REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

15 October 2000

Let me tell you three stories of how we got this building. Four, if you count the assertion we purchased it from the Episcopalians. However, as soon as that one is voiced, there are always folk around to say, "No, no, this is ours. We built it ourselves." Here are the others.

One has it that at the turn of the century when we decided we had run out of space at the old MeetingHouse, the congregation voted to build a new church. They hired a Boston area architect because he was a Unitarian. What they didn’t know was that he’d recently converted to Catholicism. This building is the result.

Another story has it that the Reverend Julian Jaynes, beloved longtime pastor of the congregation returned from the Grand Tour, and informed the membership that our New England meeting houses simply lacked any genuine sense of spirituality. This building we now sit in was the product of his perhaps too eloquent salesmanship.

And last, but not least, is the story that a growing and affluent congregation decided that they needed to build a new edifice. They went, as so many successful and affluent people went at that time, to the prominent Bostonian architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. Now, at the turn of the century Ralph Cram was possibly the single most prominent force behind the Gothic revival for both ecclesiastical and collegiate construction. Everyone knew this.

The congregation wanted the most prestigious architect of the time, and they got him. Incidentally, Ralph Cram had been born a Unitarian, but for almost all his life had been a practicing Episcopalian. From here he would eventually go on to design the Episcopal cathedral church St John the Divine in New York City, possibly the most famous gothic revival cathedral in the New World.

Also noteworthy, not to be outdone, our neighbors and friendly competition across the way at the Second Congregational Parish, added their own contribution to the skyline just a couple of years after this building went up. I’m sure it is just a coincidence their spire looms above our towers.

What I find in this brief reflection on our folk histories, as well as the rather more mundane facts one can dig up in files, in old sermons, and occasional historical pamphlets; is how in all this we’re stumbling upon the mystery of memory. I think, as we expand our reflection on the nature of memory to speak to our sacred institutions, particularly this beloved Society of ours, much of value may be revealed.

Memory is such a strange, powerful and magical thing. Like a reflection from beneath the waves it takes on shapes of its own, conveying and at the same time distorting: stretching pulling and giving new life to the things of the past. Memory is the sacred act of human imagining. Transient, full of holes, and yet at the same time memory is the beaded cloth covering our loneliness, giving us protection, and revealing the ways of compassion.

Much of the work of religion, of organized spirituality has to do with memory. Sometimes these memories are frozen into stone, becoming great weights burdening human hearts. This can be a tragedy. In our own liberal religion we’ve tended to go in the opposite direction. In our quest for personal liberation, we frequently throw off the weight of memory, freeing ourselves from the oppressions of the past. But also we may find in this that we’ve cut ourselves off from our connections.

So, every once in a while we find this great urge welling up from within us, to remember. As most here know, this whole month is about that remembering. I believe this is very important. Here as we do this remembering, we’re letting the sacred emerge, not as a weight to burden us, but as a shimmering, wavering reflection of what has gone on before. Often out of this engagement we even birth a dream of what might yet be. Indeed this is why engaging memory can be the secret workings of love.

So, some facts, the stone foundation upon which we build our dreams, our lovely gathered community, this sacred Society. According to Lawrence Shaw Mayo the author of The First Unitarian Society in Newton 1848-1923, as a commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of this Society, Newton was at first a very conservative place.

During the great rolling schism between Congregationalists and Unitarians during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Newton church experienced no split. Brighton, Brookline, Needham, Weston, Waltham and Watertown all declared for the new liberal faith. However, as Lawrence Mayo observed, "(o)ur town remained an island of Orthodoxy in a sea of Unitarianism, or (if you prefer) a rocky knoll of Conservatism in the green pastures of the new faith."

What would be the first attempts at a Unitarian presence were not successful. An "Upper Falls Religious Society" was formed in 1827 or 28. While nominally undenominational, the visiting clergy were all Unitarian. However there was little interest, and by 1830 this society was gone, the building sold to the Methodists.

Still things were changing in West Newton, which in 1834 had become the terminus of the Boston and Worcester Railroad. West Newton was becoming a center of commerce and all sorts of enterprise. Then, early in the 1840s the most significant event for the foundation of a Unitarian presence happened. Horace Mann arrived.

As Lawrence tells us "Known at first as a successful lawyer, he later devoted his energy to the improvement of education in Massachusetts, then succeeded John Quincy Adams as our Representative in Congress, and finally returned to the field of education as the first president of Antioch College." But there was one point even more important for us. The new Newton resident Horace Mann was a fervent Unitarian.

As with Upper Falls, the first attempt at establishing a congregation in West Newton failed. Meetings were called during the summer of 1844, but by August they had ceased. However, three years later, in 1847, they tried again. This time they succeeded. After using a variety of ministers on a Sunday to Sunday basis, they engaged the Reverend Arthur Buckminster Fuller to, and I love the term "supply the desk for the winter months."

Then on October 17, 1848, the congregation formally organized itself as a member society of the American Unitarian Association, electing William Ward as their--as our first Clerk, and Cyrus Pierce as first Moderator. Horace Mann was the second subscriber, second signer of the membership book of the new Society.

One thing I find particularly fascinating was that while our origins were within a very conservative area, our founders were for the most part radicals. They were focused closely on the reforms that would become our modern national educational system. And they were fervently abolitionist, at a time when this was far from welcome in most circles, even New England circles.

