yearning to breathe free

We’re getting ready at the Wackerlin Center to welcome an exhibit on the life and work of the poet and activist Emma Lazarus.  The more I learn about this woman and her work, the more excited I’m becoming about celebrating her life and reflecting on her legacy.  In many respects, hers is a story about the experience of America itself.

Born to a wealthy New York family, Lazarus grew up quite insulated and protected from the harsher realities of life, and moved in elite artistic and literary circles.  Her early friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson shaped her vocation to poetry, and she published youthful volumes of work showing considerable promise.

It was the arrival of refugees from the East, Jews fleeing dreadful persecution in Europe, that changed Lazarus’s life and outlook.  She threw herself into volunteer work, greeting those whose lives had been ravaged by prejudice and violence, and working to educate and resettle all who sought a new home in America.  Although sometimes critical of traditional religious practice, she discovered in this a distinctively Jewish voice, enunciating the biblical principles of welcome, hospitality and generosity, especially to strangers and refugees, as the values which ought to undergird the United States.  Decades before her time and to considerable disdain, she advocated for the creation of a Jewish homeland.  She saw the potential dangers of global anti-Semitism in the 1880s, sixty years before the devastation of the Shoah under the Nazis.

It was the gift of the statue Liberty Enlightening the World from France to the USA that raised Lazarus to her greatest contribution.  While Americans struggled to embrace – or fund – a project whose purpose was unclear (save uniting the French and Americans in a common hatred of the British!), Lazarus and her friends tried to raise money to erect the monument.  She wrote for a fund-raising event a poem: The New Colossus, which redrew Lady Liberty as the ‘Mother of Exiles’, a symbol of generous, welcoming America, the champion of justice and diversity, whose presence in the world would be a restraint on tyranny and a healing balm to the persecuted. 

It was two decades after her death in 1887, aged just 38, before her poem  finally became the defining word on the statue.  Today, it is affixed to the pedestal, a permanent reminder of Lazarus’s contribution to the forging of national self-understanding.  Her biographer, Esther Schor, who curates our exhibition, has written:

“She showed America how to become more generous, more noble, and more just. Her passion for justice lives on whenever we Americans dedicate ourselves to welcoming immigrants, training and educating the poor, and celebrating diversity.”

The exhibit opens in the atrium of the Institute for Collaboration on October 31^st and will be open to the public 9am-8pm every weekday until December 16^th.   In addtion we have three exciting events, all in Crimi Auditorium, all free and all open to everyone!

November 3^rd: ‘From Slavery to Freedom’ (3.30-5.00pm)

Magda Brown returns to tell her refugee story, coming to the US after surviving the Nazi Holocaust

November 15^th: ‘Emma Lazarus: A Passion for Justice’ (12.00-1.00pm)

Rabbi Prof. Victor Mirelman on Lazarus and the quest for human dignity

December 7^th: ‘Emma Lazarus and Us’ (3.30-5.00pm)

AU faculty including President Rebecca Sherrick offer concluding reflections and discussion

More at our website: http://aurora.edu/student-life/wackerlin/emma-lazarus.html#axzz1ax7A7GnG

Call us on 630.844.6864 or 6866 or email wcfa@aurora.edu for more information or to book a place for yourself or a group.

uncle fred

A few years ago, my cousin did some research into our family history; I remember being interested at the time to hear that she’d discovered relatives of ours who had emigrated to the USA over a century ago, but didn’t pursue it much further.  Just recently, my mother mentioned to me that she’d just realised that one of those who came over had served in the Civil War, and had lived in Illinois.  My attention was caught, and cousin Joyce sent through the details. 

It all began when members of my great-grandmother’s family made the huge decision to seek a better life across the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century.  That side of my family, my maternal grandmother’s, lived in the small farming village of Isleham, about ten miles from Ely, the market town where I grew up.  In those days, it was remote, and isolated, and probably rarely offered its inhabitants much that was new or strange.  John and Mary Fletcher’s decision must therefore have been doubly shocking and difficult, but they left home and family in January 1855 and set sail for America, taking their nine-year-old son Alfred with them.  I can only barely imagine them, resigning themselves to the grief of never seeing other family members again but firm in their resolution and confident in the dream of their new life.  They landed in New Orleans and made their way north on the Mississippi (including a six-week delay in St. Louis for ice) before settling in Iowa. 

 Uncle Alfred apparently went his own way, and settled with a cousin in Morrison, IL for seven years.  It was during this period of time that he joined the 8^th Illinois Cavalry, Company A, and served under General Grant in the closing months of the war.  Returning to civilian life, he resettled in Iowa, in Johnson township, where he farmed the American soil just as, when a child, he had helped to farm the dark earth of the English fenland.  He retired to Merrill, IA, where he was buried in 1929 with high honor as the last local Civil War veteran.

