by Sasha Rosser
October 13, 2019
This service is available to watch on YouTube in two parts.
Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists - Announcements & Dialog
by Sasha Rosser
October 13, 2019
This service is available to watch on YouTube in two parts.
September 29, 2019
By Linda Dove
Let’s now continue meditating on the season this lovely autumn morning. As the late Mary Oliver wrote:
Another year nearly gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows,…
My hope is that today we savor the moods that the season evokes in us. We’ll use the power of poetry to put us in touch with autumn’s beauty, its significance in the cycle of the seasons, and what I call its fragile holiness.
The late UU poet, Mark Doty, wrote that a still-life painting is a dialogue between the painter and the observer. The painter’s wish is that every still-life object is transformed into live feelings in us— smiles of pleasure, perhaps, or tears evoked by memories. In paying attention to how we respond, he says, we come to know ourselves more clearly.
This, I think, is as true for the language of poetry as for the visual arts. Poetry’s power can be felt like a glow in the heart or a kick in the gut. When a poem speaks to us emotionally we come closer to knowing who we are by our visceral responses to it.
Theme 1: Autumnal Beauty
First and foremost, the glory of autumn catches the attention of all of us and inspires poets.
In 1819, John Keats wrote a letter to a friend after harvest. ”How beautiful the season is now, he wrote. How fine the air — a temperate sharpness about it . . . . I never liked stubble-fields so much as now . . . . Somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”
That walk inspired a poem and you alI recognize the famous first lines? “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom friend of the maturing sun.”
David is going to read for us the later part of that poem, To Autumn.
…Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
To Autumn: John Keats
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Robin taught this poem for many years and will be happy to tell you more about it if you ask him.
Of course, Autumn poetry has usually been about the beauty of the rural countryside and today this is fast disappearing. I suggest we now need more poems about autumn for city dwellers.
Theme 2: Seasonal Cycle
Many poems remind us of the seasonal circling from the new life of spring, to the energy of summer, to the transition of autumn, into the resting phase of winter.
When we were lighting the chalice, Robin read to us the first stanza of Immortal Autumn, a poem by Archie MacLeish. Chris is now going to read the rest of that poem for us (entire poem below).
I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
Immortal Autumn: Archibald MacLeish
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now no more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.
Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.
It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.
Autumn as Fall
Autumn isn’t called Fall for nothing here in the USA. The term comes from an ancient Germanic root and was once the common word for autumn in Britain, though no longer. Poetry is full of Fall symbolism. [François-René de] Chateaubriand wrote a prose poem as part of his Memoirs from the After-Life (Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe) in which Fall symbolizes how we often feel about our own lives. Elizabeth will read this in translation.
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes;
Memoirs from the After-Life: Chateaubriand
the leaves falling like our years,
the flowers fading like our hours,
the clouds fleeting like our illusions,
the light diminishing like our intellect,
the sun growing colder like our affections,
the rivers becoming frozen like our lives—
all bear secret relations to our destinies.
And Dylan Thomas expressed a similar feeling in a metaphor in his Poem in October.
. . . And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days . . . .
I don’t know precisely what Thomas meant by “ in a shower of all my days” but somehow I can feel the soft rain falling on my head and the feelings Thomas put into those few words.
Theme 3: Transitional Change and Dissolution
The lyric poet Gregory Orr (UVA) describes the roles words play in helping us process painful emotions such as insecurity, sadness or grief. He calls this the existential necessity of poetry.
Autumn is the season when poets ask us to face change and dissolution as an inevitable part of life. Nancy Barbour will read a poem by Robert Frost that symbolizes this theme.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Nothing Gold Can Stay: Robert Frost
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Theme 4: Autumn and Climate
Many poets are writing now about the seasonal Fall as symbolic of climate change. An entire website has sprung up devoted to modifications of classic poems so that they address climate change. We only have time for one of these, an amusing and horrifying play on The Wild Swans at Coole by William Butler Yeats. Beryl will read.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The Wild Swans at Coole: William Butler Yeats
The woodland paths are dry,
The woodland paths are way too dry.
