Leader’s Message – Ah, summer. . . – July 2009

Once upon a time, when ours was an agricultural society, winter was the season of reflection. The hard work and celebration of harvest were over: Food was stored for people and animals alike; the wood was piled high for the stove; and everyone rested. Of course, there were always chores to do, stray animals to find, and blizzards to endure. But winter was welcomed for the opportunity to settle in and renew family connections, read books, and tell stories.

 Today we live in a technological society. The forty-hour work week is a thing of the past now that we are all electronically connected. The ring of the telephone was intrusive enough; now we have Blackberry devices that twitter.  We no longer live with the natural rhythms of the seasons; instead, we create artificial environments and schedule every day’s activities.  Even vacations, though escapes to other places, are programmed to deliver maximum pleasure.

 When do we allow ourselves time to reflect upon our lives?  How can we find meaning and purpose in our lives if we do not listen to ourselves, learn from our experiences,  share what we have learned with others, and listen to them?  We need to stop and take a deep breath, feel that breath in our bodies, and draw inspiration from the simple fact of breathing.  Then we need to settle in and renew our connection with ourselves. 

 Summer offers me some respite, and it started in June at the American Ethical Union Assembly in St. Louis.  Yes, there were meetings many and long, but there were also conversations with colleagues and members that inspired me.  I had an opportunity to reflect upon the nature of Ethical Humanism and why it still offers my life such meaning.

 As we struggled at the National Leaders Council meeting to articulate a clear identity and definition of Humanism as a philosophy, a way of life, and a religion to offer our members, I thought about my own spiritual journey.  I was brought to the religion of Roman Catholicism by my family: Gram taught me to recite prayers; Mom and Dad took me to church with them; my sister and I saved our allowance to give to the missions in Africa.  I loved growing up in St. Anne’s community and cherish what I learned there.  As a young adult, I explored the literature and practices of other religions, drawn as many people of my generation were, to exotic Eastern philosophies.  When I married and had  my own family, Glenn and I found Ethical Culture, and the Brooklyn Society became our spiritual home.

 Now my children our grown and on their own, and I stay. Humanism is my religion, and Ethical Culture is my denomination.  It’s not just about the belief – “a naturalistic philosophy that rejects supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion,” as Corliss Lamont put it – but about the practice of engaging with others and the world.  That is where I find religious meaning. 

 Religion should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  It should provide a transformative experience.  I can settle in with like-minded people and create a comfort zone for us where we are never challenged to think or feel differently.  I can also choose to test the limits of what I belief by engaging with people and groups who form other circles, challenging myself, as well as them, to find common ground.  That’s what founder Felix Adler encouraged us to do.  That’s what my uncle, Father Thomas O’Keefe, encouraged me to do, too, whether it was supporting my journeys to other countries or to other books in the library. 

 Bringing out the best in others and in ourselves means looking for the unique gifts every human being possesses and connecting with their goodness, no matter what their beliefs. I am changed when I listen deeply to others. My life is transformed when I engage in human relationships. I want that challenge and change in my life. It gives my life meaning.

 Take some time this summer to reflect. You just might find religion.

Leader’s Message – Equality and Justice for ALL – June 2009

“When two people love each other,” I remember my father saying, “It’s a miracle.”  We were watching my then two-year old daughter playing in my parents’ backyard.  I wondered aloud whether it had disturbed him that Glenn and I had lived together for a number of years before marrying.  “Not really,” he said, although I doubted him.  “At least you’re married now,” he added with a smile.

 It is indeed a miracle when two people love each other enough to make a commitment to each other’s happiness: sharing life’s joys and sorrows, building a family and a future together.  I witness that miracle almost every time I interview a wedding couple.  I see it in the way they look at each other, hear it when they laugh together, feel it when they tell me their stories.  Why would some people imagine that such love is limited to heterosexual couples?  Why would they deny marriage to same-sex couples whose depth of commitment is every bit as real – and as miraculous – as theirs?

 I spent Tuesday, April 28, in Albany with Empire State Pride Agenda, and thousands of supporters, lobbying for the right of other couples, like Glenn and me except in gender, to make the choice that we had made: to legally marry. 

 Beside the 1,138 rights and responsibilities bestowed upon married couples by the federal government, there are another 1,324 rights and responsibilities that come from New York State, including medical decision-making authority, inheritance rights, immunity from having to testify against a spouse in court, and not having to pay taxes on spousal health insurance benefits. Many of these protections, e.g., a Workers Compensation death benefit for a surviving spouse, can be achieved only through marriage or some other governmental recognition of a family.  Neither civil union nor domestic partnership secure the federal rights and responsibilities that come with marriage, such as Social security survivor benefits and immigration rights.

In the afternoon, I participated in an Interfaith Service at the Albany Convention Center with clergy and lay people from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist traditions.  It was a celebratory occasion, full of hope and companionship.  Pride in the Pulpit, comprised of hundreds of faith congregations throughout the state, advocates for the rights of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) New Yorkers and confronts religious-based bigotry.  I recited the words of Ethical Culture Leader John Lovejoy Elliott: “The love of the human heart is the most real and the most beautiful of all the realities we know. . . Whatever the length of time may be, to have known something of this is to have experienced the supreme privilege of being human.”

 Being human: That’s what is at stake here.  We experience ourselves as fully human in relationship with others; giving and receiving love, building homes and communities that nurture our potential for goodness.  We need to protect all couples who make a profound commitment to make a home for each other in their hearts and who contribute to the strength and vitality of their communities.  It is our ethical obligation.

