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A Challenge September 28, 2008, Prelude “Ascension”
Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu melech ha'olam. [May the peace of Allah descend upon you, and His Mercy and Blessings.] (Note: This line in Arabic is the new text. In the original, which you hear, it is simply “Allah Akbar.” (God is great!) I could not re-record at this point, but I wanted the ‘book’ to reflect the intended change of text.] –D.b.A. Dona nobis pacem! Grant us grace and abundant peace. Amen. Processional: “Imagine / Sing To the Heart!” Dedication: “Song For My Father”
Imagine in our darkness shines a light with which we see Imagine creating a world where people live as one; Baruch ata Adonai, Now sing! “Song For My Father” Today is a day like any other day. And this song is a song like any other one. But this church is a church unlike any other one. And my father is a father unlike any other one. And this day, and this song, and this church are special
Introduction of the Speaker
The guest at our podium this morning is not only a member of our choir and Troubadour of Jazz, he is the composer of the music in today’s service. Daniel Zwickel McJean ben Avram (son of Jean, son of Abraham) is a life-afirminist rationalist mystic ovo-lacto activist-pacifist eco-feminist Zen-neo-pagan Judeo-Christian secular humanistic unitarian bio-theistic Trinitarian pan-theistic existentialist Universalist trans-gender/generationist Troubadour of Jazz & Bay Arean MtDUUC UniUni since 1976 and a birthright Jewnitarian. When Daniel first stepped foot in our church, his grandfather’s sermon, “Good Men In Hell” was on the literature rack. The Rev. Dr. Frank Scott Corey Wicks was minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. That sermon was being discussed on a blog in Australia in 2006, ninety-two years after publication Before Daniel was hired away by other churches, first as Bass Section Leader in the choir of the First Unitarian Church in Kensington, then as Cantor at St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church in Berkeley (for sixteen years!), along with stints at various Unity and Religious Science churches, he joyfully served our church as a musician and, on occasion, as a composer. A classical violinist from age nine, his compositional talent was first acknowledged by the San Diego Symphony with an Honorable Mention in that same year. He began songwriting in college at age sixteen. His career as a professional singer-guitarist began in San Diego, playing at the Staff NCO Club at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. As he is alive to tell the tale, he obviously failed to disclose his day job of janitor at Mercy Hospital: which was his alternate service as a conscientious objector. A San Francisco Bay area resident since 1971, his repertoire of close to a thousand songs spans nearly every genre and ten languages. He has penned well over a thousand compositions, ranging from simple chants and ballads to complex choral and symphonic works. A social/political activist as well as troubadour, he voluntarily designs, hosts and maintains Websites for various peace and justice organizations at “PeaceHost.net”, his Web domain. He speaks to us this morning as a second generation pacifist and conscientious objector. Please join me in welcoming Daniel Zwickel McJean ben Avram. Lighting of our Chalice: “As We Gather In This Sacred Place”
[First spoken, then played] As we gather in this sacred place,
Once upon a time there was a village where the people were all family—cousins and aunts and uncles. The leader was the father of them all. Like all families, they played and argued, and generally got along, because they were family. Now there were two brothers in this family, and they were best friends and loved each other very much. But one day, they got into an argument and began fighting. They were both big and strong, and they could be heard all through the village, and they came to such blows that the earth shook and cracked, and the crack became a rift, and the rift became a chasm, and they fell to the ground, one on each side, and the gap between them became so great that finally they could only shout at each other. And the people all took sides, one on each side of the canyon. Over the years the village families grew, and spread out, and became many different peoples who looked different, and spoke differently, and believed in different things except for one thing that they all believed, and that was that the people on the other side of the canyon were different from them, and that those people were the enemy. They forgot they were related; they forgot the two brothers, who couldn’t even remember what they were fighting about. They just remembered the hate, and the anger. Many years later, a boy named Inquisitos lived on one side of the canyon. He was a curious lad, always asking questions. When he grew to be a young man, his friends would go off to war against the people on the other side, and some would not come back. He thought this was very sad, and he asked why there was war, but no one could tell him. One night Inquisitos had a dream, and in that dream he was walking across a meadow and met up with an old man who was the saddest person he