This Land Is Your Land?

"There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses."

-- Pearl S. Buck

Reading: from a piece published in The Sun Magazine (Nov. 2008), the name of the author was withheld

The morning the U.S. marshals rang our doorbell at 5 a.m., I answered in my green frog pajamas. When I saw the police cars and flashing lights, I figured our downstairs neighbors had had another domestic dispute, but then a female officer asked for my husband. The marshals followed me upstairs and arrested my groggy spouse. I begged them please not to wake our children; the last thing I wanted them to see was their daddy in handcuffs.

The marshals asked for my husband’s passport, and — not knowing we could refuse — we gave it to them. (This would speed the deportation proceedings.) I watched from the living-room window in shock as my hardworking husband of thirteen years was taken away. This shy, sweet man who’d painted my mother’s front steps and filled her empty refrigerator with food, who’d played Uno with our kids and washed our daughter’s hair every Saturday night, was gone. With him went our security, both financial and emotional.

It is now four years later, and I’m struggling to make mortgage payments and maintain a long-distance marriage. My husband and I made the tough decision that the children should live… with him. I still live in the U.S., in a one-room studio, and support both households on a single income.

Some mornings I wake up in my queen-size bed and reach for my husband. Then I remember that I am alone, and I wonder how I got here.

Reading: by investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele, from an article that appeared in Time magazine (Sept. 20, 2004), entitled “Who Left the Door Open?”

In a single day, more than 4,000 illegal aliens will walk across the busiest unlawful gateway into the U.S., the 375-mile border between Arizona and Mexico. No searches for weapons. No shoe removal. No photo-ID checks. Before long, many will obtain phony identification papers, including bogus Social Security numbers, to conceal their true identities and mask their unlawful presence.

The influx is so great, the invaders seemingly trip over one another…

Who’s to blame for all the intruders? While the growing millions of illegal aliens cross the border on their own two feet, the problem is one of the U.S.’s own making. The government doesn’t want to fix it, and politicians, as usual, are dodging the issue, even though public-opinion polls show that Americans overwhelmingly favor a crackdown on illegal immigration.

Reading: by the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco, a poem entitled “My Tribe” (translated by James Nolan)

Earth is the same

sky another.

Sky is the same

earth another.

From lake to lake,

forest to forest:

which tribe is mine?

—I ask myself—

where’s my place?

Perhaps I belong to the tribe

of those who have none;

or to the black sheep tribe;

or to a tribe whose ancestors

come from the future:

A tribe on the horizon.

But if I have to belong to some tribe

—I tell myself—

make it a large tribe,

make it a strong tribe,

one in which nobody

is left out,

in which everybody,

for once and for all

has a God-given place.

I’m not talking about a human tribe.

I’m not talking about a planetary tribe.

I’m not even talking about a universal one.

I’m talking about a tribe you can’t talk about.

A tribe that’s always been

but whose existence must yet be proven.

A tribe that’s always been

but whose existence

we can prove right now.

This Land is Your Land?

A Sermon Delivered on November 20, 2011

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

This coming week many of us will have a day or two off from work, to celebrate a national holiday, and maybe even enjoy a special meal with friends and family. As far as holidays go, Thanksgiving is a good one. It combines themes of gratitude, the blessings of nature and harvest, as well as a celebration of human fellowship.

The story of the First Thanksgiving paints a pretty picture of friendship that extends beyond boundaries nation and race. The Pilgrims, so the story goes, would not have survived their first winter at Plymouth Colony without the help of the Native Americans. The following year, in fall of 1621, a harvest festival lasting three days was held, at which the Pilgrims welcomed their Wampanoag neighbors into their midst, celebrating their friendship, and thanking God for their bountiful harvest.

* * *

The Pilgrims were immigrants to these shores, hoping for a better life here, than they knew in Europe. And, according to the Thanksgiving story, they were welcomed here with open and arms by a generous and compassionate tribe.

Reflecting on the Thanksgiving story today, 390 years later, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the Pilgrims walked onto a New England beach in 2011, hoping to build a life here.

Lacking proper paperwork, I imagine, the Pilgrims arriving on our shores today, would invariably be considered illegal aliens. And this raises all sorts of complicated questions.

