Reading
From The Book of American Values and Virtues, Edited by E. Bruun and R. Getzen.
Let me start with a cartoon that appeared on yesterday’s The New York Times Op-Ed page. It was “Op-Art” by Seymour Chwast. After the date – July 4, 2001 – it says, “How to be a REAL American.” These are the answers: “Take kids to soccer; Buy stuff; Wave Flags; Drink Diet Coke; Work out; Drive an S.U.V.; Go to the mall; Waste energy; Wait in traffic; Work overtime; Get anxiety attack. See your doctor.”
Now to The Book of American Values and Virtues. Quotations from famous Americans are divided up into Chapters which focus on one American Virtue or Value. Here are a few quotes.
“We, the People”
Waldo Frank: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.”
“Establish Justice”
Robert F. Kennedy: “Justice delayed is democracy denied.”
George M. Cohan (song lyrics, World War I):
“We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
and we won’t come back till it’s over over there.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy
the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”
“Let Freedom Ring”
Popeye: “I ams what I am.”
Dr. Seuss:
“You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
Any direction you choose.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt: “We, too, born to freedom, are willing to fight to maintain
freedom. We, and all others who believe as dearly as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.”
Lyndon B. Johnson: “The promise of America is a simple promise: Every person shall share in the blessings of this land. And they shall share on the basis of their merits as a person. They shall not be judged by their color or their beliefs, or by their religion, or by where they were born, or the neighborhood in which they live."
James Thurber: “The most frightening study of mankind is man. I think he has failed to run the world, and that Woman must take over if the species is to survive. Almost any century now Woman may lose her patience with black politics and red war and let fly. I wish I could be on earth then to witness the saving of our self-destructive species by its greatest creative force. If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.”
Mario Cuomo: “We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound to one another.”
John F. Kennedy: “Let us not seek the Republican Answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”
“Land of Opportunity:
Diana Ross: “You can’t just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream, you’ve got to get out there and make it happen yourself.”
Calvin Coolidge: “The chief business of the American people is business.”
“Pursuit of Happiness”
Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
“Home of the Brave”
Rosa Parks: “I’m just an average citizen. Many Black people were arrested for defying the bus laws. They prepared the way.”
Robert Frost:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Reading
The Cultural Creatives. How 50 Million People are Changing the World, by Ray and Anderson. From a chapter titled, “The Three Americas:”
The Cultural Creatives did not materialize from some eternal cornfield in Iowa, near Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams. … Two powerful subcultures were already contending in the arena, the Moderns and the Traditionals. The fight was, and is, a struggle to define America.
The Moderns
Today’s Modern imagery and worldview has nineteenth century roots in European intellectualism and in U.S. urbanism and industrialism. … The triumph of the Modern world is often celebrated as our liberation from authoritarian political and religious controls. It’s great strength is simply in being the dominant culture of the whole planet in our time, able to set agendas, define the terms of discourse, and dominate the mass media. … It has found ways to harness the elements, reduce plagues and illnesses, create plenty and then distribute it, house and feed and exploding population, create effective and productive organizations, come to terms with increasing social complexity, and build more universal standards of morality and social practices.
Here are four types of Moderns:
1. At the top of the heap are the Business Conservatives. … They are free market conservatives who believe in the American Way,” with a materialistic focus on status and success and a heavy dose of the work ethic.
2. The Conventional Moderns tend to reject idealistic values, are rather cynical about society, and disgruntled about politics. They … focus their energies on their own personal and family situations, and they refuse to look at many public issues.
3. The Striving-Center Moderns, at the middle of the income distribution, yearn for inclusion and success in life, for some spiritual and psychological meaning, but they also lean to conservative religion. Upward mobility is their creed. They are working hard to achieve the American dream.
4. The Alienated Moderns reject the values and worldviews of all other groups. They are lower middle class and blue-collar workers. American life has not been working for them. They seem to suffer from loss of an inner compass that gives their lives meaning and structure, and from social disintegration.
Today’s modern achievers often have to tear up their roots in order to succeed. By migrating to another city or state or another country, millions of business travelers are constantly leaving home. Where once we were embedded in communities for life, we now suffer the loss of roots on an epidemic scale.
Moderns who achieve financial success … tend to enjoy getting and spending. Their lives are centered on acquiring ever more “stuff,” buying prestigious services, … investing in the stock market … and then making more money. Overspending is the addiction of many Moderns, from the poorest to the most affluent.