Letter to the Editor of the NY Times

To the Editor:

 

I read Laurie Goodstein’s article, “More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops,” (4/27/09) with great interest.  As an Ethical Humanist clergywoman and university Humanist chaplain, I often hear the refrain from wedding couples, families, and students:  “We want something ‘spiritual,’ not ‘religious.’”  Many people identifying themselves as “unaffiliated” and “non-believers” in recent studies (including the excellent “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life) are breaking with traditional theology because of the cognitive dissonance they experience as educated individuals and because they want to participate in communities that respect everyone’s unique path to a deep understanding of what it means to be human.

 

This is nothing new: Throughout American history, there have been intertwining waves of conservative theology and progressive free thought.  At the edges of the religious spectrum, we will always have fundamentalists – both theist and atheist; in the center, is a growing move towards “humanistic” religion that reveres life, celebrates diversity, and holds the common ground for people of faith in people and their potential for goodness to make this world a better place.

 

Dr. Anne Klaeysen

Leader, New York Society for Ethical Culture

Chaplain, Adelphi University

2 West 64^th Street

New York, NY 10023

www.nysec.org

work: 212-874-5210

A Church for the Godless?

Uptown Radio at Columbia University reports on the New York Society for Ethical Cultue

Can a religion exist without a God?  Maura Walz reports on some religious humanist congregations in New York to discover whether a church can be called a church without a God at its center.

Maura spent several days visiting our community.  Listen to her report – dated April 17, 2009 - online at www.uptownradio.org.

Leader’s Message – “The Freedom to Doubt and the Right to Believe” – May 2009

“This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. . . I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.” Richard Feynman, physicist

“I just don’t know what to believe any more.”                                           Gentleman caller from Alabama

* * * *

Ethical Culture does not lay claim to certainty – moral or spiritual – as more traditional Western religions do. We live in the question, learning from our experiences and relationships how to lead good lives. I remember a young man from the Brooklyn Society who was ready to graduate from Sunday school. His parents were Jewish, and he had been invited to several lavish bar and bat mitzvah parties. One day he asked them if he could attend Hebrew School to prepare for a bar mitzvah and, although they were surprised, they agreed. A month or so later, Jon returned. He said it was because of the questions. In Hebrew School, teachers asked questions for which there were certain answers, and he was expected to recite them. To him, this was a rote exercise without meaning. “In Ethical Culture,” he said, “everyone asks questions, and we discuss what we think and feel about them. We all learn together and figure things out.”

Not everyone is comfortable with that kind of moral teaching. Commandments, after all, are to be obeyed, not questioned or discussed. Divine revelation must be trusted, not doubted. There are serious consequences when traditions and rules are not followed. Yet to doubt their efficacy, to wonder whether they are relevant thousands of years later, is necessary if we are to confront and solve the problems of today.

Ethical Culture founder Felix Adler wrote, “We should teach our children nothing which they shall ever need to unlearn; we should strive to transmit to them the best possessions, the truest thought, the noblest sentiments of the age in which we live.” By modeling ethical behavior, by permitting the possibility that we cannot be certain about everything, and by engaging them in a rigorous conversation about what it means to be good, we “leave the door open to the unknown,” as Richard Feynman put it, and give our children the capacity to live with doubt and, with “abject honesty,” to understand the situations they confront and decide how to act morally.

One day a gentleman from a small town in Alabama called the Leaders’ office. He was married with two young children and attended the local Baptist church. He enjoyed “surfing the ‘net” and had discovered Ethical Culture and Humanism online. Now he had doubts about his religion and didn’t know what to believe. He was concerned that it was a sin to doubt, that he was putting his soul and the souls of his children in jeopardy. There was no one he could talk to about this. So he and I had a long conversation. Although not his pastor, I became his pastoral counselor, creating the place for him to honestly tell himself what he was thinking and feeling. I couldn’t give him answers, but I could acknowledge and honor the existential struggle he was experiencing. Fathers must be certain about things; church-going Baptists must toe the creedal line. But he was questioning and wondering: a door to the unknown had opened for him, and he was afraid to go through it.

I asked him about the god he believed in and whether he could believe that that god would hold him safely and lovingly while he doubted. After all, Jesus still loved his disciple Thomas when he accepted his invitation to touch his wounds. I asked what goodness meant to him and if he thought he was a good person. He wasn’t sure if it was good to question belief.

We ended with a discussion about books we had each read and exchanged the names of favorite authors. I haven’t heard from him again. I wish him well and hope he finds a way to live with doubt and to believe in goodness.

“Act the Good, and you will believe in it.” – Felix Adler, Life and Destiny 

Memorial Service

This is a draft that I often share with families who are getting together to plan a memorial service.  It helps them to focus on the various parts of a service and think about how they want to present it.

Opening Words and Welcome

 “We come together from the diversity of our grieving,
to gather in the warmth of this community
giving stubborn witness to our belief that
in times of sadness, there is room for laughter.
In times of darkness, there always will be light.
May we hold fast to the conviction
that what we do with our lives matters
and that a caring world is possible after all.”
(M. Maureen Killoran)

Good morning/afternoon. My name is Anne Klaeysen, and I am a Leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  I welcome you into this time and space that are made sacred with the spirit of love and friendship you bring as you gather to remember and mourn _____________.  We come together as family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues: co-creators of a community that includes those present but also family and friends who could not be here today.

A memorial service is an act of loving leave-taking and a celebration of life.  We don’t need protection from grief, but rather time and the means to express it, to experience it, and to live through it.  A memorial service is for those who have loved and lost, who miss loved ones and must go on living without them.  Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth: “Give sorrow words.  The grief that does not speak/Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.”