Another of the significant leaders of the new congregation was Mary Peabody Mann. Married to Horace, she was one of the three renowned "Peabody Sisters of Salem." They included Sophia, probably the least famous in her own right due to a lifetime of illness, but a successful editor for her husband Nathaniel Hawthorn; and Elizabeth the celebrated Transcendentalist thinker justly credited with helping William Ellery Channing, the great leader of early Unitarianism, to declare for abolition.

Mary Mann was herself an author and educator as well as a social activist. She advocated for Native Americans, against slavery and for women’s rights. Mary also was one of the founders of our Society’s Women’s Alliance, one of the oldest continuing women’s organizations in the nation. This crowd that formed our congregation, were formidable human beings, men and women of insight, courage and wisdom.

The greater number of our founders seemed interested in the concerns of education. I understand that five of the schools in Newton are in fact named for former members of this society. That great window which I get to look at above our front doors is dedicated to the memory of Nathaniel Allen, an educational theorist and activist second only to Horace Mann in importance beyond these walls. (The windows we will explore in two weeks, by the bye, in my sermon "The Windows of Perception." I hope you can come.)

The Society met in a variety of locations, and for years suffered from lack of ministerial continuity. It wasn’t until Francis Tiffany, "lovable and scholarly," that we had such needed ministerial continuity, and a more or less suitable building. He served among us from 1866 to 1883, "interrupted" as Janet Meacham wrote in her historical essay "by a two-year absence because of ill health… The parish thrived and the congregation soon outgrew its (then) meetinghouse. In 1868 the building was enlarged to hold more pews and in 1879, a church parlor… and a modest tower (were) added."

Francis Tiffany’s tenure was followed by the remarkable and brilliant career of Julian Jaynes. His ministry encompassed vastly more than the construction of this building. Still Julian was "(v)ery much taken with the ecclesiastical architecture he saw (while visiting) in England… (and during the questions of what next for a building,) asserted, ‘I regard flat walls, white glass, and starved simplicity as the last resort for a house of religion. On the contrary, I want to preserve the best features of Gothic art—to keep all traditions and symbols that do not positively outrage our fundamental beliefs…" I’m not sure, frankly, to what degree he succeeded.

On the other hand we need to understand context. We have moved far afield from what was then the dominant Unitarian Christianity of Julian Jaynes and the majority of the congregation. We now have found a fuller expression of our liberal religious tradition, including our beloved Christians but now greatly enriched with a strong Jewish leaven as well as neo-pagan, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and many individualistic perspectives. What might outrage us certainly Julian Jaynes could never have even dreamt about.

And, you know, in this shifting we’ve become a mysterious and wondrous gathering. What we are, and our current theological perspectives are not easily encompassed by any list, any mere recitation of theological emphasis, is vast and beautiful. What I believe and frequently say holds us all together, is a spiritual style. Within this style, this spiritual discipline, we can be characterized as the thinkers among religious traditions.

Of course people think in other traditions. But we find the human mind particularly significant, perhaps the very image of the divine spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures. We Unitarian Universalists, whatever else may be said of us, are probably almost all of us reasonably called humanist. We find the principles of this-worldliness, of focus on the lived life, incredibly important. We find the questions of a life fully in the world the very essence of an authentic spirituality. Certainly as we engage fully, we find the mind often opens the heart, wisdom often leads to compassion.

This spiritual perspective of ours allows us to come together into this wonderful and horrible old building, knowing—I hope--we belong in some very real ways to it, even as it belongs to us. As Janet Meacham wrote in her historical essay on our Society, recorded in part at our web site, we find this building "both… a classic archetype of sacred space as well as an architectural albatross." Both.

As we open ourselves to the possibility of that "both," memory and dream and hope fill this meeting room. Here the long-term ministries among us from Francis Tiffany, to Julian Jaynes, to Paul Phalen, to Herbert Hitchen, to John Ogden Fisher to Gerald R. Krick, speak to the thread of continuity. Here our long line of lay leadership, women and men of vision and action, become our ancestors. As we find open hearts and open minds, even the stones can teach us the ways of wisdom and compassion, and certainly our stone angels can sing to us.

Here we find that even as we’ve invited young Julia Lanfier into our warm embrace, we’re all embraced just as we are. Just as we are, in all our complexity, in all our ambivalences, in all our wonder. Here memory, partial and incomplete, becomes the very vehicle of our hope. Here, as we hold Julia to our hearts, we find we’re held, as well.

Here in this wonderful old building, astonishingly expensive monstrosity and profound home to the sacred, we can engage in the good work. For our hundred and fifty years, we’ve done so. For the hundred since this building went up, we’ve done so. Here we struggle. Here we laugh. Here we mourn. Here we find the good work of a lived life as a spiritual reality.

Oh, to remember all the things past. But, of course, it is impossible. Our hopes and prejudices and the holes in our hearts prevent us from knowing everything, the full past. But, of this I am sure: we can know enough. Here in this place we find a container for our dreams, our hopes and our longings. Here, in this old building, we find the good beginning for the great work of love. And so my prayer is this: may this good work continue to be true for us, and may it be true for the generations that follow.

Amen.