The Traditionals
Traditionalism is a culture of memory. Traditionals remember a vanished America and long for its restoration. They place their hopes in the recovery of small-town religious America, a hazy nostalgic image corresponding to the years from 1890 to 1930. The mythic world was cleaner, more principled, and less conflicted than the one that impinges on us every day. At that time, “men were men,” and authority was self-reliant, fixed on the task and impatient with complexity. Its values are invoked in Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne movies, fourth of July speeches, and Veteran’s Day parades.
Turning away from a daunting modern world they don’t like or understand, they turn toward one another to create bulwarks of religious, racial, or ethnic unity against others. The Traditionals innovated by inventing fundamentalism, which hadn’t existed anywhere in the world before the early nineteenth century. After the Civil War, they invented the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, as well as the Temperance Movement that gave rise to Prohibition. But the most important thing they invented, in the twentieth century, was the myth of virtuous small-town America.
The Cultural Creatives
Between the extreme positions of the Culture Wars lies a third way. It is not simply a neutral center but a distinctive expression. ... Cultural Creatives are bridging an old way of life and a new one. … For example, in New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Cultural Creatives are creating wellness centers that include both Western medicine and acupuncture, massage and yoga, psychotherapy and meditation. Cultural Creatives are also bringing 2500-year-old meditation techniques into prisons and corporate America.
One of the most interesting such integrations is the project of an Episcopal priest named Lauren Artress. Since 1989 she has been bringing an ancient path of prayer—the labyrinth found in medieval Christian cathedrals--to hospitals and prisons, schools and even cemeteries. …
Cultural Creatives look for ways to connect what has been broken apart. [They] are sick of the fragmentation of Modernism, and they find the Modern-versus-Traditional culture wars to be just another instance of splitting apart what needs to be healed. (The strong exception is the issue of women’s rights, where the Cultural Creatives side adamantly with the Moderns.)
The strength of the Cultural Creatives is that they are the part of the population most likely to carry forward a positive vision of the future. They have already begun imagining and developing alternatives to the urgent problems that confront our world.
The weakness of the Cultural Creatives is that they don’t yet have a basis for supporting each other and working together. Until they develop a substantial sense of community, their fledgling movements, businesses, and institutions cannot grow, and potential political leaders cannot create a common cause with them.
When people learn how to see things differently, and help each other to live differently, great changes are possible.
Meditation
“All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found all the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence … [Thus] ‘Your life has no end, and you shall live forevermore.’”
-Kahlil Gibran
Sermon: “A Hidden Changing World View – Yours and Mine?”
Here we are, again, at the holiday that celebrates the birth of this nation. America will be 225 years old on July 4, really just a youngster in the eons of our home planet’s existence, to say nothing of the cosmos!
America, the United States of America, has a location, geography; it has boundaries and borders. It is marked off and labeled on all maps of the world today. In the Northern Hemisphere of planet Earth, between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; between Canada and Mexico – there it is!
America, the United States of America, is also an idea that has its own location and geography in our mind, and in the collective mind of its citizens. It is a fascinating experiment in democracy, freedom, and equality, one that continues to evolve and change. It warrants close scrutiny.
I’ve pulled the preaching assignment on this particular holiday for much of the twelve years of my ministry in this church. The other minister was usually on vacation, the church school was closed for the summer, and most of the congregation was usually out there somewhere, picnicking, swimming, preparing the potato salad, and certainly not in church.
But, that didn’t matter. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve had to face this holiday seriously, to ponder the growth and development of the Birthday Child, to reflect on the dynamic identity in which we live. I’ve talked about patriotism, tackled the Culture Wars, considered ideas of “Interdependence” on Independence Day. Last year, I looked at the very American value of “freedom.” I’ve become Rev. Joan, the Summer Sociologist!
This July 4th, I’ve been pulled towards examining what looks like a paradigm shift in American culture that is beginning to show its form and potentials. Where is America going in the years ahead? What kind of America seems, now, to be taking shape?
A new book caught my attention. I first heard about this book on the UU ministers’ chat line, and quickly purchased a copy. Its title is, “The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World.”