could imagine. The old man told him he was looking for his brother. He had not seen his brother for so long that he could barely remember him, only that he was once very angry with him, but now he just missed him very much. The young man asked him if he wanted company, and the old man said, yes, he would like that very much. They walked for hours and hours, and came up to the edge of a canyon. And on the other side was another old man who looked just like his companion. Inquisitos stepped back, and watched. The two old men gazed at each other silently, and the young man could see that they held a great love for each other. They began weeping with joy. They wept and they wept, until the canyon filled with their tears. And when the water came all the way to the top, they both leaped in and swam to each other and embraced. When Inquisitos woke up he was sure that canyon was real, and vowed to find it. It took years, but one day he came to a place that looked just like the one in his dream. He found a path and went all the way to the bottom, and there was a stream. He tasted the water, and it was the most delicious water he had ever tasted. He filled his waterskin and climbed back to the rim of the canyon. He made camp as night fell, and he slept and dreamed again. This time Inquisitos dreamed he was in a cool stream of water, and he knew that the water sustained him. He understood that the one thing that all people had in common was that they needed water for life. When he awoke, he took a new name, Aquos—a word for water. He walked until he came to a village, and when he was offered water to drink, he said, no, have some of mine. And the villagers drank, and found it to be cool and sweet. Aquos told them this was the water of life, and that it belonged to all of them, and they belonged to it. He said all people belonged to each other, and should not fight, but share water with each other as members of one family. Before Aquos left the village, he filled his waterskin from the village well and when he tasted it, later in the day, it tasted just as cool and sweet as the water from the canyon. He did the same thing in each village he visited, and as more and more people shared his water it began to seem that everywhere the water had become like the water from his dream, cool and pure and sweet. A wonderful thing happened: as they shared his water, the people stopped fighting. The rest of his life, Aquos went from village to village teaching about the water of life. When he was an old, old man, laying on his cot for his final sleep, his friends asked if there was anything they could bring him. He said, just a sip of water from his waterskin, and, with the water of life on his lips, he passed into death and his spirit passed into the ocean of spirits and of life. So every once and a while, when you take a drink of water, remember the tears of joy from those brothers who once were fighting, lost in anger and hatred, and who now live in harmony. And remember, also, those who do not have clear, clean water to drink, like people in Haiti, and in Iraq, and in Africa, and even places right here in this country. And try to think of ways to help others who do not have what we have, that some day they all may drink the cool, sweet water of life. Meditation: “Within the Center Of Your Heart”
Within the center of your heart, whispering
According to Arthur M. Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, “John F. Kennedy went to San Francisco in June of 1945 as a special writer for the Hearst press to watch the
founding of the United Nations. For a young veteran, with stabbing memories of
violence and death, it was in a way a disenchanting experience. But for a
student of politics it was an indispensable education. Call for the Offering: “Gifts”
Daniel was attending a MDUUC sponsored meditation workshop, led by Alan Hunter. Asked to reflect on the unique gifts we each have to share, during a meditation Daniel wrote this song. You are now invited to generously share your monetary gifts. What are these gifts, these gifts that we bring, Eyes to see, fingers to feel, strength to change and time to heal. How can we use these gifts that we bring, See the pain, feel the wound, change our hearts, heal the wound. Then let us share the gifts that we bring, See the joy, feel the touch. change the hate with love’s healing touch. Anthems: “Lágrimas” and “Candle” From the jungles of Central America to the deserts of the Middle East, Empire marches on. "Lágrimas brotan de los ojos de Diós ..." "Tears fall from the eyes of God." On that fateful night, eight new stars appeared in the heavens — tears from the eyes of God.
[Chorus]: November sixteen, nineteen eighty-nine, [Chorus]: Blood flowed like fire into the rivers of the night, [Chorus] In the heavens of our dreams God shed a tear [Chorus] Now let us call, “¡Presente!” “Candle” I'll not curse the darkness. I will light this candle instead. I survey the starkness where the broken bodies lay and bled, [CHORUS] I see pain and sorrow, smoke that casts a shroud beneath the sun; We must look toward the morrow, with one will begin the work that must be done. [CHORUS] I can see the dawning of a nation waging peace at length, We are the foundation; In forgiveness may we find our strength.