This morning/afternoon we will give sorrow words: some of you will share your memories; others will sit quietly and reflect; together we will invoke ____________’s spirit and celebrate his/her life.

Memorial Portrait and Readings
This part combines shared memories and readings by selected family and friends.  See “Selected Readings” below.  You can let me know who will say what or leave it open until the memorial service.  I will help you choreograph this part so that it flows well.

Shared Memories Circle
During the next few minutes, I invite you to share something of what it has meant to you to experience ____________’s companionship, wisdom or humor in your own lives.  You may wish to share a memory or say something about how your life has been enriched by her/him.  In this way, we make _________ present among us.  Please speak briefly so there will be time for several people to speak.  Please stand and say who you are, and speak loudly enough for all to hear.  If there are silent spaces between speakers, we can use this time to nourish a silent memory.

Closing
Felix Adler, founder of Ethical Culture said “The dead are not dead if we have loved them truly. In our own lives we can give them a kind of immortality. Let us arise and take up the work they have left unfinished.”  Take a moment to remember what you most admired about _________. Remember what most endeared him/her to you.  Have it?  Good.  Hold on to it.  Now imagine incorporating that quality, that gift into your own life.  Love him/her, honor him/her, give him/her immortality by taking up the work he/she has left unfinished.

The act is done.  The words have been said.
The gate of the coming hour
now opens to us in peace.
Let us go through with thanksgiving for all that we said and did in this hour.
Blessed is the mystery of life and death, which is our own.
And blessed be Love forever.

Selected Readings
“The dead are not dead if we have loved them truly. In our own lives we can give them a kind of immortality. Let us arise and take up the work they have left unfinished. . .”

“The good deeds we have done, the nobler traits of character we have developed – these are imperishable.”

“Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this.”

“A great man helps us by the standard which he erects. He never really is level with his own standard, and yet we do not therefore reject him. He helps us by what he earnestly tries for, and by what he suggests to us that we should try for he helps us, not so much by what he achieves, as by what he reveals, by the insight which he gives us into the nature of good.”
(from Felix Adler, “Life and Destiny”)

“Invocation” by Algernon Black, Ethiucal Culture Leader

This is the call to the living,
To those who refuse to make peace with evil,
With the suffering and waste of the world.

This is the call to the human, not the perfect,
To those who know their own prejudices,
Who have no intention of becoming prisoners of their own limitations.

This is a call to those who remember the dreams of their youth.
Who know what it means to share food and shelter,
The care of children and those who are troubled,
To reach beyond the barriers of the past
Bringing people into communion.

This is a call to the never-ending spirit
Of the common man, his essential decency and integrity,
His unending capacity to suffer and endure,
To face death and destruction and to rise again
And build from the ruins of life.

This is the greatest call of all
The call to a faith in people.
To believe in freedom, we have to believe in people.

 

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; . . .
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance; . . .
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.
(from Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible)

A long time I have lived with you
And now we must be going
Separately to be together.
Perhaps I shall be the wind
To blur your smooth waters
So that you do not see your face too much.
Perhaps I shall be the star
To guide your uncertain wings
So that you have direction in the night.
Perhaps I shall be the fire
To separate your thoughts
So that you do not give up.
Perhaps I shall be the rain
To open up the earth
So that your seed may fall.
Perhaps I shall be the snow
To let your blossoms sleep
So that you may bloom in spring.
Perhaps I shall be the stream
To play a song on the rock
So that you are not alone.
Perhaps I shall be a new mountain
So that you always have a home.
(by Nancy Wood)

Hold on to what is good
even if it is
a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when
it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.
(by Nancy Wood)

Let me die, working.
Still tackling plans unfinished, tasks undone!
Clean to its end, swift may my race be run.
No laggard steps, no faltering, no shirking;
Let me die, working!

Let me die, thinking.
Let me fare forth still with an open mind,
Fresh secrets to unfold, new truths to find,
My soul undimmed, alert, no question blinking;
Let me die, thinking.

Let me die, giving.
The substance of life for life’s enriching;
Time, things, and self on heaven converging,
No selfish thought, loving, redeeming, living;
Let me die, giving.
(by S. Hall Young)

You shall ask
What good are dead leaves
And I will tell you
They nourish the sore earth.
You shall ask
What reason is there for winter
And I will tell you
To bring about new leaves.

You shall ask
Why are the leaves so green
And I will tell you
Because they are rich with life.

You shall ask
Why must summer end
And I will tell you
So that leaves will die.
(Native American Indian)

When I am dead
Cry for me a little.
Think of me sometimes
But not too much.
It is not good for you
Or your wife or your husband
Or your children
To allow your thoughts to dwell
Too long on the dead.
Think of me now and again
As I was in life
At some moment it is pleasant to recall.
But not for long.
Leave me in peace
And I shall leave you, too, in peace.
While you live
Let your thoughts be with the living.
(Native American Prayer)

“We come together from the diversity of our grieving,
to gather in the warmth of this community
giving stubborn witness to our belief that
in times of sadness, there is room for laughter.
In times of darkness, there always will be light.
May we hold fast to the conviction
that what we do with our lives matters
and that a caring world is possible after all.”
(by M. Maureen Killoran)

“Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.”
(by Shakespeare in “Macbeth”)

“A Litany of Remembrance” by Roland B. Gittelsohn
In the rising of the sun and in its going down, we remember them.
In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter, we remember them
In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring, we remember them.
In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.
In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn, we remember them.
In the beginning of the year and when it ends, we remember them.
When we are weary and in need of strength, we remember them.
When we are lost and sick at heart, we remember them.
When we have joys we yearn to share, we remember them.
So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us,
as we remember them.