But, first off let me tell you, I am not an impartial observer when it comes to immigration issues. You see, I myself am an alien. I am not an American citizen. I’m German. And I am with you today, because of this little card right here (show card). It’s called a Green Card, but it isn’t really green. It took some doing to get it. This card expires on October 1, 2013. And over the years that I’ve had a Green Card, a lot of rules have changed: what I need to do to renew it, and how long it is valid. Especially after September 11, 2001, things got a lot trickier. But I have little doubt my Green Card will be renewed again.

* * *

The majority of U.S. citizens have little tolerance for illegal immigrants. The latest anti-immigration legislation in Alabama is a good example. Alabamans now need to prove their immigration status for “any transaction between a person and the state,” for instance renewing a driver’s license or registering an automobile. In some Alabama cities utility companies are now barred from providing services to illegal immigrants. The immigrants need to get by without running water and sewer access.

Any agency or official that doesn’t carry out the law to the fullest can face civil or criminal penalties. Simply observing a violation and failing to report it is a crime that can lead to felony charges. According to some state lawmakers, proof of citizenship now needs to be provided when arranging for garbage pickup, applying for a dog license, or getting flu shots at county health departments. (NYT, Nov. 16, 2011, “In Alabama, Calls for Revamping Immigration Law.”)

Between 1996 and 2006, 1.8 million illegal immigrants have been deported from the U.S.. Most are from Mexico.

* * *

U.S. citizens, we are told, have little tolerance for illegal immigrants. We call them illegal aliens, a species unto itself; aliens, like the little green men from Mars. Not quite human. Or simply “illegals.” People, who by their very presence are breaking the law. Fugitives, criminals, invaders, intruders. That’s the way we are supposed to think of them.

In fact, however, while entering the U.S. without permission is a criminal offense, it is only a minor misdemeanor. And living or working here without permission, is only a civil infraction, not a crime. According to the law, it is not like trespassing, it’s more like the ticket you would get for jaywalking. (Jane Guskin, David Wilson The Politics of Immigration, p. 40)

And yet, illegal immigrants can be jailed in a detention center for years, because of bureaucratic delays or backlogged federal courts. Their presence in this country without permission is only a civil violation. But they are imprisoned as if they were being punished for a serious crime.

I wonder how our Thanksgiving story would be told today, if the Pilgrims had been imprisoned by the Wampanoag immigration authorities, spending months or years in a rustic prison, before being sent back to Europe.

* * *

There are many factors that contribute to the migration of Mexicans to the U.S. and back.

In the course of the twentieth century, Mexico grew from a mainly agricultural country to the world’s thirteenth largest economy, right ahead of Russia. In the 1980s, Mexico suffered a financial crisis. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which we negotiated in the early 1990s, was supposed to help. But instead, NAFTA’s elimination of protective tariffs forced 1.5 million Mexican farmers out of business, and forced them to abandon their farms. Farmers earned 70 percent less for the corn they sold, but Mexicans paid 50 percent more for the tortillas they ate. Meanwhile, the purchasing power for the Mexican minimum wage fell by two-thirds between 1980 and 1996.

This kind of economic crisis leads men and women to seek employment in the U.S. despite the dangers involved.

The Catholic bishop John Wester sees migrants from Mexico to the U.S. as pawns in a game of chess played by their respective governments. He writes:

“Migrants from Mexico, unable to support their families at home, take a dangerous journey to the United States and fill menial but crucial jobs in the U.S. economy — dishwashers, farmworkers and day laborers, for example.

As a result, the United States receives the benefit of their toil and taxes without having to worry about protecting their rights — in either the courtroom or the workplace. When convenient, they are made political scapegoats and attacked — through both rhetoric and work-site raids — as if they were not human.

But Mexico also wins financially under this system. The country receives up to $20 billion in remittances per year… [the money sent from workers in the U.S. to their family members in Mexico]

What is left is a “go north” policy that exposes Mexican citizens to the ravages of human smugglers, corrupt law enforcement officials and potential death in the desert.

