James

My colleague Andrea Perry Lerner, in her capacity as a friend on Facebook posted this picture:
















She then offered how she's going to be alternating optimistic and pessimistic posts, but it will be the reader's task to figure out which is which...

Kind of like life...

I wasn't watching a lot of television in 1966, so I missed out that day, this day, in that year, when Star Trek made its debut.

Later, I would be a fan, if not of the ferocious sort.

I'm glad for the humanistic spirituality it advocated.

Good stuff.

Could use a little more of that, these days, no doubt...

I think of labor day and I think of what the union movement gave to America.

Like the eight hour work day & the five day work week.



Like actual safety regulations, often actually enforced.



I feel terrible that the union movement has not been swift in adapting to the new conditions, and the increasing irrelevance of the white collar unions in the public sector.



I think we're facing some hard days ahead.



And without a revival of the unions or some successor organization, things are going to be much harder for most of us...

JESUS WAS A CARPENTER

One of the most moving scenes in a film that I can think of is where Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid walk out of a private meeting into the bar where Conrad Veidt is leading a bunch on Nazis singing Deutchland Uber Alles. The screen pans across the faces of the crowd. For me most notably Claude Rains stone faced witness. That is until, as Henreid walks to the band, I watch Ingrid Bergman's face. Then Henreid tells the band to strike up the Marseillaise, and they look to Bogart who gives that small nod, I'm swept away by all of what follows...

Thinking of that sets me to thinking about we as human beings and what it means that we belong to groups.

I have just enough of a defective gene, it appears, to have some small distance from these things. I've never had a taste for sports and find people's affinity for teams mildly amusing. I can play at it, but, truthfully I'll never be a true citizen of Red Sox Nation.

Not that I'm completely immune to such things. I know I have a visceral connection to California that even though it is past unlikely I'll ever return there to live, doesn't mean I won't die a Californian.

And when I'm not mad at it, I am glad to be an American.

And not just because it's so rich and that as an American my family and I have a better chance than most humans of not going to bed hungry. At least so far...

Intellectually, spiritually, I'm enamored with the experiment, the project of a broadly based democracy. I think constitutional democracy is a great and good thing.

Even knowing that there is a bit of a lie to it as it is practiced, particularly here. The other day I found myself bitterly ruminating on how our elections are often decided by people who are swayed by appeals to baser sentiments broadcast through relentless advertising and how their actual decisions are made when marking the ballot.

The upshot is that our democracy is more an oligarchy designed to serve the rich empowered by those many voters who fantasize they can be, too...

And, still, I love our country.

Ruminating on this I find a distinction between patriotism and nationalism.

Patriotism is that natural enough identity with our group, the us of things.

And nationalism is when it goes bad.

So, in Casablanca we get the patriotism of those who have been conquered standing up to nationalism's iron heel. If just for a moment.

If just in a movie.

So, here we are on Labor Day weekend. I've been struggling with a sermon. I think the old Labor movement has had its day. No doubt the labor movement was important because it was the group that actually cared about the working people. We should never forget the unions are the people that brought us the five day work week. But, that is mostly about the past. So, in the public sector, about the only place they continue to have some power, they're as likely to be obstructive to necessary changes as useful to the actual needs of the people. Increasingly they're simply irrelevant to ordinary lives.

But with them gone, or marginalized, who will stand against the powerful as they continue their relentless grasping after wealth?

I fear what may be replacing the unions, the labor movement, the liberal progressive element of our culture.

These are not, in my opinion, good days for the Republic.

In the wake of a disastrous presidency, we elected a young and vital president who tries hard to bridge the gap between the truly rich and the shrinking number who do well but live precarious lives on the one side and the increasing number of people who work hard but are poorer each year, not to mention the truly poor. He almost certainly saved us from a depression. And he led a charge that produced a health care package that while not anyone's ideal, could be and was passed through the congress.

And, for his efforts, he is castigated by the left for not doing enough and by the right for being a communist (if not a secret Muslim)...

And, if the talking heads are right, the election will be decided by the simple fact the economy has not recovered sufficiently. And instead, a passel of folk who when they're not outright insane are only looking for a fight against the communist, or, possibly, the secret Muslim, are going to be swept into political office.

The big question right now is whether this resurgent right will take the senate as well as the house.

And, because right after the generic down economy reason, that the airwaves are filled with charges that the president and his agenda is somehow alien, not American.

Here's nationalism's shadow.

The veiled racism inherent in suggesting he's really born in Kenya is obvious to anyone not caught up in the boiling water inside this country. Ask most anyone from Europe, or Asia or Africa, if you want a bewildered and possibly frightened view of what is going on here. But woe to those in the public arena that actually voice this harsh truth.

That's nationalism, pure as snow.

As I worry about all this I'm probably most worried by the fact that one appears to not be electable if one does not buy into the dogma of American exceptionalism.