It hasn’t rained in like two months;
There should be a lake here with
Brimming water and swans among the stones . . . .
My God they’re all dead.
Nine and fifty dehydrated, dead swans.
Poetry, what have you done?
You probably know that the DMS Manual 5 (for mental illness diagnosis and treatment) has a new classification. It labels the extreme grief many people are suffering over climate change as a mental health condition. Here is a cathartic little Elegy for the Planet. Trudy will read.
Earth Elegy
With no heart or mind for Earth’s sanctity
we roll time down treacherous paths,
driving the years to uncertainty.
Tree canopies strive to stand tall sentry
shielding the endangered soil,
reverencing its fertility.
But we hear the moans of choking skies.
We witness quakes and seas that roil,
cracks in ice as waters rise.
We must begin to listen to Earth’s gasping sighs
or we will leave behind this epitaph:
Humans neglected with All Life to empathize.
Martin Rowson is a British satirist and cartoonist for the Guardian newspaper. He says the term climate change does not kick us hard enough in the butt. So he proposes instead the term climate collapse. We’re looking at ‘systemic collapse’, he says,…our lungs collapse, financial systems collapse, and we collapse in exhaustion at the end of a difficult day. He thinks people can relate to that. He hopes this term will take off and help spur us to action. I think a poem entitled Climate Collapse is waiting to be written.
Theme 5: Poetry as Communal Pondering
Today the many voices of Black Lives Matter and MeToo poets are having a lot of impact, especially through the internet and live performances. The poets hope their words can help change our conversations about race and sexual violence, which in turn can help change our culture, and then our behavior and practices.
The poet Marilyn Nelson said that in “communal pondering” through reading poems together people can get a sense of collective connection. (I guess this would be much like, in earlier times, gathering round the piano to sing together). My hope is that, by making poetry more accessible and appealing to direct experience, poets can help everyone ponder on the beauty of the autumn, the meaning in the seasonal cycles, and the fragility of the holy planet. For this, as Mark Doty might have said, we need to pay attention so that all life does not become still life. We need to do everything we can to prevent our autumns collapsing into permanent winter.
Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion
May 5, 2019
Facilitator: Martha Sider
2019 Flower Communion
The title of today’s service is taken from the song “ White Coral Bells†You’ll find it printed on the insert to the OOS. White coral bells upon a slender stalk, Lilies of the Valley deck my garden walk… I, like many children, was introduced to this song at summer camp, Kenbrook Bible Camp. And yes, at that camp we sang mainly specifically Christian songs around the campfire, but this song I learned with a group of girls in the cabin with our counselor at lights out time. We sang it as a round, our little girl voices joined together, and I loved being a part of that community. Many years later, the Lilies of the Valley in my garden today are a gift of this community shared from Cathy and Charlie’s garden.
Lilies of the Valley hold much significance around the world – they are said to bring luck, used in weddings to symbolize purity, in Christian lore (mentioned 15 times in the Bible) used to symbolize tears (Eve’s, the Virgin Mary’s, Mary Magdalene’s at the cross of Jesus) and in some folklore they are believed to protect from evil spirits, charm against witches spells and considered the flowers of the fairies, their tiny bells used as cups from which to drink. Some in European countries hold the belief that Lilies of the Valley prompt visions of heaven.
However, aside from folklore, I think these beautiful, sweetly scented flowers call us to an awareness of our HUU community.
We are the lilies of the Shenandoah Valley, white coral bells. “Oh, don’t you wish that you could hear them ring? That will happen only when the fairies sing.†In this religious community where as we often sing “we seek elusive answers to the questions of this life†and can claim that “even to question, truly is an answer,†that will happen only when we open ourselves to the experience of transcending wonder and mystery.
Today our four readers will offer words that hopefully inspire us to seek the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder” stated as one of the many sources from which we draw. [Read more…]
by Nancy Barbour
April 14, 2019
On Children (from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran)
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of
Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though
they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their
own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls
dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life
goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with
His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s
hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves
also the bow that is stable.
