by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
August 15, 2021

It has been widely argued that New England transcendentalism was the first genuinely Americanintellectual movement, strongly influencing philosophy, theology, politics, and literature. Many date its clear beginning to the first meeting of the Transcendental Club on September 12, 1836, never really a club rather than a series of meetings. That first meeting had only three participants: two Unitarian  ministers, Frederic Henry Hedge who hosted and initiated it and George Putnam, along with Ralph  Waldo Emerson, who had stopped being Minister of the Unitarian Second Church in Boston in 1832 , following the death of his first wife and his developing doubts about communion and Biblical miracles.

Later male “members” (attendees of the meetings) included Bronson Alcott, experimental educator and  father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women; Theodore Parker, abolitionist and Unitarian minister whose parishioners in his West Roxbury church included the abolitionist leader, William Lloyd Garrison; Henry David Thoreau, author of “An Essay on Civil Disobedience” and Walden, which exalted mystically merging with nature in accordance with Hindu and Buddhist views; William Henry Channing, nephew of the main founder of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. William Ellery  Channing, who resisted transcendentalism even as his views influenced the movement; and George Ripley, journalist and Unitarian minister who would found the utopian Brook Farm experiment in 1841 in West Roxbury (which would fail in 1847).

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Presented by Chris Edwards and Robin McNallie
July 4, 2021

Video:
Democracy, by Leonard Cohen

Chalice reading:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will.  Frederick Douglass

I:

On The 1619 Project (CE) — In August, 1619, a ship with about 20 African captives from what is now Angola docked in Virginia near what is now Hampton. The pirates in charge sold them to colonists. Slavery in America began with those men and women, the first among 12.5 million to come in chains across the Atlantic. Almost two million failed to survive that dreadful Middle Passage.

Asphyxiation was a hazard. Captives were confined below deck, where oxygen could get too low for a candle to burn. Centuries later, during Ireland’s potato famine, the same conditions would prevail on a “coffin ship,” so-called because only about 70% of passengers survived, such as the ship a young barrel-maker named Patrick boarded in 1849. Patrick debarked in Boston, where he would die from cholera, but only after marrying and having 5 children. The family might have seen those ads that said “Irish need not apply,” but some of Patrick Kennedy’s progeny did well. His great-grandson was President John F. Kennedy.

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by April Moore
May 30, 2021

A few months ago, here at HUU, I expressed a great joy about something that had unexpectedly come into my life—a folder of my mother’s writings from long ago.  Apparently, when I’d received the folder a couple of years ago from my sister, I’d stashed it in a closet and forgotten all about it. But a couple of months ago I came across it.  

This folder was stuffed with more than 40 typed stories and essays.  From the return address on the first page of each one, I could tell that the writings spanned decades, from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s. 

I realized I held in my hands a treasure, the fruits of my mother’s creative efforts over much of her adult life.

Oh, my God!  Reading these stories has had a profound effect on my heart. 

For starters, the quality of Mom’s writings stunned me—many were expertly structured, beautifully worded, and insightful.  My mom was truly an artist, and I had never realized it!

But it is the way these stories restored my parents to me that had the profound impact on my heart.  Although both my parents died a long time ago, I am re-experiencing them, vividly, at different stages of their lives.  For instance, I can see my dad through my mom’s loving eyes, as a young man, and then as the more mature man he was during my childhood. 

And reading a harrowing account of how a moment of carelessness by my parents when they were young nearly cost my sister her life when she was just three years old.  Mom wrote poignantly about  that brush with tragedy and how it changed her as a mother.

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by Tom Hook
April 11, 2021

When I first began to review this topic from Soul Matters of “Becoming”, I must admit that I was a bit perplexed and challenged. After all, most of us present here today – including myself – would be categorized in the camp of “aging out”.

So what else do we need to Become? After all, we have weathered so much in our brief stay on Mother Earth. Wars, unrest, pandemics, the re?emergence of racism. Can’t we just rest? Put our feet up and relax for the rest of the journey?

Sometimes. There certainly is a place for that. However, let me suggest that we ponder the “Story” of our life to this point and ? with courage ? the “Story” of our future.

Pádraig Ó Tuama in his poem Narrative Theology #1 writes: And I said to him

Are there answers to all of this?
And he said
The answer is in a story
and the story is being told.

And I said
But there is so much pain
And she answered, plainly,
Pain will happen.

Then I said
Will I ever find meaning?
And they said
You will find meaning
Where you give meaning.

The answer is in the story
And the story isn’t finished.

“You will find meaning where you give meaning. The answer is in the story and the story isn’t finished.”