The big losers in this globalization game are the migrants, of course. They have no political power and are unable to defend themselves from inevitable abuse and exploitation.” (Politico, May 19, 2010, “Migrants pawns in Mexico-U.S. game”)

I wonder how history would have unfolded if the Pilgrims had encountered barbed wire fences running hundreds of miles along the coast. Imagine if they managed to moor their boats, scale the fences, and reach solid land, only to be confronted by a Native American volunteer police force that either imprisoned them, or, in short order hurled them back into the sea - indifferent whether they would live or die.

* * *

The complicated relationship between Mexico and the U.S. has a long history.

Two hundred years after the Pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving, and called this land their home, Mexicans had reason to celebrate a new home, too. That year Mexicans brought their revolutionary war against Spain to a victorious end. In 1821 Mexico was no longer a Spanish colony, but a country of its own. At the time Mexico was about twice the size it is today. It included today’s Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and part of Colorado.

But when James Polk was elected President of the United States in 1845, it soon became clear that he had serious expansionist ambitions. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson had doubled the territory of the United States, buying vast stretches of the Midwest from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Forty-two years later, Polk was determined to see the United States extend to the Pacific shore.

It was that same year, 1845, that newspaper editor John Sullivan, captured the spirit of many Americans when he wrote, it was “Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” It was God’s will, he said, that the land extending from East coast to West should be ours.

What President Polk did, was send U.S. army troops 150 miles into Texas Mexican territory, chasing away the inhabitants, and building a fort on the bank of the Rio Grande. Mexicans did not take kindly to this provocation, and in April of 1846, a patrol of U.S. soldiers was attacked, leaving sixteen dead.

President Polk was promptly informed that “hostilities had commenced.” This was just the news he was waiting for: the Mexicans had fired the first shot. Thus the U.S. could declare war on Mexico in retaliation for this Mexican “act of aggression.”

A large portion of the U.S. population welcomed the war, and the opportunity for expansion of their lands. But not everyone did. Earlier that year, Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, commander of the 3rd infantry regiment wrote in his diary: “I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors… We have not one particle of right to be here… It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico… My heart is not in this business… but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders.”

Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio called it “an aggressive, unholy, and unjust war.”… “In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their country, I can take no part either now or hereafter….”

These were minority opinions. Henry David Thoreau was also an outspoken opponent of the war, and chose to spend a night in jail rather than pay taxes in support for the war-effort. His reflections on this experience deepened his affirmation of civil disobedience. And his writings on civil disobedience, in turn, inspired - among others - Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Buber, and Leo Tolstoy.

Walt Whitman captured the sentiment of most Americans, when he wrote, “Yes: Mexico must be thoroughly chastised!... Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!” (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p.147-152)

In 1848 Mexico surrendered. And what was once their land became our land, now stretching from California to the New York Island.

Suddenly 300,000 Mexicans found themselves living in the United States. Initially there were no restrictions to migration between the U.S. and Mexico. But over the years immigration laws became more restrictive. The laws changed depending on U.S. economic interests. Early in the twentieth century it was easy for Mexicans to emigrate into the U.S.. Their inexpensive labor was welcome. During the Great Depression, when jobs were scarce, many Mexicans were forced back out of the U.S.. Between 1929 and 1931, legal Mexican immigration fell by 95 percent.

Our definitions of legal or illegal immigration have always been in a state of flux.

Today, as the U.S. economy struggles along, Mexicans are once again cast as villains. Hard working men and women, tax-paying residents, loving families are torn apart and treated as if they were the intruders, as if they were the invaders in our land.

* * *

Thanksgiving is a fine holiday. It tells a compelling story of friendship that extends beyond boundaries of nation and race. But it is not a historically accurate story. It doesn’t capture the tension and warfare that existed between Settlers and Natives in 17th century New England. It doesn’t describe the how Europeans systematically drove the Natives from their land, so that we could create a country of our own here: the United States. Our land.

No, the Thanksgiving story is not about a past we remember, it is about a future we envision. It isn’t a story about the actual European encounter with the Wampanoag tribe. It is a story about a tribe we have yet to create: a tribe in which nobody is left out.

Thanksgiving is about a tribe we long for, but whose existence must yet be proven. A tribe that has long lived within our moral imagination, and whose existence we can prove right now.