Introduction
These words from Kahlil Gibran will frame what I have to share with you today. They provide an image of the child as a powerful human being. Though I am not a parent, I have spent most of the last 35 years as an Early Childhood Education scholar studying how children grow and learn and how families in the US and abroad support and care for their children. As an early childhood teacher educator, I advocate for best practice so that all children can succeed in the world. I have long been a champion for children, but my concern for what is happening on our border with young children being separated from their families makes me feel angry, helpless, and unsettled. I am well aware of the lifelong impact on children when they are separated from their families. And I worry about what we are doing to children who have already been up-rooted from their homes and countries, not having a say in their fate. I will share with you information on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (UNCRC), a document completed in 1989 (an abbreviated version is what you have in your hand). This convention clearly defines children’s rights that are guaranteed. I will use this document to examine how the separation and warehousing of children on our southern border challenges these rights. I have struggled in preparing this service because I don’t want it to be a class lecture, but more of an unburdening and sharing of my passion to protect children’s rights. [Read more…]
J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
February 24, 2019
By B. Don Franks,
February 10, 2019
[I thought that it might be interesting to talk about Arkansas and Georgia in the 50s and 60s when some of the legal basis for Jim Crow was being dismantled with the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court Decision and the Civil Rights Act being passed Given the recent revelations about our Governor and Attorney General in the 80s, it appears that someone growing up in Virginia 25-30 years later would also have some stories.]
Atmosphere
I was born in 1938 and lived in several towns in Arkansas until the early 60s. In this “last†part of the Jim Crow era, Whites controlled all aspects of life, including politics, education, courts, and financial affairs. We were kept separate from Blacks (except for the servants). There was no mixing of the races in schools, cafes, parties, & churches. We did include Blacks in our lives, Little Black Sambo was read to children; Amos and Andy watched on TV; and when a decision had to be made, the following was used: “Ennie, minnie, mighty mo, catch a N(word) by the toe—if he hollers, make him pay $50 every day.â€
“The “public†swimming pools, golf courses, and parks.were for Whites only. In some cases there would be a separate Black public facility such as a park, but it would be inferior to the White one. As you have heard, there were White and Colored water fountains, in addition to White men, White women, and Colored restrooms.
I remember three incidents that illustrate the separate, but unequal, aspects of this time. I was playing with a baseball team, when some Black kids came by and challenged us to a game. When we asked our coach if we could play them, he answered, “No if we let them play baseball with us, then the next thing they will want to go swimming in “our swimming pool.†My friends and I could watch ball games at the Black school and sit wherever we wanted. There was a small separate section for Blacks that wanted to watch our games, and of course, they could only sit in the baloney at the movies. The Assistant Superintendent of Schools spoke to my Civics class, asking us to be careful with our books, because when we got new ones, our old ones went to the Colored school. He also explained that a Black teacher with the exact education and years of experience would make hundreds of dollars less than our White teacher confirming the Supreme Court Decision that Separate was Unequal. [Read more…]
By Chris Edwards
2.3.2019
“But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more stepâ€
Don McLean, from the song, “American Pieâ€
“I’d love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers.â€
Luis Buñuel, Spanish filmmaker (1900-1983)
“War reporting is still essentially the same – someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people be they government, military, or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.â€
Marie Colvin (1956-2012), American foreign affairs correspondent for The Sunday Times, a British newspaper. Subject of biography, In Extremis, The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin, by Lindsey Hilsum (2018).
“Go where the silence is and say something.â€
Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!
The first part of my strung-out title comes from a book, “An Honorable Estate: My time in the working press,†by the late Louis Rubin, my professor at Hollins. Louis called journalism, the Fourth Estate, “honorable.†Way earlier, he and our friend, the late Jim Geary, had worked together for the Associated Press. Writing about the hot lead typesetting of their time, Louis said the technology changed less in the first five centuries after Gutenberg than in the late 20th. The book came out a day before 9/11. He didn’t hope for many reviews – knowing a day’s monster news swallows all else. He was right.
As to “Enemies of the People,†here are some typical complaints, from a letter in The Daily News-Record: “Watching the news these days is so depressing. All the media seems to do is focus on the negativity in the world. Personally, I blame the media for blowing everything out of proportion.â€Â [Read more…]