May every creature abound in well-being and peace. May every living being, weak or strong, the long and the small, the short and the medium -sized, the mean and the great, May every living being, seen or unseen, those dwelling far off, those living near by, those already born, those waiting to be born, May all attain inward peace. Let no one deceive another. Let no one despise another in any situation. Let no one, from antipathy or hatred, wish evil to anyone at all. Just as a mother, with her own life, protects her only child from hurt, so within yourself foster a limitless concern fo every living creature. Display a heart of boundless love for all the world in all its height and depth and broad extent, Love unrestrained, without hatred or enmity. Then as you stand or walk, sit or lie, until overcome by drowsiness, devote your mind entirely to this: It is known as living the life divine. Remarks: “The Pragmatic Pacifist”
As an amateur wordsmith, I love the term, “cognitive dissonance”. It is defined in psychology as an uncomfortable feeling or stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas: for instance, the belief that all life is sacred, coupled with the notion that there is an evil “other” that must be destroyed at all costs, even human. One may become so mired in that mind set as to forsake reason and logic for the comfort of a certainty that must be defended at all costs. Forget the Christian teachings of mercy, compassion and forgiveness — Satan and all who serve him must be defeated. Last century it was the Communists. The last election, it was the gays. Today, it is the Moslems. We hate because we fear; we fear because we do not understand. A dear friend of mine, a fellow songwriter and a devout Catholic composed a Peace Mass of impressive complexity and genuine devotion. That he is a beautiful and loving soul is reflected in his music. And yet he once spoke to me of the evil of Islam, and the righteousness of our holy war against it, that the cost of a few (few!) innocent lives is worth the price if we are to defeat evil. I would presume that he is against the murder of fetuses, but I might as well presume that he would be in favor of the execution of a murderer, or a rapist. Sanctity, shmancity, reverence for life, it would seem, has its limits. Cognitive dissonance, anyone? So. How does one balance this popular view of radical Islamic fundamentalism with the story of one radical Islamic fundamentalist by the name of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as the “Frontier Gandhi”. As a Pashtun of northern India, among the most fierce and feared warriors on earth, his credentials were beyond question. Sick to his soul of the blood feuds that were taking the lives of the Pashtun youth, he went to the Qur’an for inspiration, and to the teachings of Gandhi, and then sought to convince a group of young men that the Prophet Mohammed commanded that they behave with mercy and compassion, and foreswear violence. His efforts would culminate in the establishment, in the 1920s, of the “Khudai Khidmatgaran”, or Servants of God — an army of tens of thousands of unarmed Pashtuns who limited themselves to passive resistance through civil disobedience. And on April 23, 1930 at the climax of the protests against British sovereignty in northwest India, British troops fired on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators. Those soldiers of nonviolence, whose children and grandchildren would become the Taliban, fearlessly faced the British soldiers, tearing their tunics and baring their chest in defiance and, armed only with satyagraha, or the Force of Truth, and clothed only in the righteousness of Islam, a word meaning “seeing peace”, line by line they fell, until two hundred of their members were dead and the British soldiers could no longer stomach the bloodshed, and refused their officers’ order to fire. The word, pacifism does not derive from the word, passive. Pacifism does not retreat from the world, it actively engages it. Pacifism does not simply reject violence, it embraces justice. Pragmatic pacifism is not an oxymoron, but implies an integrity lacking in those who see the words as either/or. Pacifism does not disrespect those who feel that the only answer to oppression is armed revolution, but wishes them Shalom, which is an ancient Hebrew word meaning ‘harmony’. Those who fail to see the practicality of pacifism suffer from an acute lack of imagination. War is not the last resort but the abandonment of conviction. The pacifist does not flee from conflict, but seeks to resolve it through nonviolent means. The task of the pacifist is to prevent war from coming about. But when the pacifist fails and, as Forrest Gump would say, shit happens, then the pacifist must make a choice, a hard choice. Pacifists are accused of being cowards, but pacifism, in the face of violence or even death requires a profound courage. Dynasties, and Hitlers, will come and go, but the earth abides. Do we choose to participate in its destruction, or to live in shalom? Indigenous tradition teaches us to live in harmony with the earth; Jewish tradition teaches us to question, and to live