If I should die before the rest of you,
Break not a flower, nor inscribe a stone,
Nor, when I’m gone, speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known,
Weep if you must:
Parting is hell,
But life goes on
So . . .sing as well!
(from a poem by Joyce Grenfell)

Sing! Let us sing out,
Sing out again so our hearts may burst into flame
And our burning blood may finally melt these chains.
So that in the depth of the blackest night
The sun shines forever.
(by Hien Luong)

Time is too slow for those who wait; too swift
for those who fear; too long for those who grieve;
too short for those who rejoice. But for those
who live, Time is Eternity. Hours fly, flowers
die, new days new ways pass by. Love stays.
(Inscription on a sundial at the University of Virginia)

“For death does not end life but is part of it, one of nature’s transformations as we work our way through its cycles. Death informs life. It is not simply the mother of beauty; it is the mother of life itself for how could we conceive of life if there were no death? And it is only because we conceive of life that we know we must taste it lingeringly, try every flavor and nuance, drink in experience while we can. Death and life are dependent upon each other, like order and chaos, neither concept being possible without the other. So there should be no fear of death, which is omnipresent, part of life. Welcome it into your arms, for it is but rest; for you lie in nature like a heartbeat.”
(from Willam Butler Yeats)

I have loved and have been loved,
The sun has caressed my face.
Life, you owe me nothing,
Life, we are at peace.
(from poet Pablo Neruda)

This song of mine will wind its music around you like the fond arms of love
This song of mine will touch your forehead like a kiss of blessing.
When you are alone it will sit by your side and whisper in your ear;
When you are in a crowd it will fence you in with aloofness.
My song will be like a pair of wings to your dreams;
it will transport your heart to the verge of the unknown.
It will be like a faithful star overhead when dark night is over your road.
My song will sit in the pupils of your eyes, and will carry your sight into the heart
of things.
And when my voice is silent in death, my song will speak in your living heart.
(by Rabindranath Tagore)

At the grave site:
We are here to return the elements
that made up the body of ___________ to the earth:
earth, air, fire and water,
joined by the ligaments of the spirit,
the bindings of life and love.

Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust,
memory to memory,
story to story,
gratitude to gratitude,
spirit to spirit,
love to love.
The wheel turns ever,
and what came out of the earth
returns to it now in peace.
The wheel turns ever,
yet whatsoever love and grace and gift
we know from _____ is at the center of that wheel,
the center which turns not, but remains as constant as the flow of time.

Earth, air, fire, water,
receive your own. We stint you not.
But leave us what is ours forever.

The act is done. The words have been said.
The gate of the coming hour
now opens to us in peace.
Let us go through with thanksgiving for all that we said and did in this hour.
Blessed is the mystery of life and death, which is our own.
And blessed be Love forever.

“I Am Not There” – anonymous

Do not stand at my grave
and weep.
I am not there.
I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds
that blow.
I am the diamond glints
on snow.
I am the sunlight
on ripened grain.
I am the gentle
autumn rain.
When you awaken
in the morning’s hush.
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds
in circled flight.
I am the soft stars
that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave
and cry.
I am not there; I did not die.

Weddings and Commitments with Readings

I share the following draft ceremony with couples and invite them to play with it, thinking about the best and worst weddings they have attended.  I assume that couples are already married in the sense that they have made a profound commitment to one another.  My role is to facilitate a creative process of making that commitment public, sharing only what the couple feels comfortable sharing with the wedding community.

This ceremony can be adapted for LGBT commitments, civil unions and domestic partnerships.

WEDDING CEREMONY

NOTES:
The couple applies for the license.  A NYS marriage license is not good until after 24 hours from receipt and is valid for 60 days.  The clerk of the court types in the information, e.g., birth certificate, valid address, etc.  In NYC, the couple and two witnesses, with names and addresses printed, must sign.  In upstate NY, the couple does not sign, but must include on license the date and exact place of the wedding.  The signed license must be returned by the officiate to the office from which it was obtained within 5 days.  It may take 3-4 weeks for the couple to receive a certified copy back from the clerk.  For out-of-state weddings, the burden is on the couple to get the necessary information.  NJ & CT have a reciprocal deal with NY; other states have varying requirements.
Website for NYC: http://nycmarriagebureau.com/about/marriagelicense.html

Honorarium: no charge for Ethical Culture members, $750 for non-members

* * * * * *
WELCOME

Welcome.  My name is Anne Klaeysen, and I am a Leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  As you know, Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the wedding ceremony of ____________ and _____________ .

As couples have done for some thousands of years, these two come before you, their wedding community, to make their pledges to each other.  They come before you to make an ancient promise that binds the wedding couple across all previous boundaries.  They come before you to join their two lives in marriage.

In the Ethical Culture wedding ceremony we encourage the couple to find and share words that come, for them, as close as possible to the joint truths of this event.  This ___________ and ___________ have done.

READINGS
Poems, songs, essays, family sayings and writings, personal statements, etc. selected to give special meaning to the ceremony and/or to provide a family member or friend with a role. Many compilations of wedding readings have been published and are readily available.

Three sample readings:
1) “A wedding does not depend on flowers
or bells or candles, choir or lace.
It does not need a congregation
or a vast marquee.
Only two people taking the courage to leave
one life and find another – trusting each other
for true patience, forbearance, strength and love to
face any hardship that the years may bring.”

