. Reminds me of an old story by Aesop, about a man and his son taking a donkey to market. Didn’t matter what they did, they did it wrong. Bystanders screaming at them. Mocking and jeering. Don’t let the donkey go without a rider—what’s a donkey for, but to ride upon? The boy shouldn’t ride while his father walks—it’s disrespectful! The father shouldn’t ride—what about his poor little son? Scoffing and jeering like this. By this time the boy and his father don’t know what to do—they are besides themselves. They try something different—both ride the donkey—but the complaints still come: this time they are being cruel to animals. The boy and his father think hard—how can we make sure that no one is going to be dissatisfied by what we do? And then the solution hits them. They cut down a pole, tie the donkey’s feet to it, raise the pole and the donkey to their shoulders, start walking. When they get to the Market Bridge, the donkey gets one of his feet loose, kicks out and causes the boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle, the donkey falls over the bridge, and because his forefeet are tied together, he drowns. Please all, and you will please none.

I’m thinking about this story today. We need to bring quality, affordable health care to market. We need to get it safely across the Market Bridge, get it there all in one piece, don’t allow ourselves to go to crazy lengths to please everyone, don’t allow ourselves to be dismayed or discouraged by bystanders along the way who are saying one thing and then saying another thing. Blue dog Democrats who criticize the public health insurance option, even though this is truly the tactic that will create the most change and challenge the greed of the medical-industrial complex. Then there’s the right-wing propaganda machine—screamers on talk radio and Fox News—spewing out lies about death panels and government take-overs and how reform is going to ruin the economy and mortgage our country’s financial future. And then there’s the gullibility of people who believe the lies. All of these represent bystanders telling President Obama and telling the Democrats that that they are doing it wrong. But it’s the Democrats who are wanting to get that donkey to market. Leaders in this country have been trying to get that donkey for almost a hundred years now. And now is the time.

Clearly, health care reform—especially with the public option—is not going to please everyone. It’s absolutely not going to please Republicans and right wingers who care more about ruining Obama and galvanizing their party than doing the right thing. It’s absolutely not going to please insurance companies who speak out of both sides of their mouths, saying that they want to ensure a competitive market but then refusing to see how the public option will do just that. My prayer is that we don’t fall all over ourselves to please these groups. Got to love them—they are children of God like we are. But we have to be strong in our resolve. We have to bring that donkey straight to market. Get it across Market Bridge safely. The answer to how is YES. We need a world that works better for all, not just some. Let our prayer be for God to strengthen our leaders, strengthen the moral vision in them to do the right thing. May they be undistracted. May they be undaunted. Though screamers surround them and cast frightening visions of how the world will end if health care reform with the public option is passed, may they be calm and confident. Calm and confident. Let it be so.

Spending Our Lives

“Near the end of March, 1845,” says Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing….” Ever afterwards, the question of whose axe Thoreau borrowed has been an open one. Was it Emerson’s? Bronson Alcott’s? Ellery Channing’s? What we can know is that, this morning, as we contemplate our own experiment in living more simply and wisely, we borrow Thoreau’s angle of vision. We borrow the bent of his genius which, as Thoreau himself wryly admits, is “a very crooked one.” We do what he did: “see our native village as if we were a traveler passing through,” “to think new thoughts and have new imaginings, for the deepest and most original thinker is the farthest traveled.” We borrow all this from Thoreau as we begin deliberate travel through our own native village, seeing everything with new questioning eyes as we pass through. And as for where each of us ends up? Once, Thoreau tells us, “a young man of my acquaintance … told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. [But] I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account. […] I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.” Robert Sullivan, in his excellent biography of Thoreau entitled The Thoreau You Don’t Know, puts it like this: “Thoreau doesn’t offer answers. His is the analysis that leads to the questions. For application purposes, you can apply Thoreau to any question, not to find the answer, but to imagine how he might pose it anew. When you ask what car to drive, imagine Thoreau asking where you are going, or if the car is driving you…”

We borrow all this, as we begin pursuing our own way. Not an axe, but an angle of vision, the bent of a genius, a way of making the familiar strange, a manner of questioning. The first chapter of Walden is entitled “Economy,” but characteristically, Thoreau invites us to use this word not in its conventional sense of wealth creation or fiscal frugality. He wants us to go straight to the ancient Greek origin of the word—oikonomia—which means caring for the household, a holistic way of living in which your use of life resources is in alignment with vital values of freedom and sustainability and beauty. “I am convinced,” he says, “both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.” “Economy,” he says, “is synonymous with philosophy.” This is how he uses the term in the first chapter of what has become, in the 155 years since it was published, sacred scripture for Unitarian Universalists today.

Economy is about how you maintain yourself on this earth. Could be a joyful pastime, but what Thoreau discovers as he travels through his own native village of Concord is people experiencing something very different. Just listen to some of his observations:

“Most men … through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. […] The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat each ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”

Or this: “The childish and savage taste of men and women for new [clothing] patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.”

