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.

Leader’s Message – “Living the Life We Choose” – January 2009

“For me, with certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.”

Cynthia Ozick, from her essay “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means”

 

“She’s promiscuous. She’s in five book groups.”

(One book group member to another in the caption to a New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner)

 

I’m down to one book group now: a group of mothers who met many years ago while waiting for our children to pour out of P.S. 321 in Brooklyn. Our favorite books were novels but, finding less time to read, we gravitated to short story collections and regaled each other with memories of our favorite books. We decided early on not to meet in our homes, preferring instead neighborhood restaurants with big round tables, good acoustics, and cuisine that our children hated. Fathers with our young children in tow would sometimes walk by and wave to us through the windows.

 

With three librarians in the group, we are never at a loss for books to choose. We can tell our history by the list of books we have read and discussed over the years. What we share is not just a love of literature but also a belief that literature is important, that it is, as Cynthia Ozick wrote, “the moral life.” Writers and their characters make choices: some ethical, others decidedly not, and many that are ambiguous. These are the stories that we carry around with us, mulling them over, wondering what we would do in similar situations, hoping we would make the right choices.

 

When I studied pastoral counseling, I became familiar with Irvin Yalom’s work. He is a psychiatrist who found, as he grew up in the inner city of Washington, DC, a refuge in fiction, “a source of inspiration and wisdom.” His first writings were scientific contributions to professional journals, followed by textbooks on group therapy and existential psychology. After his students told him that his books, full of therapy vignettes,  read like novels, Yalom wrote When Nietzsche Wept, a book that he calls a “teaching” novel, joining history and fiction to imagine the beginning of psychoanalysis by bringing the doctor Josef Breuer and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche together in Vienna to create the “talking cure.”

 

What I have been carrying around with me since reading this book is Nietzsche’s fictional challenge to Breuer (They never actually met, though they had mutual friends.): “eternal recurrence.” He asks, “Have you consummated your life?” In other words, has Breuer lived his life or been lived by it? Has he chosen it or did it choose him? Has he loved his life or regretted it? Nietzsche gives him a thought experiment that he introduced in his book Human, All Too Human:

 

“Josef, try to clear your mind. . . What if some demon were to say to you that this life — as you now life it, and have lived it in the past — you will have to live once more, and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and everything unutterably small or great in your life will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this wind and those trees and that slippery shale, even the graveyard and the dread, even this gentle moment and you and I, arm in arm, murmuring these words?. . . Listen to me, my friend, listen to my words — this is the most important thing I will ever say to you: let this thought take possession of you, and I promise it will change you forever!

. . . Do you hate this idea? Or do you love it?. . . Live in such a way that you love the idea!”

 

What a powerful challenge! Breuer is stunned. He hates his life and the choices he has made, a life that he feels has been thrust upon him, full of responsibilities and choices made for him.  I won’t spoil the story for you by revealing how he works this all out.  I will, however, pose the same questions: Are you living the life you have chosen? Have you found meaning in your relationships and your life’s work? Would you willingly live this life again? If not, take the time to reflect upon your choices. Winter is a good time for that. When the cold wind and snow keep us inside, instead of turning on the television and surfing for a movie, instead of distracting ourselves, let us turn inward and find the meaning that is waiting to be illuminated.

 

 

Leader’s Message – “Reconcilable Differences?” – December 2008

“Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. . . Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. . . While the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.”

from President-Elect Barak Obama’s victory speech

 

“I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.”

from Senator John McCain’s concession speech

 

* * *

The above quotations are heartening indeed.  For too long we have been bitterly divided as a nation, polarized into separate camps of blue and red politics, questioning one another’s morality and sanity, unable to understand positions so opposed to our own.  Can we ever find our way back to one another?  Is healing possible?

 

We have always been a land of diversity and conflict, but we have also upheld high ideals and committed ourselves to democracy, favoring the majority position while honoring the minority’s.  Republican strategist Ken Mehlman calls the current political environment “hyper-partisanship,” a state resulting in a paralyzing inability to confront difficult problems facing the nation, problems like the “three E’s” of economy, energy and environment. We desperately need bipartisanship now; without it, it’s like trying to cut a piece of paper with one scissor blade.

 

What brought us to this impasse — a country split in half by the elections of 2000 and 2004?  There are many opinions.  Some are political: Revised congressional rules made it easier for party leadership to corral their members; interest groups sprang up on the extreme right and left; media outlets took partisan positions and covered the overly long campaigns 24/7, emphasizing sound bites of negativity.

 

Some opinions are psychological: Jonathan Haidt specializes in the new field of moral psychology, researching the evolution of morality and emotion, and how they vary across cultures. His study of the intuitive foundations of political ideology has led him to search for ways to overcome what he calls “the moralism of the American culture wars.”