2) “The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words.  We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word.  And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to one another we are joining ourselves to the unknown.  We can join one another only by joining the unknown.  We must not be misled by the procedures of experimental thought:  in life, in the world, we are never given two known results to choose between, but only one result that we choose without knowing what it is.

“Marriage rests upon the immutable givens that compose it: words, bodies, characters, histories, places.  Some wishes cannot succeed; some victories cannot be won; some loneliness is incorrigible.  But there is relief and freedom in knowing what is real; these givens come to us out of the perennial reality of the world, like the terrain we live on.  One does not care for this ground to make it a different place, or to make it perfect, but to make it inhabitable and to make it better.  To flee from its realities is only to arrive at them unprepared.

“Because the condition of marriage is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge.  What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be.  Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go.  It is going where the two of you – and marriage, time, life, history and the world – will take it.  You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.

“Forms join us to time, to the consequences and fruitions of our own passing.  The Zen student, the poet, the husband, the wife – none knows with certainty what he or she is staying for, but all know the likelihood that they will be staying “a while”: to find out what they are staying for.  And it is the faith of all of these disciplines that they will not stay to find that they should not have stayed.

“That faith has nothing to do with what is usually called optimism.  As the traditional wedding ceremony insists, not everything that we stay to find out will make us happy.  The faith, rather, is that by staying, and only by staying, we will learn something of the truth, that the truth is good to know, and that it is always both different and larger than we thought.”
poet and essayist Wendell Berry

3) “Though I speak in the tongues of men or of angels: if I have no love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  Though I prophesy and see into all the mysteries and all hidden knowledge, and have faith enough to move mountains: if I have no love, I am nothing.  And though I give away all my possessions to feed the poor, and offer up my body to be burned: if I have no love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient and kind, is never envious or boastful or conceited, does not act rudely or selfishly, is not easily angered, does not count up offenses, takes no pleasure in injustice, but rejoices in the truth; includes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things.

“Love never ends.  If there are prophecies, they will disappear; if there is ecstasy, it will cease; if there is knowledge, it will vanish. . .  When I was a child, my speech, my outlook, and my thoughts were all childish.  When I grew up, I had finished with childish things.  Now we see only puzzled reflections in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face.  My knowledge then was partial, then it will be whole.

“In a word, there are three things that remain forever: faith, hope and love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
First Letter to the Corinthians by Paul of Tarsus

OFFICIANT’s WORDS
I am very pleased to be here today and would like to share some wedding thoughts with you.  Why marry?  Why not just live together and love each other without a public declaration?  What makes today remarkable?

First of all, __________ and ___________ love each other.  That much is obvious.  No ceremony can create a human relationship; it can only recognize, and celebrate, an existing relationship.  These are people who share the same values, who delight in each other’s company more than any other’s, who together are somehow more than they are apart, and who promise, at life’s most critical juncture, to help each other deepen and heighten their own best selves.

You and I are also involved in that promise.  We have the right and the responsibility to hold them to their vows, to help them struggle against the voices of modern distraction.  What is it to marry because you love?  What is it to stay loving because you have married?  These things are mysteries.  The work of questions such as these is also an obligation assumed by the heart and the will according to the promises made today.

Across many centuries, traditions, geography and generations, weddings take place at the heart of the world.  In the smallest hamlet and the largest metropolis, people are getting married, and people who love them are in attendance.  The best hope of the world is represented in this community of beloved families and friends here gathered, perhaps at some sacrifice, to wish this couple well.  Look around.  Though we may not all know one another, still we are members now of the same wedding community, family in an extended sense, sharing our love for this couple and our hopes for the success of their life partnership.

Secondly, a wedding ceremony is a unique opportunity for a couple to openly declare their personal feelings and to share with us, the wedding community, what is most important to them.  What is most important to __________ and __________?

[Shared thoughts from interview and meetings with the couple: what is most important and meaningful, how they experience and appreciate each other, etc.]

VOWS and EXCHANGE of RINGS
Vows may be recited from memory, read, or repeated after the celebrant.  This constitutes the legal contract and must be witnessed by those chosen to sign the marriage license.

The Hands Passage
“Please face each other and hold hands, so you may feel the gift that you are to one another.

 “These are the hands of your best friend, young and strong and full of love for you, that are holding yours on your wedding day as you promise to love each other today, tomorrow, and forever.

“These are the hands that will work alongside yours as together you build your future.

“These are the hands that will passionately love you and cherish you through the years, and with the slightest touch will comfort you like no other.

“These are the hands that will hold you when fear or grief racks your mind.

“These are the hands that will countless times wipe the tears from your eyes, tears of sorrow and tears of joy.

“These are the hands that will tenderly hold your children.

“These are the hands that will help you to hold your family as one.

“These are the hands that will give you strength when you need it.

“And lastly, these are the hands that even when wrinkled and aged will still be reaching for yours, still giving you the same unspoken tenderness with just a touch.”

Sample vows:
I, ____________, take you, ______________, to be my wedded wife/husband, to have and to hold, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, for the rest of our days.

I, _____________, take you, ______________, to be my wife/husband.  I give you my hand and my heart.  I pledge to share my life openly with you and to speak loving truth to you.  I promise to respect and honor you, care for you in tenderness, support you with patience and love, and walk with you through all the seasons of our lives.

I, _____________, take you, ______________, to be no other than yourself, loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know, with respect for your integrity and faith in your love for me, through all our years and in all that life may bring us.  I promise to try to be ever open to you and above all, to do everything in my power to permit you to become the person you are yet to be.  I give you my love.