May Thanksgiving inspire us to transcend the boundaries that would divide us,

and help us see that we are all brothers and sisters.

May we each do our part to make this a land

In which nobody is left out,

In which everybody has a God-given place.

Amen.

Taming the Monkey Mind

"The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

-- John Milton

Meditation: by the Unitarian Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (Singing the Living Tradition #660)

Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?

We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.

I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.

I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear…

I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,

I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;

Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.

Reading: by Nicholas Carr from The Shallows - What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (p. 5, 7)

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly, disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it too. Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going - so far as I can tell - but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle…

Maybe I’m an aberration, an outlier. But it doesn’t seem that way. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends, many say they’re suffering from similar afflictions. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they’re becoming chronic scatterbrains.

Reading: by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron from Taming the Mind (p. 104)

Taming the mind takes time. Through good and bad moods, through periods of peacefulness and [anxiety] attacks, we train in being present. Day by day, month by month, year by year, we become better able to keep a rule of life, better able to lead the life of a bodhisattva who can hear the cries of the world and extend a hand…

In Buddhist literature there are many animal analogies for the wildness of mind: monkey mind, for example, or the out-of-control nature of an untamed horse. [Some teachers magnify] the image by choosing the most powerful of all tamable beasts: an elephant. If a wild horse or monkey can wreak havoc, imagine the destruction that could result from a crazed elephant!

Reading: by the Christian Trappist monk Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation (p. 1)

Contemplation is the highest expression of [our] intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source…

Taming the Monkey Mind

A Sermon Delivered on November 13, 2011

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Henry David Thoreau is one of my Unitarian heroes. His story of a simple life in a small cottage near Walden Pond has long been an inspiration for me. I long for such simplicity, that I too might learn to live deliberately.

So it is with come embarrassment that I must tell you what I was doing last month, on Friday, October 14, in the RadioShack store at the corner of Vine and Main Streets in Urbana. You see, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of consumers around the country who acquired the brand new iPhone on the first day it was on sale. Unlike several other customers who dropped by the store that afternoon, and left empty-handed - my phone was pre-ordered and waiting for me.

I am embarrassed, because I have reason to believe Henry David Thoreau didn’t own an iPhone. And if he did, I imagine he wouldn’t have taken it along to Walden Pond.

In the way of mitigating explanation, let me say, this was not entirely my own initiative. The phone was pre-ordered by my loving wife, Elaine. It was a birthday present.

But it is a fact - I do really like my iPhone. Some of you may have heard a sermon I delivered almost two years ago, when I mentioned purchasing my first iPhone… and talked about the religious implications.

Since then, I have grown increasingly attached to the device, and its seductive distractions, perhaps even addicted to the temptations of technology. Some scientists say smartphone use can tap into the same neural pathways that drive compulsive behavior, like gambling. Or that they trigger the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is associated with addiction to cigarettes or drugs.

One researcher recently determined that among committed users, the iPhone can elicit almost religious devotion. MRI tests showed that images of Apple products touched into the same brain regions of research subjects, as images of rosary beads or the pope.

In a test earlier this year, the researcher set out to determine whether iPhones are indeed as addictive as alcohol, shopping or video games. What he discovered was that for devoted users the iPhone triggered a flurry of activity in the “insular cortex of the brain,” which is the area associated with feelings of love and compassion. It is the same area that is active when we are in the presence of a close friend, family member, or lover.

The researcher concludes: “In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.” (NYT, 9/30/11, “You Love Your iPhone. Literally.” By Martin Lindstrom)

Which makes me think, it’s a good thing my iPhone is a gift from my beloved wife, and is thus re-enforcing my love for her, rather than competing with it.

* * *

Nevertheless, the continual internet access which has been made possible by smartphones can have troubling consequences for our lives. There are potential benefits, in terms of useful information and communication, but also potential dangers.

Nicholas Carr believes extensive internet use has a troubling impact on our mental and emotional health. Its endless distractions and interruptions undermine our ability to concentrate and think deeply. It makes us scattered, fidgety, and restless.