The authors are a married couple, sociologist Paul Ray, and psychologist, Sherry Anderson. Dr. Ray was educated at Yale and the University of Michigan, where he also taught. He currently heads up a market research and opinion polling firm doing research on the lifestyles and values of Americans, and he has published many articles on values and social change. Dr. Anderson was educated at Goucher College and the University of Toronto, where she taught, and was head of psychological research at the Clark Institute of Psychiatry. She’s authored many articles on psychology and co-authored the book, “The Feminine Face of God.”
In their study, the authors came up with a name for this big bunch of people they’ve identified, hidden in our midst. They call them the “Cultural Creatives.”
I’m excited about the material in this book, because I think Ray and Anderson are describing Unitarian Universalist values, and thinking about this makes me feel more hopeful than ever about our UU future as effective change agents in the world.
I’m also excited about it because, in my own personal experience, and observations of so many around me, I know they’ve hit a vein; a rich one. I see US in the pages of the book. Their conclusions ring true to me.
The authors feel they’ve uncovered something that has been hidden, yet pervasive; a newly described cohort group, some 50 million strong, that will influence the coming twenty-first century American agenda.
Briefly, the “Cultural Creatives,” described in the study, care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, about peace and social justice, about self-actualization, spirituality, and self-expression. AND, they are BOTH inner-directed AND socially concerned. They’re activists, volunteers, and, contributors to good causes more often than other Americans. The authors tell us, as a result of thirteen years of survey research on more than 100,000 Americans, many focus groups, and in-depth interviews, that Cultural Creatives have been invisible, and they, themselves, are astonished to find out how many others share both their values and their way of life. Ray and Anderson stress their point, that, once they realize their numbers, their impact on America promises to be enormous…”
They’re talking about revealing no less than the emergence of an entire subculture of Americans. Their projection is that, since the 1960s, 26 percent of the adults in the United States – 50 million people – have made a comprehensive shift in their worldview values and way of life. That’s a major development in our civilization! The speed of this emergence, the authors call, “stunning,” and “surprising.” It’s already affecting the way Americans do business and politics. It’s influencing the market place and public life. It’s big and it’s there, even though it has no coalescing leadership at the moment. You might say the data is pointing to the gorilla in the living room, or the elephant in the garden!
I’d like you to hear more of what the authors have to say about the Cultural Creatives. They are the ones who invented the current interest in personal authenticity in America.
Their actions, more often than not, are consistent with what they believe and what they say.
They like direct personal experience, and also intellectual ways of knowing.
They read a lot, and synthesize many bits and fragments of information to make their own big picture, often using the perspective of whole systems and ecology.
They expect to follow through on their values with personal action. Many are convinced that if they are not engaged, their convictions are “just talk.” They express more idealism and altruism, and less cynicism, than other Americans. They do indeed walk their talk.
Their desire for knowledge of parts and interconnections – the importance of whole systems - leads them to a deep concern about the condition of our global ecology and the well-being of people of the planet. They want to make a new way of life that is sustainable over the long run.
Both male and female Cultural Creatives embrace what are usually called “women’s issues,” and “women’s values,” such as -- feeling empathy and sympathy for others, an ethic of caring, distress about violence and abuse, more attention paid to children’s needs and education, and, the improvement of caring relationships in all areas of life, public and private. They agree that women should get equal pay for equal work with men, that they shouldn't have to return to traditional roles in society, and that more women should take top leadership positions in government and business. In striking contrast, other American subcultures show a strong gender gap.
Cultural Creatives have a well-developed social conscience, and are concerned about both social justice and the development of an inner life. Their sense of the sacred includes personal growth, service to others, and social activism. The researchers observe that the stronger their values and beliefs about altruism, self-actualization, and spirituality, the more likely they are to be interested in social action and social transformation.
They are disenchanted with owning more stuff, materialism, greed, me-firstism, and status display. They are disenchanted with the glaring social inequalities of race and class, and society’s failure to care adequately for elders, women, and children. They would not subscribe to the hedonism and cynicism that pass for realism in modern society. They reject the intolerance and narrowness of social conservatives and the Religious Right. They are critical of big institutions, including corporations and government.
Cultural Creatives have changed their values, and their worldview. It has resulted in a changed sense of personal identity and relationships; “truth,” and its interpretation, has changed. Their priorities for action and the way they want to live are different now. With a changed worldview, everything has changed for them.
Cultural Creatives, the authors say, come from many religions, including agnostics, and “nonstandard believers in Eastern religions and new spirituality. The vast majority of them would reject a “New Age” label for themselves.
Where did the Cultural Creatives come from? And when? What is their creation story?