“Rings are an ancient symbol,
blessed and simple.  Round like the sun,
like the eye, like arms that embrace.
Circles, for love that is given
comes back round again and again.
Therefore, may these symbols
remind you that your love, like the sun,
illumines; that your love,
like the eye, must see clearly;
and that your love,
like arms that embrace,
is a grace upon this world.”
(from “The Golden Rule”)

With this ring, I thee wed, and bind my life to yours.

DECLARATION
By the power of your choice and the words that you have spoken to each other, I do declare that from this moment forward you are married, husband and wife, wife and husband.  You may now kiss one another.

We wish for them such goodwill and respect towards one another, and such support from others, that they may grow stronger in their love and be able to turn every crisis and challenge into an opportunity for the renewal and deepening of their relationship.

In Ethical Culture, we say, “The place where we meet to seek the highest is holy ground.”  Today in this place, at this time, we have truly sought the highest and together shared holy ground.

Selected Wedding Readings

Sharing of wine and Breaking of the glass:  “It is the goal of marriage to achieve a blending of hearts and lives, but let there be spaces in your new life together, so that each may encourage and nurture the individual growth of the other.  Even so, your separate lives will become one life; your separate homes, one home; your separate fortunes, one fortune.  Over the horizon of the future, there comes toward you even now hours of brightness and hours of shadow, for such is the nature of life.

“As you share from this cup, a symbol of both the past and future, so may you draw contentment, comfort and happiness from the cup of life.  May you find life’s joys heightened, its bitterness sweetened and all things hallowed by the true companionship of life.

“In the Jewish tradition, a glass is broken by the groom at the end of the wedding ceremony.  Both ____ and ____ will break this glass with the symbolism and intention of breaking and permanently disintegrating all barriers between them.  When the glass is crushed underfoot, please join me in saying: ‘Mazel Tov.’”

Family Vow:
Will the families of ____ and ____ please stand?  This union brings together different family traditions in the hope that a new family tree will become strong and fruitful.  Theirs is a personal choice and a decision for which they are primarily responsible, yet their life will be enriched by the support of the families from which each comes.  Do you affirm your continuing support and love for ____ and ____ as they grow in their marriage? [“We Do.”]
Do you celebrate with them the decision they have made to choose each other? [“We Do.”]

1) “Sonnet CXVI” by William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.  Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no!  It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

2) “A Dedication to My Wife” by T.S. Eliot
To whom I owe the leaping delight
That quickens my senses in our wakingtime
And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,
The breathing in unison

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
And babble the same speech without need of meaning.
No peevish winter wind shall chill
No sullen tropic sun shall wither
The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only

But this dedication is for others to read:
These are private words addressed to you in public.

3) “A Prayer for a Wedding, 29 November 1963″ Joel Oppenheimer
because everyone knows exactly what’s good for another
because very few see
because a man and a woman may just possibly look at each other
because in the insanity of human relationships there still
may come a time we say: yes yes
because a man or a woman can do anything he or she pleases
because you can reach any point in your life saying: now, i
want this
because eventually it occurs we want each other, we want
to know each other, even stupidly, even uglily
because these is at best a simple need in two people to try
and reach some simple ground
because that simple ground is not so simple
because we are human beings gathered together whether
we like it or not
because we are human beings reaching out to touch
because sometimes we grow
we ask a blessing on this marriage
we ask that some simplicity be allowed
we ask their happiness
we ask that this couple be known for what it is,
and that the light shine upon it
we ask a blessing for their marriage

4) “It is Marvellous to Wake Up Together” by Elizabeth Bishop
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening:

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise

The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking.
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

5) “Sonnet XVII” by Pablo Neruda
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

6) “Native American Marriage Ceremony”
Now you feel no rain,
For you will be the shelter for the other.
Now you will feel no cold,
For each of you will be warmth to the other.
Now you will feel no loneliness.
Now you are two persons but,
There is only one life before you.
Go now to your dwelling to enter
Into the days of your life together.
And may your days be good,
And long upon the earth.

7) Leland Foster Wood – 20th Century American author:
“Married love is love woven into a pattern of living.
It has in it the elements of understanding and of the passionate kindness of husband and wife toward each other.
It is rich in the many-sided joys of life because each is more concerned with giving joy than with grasping it for himself. And joys are most truly experienced when they are most fully shared.”

from “To Have or To Be” by Erich Fromm:
“Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as “love.” “Love” is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing. . .

To say “I have a great love for you” is meaningless. Love is not a thing that one can have, but a process, an inner activity that one is the subject of. I can love, I can be in love, but in love I have . . .nothing. In fact, the less I have the more I can love.”

9) from “Letters” by Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Marriage is in many ways a simplification of life. It combines the strengths and wills of two people so that, together, they seem to reach farther into the future than they did before. Above all, marriage is a new task and a new seriousness, – a new demand on the strength and generosity of each partner, and a great new danger for both.

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them.

“. . . [The question is] whether you are willing to stand guard over someone else’s solitude, and whether you are able to set this same person at the gate of your own depths, which [s]he learns of only through what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness.”

10) Excerpt from “The Velveteen Rabbit” by Margery Williams:
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “But when you are Real you don‘t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit.”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

11) “When You Are Old” by W.B. Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sad, “From us fled Love,
He paced upon the mountains far above,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

12) “How to Kiss” from Romantic Love and Personal Beauty by Henry T Finck (1887):
“Kissing comes by instinct, and yet, it is an art which few understand properly. A lover should not hold his bride by the ears in kissing her, as appears to have been customary at Scotch weddings of the last century. A more graceful way, and quite as effective in preventing the bride from ‘getting away’, is to put your right arm around her neck, your fingers under her chin, raise the chin, and then gently, but firmly press your lips on hers.”