The trouble with the internet, Carr writes, is it “seizes our attention only to scatter it. We focus intensely on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli.” (p. 118)

Studies of office workers who use computers show that they constantly stop what they are doing in order to read and respond to incoming email. Many glance at their inbox thirty or forty times an hour. Each glance is an interruption of thought. Over time, these “interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious.” (p. 132)

“Every time we shift our attention,” Carr writes, “our brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources,” leaving us restless and bewildered. (p. 133)

* * *

The seductive distractions of our lives in the twenty-first century are unprecedented. But the challenge of coping with a mind that is distracted and bewildered, has been a source of religious concern for millennia.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham - who was trained in the contemplative arts of archery, calligraphy and horsemanship - writes, “The bewildered mind is like a wild horse. It runs away when we try to find it, shies when we try to approach it, it takes off with the bit in its teeth and finally throws us right into the mud. We think that the only way to steady it is to give it what it wants We spend so much of our energy trying to satisfy and entertain this wild horse of a mind.” (Turning the Mind Into an Ally, p. 19)

A bewildered mind is weak because it is continually distracted. When difficulties arise, we are unable to cope. When we feel threatened, we strike out in anger. If we see something we like, we immediately want to have it. We live our lives at the mercy of our moods, and our actions are guided by thoughtless impulse, desires for immediate gratification, and short-term satisfaction.

A restless mind is unable to focus long enough to see the long-term consequences of what we do and leave undone. And so we make bad decisions.

We make the kind of bad decisions I talked about last Sunday. Bad decisions like those surrounding business on Wall Street, and a financial industry that was devoid of safe-guards, allowing dreams of short term gain to lead us into a global economic crisis with long-term consequences.

And this week, the news has been offering more examples. The president of Penn State university, and the football team’s head coach, made some bad decisions, when they chose not to appropriately address instances of sexual abuse and child molestation committed by an assistant coach, which took place for over a decade. This is a scandal, which got the president and head coach fired this week.

And on a local level - we have learned that an associate dean at the U of I law school, has been falsifying test scores of hundreds of law students over several years, in order to improve the law school’s position in national college rankings. Since the dean’s efforts helped the law school regain entry to the top-twenty law schools of country, his salary had been more than doubled. The dean - now no longer employed at the U of I - made some bad decisions.

Sometimes people make bad decisions. And when hear about them, after the fact, when we watch the consequences of bad choices unfold over time, and see the final outcome - we may wonder: what were they thinking?

When I hear stories of intelligent and conscientious individuals whose actions seem anything but intelligent and conscientious, it seems obvious these people were not thinking very clearly.

Poor choices are evidence of a bewildered mind, scattered and rushed, a mind unable to think deeply. A bewildered and distracted mind does a fine job attending to the immediate demands of living. Forever darting around, from one interest to the next, it can respond to immediate threats and dangers, it can guide impulsive action, and point us toward short-term gain.

The research of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio supports this. But his research also shows there are other kinds of mental functioning at are “inherently slow.” The mental processes associated with higher brain functions, such as empathy. They cannot be rushed. For a brain to understand and feel the “psychological and moral dimensions of a situation” takes time. (Carr, p. 220)

The more distracted we are, the more difficult it is to experience the subtle and distinctly human forms of empathy and compassion and morality.

* * *

Pema Chodron reminds us that it takes time to tame the monkey mind. And only if we take the time will we gain the clarity of mind needed to lead the life of a bodhisattva, a life of service, a life that allows us to hear the cries of the world, and which allows us to extend a helping hand.

Chodron draws on the insights of the eighth century Indian teacher Shatideva. Shatideva envisions the bewildered mind as neither a monkey, nor a horse. He envisions an elephant. Shatideva writes:

Wandering where it will, the elephant of mind,

Will bring us down to pains of deepest hell.

No worldly beast, however wild,

Could bring upon us such calamities.

Hell, he understands, is not some place the unfortunate may discover after death, nor punishment for disobedience to the divine. Hell is a state of mind - a bewildered mind.

This insight is not unique to Eastern philosophy. John Milton knew as much, when he wrote, “The mind is its own place, and itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

In the Western tradition the practice of contemplation can provide relief from such hellish suffering. Contemplation opens our eyes to the blessings of life itself. It can teach us to be fully awake, fully active, fully aware. It can teach us gratitude.

