The Free Seeker
E-Newsletter of the Unitarian Fellowship of Hntington
Editor: Jack Wilkinson
Issue 20: May 26, 2010
Program for Sunday, May 30, 2010
Fellowship Potluck Picnic
Come and bring a dish to share, but if you forgot the dish, come anyway. We shall be dining together in the back yard, minus the tiny cabal of anti-naturists that huddles inside and plots the overthrow of the rest. The balancing of the meal will, as usual, be left entirely to chance. What you bring may depend on the politics of whoever you reflect: if of Herbert Hoover (a chicken in every pot), then you'll bring a chicken, if of J. Edgar Hoover, perhaps a salad with a hidden microphone, if of the contemporary Republicans (the party of 'nay') then perhaps a roasted state bird of Hawaii (ne-ne)..
We'll see you at 11:00 AM Sunday.
Future Programs
June 6: Open Discussion
June 13 Ed Necco: "Free Thinkers: A History of American Secularism"
June 22: Jack Wilkinson: "The Yankee Bard: the Life and works of Robert Frost"
June 29: Jacqueline Muth: "Occupied Minds in Occupied Palestine"
July, the Month of Revolution
July 4: Open Discussion
July 11: The dance presentation that Nixon saw when he went to China
July 18: Chinese dance presentation, Part II
July 25: Discussion: "China, Then and Now" with a perspective by Claire Horton
Retrospective of Last Sunday's Program
Jenny Kerr: "Autobiography"
This was the first time in my life I saw a power point demonstration. It is apparently a device that more and more students and businesses are beginning to utilize. I, who grew up in the age of chisels and stele, could only grunt and shake my goose quill pen.
Jenny is planning a book under a nom de plume, which she will call Surviving Mother Nature by Stephanie Rose Robinson. A subtitle may be A Personal Experience of Culture. She will be dividing her analysis into three stages: childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Her family situation was dysfunctional, insofar as her parents were concerned. Her paranoid schizophrenic mother refused to hold her when she was born, calling her a 'spawn of Satan.' Blessedly some of the slack was ultimately taken up by an able and loving grandmother and three fond uncles. Nevertheless, the pressures on her young mind were enough to drive her to skip school and hide in the neighborhood. At age six she attempted suicide. In short, she was left behind in school both intellectually and socially. Then when she was 7 and in the second grade her mother went raving mad, and her grandmother took her in. She regards this woman as her savior, because she taught h er how to be normal. For example, her mother had treated her like a dog by making her eat off the floor and generally turned her into a wild child. Her grandmother, on the other hand, brought order into her life and taught her table manners. This woman had served in the military and had left an abusive relationship and had raised four children before raising her granddaughter.
To recover from life with mother she went on a regime of self-therapy. She joined school groups and took extra classes, both to re-educate herself and to avoid spending time with her mother, who had returned after a few years' absence. She went through life-style phases in high school that she variously characterized as 'dramatic,' 'butch gothic,' finally synthesizing all her idiosyncracies into 'hippy pagan' as a rebound from 'goody Christian.' In the course of her self-therapy she accepted her sexual orientation as a bi-sexual. Her own experience of a dysfunctional life caused her to want to help others in a similar situation. She became a counselor at Great Oak Farm, where she saw herself as a wounded healer,
In college she took a double major in biology and music, then added psychology.
Her mother had had a still-born twin that bore a resemblance to her (Jenny). when she suggested to her grandmother that she, Jenny, was that very twin come back as her granddaughter, the grandmother burst into tears and admitted that she had always thought that was what had happened.
Slowly she developed a humanistic and holistic world view.
In a last-ditch effort to be straight she married a man who, like herself, preferred his own gender. After they came to a mutual realization as to what had happened they parted amicably and sustained a brotherly-sisterly relationship thereafter.
She graduated form the State University of West Georgia in Carrolton, and she presently works for Prestera as an addiction recovery counselor. Her message: you are not your label. She is a Unitarian Universalist of several years and a member of the UU Pagans. Incidentally, she often wonders what would have happened to her mother if she had been a member of a Native American tribe that had allowed her the many voices in her fractured psyche.
Homily: "Meeting Yourself Halfway" by the Reverend Jack Wilkinson
When you have to walk a mile down the road, maybe to pick up a copy of the Sunday Times, you assess whether the paper is worth the walk. However, as your resolve stiffens you may become aware that a part of you is already at your destination, and as you start out he starts out towards you. You meet half-way at the point of no return. You're already half way there, so you might as well keep on going, and you do.. Sometimes, however, your meeting with yourself becomes palpable, as it did for poet Robert Frost, when he made an important destiny choice, which later came out in his poem "The Road Not Taken." In explaining the poem he said that he had met himself on one of his walks, but he did not elaborate. If they spoke, imagine how it might have gone.
The Meeting of Frost and Counter-Frost
Counter-Frost: Hello, there, Rob.
Frost: Hi, Rob.
Counter-Frost: Where are you headed?
Frost: Nowheres. Just out for a walk.
Counter-Frost: Oh, sure, but then you could be going somewhere specific.
Frost: Just to the mill pond and back. My usual.
Counter-Frost: Suppose your destination were unconscious?
Frost: See here, are you trying to confuse me?
Counter-Frost: What are you, Rob?
Frost: I'm a teacher, of course.
Counter-Frost: Is that all?
Frost: Of course not: I'm a husband, a father, an apple grower…and…
Counter-Frost: And what?
Frost: A poet, damn you! Why do you ask?
Counter-Frost: Why did you come today? It wasn't convenient, was it?
Frost: No, I had a cold.
Counter=Frost: But you came.
Frost: Yes, I came. God knows why!
Counter-Frost: You know why.
Frost: I do?
Counter-Frost You came to meet the poet.
Frost: Yes, and I have met him.
Counter-Frost: Then you know what you must do.
Frost: Yes.
Frost went back to the State Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he resigned his job as teacher. Then he sold his farm in West Derry, New Hampshire (willed to him by his grandfather) and took his family to England, where he was at long last discovered as a poet.
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