justly; Christianity teaches us forgiveness and compassion; Islam, in its respect for the other Abrahamic traditions, reminds us that we all share a common forefather; Universalism teaches us that salvation is not exclusive, but embraces all of humankind and Americanism, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence tells us that all are created equal and are endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty and happiness and does not qualify that by saying just all Americans. For war is always about the killing of civilians and to say that the killing of any civilian is acceptable is to imply a racism that a true American will not countenance. Traditions and prophets, all that, and who embrace life over death teach us that war is wrong. There are those fatalists who will hew to Ecclesiastes, who insist that there is a time for war, that sometimes you just have to fight. Besides the obvious, demonstrations by the likes of Gandhi and King of the practicality of applied pacifism, I would remind them that pacifism is always, always, whether in time of peace or in time of war, about saving lives and, when the world is so out of control that war happens it is the ultimate defense – the defense against, not just the evil that is done to us, but the evil that we do in the name of righteousness. Now, pacifism is not so arrogant as to impose itself upon the will of the people. It is all about how an individual responds to the presence of injustice and the immanence of war. For pacifists do not just, devote their lives to the prevention of war and the establishment of justice then, when they fail, decide, ‘well, that didn't work after all, so I guess I'll just abdicate my position, abandon my principles and become one of ‘the few, the proud....’ ’ Pacifists look at the results of every war ever fought and recognize the impracticality of a system that results in death and destruction and take the pragmatic view that what's even better than winning a war is seeing that it never comes about in the first place. But that having failed, how does the pragmatic pacifist, as an individual, respond to the menace of a Hitler, the deaths of millions of Jews, the very real threat to liberty? It then becomes prudent to ask, how can I best serve? What is in most urgent need of defending? Well, 37,000 conscientious objectors, of whom one was my father, answered those very questions to the best of their ability. And what was the practical result of their decisions? Was it a weakening of our defense effort? Was it the downfall of Western civilization as we know it? What did it result in? Best look at its legacy. From their groundbreaking commitment to prison and mental hospital reform, they became the the bricks, their uncommon courage the mortar of the foundation of the peace and justice movement which, to this day, works to liberate people from oppression through peaceful means and to address injustice throughout the world in hopes of preventing war from occurring. And what could be more practical than that? Would the pragmatists have us abandon the defense of the walls of civilization against fear and bigotry and hatred? Would they erase the bloodlines of those courageous people and remove the pavingstones upon which will walk the likes of Gandhi and King, saying, ‘Folks, we're sorry, but to save the lives of your foreparents from irrelevance we used them for the war effort?’ In the struggle for the survival of the species the pacifists are the noble voices of sanity in which echo the lessons of the prophets of peace and the hopes of the founders of our nation. Ignore and dismiss them at your peril. A Rabbi once asked his students, “How can you can tell when night is done?” In response to their several answers he finally said, “When you can look into the face of another and see the face of your sister and your brother, then you will know that the night is over and that the light has come. And if you cannot, then it will always be night.” Let us live in the light
as we see our brother and sister in the faces of those who are called our
enemies, and know war no more. Reflection: “Beatitudes / Alleluia”
And, seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Alleluia” Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, praise God! We are called to be servants of God, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, praise God, Hymn: “Woyaya” (Sol Amarfio of Osibisa) We are going, heaven knows where we are going, We will get there, heaven knows how we will get there, It will be hard, we know, But we'll get there, heaven knows how we will get there, Extinguishing our Chalice We close with the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” Postlude: “Jean” / “In the Quiet Of the Day” / “It Seems To Me”
In the quiet of the day, the call of our passion we obey; “It Seems To Me” It seems to me that you and I could change the world together It seems to me, if we could see the wounds that must be healed, At night I dream, and in my dream above the hills I’m flying; Yes, in the end I find, my friend, ‘tis you, my sister/brother. Peace and love be with you all;
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