In the Eastern tradition the practice of meditation and mindfulness can help us. Shatideva envisions the practice of mindfulness as a rope that can restrain our restlessness, tying our attention calmly to the present moment. He writes,

If, with mindfulness’ rope,

The elephant of the mind is tethered all around,

Our fears will come to nothing,

Every virtue will drop into our hands.

Sakyong Mipham says meditation is not some esoteric skill, but rather a natural process of the mind. Meditation is simply a matter of watching our thoughts, watching as they jump from one idea or impulse to the next, from one distraction to another. He says, “Even though the bewildered mind is untrained, it is already meditating, whether we know it or not.” (p. 24)

Simply by watching our restlessness in action, we are already slowing down. We are already stabilizing the mind. If we continue to practice mindfulness, first by paying attention to our restless thoughts, then our breathing, then our actions this very moment - then, over time, every virtue will drop into our hands.

* * *

Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? Thoreau asks us. He says we should slow down, and learn to live deliberately.

We have good reason to live more deliberately, not only for the sake of our own personal health and happiness, not only so we can learn to transform our lives from a personal hell to heaven - though that’s part of it.

We must live deliberately, because only if we do so, will we be able to transform the world around us from hell to heaven.

We must slow down, in order to think deeply, and see clearly. That is simply the way our brains are built. We need to slow down in order to understand the moral dimensions of our actions, in order feel compassion, in order to experience love - real love, not just a blip in the brain when we get a new iPhone or other gadget.

We must slow down, so that when we look back on our lives, we don’t see a long series of bad decisions; so we don’t scratch our heads and wonder: What were we thinking? And when we come to die, discover we have not lived.

We must slow down, in order to hear the cries of the world, so we can extend a helping hand.

Our lives are, and always will be, filled with distractions

May we learn to pay attention to them.

May our every distraction remind us to slow down.

So we might understand the deeper purpose of our lives,

So we might feel compassion and commitment and love

And find that peace of mind that can guide our efforts to

Build a better world.

Amen.

Wisdom on Wall Street

"The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom."

-- Aristotle

Reading: by Rev. Craig T. Roshaven, Witness Ministries Director for the Unitarian Universalist Association, from an October 31, 2011 statement about Occupy Wall Street and related events:

Across our nation and around the world, thousands of people have taken to the streets to question the morality of our financial system. The movement that initially started as an occupation of Wall Street has now spread to cities, large and small, all across the land. It is a movement of people who are demanding a fundamental restructuring of how we distribute the wealth that we, the people, produce.

There are good reasons for this outpouring of anger and discontent. The rich are getting richer, while everyone else is getting poorer. Since 1976, hourly wages have declined by 7% while the share of total income going to the top 1% of earners rose from 9% to 23.5%.

Unitarian Universalists have a long tradition of calling for economic justice. We are especially concerned with justice for the most vulnerable. Hundreds of Unitarian Universalists across the country are participating in the Occupy movement in a variety of ways. We add our voice to theirs in demanding fundamental change.

Reading: excerpts from a New Yorker Magazine blog from October 19, 2011, posted by David Holmes, entitled “The Crisis in a Nutshell: Occupy Wall Street”

A digest of the past week’s prophetic and interpretive thought

“In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.” —President Barack Obama

“If you don’t have a job, and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” —Herman Cain, former C.E.O. of Godfather’s Pizza

“I think Mr. Cain has blamed the victims. There’s a lot of people that are victims of this business cycle. We can’t blame the victims.” —Ron Paul, a congressman for Texas

“I regard the Wall Street protests as a natural outcome of a bad education system teaching them really dumb ideas.” —Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House

“Being in the streets and calling attention to issues is sometimes the only recourse you have.” —Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare.” —Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts

“At some level, I can’t blame them.” —Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve

“I think that if the Occupy Wall Street wants to be upset about something they should go in front of the White House.” —Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman for Minnesota

“Ninety-nine per cent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily ninety-nine per cent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling one percent who disagree.” —Lemony Snicket, an author of children’s books

Reading: “Seven Social Sins,” quoted by Mahatma Gandhi in a 1925 edition of his weekly journal, "Young India"

Politics without principles

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without character

Commerce without morality

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice

Wisdom on Wall Street

A Sermon Delivered on November 6, 2011

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

When I first heard about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, I didn’t know quite what to make of it. The first time I heard about it, it was in a news segment that was reporting on the fact, that there had not been much reporting on the occupation, and the allegation that mainstream media outlets were in cahoots with the mighty financial institutions the protesters were picketing. Since then I have heard a variety of accounts that paint the protesters either as kooks, or as solid citizens; either as savvy tech geeks and political activists, or as a public nuisance laying waste to a city park.