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By Cathy Strickler
February 14, 2021

Hi Everybody, it’s really great to be here with you all and have the opportunity to talk. Thank you Merle, I really appreciate you for asking me and I really appreciate you all for listening. I also appreciate and thank everyone who has made these programs possible. They have been a consistent source of connection and comfort.

When Merle asked me to speak I knew right away that I wanted to talk about compassion because I had been thinking about it a lot lately. I have enjoyed the process of writing and getting my thoughts organized.

The main thing I want to talk about is what I’ve found helpful in difficult situations where I react with a strong negative response. Sometimes it’s a harsh judgement, anger, deep irritation, or deep disappointment. Ideally, compassion is a better response. Compassionate thinking is the necessary first step to compassionate action. But sometimes we don’t even get to first base with compassionate thought. It’s easy to run the bases when the object of our compassion is easy to be compassionate to. But it’s hard to even swing the bat to try to get to first base when we’re faced with people who seem hurtful to other people or to us, who seem to reject us or disappoint us, who seem mean or irrational, whose actions are abusive or violent, people who are so damaged that they seem to have no redeeming value, people who we think have done huge damage to our world and who we disagree with so strongly that we want to scream, cuss, get as far away as possible or completely shut out. The trouble with compassion is that sometimes it’s really hard, and even seems impossible.

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By J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
January 31, 2021

               Three weeks ago Tom Hook spoke about “Imagination,” the topic this month from Soul Matters, with today the last of the month. While he mentioned a dark side to imagination, he mostly focused on its positive aspect, providing visions of better futures that may be achieved with proper hope and effort.  Today we shall be more concerned with the dark side, people imagining things that are simply unreal and are not going to be real, with their belief in such unrealities possibly leading to bad outcomes.

               We have such a situation now with a large portion of the American population seriously believing a Big Lie, that the presidential election of November 3, 2020 was rigged and marked by widespread fraud that resulted in the wrong person being declared winner. Obviously the spread of this inspired the attack on the Capitol on January 6, and this belief looks to persist among many people, even though the new president has been inaugurated.  This is a serious problem, a manifestation of the dark side of imagination.

               Some of the believers in the Big Lie have changed their minds. A particularly dramatic sub-group among the Big Lie believers has been those who have followed the QAnon conspiracy theory.  Increasingly influential with a follower now in Congress, with its people among the leaders of the assault on the Capitol, including the woman killed while trying to break into the House of Representatives, their moment of truth came on Inauguration Day, when supposedly the president was going to order the military to arrest mass numbers of enemies who would be executed or sent to Gitmo, the prophesied “Storm.” The failure of this to happen led some to abandon the theory, with the apparent Q himself, a man named Watkins, declaring that “It is over” and encouraging people to “go back to your normal lives.” Indeed Q had not issued any messages since early December, just before December 8 when by certifying their results states could guarantee that their electoral college votes could not be challenged by Congress.

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By Mary Hahn
January 17, 2021

I woke up one morning and saw the frost on the roof and on the grass and I looked out at the mountains that stood strong like an unbreakable sentry that has stood guard over the valley for millions of years. The mountains are the soul of the region. To understand the mountains is to know ourselves. During our brief lifetime we see little change; they appear much the same. My mind drifted back to the times in which we live. The acrimony and the pain that we face as a nation seems overwhelming.  My mind started racing and then I look back at those mountains that have witnessed things of history and folklore. I thought about the Indians who used to roam these lands and the change that was forced upon them by Europeans. The Indians used the Valley in the shadows of the Blue Ridge for farming. The fertile Valley of the Shenandoah was home to the Monacan Indian nation for 10,000 years where they harvested crops and hunted deer and bear. They eventually were pushed west by the European settlers.

The mountains witnessed Black people working in servitude and a war between the states that should’ve torn us apart. By 1820 there were over 2423 Slaves in the Shenandoah Valley. One in seven was enslaved. The Shenandoah Valley strongly supported the confederacy to preserve the slavery. Whites reacted slowly to new laws where people were considered people Instead of property. The south past laws for segregation called the Jim Crowe laws. All this while the mountains remained vigilant.

They saw us preparing for a world war and a pandemic at the turn of the last century. During the 1918 pandemic in Virginia, schools, churches and a variety of public places closed their doors during the pandemic peak. (Sound familiar?) Newspaper obituaries were filled with names of young men and women whose lives had been cut short by the influenza.

They were around during the economic fall of 1929 but most of these people that lived in their shadows were too poor to tell. Unemployment began to rise rapidly in 1931, farm prices plummeted and the state government cut spending to maintain a balanced budget and relief rolls rose sharply. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the civilian conservation Corps which built the Skyline Drive.

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