13) “Love without marriage can sometimes be very awkward for all concerned; but marriage without love simply removes that institution from the territory of the humanly admissible, to my mind. Love is a state in which one lives who loves, and whoever loves has given himself away; love then, and not marriage, is belonging. Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.”
Katherine Anne Porter

14) from the Buddhist adaptation of the benediction:
“May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
The rains fall soft upon your fields
And as you walk through life
May every flower bloom in your path.”

15) “The Old Song and Dance” by Kenneth Rexroth
You, because you love me, hold fast to me, caress me,
Be quiet and kind, comfort me with stillness, say nothing at all.
You, because I love you, I am strong for you, I uphold you.
The water is alive around us.
Living water runs in the cut earth between us.
You, my bride, your voice speaks over the water to me.
Your hands, your solemn arms, cross the water and hold me.
Your body is beautiful. It speaks across the water.
Bride, sweeter than honey, glad of heart,
Our hearts beat across the bridge of our arms.
Our speech is speech of the joy in the night of gladness. Our words live.
Our words are children dancing forth from us like stars on water.
My bride, my well beloved, sweeter than honey, than ripe fruit,
Solemn, grave, a flying bird,
Hold me. Be quiet and kind. I love you. Be good to me.
I am strong for you. I uphold you. The dawn of ten thousand
Dawns is afire in the sky. The water flows in the earth.
The children laugh in the air.

16) from “The Prophet” by Kahil Gibran
“You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death shall scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

“Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

Leader’s Message – “It’s Just Not Funny!” – April 2009

“Cops don’t check my bank account when they pull me over and make me spread-eagle against the car.  These miseducated brothers, like that sociologist at the University of Chicago, talking about ‘the declining significance of race.’  Now, what country is he living in?”

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. to Barack Obama in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

 

“They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Caption to a political cartoon by Sean Delonas depicting two police officers standing over the body of a bullet-ridden chimpanzee, NY Post, 2/18/09

 

* * * * *

I value our right to free speech.  I also value my right to choose what I read, and I choose not to read the NY Post.  Their coverage of the Son of Sam murders decades ago was so exploitative that I wrote to the editor letting him know that I would never waste another cent on his publication.  So I missed the initial furor over its controversial cartoon.  When I finally saw it, it struck me as simply inane: Why conflate the killing of a rampaging chimpanzee in Connecticut with the economy?  But that’s because I’m white.

 

In the small upstate NY town where I grew up, a “mixed marriage” was between a Protestant and a Catholic.  There were no Jews, no Blacks, no “aliens” for miles around.  Arriving at the Rochester airport one summer for a visit, my young son, who grew up in Brooklyn, looked around and asked, “Mommy, where are all the other people?” 

 

The land south of Lake Ontario was fertile and the climate ideal for orchards, so at harvest time migrants, mostly African-Americans, would move into humble shacks to pick the fruit.  One boy named Terry, whose parents worked on a farm in town, joined my third grade class.  We loved everything about him – his skin, his hair, his laughter when we played together in the playground.  We were sad when his family moved back down south.  We didn’t understand why he had to leave.

 

Alice was my next African-American friend.  She was my roommate freshman year of college, a year older, from the city, and very wise about the world.  One night I came home late from the library, and she asked who had walked with me.  When I told her I was alone, she gave me a lecture about women being assaulted on campus and the need to protect ourselves.  “You really are a hick, aren’t you?” she sighed.  Being black was hard enough; being a black woman was harder still.

 

Before we met him, all our son told us about his best friend in kindergarten was that he wore glasses.  Adam is African-American, and he and Andrew are still best friends.  Sometimes, when they were teenagers hanging out in Manhattan, a group of young black men would razz Adam about being with a white boy, but they just laughed about it.  What wasn’t funny was the time Adam was stopped at his front door by two police officers who demanded he provide proof that he lived there.  He didn’t have any; he had just taken a walk in his neighborhood.  It wasn’t until a white person from his building appeared to vouch for him that he was allowed to enter his own home – without an apology from the cops.

 

My friend Angela, who was my son’s coming-of-age mentor at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, says she is always aware of her color.  When she enters a room filled with people, she immediately takes its racial temperature.  Will she be at ease or on guard? 

 

It is a luxury that white people obliviously enjoy - to walk down the street, to drive a car, and to enter a room without wondering whether they will be stopped, interrogated or insulted.  Since the election, articles in magazines and journals have posited a “post-racial America,” but the reality is closer to the NY Post cartoon.  At its most benign, it suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad that monkeys could have written it.  At its most provocative, it compares the president to a rabid chimp. At its most dangerous, it invites assassination.

 

Chairman of the NY Post Rupert Murdoch claimed ultimate responsibility for the cartoon, writing, “I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. . . I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.”  He still maintains that the intention was not racist and regrets that “it was interpreted by many as such.”  Murdoch sounds like the bully that Terry and our friends used to chase around the school playground: “I’m sorry you’re such wimps that you got hurt by my joke.”

 

This is not a matter of much-maligned “political correctness,” but one of empathy – and a profound lack of imagination.  How does it feel to walk in another person’s shoes?  It really doesn’t take much to feel another’s pain and fear; all it takes is being human.

 

Leader’s Message – “Hail to the Nonbelievers!” – March 2009

“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.  We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.”

