Marginalia

Marginalia

Sermon by Eugene R. Widrick, Minister Emeritus, June 8, 2008
First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts

We have been meeting here – or almost here – for 250 years. Actually 197 years on this spot and before that in a building to the right of where we are. If you check the Revolutionary War Monument out front, it is approximately where the front steps of the original building were located. That building was struck by lightning and burned in 1810, so this one was built. This building has gone through three major changes: In the middle 1800s the balcony was floored over to create this space and Union Hall below. In 1905 if I remember correctly, the whole building was jacked up high enough to add the ground floor, what some of would call the basement. The “new building” giving space for the new kitchen, elevator, classrooms, offices was added in 1994.

There have been changes that were social, cultural, spiritual. Our first settled minister, Paul Litchfield, died in 1828. Litchfield was an orthodox Christian, a Calvinist, and had resisted the ideas of Universalists and Unitarians for years. The calling of a minister to replace Litchfield turned into a conflict which split the congregation, eventually leading to the calling of a Universalist to this church and a substantial number of people going across the street to build a church with preaching and teaching more in line with the Calvinism of Litchfield. The Universalist was followed by a Unitarian minister.

Life is funny. Victor Carpenter and I have never worked together but I followed him in The Free Protestant [Unitarian] Church in Cape Town, South Africa going there in 1968. Now Vic has followed me here though there has been a six year gap. This church had a Harvard Divinity School student here as an intern from 1979 to 1981 named Eric Heller. Eric eventually ended up in South Africa where he preached on occasion at the Unitarian Church and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Stellenbosch in 1995. Eric’s dissertation was on Unitarianism in South Africa. South African Unitarians – Free Protestants as they called themselves – were and are, according to Heller a “marginal” group, that is, people who live at the margins of society, are open to other ways of being – in the case of South Africa open to Non-White members, communicative with other religious groups. During the time Victor and I were in Cape Town there was a Parsi family, Zoroastrians from India, in the church. No one asked them to convert, no one objected when the woman taught Sunday School. The church did not require, as some groups did, that admission to the church or where people where seated be determined by racial classification. The church had Coloured members and had had since its founding in 1865. The church was actively engaged in building relationships with other religious groups, Quaker, Bahai, Sufi, Islam. Building bridges between various elements of society

The concept of “marginal” as a description of human personality or groups was postulated in 1921 by Robert Ezra Park at the University of Chicago. Park claimed that group solidarity correlates to a great extent to the animosity we have toward other groups. As we mix and fuse cultures, become “more civilized” in Park’s terminology, people can find themselves on the margins of cultures where they can observe their own culture and other cultures with some detachment, learn to accept differences, develop appreciation, develop mature adjustments. Marginal people and groups build bridges across cultural divides, open paths of communication, establish relationships.

Dr. Billie Davis in a speech delivered in 1997 to the National Honor Society in Psychology spoke of marginality:

“What makes real people?” she started her talk.

“What makes real people?

“Before I was seven years old I asked my father that question. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ my dad answered in response. ‘What kind of notion is that—real people?’

“’People that live in houses,’ I tried to explain. ‘People that stay together in towns.’

“I was expressing in a child’s blunt language the basic questions of theology, philosophy, and psychology. What is human? How do people become what they are?”

She goes on to explain that she was born into a family of migrant farm laborers. “I heard people,” she continues, “call us gypsies, tramps, migrants, bums, farm labor, transients, and oakies. The designations so obviously set us apart that I began to conceive of the townsfolk as real people. I asked ‘what makes real people’ because I had sensed the vital concepts of being and belonging. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to belong?”

What makes real people? Who is a person? Who are real people to us?

The Calvinism of the early Congregationalists, as preached in this church up to 1828 – to over simplify a bit, held that God was all powerful and all knowing, omnipotent and omniscient. Therefore God knew, before He created Heaven and Earth, everything that was going to happen, and had, in a sense, chosen who among us were to be saved and go to Heaven and who among us were damned to Hell. And, since God knew and knows all, there is nothing we can do to change it. We can hope to be among the elect—the saved—but we cannot know.

The Universalists believed that God had chosen for all souls to go to Heaven. The Unitarians believed that human beings could chose to be good, had elements of divinity within them, and were therefore worthy of salvation, could chose their own fate.. It was a conflict, in a sense, over who are real people? The Universalist answer was everyone goes to Heaven therefore everyone is a real person. The Unitarians believed in the “progressive capacity” of human beings – that we have within ourselves the ability to grow in holiness, knowledge and righteousness. If we had not earned Heaven we still can. In 1784 Charles Chauncey, minister of the First Church in Boston from 1727 to 1787, published a book The Mystery Hid From Ages and Generations, which begins “As the First Cause of all things is infinitely benevolent, ‘tis not easy to conceive that he should bring mankind into existence, unless he intended to make them finally happy.” We can all be real people.

In our 250 years as a Church there has been a long list of not real people who have struggled with the right to be full human beings. When this building was erected in 1811 there was a pew in the back corner of the balcony, on my right, for People of Colour. In 1882 an English Unitarian woman wrote about the issue of the suitability of women as ministers. “[W]omen,” she wrote, “are (…) actually much deconsidered by men. Would not their deconsideration be reflected on Religion itself it they were to become authorized ministers?” Just the fact that a woman promoted and idea could devalue that idea.

Poor people are easily considered as not real people. The President of this country could safely ignore the folks in New Orleans who lost homes and businesses in Katrina. Are they not real people? Or just not real enough to help?

When a group goes from this church to New Orleans to help build and rebuild they were affirming that the people there are real people. Working on Habitat for Humanity projects, supporting programs in Cambodia, Oxfam, The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee—anything that reaches across the divide between cultures, ethnicity, religions, ways of being is an affirmation of their reality. When we built the addition we included handicap accessibility—I know it was a legal requirement but it was also a moral requirement when we think of the people we made welcome. I have on my desk an invitation to attend a “celebration of love and commitment” between a friend and her female companion. Are they real people? Becoming a Welcoming Church is an affirmation of their being real. Being a Welcoming Church is a logical extension of the Universalism this church chose in 1828, a logical extension of the Unitarianism embraced here in the 1830s. We have developed as a non-creedal church and we have no religious test in order to belong. We are welcoming of people.

A E Housman in one of his poems from A Shropshire Lad [XXXII] described our reason for being:

From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.

Now—for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer:
How shall I help you, say
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.

We have, for 250 years walked hand in hand, sharing what is in our hearts, helping one another, reaching out. May we so do for another 250 years.

____________________________

Bibliography:

Heller, Eric. Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation of South African Unitarians. 1995. Copy in Harvard Divinity School Library.

Peart, Ann. “Deconsidered by Men.” Women and the British Unitarian Movement before 1904. Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society. Vol. 24 No 2. April 2008. p. 61ff.

Of Interest: Cunningham, Lawrence S. Thomas Merton: The Pursuit of Marginality. Christian Century, December 6, 1978, pp. 1181-1183.