 ‘Finding’ Uncle Fred has stirred interesting feelings in me.  Suddenly, I feel more connected to this country, to which I came in my turn almost exactly five years ago.  A relative of mine gave his strength, sweat and zeal to establish a more perfect Union; someone connected to me by blood gave a measure of his life and self in the cause of justice and freedom for all America’s children.  It feels like an extraordinary new taproot in this place, an abiding connection to a country which has sometimes felt strange to me, and in which I have struggled a little with the new notion that I’m now the ‘stranger’ and the ‘alien’.  Uncle Fred helps to reinforce my sense that I really do belong here and have a contribution to make to the life of my new home.

 These themes are powerful ones in national discourse just now.  I saw one of my favorite historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin (whom I’m excited to hear at Aurora University in the spring) on Meet the Press this weekend.  She spoke in the first half as an academic, offering insights into current presidential politics.  She spoke in the second half as a mother, with her son who joined the US Army right after 9/11, exactly ten years ago.  In her reflection, she placed many of our responses to that terrible day in the context of the US’s larger story.  In so doing, she reinforced for me that sense of how large the American family has been at it best, and how generous the vision of the United States has been and can be: inclusive, confident without arrogance, and welcoming to all who would contribute to the nation’s welfare.  As we mark this anniversary, I’m remembering Uncle Fred, and hoping that we all continue to inherit from him and those like him the courage and wisdom we shall need.

 

[Postscript: the Wackerlin Center will also be hosting a national travelling exhibit about the poet Emma Lazarus (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”)  later this Fall, and thus we’ll be exploring these themes in more depth.  Mark your calendars for November!]

failure

I’m just back from a delightful week with delightful friends in Savannah, GA, home of Food Network queen Paula Deen (no distant relation, I think) and genteel Southern charm.  It was a much-needed time of renewal and rest before the start of a new university year.

For Methodists (especially a history geek like me), Savannah holds an added interest, as the site of our founder, John Wesley’s, brief experiment as the pastor of an English Anglican colony.  Wesley signed up to minister to the Savannahians, seeking the next step on his faith journey, and arrived early in 1736.  Nothing now survives of the colony as it was then, except the grid-like layout of the town, designed by General Oglethorpe himself.  In Reynolds Square, nearest to the site of his home and chapel, a statue now stands, commemorating the young man who served his time here before making a huge impact on global Christianity through the dynamic movement he was to found. 

This public honouring of Wesley, in truth, masks something rather critical.  His time in Savannah was an unmitigated disaster.  He was prissy, prim and particular, unbending about his ‘methodical’ practice of Christianity and his parishioners seem to have detested him.  He resented the claims they made on him and his time, because he really wanted to go and convert the Native Americans, or else hide himself in his study.  He became embroiled in a romance with a young woman, Sophie Hopkey; it ended in public humiliation when she interpreted their relationship status very differently than him and became engaged to someone else, frustrated at Wesley’s coldness.  Reacting with indecent self-righteousness, he refused her communion one Sunday morning: and found himself now the target of accumulated rage.  The people turned on him; lawsuits were brought against him; his friends deserted him; and he fled in the night, across the hostile Georgia marshes, to a ship that would take him away from this shame and abject failure, and back home.

All a far cry from deserving a statue in the town square…except that Wesley’s experience in Savannah proved crucial in his own growth and in the rise of Methodism.  Out of the ashes and despair, out of the utter breakdown he experienced, he clutched at Grace: and found new life.  He let go of his control freakery (somewhat!) and his need to prove himself to God and others; he acknowledged the frailty of his faith and the inadequacy of his own intellect and energies, and threw himself on God instead.  The result: within months, he was at the center of a movement which revived the churches, revolutionized social provision in England, and renewed countless people in hope, in life and in action for the poor.  But it couldn’t, it wouldn’t have happened without Savannah.

We live in a culture which despises failure.  We are citizens of world of self-sufficiency, where our own resources must be enough and needing help seems like weakness.  These attitudes, though, simply deceive us.  No-one found grace except through realising their own limitations.  No-one ever became fully alive without first dying at some level to their false self.  No-one has ever fully understood maturity without experiencing the loss of hopes and dreams.  Fr. Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward is a wonderful reflection on these themes, one which I found an apt distillation of Wesley’s story too.  As Rohr says: “we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right…if there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own”.

The mature John Wesley believed fervently in the possibility of human perfection, carefully defined.  Perhaps he knew a little of what he was talking about.

rapture

Well, here we are: another Monday.  And the world didn’t end.  Too bad.  Of course it was never going to: Jesus always said (Matt. 25:13) that even he didn’t know when it would happen and that speculation was futile; and in any case the colorful biblical depictions of the ‘end times’ are among the most misused and least understood passages in literary history.  Added to that, Mr Camping has been wrong – and exposed as a charlatan – before.  But that didn’t stop the level of public interest and media hype his latest prediction generated.