President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009

 

“Believe or disbelieve as ye list – we shall at all times respect every honest conviction. But be one with us where there is nothing to divide – in action. Diversity in the creed, unanimity in the deed! This is that practical religion from which none dissents.”

Dr. Felix Adler, Ethical Culture Founding Address, May 15, 1876

 

No, he didn’t.  Yes, he did!  President Barack Obama included us: He opened his arms wide on Inauguration Day and acknowledged us as fellow Americans.  Shall we tell him that we are believers?  That we believe in humanity, in the capacity of people for goodness, in a sacred web of human relationships?  Through some incredible process of nature, we are here: a conscious, reflective, meaning-making species with a reverence for life and all its possibilities. We are hard-wired to look for patterns and purpose in a random universe.  For some people that impulse finds expression in belief in a supernatural deity; for others, it is directed toward finding a better way of living within a diverse community.

 

I believe that Obama knows that.  He understands the subtlety and nuance of belief.  His mother, after all, was a humanist, and his grandfather encouraged him to attend a Unitarian church so he would “get five religions in one.”  But he also understands that too many Americans are not tolerant of differences. They judge others according to their belief in God – not in the God of many faces and no face or the God of many names and no name, but in their particular brand.  Several states still have provisions in their constitutions that forbid “nonbelievers” from holding public office.  For example, in Maryland there is “no religious test . . .  required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God.”   I want to know which God this is.

 

According to the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, most Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith, an openness to a range of religious viewpoints reflecting the great diversity of religious affiliation in this country.  Six in ten adults believe in a “Personal God” with whom they can have a relationship, but one in four – including half of Jews and Hindus – perceive God as an “impersonal force.”  And while almost 70% of Americans say they are certain of God’s existence (whatever form it takes), more than 22% are far less certain.  The survey also found that 16.1 % of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion.  That’s a significant number.

 

So Obama, unlike past presidents, perhaps as far back as the Deists and humanists among our founding fathers, sees everyone and reaches out to everyone.  Like Felix Adler, he respects every honest conviction and seeks common ground with those who would work with him to create a better world for all.  We Ethical Culturists may not worship a supreme bring, but we do engage in what Felix Adler called “worthship,” an act of choosing to attribute worth to every person, of eliciting the distinctive excellence in others, thereby eliciting our own unique qualities.  It is through worthship that we create communities of caring and loving people.

 

After hearing President Obama’s welcoming words, I visited the White House web site and sent him a congratulatory email.  My postscript read: “How about for your next inauguration, inviting a humanist to give the benediction?”  Hail to the Chief!

 

Sources:

President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address at http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address/

 

U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by Pew Forum at http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons

Leader’s Message – “An Enduring Friendship: Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony” – February 2009

In the center of a lovely park square in Rochester, New York is a striking bronze statue, a tribute to the friendship of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, whose bodies are interred in nearby Mount Hope Cemetery. It is called “Let’s Have Tea,” and that’s just what the friends are doing: sitting together, on a scale slightly larger than life-size, face-to-face in sturdy Victorian chairs, with a table between them set with a teapot, two cups, and two books. “They’re not talking about any particular issue,” says the sculptor Pepsy Kettavong, “but they both are anxious to hear what each is thinking. You’re not quite sure who’s talking or who’s listening, so you have that balance.”

The statue represents the early days of their friendship, when they were not yet old, nor famous, when they could find time to talk over the causes that drew them together: abolition and women’s suffrage. Douglass and Anthony met in 1845 while he was on a speaking tour. In 1847, attracted by Anthony’s active women’s movement, Douglass and his wife, Anna, moved their family to Rochester, where the famous former slave became a prominent publisher and abolitionist spokesman. Their home became one of the stops on the Underground Railroad. In 1848 Frederick Douglass attended the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls and wrote about it in his paper, The North Star:

“All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and account able being, is equally true of woman; and if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land.”

Anthony, later recalling that he was the only man who came to their convention and stood up with them, said, “From that day until the day of his death Frederick Douglass was an honorary member of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. In all our conventions, he was the honored guest who sat on our platform and spoke in our gatherings.” In fact, Douglass died on February 20, 1895, only hours after sitting next to Anthony on the platform at a meeting held in Washington, D.C., where he had been greeted with resounding applause and responded with a gentle bow.

But their lifelong friendship was not always an easy one. It encountered a serious challenge after the Civil War when they disagreed over suffrage. Under the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, Negroes and women had the same civil and protected status, but lacked the ballot. Anthony proposed universal suffrage and vowed to fight the idea of the Negro male being given suffrage before women received the same: “Men, their rights, and nothing more; Women, their rights, and nothing less.” The Fifteen Amendment guaranteed all citizens the right to vote, regardless of race, but did not include voting rights for women. Douglass tried to persuade his friend to support its ratification: “When women because they are women are dragged from their homes and hung upon lampposts, . . . then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot.” Asked if that was not also true about Black women, he responded, “Yes, but not because she is a woman but because she is black.” The amendment was ratified in 1870. Anthony, although arrested for voting in 1872, died before she could do so legally.

The sculptor, whose studio is on the park square, likes to see children climb into the laps of the two friends. In 1980, at the age of eight, he escaped with his family from Communist-led Laos in a canoe. After two years in a Thai refugee camp, they found sanctuary in Rochester. “Our idea was to utilize history to get people involved,” says Kettavong. “It’s a social statement. A black man and a white woman are drinking tea together. A Laotian makes their sculpture. It could be a metaphor for American democracy.”

To learn more about Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, and their enduring friendship, join me for Sunday Platform on February 1 and March 1.