 

How can we get along in a morally and politically diverse society? Here is what Haidt suggests:

1) Recognize that all sides in the debate are morally motivated: “Only when moral motives are acknowledged can intelligent discourse begin.”

2) Try to frame appeals in language that may trigger new intuitions on the other side, e.g., concerted effort to show that gay marriage is about order and stability.

His hope is that a fuller understanding of one another will lead to greater tolerance and respect.

 

To help realize this hope, Haidt created a website called “Civil Politics” at http://www.civilpolitics.org, a collaborative effort launched at a bipartisan interdisciplinary workshop on “moralistic politics” held at Princeton University on May 19, 2007.  The goal is to promote politics in which opponents are not demonized, and cooperation is not seen as moral failing; where power and ideas are intensely debated, but opponents are respected as fellow citizens, sincere in their beliefs.  The first step in finding common ground is recognizing that the other person is acting from moral rather than venal reasons.

 

Does this sound familiar to you? It sure sounds like Ethical Culture to me. Our faith is in the natural goodness of all human beings, a goodness that can be called upon when we confront ethical challenges.  We choose to attribute worth to others and ourselves, to experience that worth in our relationships, especially when we disagree with someone. Often a newcomer to our Society will say, “I’m looking for a community of like-minded people.”  I understand that desire; we want to be with people who think as we do, who take the same political and social positions we do.  It feels comforting and safe.  Yet our ethical challenge has always been to embrace a diversity of ideas, to welcome different ways of thinking and feeling, in the spirit of deepening our moral relationships. 

 

Remember that old call to action: “Afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted.”  It is time that we stepped out of our comfort zone, as euphoric as we now feel about this election, and seek to understand those who have opposed us and our ideals.  We as a nation have been afflicted by partisanship for too long.  Now we must embark, with Obama and McCain, on the long road toward repairing the divisions and healing the wounds of the last eight years.

 

“I was thinking the other day that I had gotten very vital things from people I hated. Friendship is a gift of the gods, a give and take; but if you accomplish anything with your enemies, it is a tremendous piece of work in itself. If you overcome your aversion, that means a great deal.”

John Lovejoy Elliott, Ethical Culture Leader (1868-1942)

 

 

Suggested readings:

Robert Coles, Lives of Moral Leadership, NY: Random House, 2001.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2006.

Jonathan Haidt, “What Makes People Vote Republican?” on Edge Foundation website – http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html

Donald W. Shriver, Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.

 

Leader’s Message – “Homecoming” – November 2008

Home is where one starts from.  As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living.  Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment.

(T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” No. 2 of Four Quartets)

 

I discovered the verses above in the opening pages of “Home Is Where We Start From,” a collection of essays by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.  I grew to love the poem and Winnicott for their insights into human nature, returning to them when I was asked, in my role as Humanist Chaplain, to conduct a “nondenominational mass” for Homecoming Weekend at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY.

 

Once the assistant dean and I cleared up the terminology and agreed that I would hold a nondenominational “service,” I pondered the meaning of “homecoming.”  It is an annual fall tradition in most American universities and colleges, usually built around a sports event and parade, a banquet and dance, to welcome back alumni.  (A really warm welcome might elicit generous donations.)  Since most alumni grew up and made homes in different communities, I wondered what about educational institutions makes them feel like home, places worthy of celebrating.  Perhaps it is because they provide what Winnicott called a “good-enough environment” in which to grow and develop.

 

“My job is definitely to be myself,” writes Winnicott.  “The central feature in human development is the arrival and secure maintenance of the stage of I AM. . . If I am, then I have gathered together this and that and have claimed it as me, and I have repudiated everything else.”  The job of becoming ourselves is perhaps nowhere more evident than when we leave our parents’ home and make a new home out in the world.  For some people that process is most intense when they attend college, a place that provides an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, if we choose to, apart from family and friends who know us and helped shape our personalities.

 

So alumni remember a time when they were responsible for themselves, even if their parents were footing the bill.  They had to learn to live with strangers, to get to class and hand in assignments on time, to experience something of the world on their own.  It was a creative time when any challenge could be faced and every dream was possible.  Leaving was hard, even if a lucrative job was waiting, because they had created a home and family in a new place.  Returning means celebrating who they have become.

 

Of course, there are other places that we call home.  For me, Ethical Culture is home.  It is a religion that requires me to be none other than myself: a whole person, facing ethical challenges, and learning to become human.  We create this home together in communities dedicated to moral exploration: to finding the goodness within others and ourselves, and bringing it to light.  There is much to celebrate in the homecoming of people to a place they have created in their hearts for one another.

 

The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others, . . .

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” No. 4 of Four Quartets)