I've read much of how the Japanese Zen Buddhist church was brought low by their embrace of Japanese exceptionalism in the run up to the Second World War. I look at the clergy of this country, particularly American Christian Evangelical Christians, but also many others, so many of whom whose religion is co-opted, who now think their god is named Jesus but it is in fact mammon. God and guns is the idolatry of nationalism...

Ugly stuff, this nationalism thing.

Patriotism has some modesty about it.

Nationalism knows no such governor.

I wonder what will save the Republic from itself?

How far are we from something very, very nasty?

I don't feel particularly good about it...

Of course there are dreamers, dreaming of other ways, of other perspectives. There are voices crying out in the wilderness, calling us to our better angels.

And, while who wins is never certain, I hear the strains of angel choruses...



And, so in spite of it all, I hope...

A few days ago I received a note from a friend about a friend of hers who is dealing with chronic pain and wanted my view on suicide, and whether it is a sin.

I said that sin is not really a term of art within Unitarian Universalism, nor, particularly, in Buddhism.

Of course the question begs a definition of sin that does not include offense against a deity. The Wikipedia article on sin gives a pretty good working examination of sin from a Buddhist perspective.

Buddhist ethics is consequentialist in nature and is not based upon duty towards any deities. It is founded upon compassion for all sentient beings and upon the duty to cause their happiness and to prevent their suffering. The well-being of all sentient beings is seen as an end-in-itself and not a means towards any transcendent end. Buddhist ethics therefore closely corresponds to secular ethics and there is no Buddhist equivalent of the Abrahamic concept of sin.^[1] Buddhism recognizes a natural principle of Karma whereby widespread suffering is the inevitable consequence of greed, hatred and delusion. Buddhism therefore seeks to end suffering by replacing greed with selflessness, hatred with compassion and delusion with wisdom.

I would argue a bit with Wikipedia's definition of consequentialist as it regards to a Buddhist understanding, as true but not sufficient.

At least within my understanding of Zen which is also my understanding of Unitarian Universalism (I suspect much could be played out from that, but some other time...) is that the action, whatever it is, is also the consequence, in addition to the various consequences that also follow the moment. We are and we are becoming. And, we are deeply, deeply interconnected. More on that in a moment.


Additionally I've come to see our intentions have a significant place within this whole thing. In that sense, what we think - we are.

Okay.

So, then to suicide.

Today would be my brother's sixty-first birthday. Except in 1997 he blew most of his head off with a high powered rifle. That year my son also committed suicide. And, a few months after both of their deaths my mother died.

These words sit so quietly on the page, or screen.

I wish they were not so compliant, so still. But as limited as what they convey, they'll have to do...

And that brings us back to that simple assertion a bit earlier, how we are deeply, deeply interconnected.

Also this past week a friend wanted to engage in a conversation about ego, focusing on whether it is just as delusionary to cling to a group ego as it is to one's own ego. There were deeper questions of personal concern hidden within that question.

Of course.

Where these events all come together is within our experience of self.

Who am I?

And, out of that, Cain's question.

Our conventional sense of self is as an isolated being whose outer boundaries extending somewhere in the general vicinity of the skin.

In some ways its an undeniable truth. The "I" is a byproduct of brain function and is responsible for the the safety and continuance of that collection of stuff that more or less extends to the skin.

But, we probe the matter a bit further and we see how much we in our simply physical, if simple can ever be used for physicality, reality, our actual boundaries are pretty vague, our senses themselves are very much part of that I and extend quite a distance past the skin, and we are connected through genes to all other life forms, some much, much more closely than others, and chemically vastly beyond that.

But there's the stuff that presents in the mind, as well.

And what makes me.

I am profoundly marked by my brother's death.

I am profoundly marked by my son's death.

I am profoundly marked by my mother's death.

In 1997 the constantly shifting being that calls itself "me" took some big hits and experienced some major shifts and while always becoming new, became something considerably different than before those three events.

So, suicide.

It all is situational. There are, to my mind, obvious reasons why one might choose to commit suicide. Unbearable pain is a pretty good one.

And whatever the choice there will be consequences.

And we don't really know who will be marked by such an act.

Or, what will be the shape of that change...

No idea...

Me, when pressed I can hold still for long periods of time...

I just learned from Carl McColman's Anamchara blog that Raimon Panikkar has died.

Joseph Prabhu writes at the National Catholic Reporter, "Professor Raimon Panikkar, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century in the areas of comparative religion, theology, and inter-religious dialogue, died at his home in Tavertet, near Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 26. He was 91.

"Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966-1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest and poet."

(the article continues here.)

Carl's reflection begins with a quote from Panikkar. "I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian."

A Universalist mystic, and a very, very interesting man.

And, I feel, his death is a loss for us all...

On this day in 1902 Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon, generally considered the first Science Fiction film, was released.

This video has English narration using a translation of the original French script, sound editing and effects by Matthew Hawes.