Should they be taken seriously? Do they raise valid issues? Our Unitarian Universalist leadership in Boston believes they do. Our financial system does more than simply manage money, it also shapes the very fabric of our society. Actions on Wall Street, and their consequence beyond Wall Street, have serious moral implications.

In his book Rediscovering Values - On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street - A Moral Compass for the New Economy, the Christian activist Jim Wallis says, underneath the public discourse about our financial crisis,

“another conversation is emerging about who and what we want to be - as individuals, as a nation, and as a human community. By and large the media has missed the deeper discussion and continues to focus only up on the surface of the crisis. And most of our politicians just want to tell us how soon the crisis could be over. But there are deeper questions here and some fundamental choices to make. That’s why this could be a transformational moment, one of those times that comes around only very occasionally. We don’t want to miss this opportunity.” (p. 2)

* * *

It all began on Saturday, September 17th, when a loosely organized group of activists gathered in Manhattan’s financial district to protest “corporate greed, social inequality and the corrosive power of large banks and multinational corporations” which undermines the democratic process.

Some say, they were inspired by similar protests earlier in the year, which took place in countries as diverse as Spain and Israel, and Egypt. On the website “occupywallstreet” they call themselves a “leaderless people powered movement for democracy,” “a resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions.”

They say, “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”

They mean they represent 99 percent of the country, in contrast to the 1 percent, that holds a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth, and asserts a disproportionate influence on our political and economic system - and thus, invariably, our society as a whole. There is some truth to this.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and 2007, earnings of the top 1% of Americans have grown by an average of 275%. This top 1% controls about 40% of the country’s wealth.

The Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman says, that while protesters are correct in highlighting the disproportionate wealth of the top 1%, they are actually setting their cutoff point too low. He points to an earlier budget office report that shows: Of the wealth acquired by the top 1%, two-thirds went to the top 0.1%. So while the incomes of the top hundredth of Americans almost tripled in the past three decades, for the top thousandths, between 1979 and 2005, incomes more than quadrupled.

Krugman says, this extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. He asks, “Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?” (New York Times, Nov. 3, 2011)

* * *

How could this come to be? How could a country that was founded with a radical moral vision of democracy and equality find itself heading down a path of ever greater inequality?

Money may have something to do with it. The connection - or perhaps the disconnection - of money and morality may have something to do with it.

In the course of the last thirty years, the banking industry in this country has changed significantly. Some see clear connections to the financial deregulation in the 1980s, and the creation, in the 1990s, of complex “financial products” called “derivatives.” Derivatives allow for financial speculation on projected growth, in effect making bets on anything from the rise and fall of oil prices, to success or failure of a company. By the end of the 1990s derivatives grew into a 50 trillion dollar unregulated market.

Furthermore banks, insurance companies and rating agencies, rather than providing checks and balances for each other, instead all found ways to profit from the deregulation. For millions of Americans these developments were most noticeable in the booming housing market. For years, the value of homes seemed to rise.

I have heard it explained like this: In the olden days, a home mortgage was based on a relationship between a homebuyer and a bank. A bank would be mindful of the risk involved in lending money, since it wanted its money back. Thus the value of a home would be carefully assessed, and the borrowers would provide a substantial down payment - a personal investment in the home as sign of their commitment and ability to repay.

In the new system, local banks could sell their mortgages to investment banks. Investment banks could merge mortgages with all sorts of other loans, like car and student loans and credit card debts, and create so-called “collateralized debt obligations” or CDOs. These CDOs, in turn could be sold to investors all around the world.

