The Free Seeker

E-Newsletter of the Unitarian Fellowship of Huntington, West Virginia

Editor:  Jack Wilkinson

Issue 18, May 12, 2010

Program for Sunday, May 16

Buddhism:  Episode I

            No, this is not a misprint.  This is the program that was supposed to take place last Sunday, but a whole house-full of sorry-assed intellectuals found themselves lacking in the technical expertise to get the DVD player working properly.  The one man who might have delivered us from our pathetic ineptitude, Serge Ruiz, happened not to show up.  (Clearly God and his angels don't wish us to witness this ramshackle offering.)  Neither did his wife, Kristie Ruiz, appear, with the result that not only did we miss our program but we went hungry as well.  For us it was not a happy Mother's Day.  The only blessing in all this was that my insightful remarks about the program last week still apply. 

Future Programs

May 23:      Jenny Kerr:  "Autobiography"

May 30:      Fellowship Pot luck Picnic

June   6       Open Discussion

June 13       Ed Necco:  "Free Thinkers:  a History of Secularism"

June 20       Jack Wilkinson:  "the Holy War"

June 27       Jacqueline Muth:  "Occupied Minds in Occupied Palestine"

Retrospective of Previous Sunday

            In the ashes of our planned program with remarkable resilience we launched into an Open Discussion.  I began with an observation concerning the Tea Party movement:  that they were essentially a Republican good squad and a bunch of yahoo sons of bitches.  Wayne Horton stated that the Tea Partyers were responding to the fundamental change in the economic environment and its stark contrast with the decades immediately following the Second World War.  In short, they can no longer have what they used to have, and they are pissed!

            Claire Horton called attention to the David Broder article, in which he compared the political climate of today with that of the Eisenhower, or even the Johnson, years.  Today the most liberal Republican is to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and the most conservative Democrat is to the left of the most liberal Republican.  We are polarized with a vengeance!  I brought up Arthur Schesinger's book, The Vital Center, written in the 1950's, in which nuanced conservatives and liberals cooperated with bi-partisan strategies.  That center is gone. 

            Jim Maphet advanced the observation that to him it seemed that most people were happy and that only the fringes were miserable.  Well, we know that Jim is a Buddhist, and we suspect that the Buddhists have their own saffron-flavored cool-ade.  Yes, I suppose Americans are still happy, by and large, but it also seems to me that we may be drifting into a new Age of Anxiety, in which we overdose on Comedy Central to keep from getting the blues. 

            Wayne Horton made another observation.  We're going into a period when survival means getting smaller.  He said that the railroads, for example, had managed to hang on by downsizing.  Time distorts.  He said that a $20 gold-piece of his youth that circulated then at face value was now worth $1200.  He said that today's financial solution was to print money. 

            Claire Horton mentioned Oswald Spengler's landmark work Decline of the West as being prophetic.  He wrote it some eighty or ninety years ago.  The German title is Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which in direct English is The Going Under of the Evening Lands.  The most visible decline of Europe and North America is in their industrial base.  The steel behemoths are definitely slowing down. 

            A guy from CUUPS (sorry, I've forgotten his name) picked up on the growing smaller theme by saying that the power companies needed to downsize by 12%.  Someone (Heath, maybe) said that we needed to be cognizant of where things were made in order to avoid supporting sweat shop labor. 

            It was noted (by Wayne, I think) that the Japanese are still reeling from their depression of 1990 and that this is a warning that the whole world is going to have to start living on less. 

            Wayne discussed medicine in terms of a global outlook.  Claire said gloomily that we are not the country we once were.  Marilyn Howells mentioned a drain-off in the middle that is accentuating the distinction between rich and poor.

Light from Jack's Lantern

            Last Friday I browsed at a book sale at the Barboursville Public Library and got ten books, one of which was a collection of the wise sayings of the Rev. William Sloan Coffin under the title, Credo. 

            Bill Coffin was chaplain at Yale University and Williams College and was senior minister at the Riverside Church in New York City.  He became famous while at Yale in the 1960's for his opposition to the Viet Nam War, for which he was jailed.  He was also jailed for his work as a civil rights "Freedom Rider," was indicted by the government in the Benjamin Spock conspiracy trial and has been immortalized by the Doonsbury comic strip as Rev. Sloan.  I have met him on a few occasions.  He's a down-to-earth fellow who simply follows Christ's gospel of love without theological complication.  Here are a few quotes from Credo.

*            Socrates had it wrong:  it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.  Descartes too was mistaken;  "Cogito ergo sum"---"I think therefore I am?"  Nonsense.  "Amo ergo sum"---"I love therefore I am."  Or, as with unconscious eloquence St. Paul wrote, "Now abide faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of the se is love."

            I believe that.  I believe it is better not to live than not to love.

*            And if we are not yet one in love at least we are one in sin, which is no mean bond, because it precludes the possibility of separation through judgment.

*            Of God's love we can say two things:  it is poured out universally to everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet;  and secondly, God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value.  It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value.  Our value is a gift, not an achievement.

*             Because our value is a gift, we don't have to prove ourselves, only to express ourselves, and what a world of difference there is between proving ourselves and expressing ourselves.

*            We don't have to be successful, only valuable..  We don't have to make money, only a difference, and particularly in the lives that society counts least and puts last.

*            It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action.  For while in many matters it is first we must see, then we will act: in matters of faith it is first we must do, then we will know, first we will be and then we will see..  One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.

*            I love the recklessness of faith.  First you leap, and then you grow wings.

*            Spirituality means to me living the ordinary life extraordinarily well.

              As the old church father said, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."

*            So why are Christians so often so joyless?  It is, I think, because too often Christians have only enough religion to make themselves miserable.  Guilt they know, but not forgiveness.  Nietzche correctly noted, "Christians should look more redeemed."

*            The banality of guilt is that it is such a convenient substitute for responsibility.  It is so much easier to beat your breast than to stick your neck out.

Fellowship News

            Oops!  Last week I incorrectly cited our new Secretary as Marilyn Young.  No, it is Marilyn Howells.

            Wayne and Claire Horton are heading up to the Big Apple to attend the graduation of their daughter with a degree in Education Administration.  "This is not academe," Claire observed tartly, "but we will affirm her nonetheless."  Her name is Katie Zakedi, and she is married to an Iranian, who has become an American citizen.  Can't get much more American than that!