The Free Seeker
E-Newsletter of the Unitarian Fellowship of Huntington
Jack Wilkinson, Editor
Issue 16, April 28, 2010
Program for Sunday, June 2, 2010
Open Discussion
What's currently in the news: financial regulation, immigration, alternative energy initiatives, co-operation on global warming, local elections? Come prepared to broach your favorite issues for discussion.
Future Sunday Programs
There have been a few changes, so here's the new line-up.
May 9: The Buddha, Episode I
May 16: The Buddha, Episode II
May 23: Jenny Kerr: "Autobiography"
May 30: Fellowship Pot Luck Picnic
June 6 Open Discussion
June 13: Ed Necco: "Free Thinkers"
June 20 Jack Wilkinson: "The Holy War"
June 27 Jacqueline Muth: "Occupied Minds in Occupied Palestine "
Retrospective of Previous Sunday
The Reverend Jim Lewis spoke to us on behalf of the West Virginia Patriots for Peace. He has served a parish as its minister, but the greater part of his career has been as a fighter for social change for the Episcopal Church. He spent a lot of time stationed in what he called the peninsular area of Delaware , Maryland and New Jersey . He helped spearhead efforts for peace there during the two gulf wars In an outdoor protest with signs he said they gauged their success by the number of honks vis a vis the number of fingers. The fingers usually outnumbered the honks by about three to one.
He said a lot of energy on the part of peaceniks went into the electi`n of Barack Obama, because he seemed like someone who would sit and listen to them. Now, he's not so sure. He said his fellow workers for social justice are beginning to see the United States as a kind of friendly fascist state.
He sees hope in some of the governors and mayors who are gradually discovering the real cost of our foreign wars. He cites the mayor of Binghamton , New York who has a clock on display that keeps adding up dollars from their city being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . It won't be long now, Price thinks, before municipal protests become louder and more frequent.
He spoke of his work with People of Faith Against the Death Penalty in North Carolina . There was general agreement among those present that the death penalty was impractical, but Price stressed its opposition as a moral imperative, and he decried the disappearance of moral concerns in public policy.
Our speaker said that a fundamental systemic problem consisted in the fact that our economy is based on militarism. A change from a war-based to a peace-based economy would free up some 2.9 billion dollars per year. He said we had about a thousand bases all around the world.
I replied that this was not totally without reason. I said that during the time when we weren't policing the world, let's say from 1900 to 1940, the result of our non-engagement was two world wars. That's right: two wars erupted because we weren't paying sufficient attention. The choice, I argued, seemed to be between militarism leading to small wars and pacifism leading to huge wars. After all, since we girdled the globe with bases there has been no World War III. There was a loud outcry against my statement. Nobody agreed with me, but nobody had a rebuttal, not even the speaker.
Cabell County has spent $146,000,000 on the two wars. Price decried our policy of destroying and then rebuilding, and we all agreed. That way not only do the war contractors get rich but the rebuilding contractors as well. That's how Cheney feeds his children: Halliburton, Brown & Root and others.
He said we use military recruitment to feed off the immigration issue. That way more poor and desperate people get piped into our military as cannon fodder.
We discussed the Tea Party movements. He said we needed to learn how to talk with these people. I called them an unofficial Republican goon squad. Then somebody (I want to give credit , but I forget who) suggested we start a Green Tea Party. We agreed that would be a good example of the left taking back the initiative from the right.
Price ended with the emphasis that we have become an empire at a time when other empires (Ottoman, British, Russian) have disappeared. He quoted George Soros, who said that as the dragon gets bigger and bigger he eventually begins to eat his own tail.
Homily: "Thoughts on Materialism and Spirituality" by the Reverend Jack Wilkinson
The great religious debate is not between those who believe in God and those who don't. That's just plain silly. The debate is between those who affirm the existence of a Divine Ground of Being and those who do not. Put another way, it is between those who affirm the primacy of Spirit over Nature and those who believe in Nature alone. In other words, as an affirmer of Spirit my battle is not with the atheist but with the materialist, because denying God is like setting fire to a scarecrow. The God-denier gets to define what he is denying as something mindlessly trivial and then easily disposes of it. However, Spirit or the Divine Ground of Being is less easily dismissed.
Spirit is all-pervasive. To deny it is tantamount to denying one's next breath. Therefore, a materialist's view of things is necessarily fragmentary. In fact, should it ever become integral, he would no longer be a materialist. What the materialist fails to see is that each integral thing is an idea clothed in substance. The occultist or spiritualist lives and breathes from a point deep inside these ideas and other such sublime coherences. He is within a magnetic field of subtle reverberations of life, mind, soul and spirit. He can also see things the way the materialist does, which is to say he can be objective and analytical, but to do so he has to shift gears, as it were.
Let's consider something particular: water, for example. Perhaps the materialist takes comfort in his knowledge that water consists of two gases, each of which is combustible, but when mixed together in the right proportion they are wonderfully wet.. In fact, the utter joy of water to someone appreciating it as a manifest idea is inexpressible, assuming that he is not mentally fracturing it in some imaginary beaker. How does one bridge the materialist's fractured universe? To live in such a universe would be like having a perpetual open wound, like Prometheus chained to a boulder by Zeus. To maintain his rigid, fractive view of things the materialist must daily give of his life substance. Actually he is making a heroic sacrifice on the altar of objectivity, the same sacrifice I must briefly make whenever I shift gears into objectivity for a short time.
Now let me speak more generally but at the same time more metaphorically. Perhaps we are talking about happiness. Let's imagine life as being some sort of cocktail, a margarita, perhaps. Imagine the materialist stringing himself out in separate streams towards life's ingredients: the triple sec, the lime juice and the tequila. He enjoys each individually, but they don't come together for him. They don't coalesce. However, the occultist, the spiritualist lives at the level of the integral cocktail the whole time. He lives in an ongoing Margaritaville. Is this far-fetched? Let's see if we can apply it to the day-to-day scenario.
Whether you're a materialist or a spiritualist you have a daily schedule. Your day is full of moments. You get up, you shower or otherwise prepare yourself, you get breakfast, you go out, you do things, you run errands, you come back home, you straighten up the house, have a cocktail, fix dinner, watch TV, read a book and go to bed. You do these things alone or you interact with others. If all these disparate acts and moments are somehow adding up for you, running together like rivulets into a larger stream, if somewhere there is a patina on your outlook that now and then shines, then, even if you consider yourself a materialist, perhaps you are not one after all. If you can wrap up your day with all its gewgaws, good and bad, and tie it with a ribbon before you go to sleep, then maybe Spirit has taken you unawares. No need to protest. You can keep your philosophy by whatever name you want to call it, and I won't tell a soul.