Rating agencies, whose job it is to assess the relative safety or risk of financial instruments, gave CDOs their highest rating: AAA. This made CDOs attractive investments for retirement funds, which of course assumed CDOs were safe and low risk.

But this new system meant banks no longer had any incentive to monitor whether the mortgages were safe or risky. Their profit came from the fees associated with selling the mortgages to the investment banks. The investment banks were not concerned about the risk of people not repaying their mortgage, since they made their money selling CDOs to other investors. Regulators had little incentive to question the value of CDOs, because they were getting rich by granting them high ratings.

More and more people were able to borrow money to buy homes. Between 2000 and 2003 the number of home loans taken out per year almost quadrupled. And thanks to the miracle of the market, by which prices rise with higher demand, home values rose.

But the rising value of homes was not real - it was only imagined. It was a product of a system, which allowed us to ignore financial risk for the sake of financial gain.

No one seemed to recognize the precarious situation this was creating. But this is not because these financial transactions were too complex to understand. It is because the enormous short-term profits provided an irresistible temptation for us to turn a blind eye to the risks involved, and the moral implications of our actions. Upton Sinclair, who had first hand experience of the last Great Depression, captured it perfectly, when he said, “It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding.”

When the bubble burst in 2008, banks and financial institutions that seemed “too big to fail” collapsed. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were spent to save them. Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs or their life savings. And yet many of the Wall Street executives who made millions during the bubble, have been able to hold on to their earnings. They are still millionaires.

Once the immediate crisis passed, life on Wall Street quickly returned to normal. The same “normal” that led us into this crisis. Soon after receiving billions in the bailout, the banks’ top executives were again receiving billions in bonuses.

In the first half of 2009, just months after the bubble burst, the financial services industry spent $223 million on lobbying to keep congress from enacting any additional financial regulation or restrictions. And they have been very successful.

* * *

Jim Wallis makes the point that while poor financial policies may have led us into this financial crisis, our monetary problems are symptom of a broader moral failure - a moral failure that is well described in the social sins Gandhi saw, which included: politics without principles, wealth without work, commerce without morality.

Wallis says, millions of Americans have good reason to be mad. We were misled. We were persuaded that we could pursue our selfish interests without thoughts to the consequences, because the “invisible hand” of the market would work it all out in the end. We were led to believe we didn’t need to work to become wealthy, if only we put our money in the hands of the right stock broker or in the right mutual fund. We were told that changes in financial regulation would have no effect on our pension funds and life savings. We were told that the wealth of the richest would trickle down, and that the whole country would prosper. In hindsight, we can see that we were mistaken.

But rather than simply being angry, and wondering when this crisis will be over, when employment figures will improve, when economic growth will resume, we should be asking different questions. We should be asking: How will this crisis change us? How will it change the way we think and act? How will it change our priorities and values?

As Wallis sees it, we are in the midst of a structural crisis that calls for new social and financial regulation. But we are also in the midst of a spiritual crisis that calls for new self-regulation. We are in desperate need to re-discover the values of humility, and balance, and priorities, and limits.

There are moral lessons to be learned from the crisis. Wallis sees three big ones: relationships matter, our good is indeed tied up in the common good, and “social sins” also matter.

As a religious community, we play an important role in shaping the moral debate of our community and our country. As a religious community, we have an obligation to hone our moral vision, and to show clearly how sound principles can inform our politics, and morality can inform our commerce.

This is not merely a matter of holding our political leaders accountable and demanding change - though that is part of it. Any efforts to address the moral wrongs of our society, need to begin with the moral dimensions of our own lives - our relationships with those closest to us, and members of our community; in our decisions how we earn and spend our money; the ways we are able to serve a greater good - whether individually, or in shared efforts, like the Hunger Initiative now taking shape in our church.

* * *

The protesters occupying Wall Street have been there for 51 days now. Over the last month, their protests have inspired similar demonstrations across the country. Friday’s New York Times reports demonstrators now gather in more than 70 American cities. Demonstrations are also taking place in Europe and Asia.

May their persistent efforts inspire us to see our current crisis

As a precious opportunity for social transformation

As well as spiritual transformation.

May we be inspired to pursue a clearer moral vision

of the greater good, so we might build a better world.

Amen.