Some clues:
¨ In 1955, a Montgomery, Alabama seamstress was pulled off a city bus for refusing to surrender her seat to a white bus rider. Rosa Parks fired the first non-violent shot of the Civil Rights Movement.
¨ The 1963 letter from the Birmingham Jail written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Black Freedom Movement.
¨ In the 50s, the modern peace movement started with demonstrations to “Ban the Bomb.” By the early 1960s, the cry became, “Hell no, we won’t go!” against the war in Vietnam.
¨ In 1962, a journalist described “the problem that has no name,” and set off an intimate earthquake in homes across America. Betty Freidan wrote The Feminine Mystique that set off the second Feminist movement in America.
¨ In 1962, a gifted nature writer put the word environment on everyone’s lips. Rachel Carson wrote, The Silent Spring.
¨ In 1962, Michael Murphy and Richard Price started Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and hosted seminars on human potential, spirituality, sensory awareness, yoga, and alternative forms of health and healing. It became the launch pad for a truly remarkable assortment of teachers, practitioners, speakers, and writers in what would become the Consciousness Movement, and Wholistic Health movement. Findhorn, a spiritual center in northern Scotland, was started the same year. The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, started out in the 70s.
¨ In the 1960’s, a new stream in psychology burst like a fresh spring into the established landscape. In a series of revolutions, group therapy came into the scene, along with models and whole schools of technique designed to evoke what Aldous Huxley termed, “the human potentiality.” The Human Potential Movement of the 60s and 70s touched and blended into other disciplines --- the new science, including biology, cosmology, and quantum physics; alternative medicine, healing, and all manner of health care; art and art therapy, and art as healing; dance therapy, intuitive movement, and various combinations of bodywork and psychology; and spirituality and religion, including pastoral counseling and transpersonal psychology.
I was there for all that stuff. I read those books and many, many more. I went to encounter groups, couple’s groups, women’s consciousness-raising groups. I did art and dance therapy. I went to workshops at Omega Institute. I participated in GASP – a Group Against Smoking Pollution.
I joined the First Unitarian Society in Plainfield, N.J. in 1966, when I came to be aware of my worldview changing. In the Plainfield church, we worked to form something called the House of Soul in Trenton to help Black kids.
I went to a Rowe Camp women’s weekend for straight women and lesbians. I went to a Rowe Camp weekend program led by Jean Houston, who, I realize now, was one of the original Cultural Creatives. Jean Houston was one of those important mentors in my life, one who taught me about spirituality, ritual, psychology and human potential. Being called to the labyrinth in 1994 was clearly a natural outcome of having become a Cultural Creative, although I didn’t quite understand there was a whole movement of people like me who are growing in similar ways.
The more I experienced, and reflected, and read, and stepped out, the more my view of myself and the world shifted. Entering seminary to study for the UU ministry was evidence of a new person in a new world. I was, and am, one of the Cultural Creatives. Didn’t know the label before, and one of the few places I felt I was with others like me was in Unitarian Universalist circles.
Those early movements and the ones that followed have shaped the lives of the people who are Cultural Creatives today. There’s been a learning curve for all of us, a deepening, going from surface to substance, slowly learning to lead authentic lives and act on our values - in community, and for community.
Cultural Creatives, joined and strong, can lead into the new millennium as the new healers. In its core meaning, to heal means “to make whole.” At the most universal level, to heal means “to wake up to our true nature.” At the level of the individual, it means to recognize as one wholeness the body, mind, emotion, and spirit. At the level of community, it means to recognize interdependence and to repair what has been broken apart. And at the level of the Earth, to heal – the Hebrew word is tikkun – means to call home those who have been in exile, to redeem and bring peace to the world.
Michael Lerner, is the editor of a new liberal Jewish magazine called, “Tikkun,” that examines issues of importance to Cultural Creatives. He asks, “What will happen when ordinary people, whose lives are often mortally wounded by the destruction to the biosphere, come to understand that their wounds are so often intimately related to the wounds of the earth?”
The patterns that underlie these changes, Lerner says, “may be telling us a story that is also our story … the story that all of life on earth is truly, breathtakingly, concretely connected right now, and that what we do to the mice of the field and the birds of the forest, we also ultimately do to ourselves and our families right now."” He concludes, “do not believe we can hide from this story much longer. It is among the great stories of our time.”
“The interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part.” --- It is the seventh principle that Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote.