Or this: “As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. […] Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end…. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Or this: “One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bone with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”

Or this: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

All are observations Thoreau makes as he travels through his native village of Concord. One after another indicates not joyful pastime, but hardship of some kind or other, and perhaps they echo observations you yourself have made, as you’ve traveled through your own village of Atlanta or elsewhere. The rush and gush of our days; time crunch in an era of so-called time-saving devices; “no time to be anything but a machine.” Or how our culture aims at creating more wants in us (rather than focusing on genuine needs)—churns out expert consumers who are fine-tuned to fashion trends but are blind to more important trends of intellect and heart and soul. How communication technologies today are far more powerful than any of the dreams of yesterday and yet still we can question the value of what is being communicated: obnoxious opinions of know-nothing demagogues; undigested data without pattern or context or meaning—“as if the main object were to talk fast and not talk sensibly.” Or people around us, not paying attention to the evidence of their experience, unconsciously in the grip of beliefs that they have never personally questioned or tested: Thoreau’s farmer condemning vegetarianism even as the vital oxen who unfailingly plough his fields are themselves… vegetarian. Finally, all the do-gooders in our world, unconsciously in the grip of the belief that they themselves are not embroiled in the injustice that they try to ease, that they are strong while others are weak—and so through their do-gooding, they administer band-aids and aspirin, never realizing that far more is needed, radical change needed, the kind of change we need today, for example, in health care. Hardship, in the economy of our time as well as in Thoreau’s, and so no wonder the first chapter of Walden is full of sharp social critique and satire, pages howling with anger and pain. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he cries. “From the desperate city you go to the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.” In other words, to bolster your courage, you’ll have to rely on the example of furry little animals, because human examples are simply hard to come by. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” says Thoreau, “and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.”

There has got to be a better way. A better way of maintaining ourselves upon this earth. In fact, that’s the core of the problem right there. People don’t think that alternatives exist. “They honestly think that there is no choice left. But,” says Thoreau, “alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” “Man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.” “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” All of these, golden lines of hope. Alternatives do exist, and we can find them. But we must put ourselves out there, in some liminal, in-between space, where creative solutions can find us. Let that be our self-culture practice. We have to borrow Thoreau’s genius, which is a very crooked one, and risk being misunderstood by our family and our peers, risk harm to our reputation. Shift the nature of our business, towards trying to hear what the wind is saying.

This is what led Thoreau to borrow an axe and begin his social experiment of one at Walden Pond. To see if his humanity could be recovered from the machine-like schedule of his days. To escape the tyranny of a consumeristic culture, and peel away all artificial wants to get down to essential needs. To discover what is worth communicating—to write out his heart and soul. To test his beliefs and see which ones actually reflect and extend his real experience. Not to be a reactive do-gooder, but to better understand the evils and problems of our world—distinguish roots from branches—and attack the roots, take his axe and chop at that. “It would be of some advantage,” he says, “to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods are used to obtain them. […] For the improvements of the ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.” Thoreau goes to Walden to return to essentials, and to sanity. He is a Transcendentalist.

Now I will tell you plainly that the first time I picked up Walden, I had no idea what this guy was talking about. I was in the eighth grade, and I had heard that the book was a classic. Being a student in the gifted and talented program at my school—being a future member of my high school’s I. Q. Booster Club—how could I not want to check it out? I found it in paperback, there on a dark dusty wooden shelf, wedged in tightly among other classics. The cover was not promising—had a weird-looking guy on it with a neck beard. Did he just forget to shave his neck? What’s up with that? I flipped through the pages: tiny print, no picture. Uuugh. Then I started to read. Sentences that had way too many phrases and commas in them, each like long tangled thread. References to Greek and Roman mythology, world religions, science; allusions to stuff I could only vaguely sense. Now, I know that Thoreau is like a contemporary Unitarian Universalist preacher in that he builds the nest of his thought from many sources of insight and wisdom; now, I know that he loved puns and paradox and wordplay, enough to drive his friend and mentor Emerson crazy; now, I know he believed that “in writing, conversation should be folded many times thick.” Now, I know—but then, not at all. Walden was indigestible. I struggled with it for a time, and then gave up.

Now I am in a different place in my life. Perhaps more mature; perhaps more able to navigate his conversation folded many times thick. Definitely hungering for an alternative to the quiet desperation that is contemporary life. And voluntary simplicity as a spiritual discipline sounds very good to me. To what degree does our genuine happiness and wellbeing depend on the clothing we wear, the shelter we possess, the food we eat, the work we do. Is there a way to “get one’s living honestly, with freedom left to pursue one’s proper pursuits”? “The more you have,” says Thoreau, “the poorer you are.” We don’t own our things; our things (or our debts) own us. Simplicity preserves an ability to journey freely through life; but a richness of things weighs us down, puts the cart before the horse, distorts and distracts, “cooks us a la mode.”

At times Thoreau is tongue-in-cheek hilarious as he figures out how to live his voluntary poverty principle. “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk,” he says, “but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.”

Or this story: “A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best,” Thoreau concludes,” to avoid the beginnings of evil.”

And can you imagine being his friend? “I sometimes try my acquaintances,” he says, “by such tests as this;–who could wear a patch … over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon.” Is he right? Is this true? Are we so completely enslaved to keeping up appearances, when in reality all that matters is the inner person, the goodness of a heart, the clarity of a mind, the depth of a spirit?

Applying the voluntary simplicity principle in a consumeristic culture like ours seems hardly possible. Yet I wonder at the effects of at least trying. Reminds me of another story that Thoreau tells, about his axe: “One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.” That’s the story. We are the snake in its torpid state. Yet there is a spring of springs that can arouse us, and raise us up to a higher and more ethereal life.

Above all, this higher life is one of trust. “I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do,” he says. “Nature is well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well night incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do: and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith is we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert….” Perhaps the root of all evil is none other than this—our pride—and to it, we must take the axe of voluntary simplicity. Greater than anything we can do or any thing we can own is the world’s graciousness, its simple things; we can trust that life is worth living, no matter what.

This is what the first chapter of Walden is all about. Describes nothing less than a hero journey in the economy of life, picks up huge themes like suffering, the quest for healing, discovery, renewal. Thoreau’s unique angle of vision on all this is what we borrow, as we begin. I’ll close with a poem by Norah Pollard that puts it all in perfect and precise cameo:

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she’d worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything—
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief—
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.