At the annual meeting of representatives from all our UU churches last week in Cleveland, the delegates, in Plenary Session, cast their vote to adopt a Statement of Conscience. The Statement of Conscience under consideration this year was titled: “Responsible Consumption is Our Moral Imperative.”
The Preface to the Statement begins, “Material comforts that we enjoy in the United States and Canada come at a greater cost than we often realize we pay. Our two countries, together with other industrial nations, consume a disproportionately large share of the natural resource base that sustains life on earth. While the United States and Canada alone account for only six percent of the world’s population, we consume over forty percent of the world’s resources.”
We Unitarian Universalists are going to have to take the lead on such an issue as this. Now more than ever, we have to walk our talk and act on our values. There are possibly 50 million Americans out there, very much like us, with similar values, who need leadership, who need visible role models. We are not alone.
That’s the most hopeful gift of this study. If it is as these two researchers say, we are not a small association – we are the tip of an iceberg! Whatever they call us – Cultural Creatives or Unitarian Universalists – we are standing on good solid American ground. We made up the bulk of those men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. They were Unitarians. And, it seems that we, even now, stand strong to influence the future.
We can help create the new stories and myths. People everywhere carry fragments of the new mythos, bringing impressions and memories, visions and metaphors. And, of all these treasures and shards, one set of images seems to have special enchantment for us now. It is the photographs of Earth from space.
Rusty Schweikart, an astronaut, tells us that travelling into space casts us into “the overwhelming experience of a new relationship.” What he has seen is the contrast “between bright and colorful home and stark black infinity,” and “the unavoidable and awesome personal relationship, suddenly realized, with all life on this amazing planet. … Earth, our home.”
Perhaps some of you will want to get hold of copies of this book and start a Cultural Creatives Covenant Group. Read it together. Discuss it. See how it applies to your life, your experience, your values. And think about how we can help provide leadership for the future of America.
I have a story for you, and an assignment. --------
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Coyote was walking down the road one day, thinking only of food. It had been a couple of days since he had last eaten, and he felt so sorry for himself that he sobbed with his face against his arm. His stomach was making noises like boiling water, and his head hurt. And then, near where the sumac grows, he saw great clusters of delicious-looking red berries! Coyote grew very excited as he ran over to grab them. Just as his paw touched the berries, his mind remembered a talk he had had with the Wise Elder.
During one of their many conversations, Coyote had asked, “Tell me, Old Woman, where did we get this land? Was it given to us by our ancestors?
The Wise Elder replied, “Of course not, Coyote. We are borrowing this land from our great-great-great-great-grandchildren. We must take good care of it because it belongs to them. To remind us of this, the children of the future have put bunches of red berries near where the sumac grows. These berries are theirs, so no matter how hungry you get, you must never eat them. They are only to remind you that the land belongs to the children to come.”
“What will happen to us, Old Woman, if we do eat the berries?” asked Coyote.
And the Wise Elder replied, “I am sorry, Coyote, but if you eat those berries, your behind will fall off.”
This is what Coyote remembered as his paw touched the berries. He stopped and thought a moment. Sweat was running down his face, and he said to himself, “I have always know the Wise Elder was a fool. How does she know? She is just trying to keep the berries for herself. Besides, how could I owe something to people who aren’t even here yet?”
So, Coyote ate the berries. He ate as fast as he could and as many as he could. Coyote felt fine! He looked behind him and his behind had not fallen off. He laughed loudly and began skipping down the road.
He had not gone far when his stomach began to hurt something awful. He became very sick with diarrhea, the sickest he had ever been. Coyote felt terrible! He thought about the children who were yet to come, and he thought about the Wise Elder, and he was very embarrassed.
Coyote dragged himself over to the river’s edge where he got a drink of water, and then he went to hide himself in the deep bushes.
He didn’t want anyone to know that he had forgotten the children yet to come and that his behind had fallen off!
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Your assignment is to get seven red beads to keep in your pocket. Let the red beads remind you of the red berries near where the sumac grows. Touch them often to remind yourself of our Seventh UU Principle and of the seventh generation ahead of us, whose land we are living on. Let them remind you to imagine a culture that can heal the fragmentation and destructiveness of our time. Let them fill you with a willingness to act for the sake of a better America; a better civilization.
And may your behind be with you always! -amen!
Benediction
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
-Jelaluddin Rumi
-Amen and shalom!