I actually found myself a little frustrated by it all.  Once again, religion and the people who find it important to them attract attention only when being caricatures, freaks, kooks or lunatic basket cases.  I understand why, of course.  But while the news channels endlessly interviewed ‘experts’ and speculated, tongue-in-cheek, about the whole thing, billions of people around the world on Saturday quietly got on with allowing their religious convictions to inform them in transformative and yet somehow less newsworthy ways.  For example:

On the southwest side of Chicago, Muslim community group IMAN continued to expand the provision of free health care to its uninsured neighbors and clients;

 In Myanmar, Buddhist monk U Gambira, aged 33, continued his extraordinary and courageous witness in a Rangoon jail, sentenced to 68 years’ imprisonment for leading the ‘Saffron Uprising’ of Buddhist religious groups against the country’s military dictatorship in 2007;

In the UK, development agency Christian Aid (whose motto used to be ‘we believe in life before death’) stepped up its campaign to end sexual violence in developing nations, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo;

In Skokie, the IL Holocaust Museum continued its project of enabling the experience of the Jewish community to inspire justice, reconciliation and understanding locally and across the world;

In Chennai, India, the Hindui Mission Hospital served dozens of the city’s poor in desperate medical need.

You get the idea.  Religion doesn’t inspire everyone for good, and many don’t see the need of it.  But for the vast majority, it issues in lives of goodness, compassion and care.  Some argue that it isn’t necessary for such lives: well, for these people and these causes, it has been.

 I’m thankful Mr. Camping was wrong.  Again.  Perhaps from now on we won’t be so easily distracted by the fraudulent from what really matters in our world.  If we allow them, our religious convictions always point us to the urgency of mending our world, not the superficiality of so much of our culture.

a life less ordinary

Last  week, I spent a couple of days in Atlanta with dear friends.  Having just taught a course on American History since 1960, I was curious to visit the Carter Center, founded to house Jimmy Carter’s papers and record the major events of his one-term presidency.  It was only the second such presidential museum I’d seen, and the only one detailing a contemporary presidency (the other being the stunning Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL), so I was curious to see ‘how it was done’.

The Carter Center is much more than a presidential museum, or even a library.  The 39^th President himself insisted that it predominantly be a place for forging the reconciliation and peace he longed to achieve while in office.  It retains that role today, a beautiful, contemplative space in the midst of the city for dialogue and the resolution of dispute.  And what struck me most about the museum was not so much its record of Carter’s time in office, about which debate will continue between historians and political scholars, but of the President’s life since leaving the White House.

In the last 31 years, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have tirelessly done simple things to find answers to global problems once thought insoluble.  Through the Carter Center and because of their global vision, diseases such as malaria, guinea worm and river blindness have been tackled head-on, to great effect.  Countries struggling to embrace democracy – and those struggling to prevent them doing so – have been overseen and scrutinized to ensure fairness and equality.  Resources have been offered to communities seeking a way out of endemic poverty.  Nations and communities have been encouraged to seek the mutual understanding that for decades have eluded them.  But for the status they afford the Carters in this endeavor, the White House years are almost unimportant, compared to this extraordinary ongoing achievement.

In many cases, the work has been simple, but simply ignored or spurned by others.   The Carters have mobilized an effort and lent it their energy and support.  Awarding them the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Bill Clinton movingly – and simply – said that they have done more good to more people than any other couple on earth.  Not bad, for peanut farmers from south Georgia.  Though I shall never have the weight of the presidency behind me, I did emerge from the Center’s landscaped lawns and elegant fountains re-inspired that one simple, focussed, committed life can make a world of difference.

remembrance

This week marked United Nations Holocaust Memorial Day.  In the university chapel, we held an act of remembrance.  This is my reflection.

Sixty-six years ago this week, Soviet troops advancing westwards in their rout of the Nazi army came upon a camp in occupied Poland.  Or rather, a connected series of camps.  As they entered, they found scenes of unimaginable horror and evidence of untold brutality and unprecedented mass murder.  This was Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place in which well over a million people met their deaths. 

Allied troops advancing east from the successes of the Normandy landings found similar atrocities in camps in Western Germany, atrocities so severe that General Dwight Eisenhower forced all his senior commanders to witness at first hand what had happened there, and what Americans had played their part in bringing to an end.

The Holocaust, almost seventy years on, still poses unanswerable questions and confronts us with indescribable suffering and despair.  No-one has ever expressed it better than Elie Wiesel: “it turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed”.  The Nazis sought to eradicate from the face of Europe those whose mere presence, whose very existence represented to them a diabolical act of resistance to their vile intentions and hateful, ill-conceived, racial ideologies.  The majority of those who died, resisting them actively or simply by being alive, were Jews, of whom around six million perished.  We shall never know for sure the exact numbers.  Others were persecuted and sytematically murdered too: the Roma, Sinti and Lalleri peoples, political enemies, the physically disabled and those with mental illnesses, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, the Slavic nations to the East and others.  We seek to remember them all today, perhaps as many as seventeen million in total. 

We come here today simply to remember, to honor, to refuse Hitler the posthumous victory of allowing his evil to go uncondemned and his victims unmourned.  We do not come to seek to impose upon these terrible events any glib platitudes, any false theological veneer, nor any empty sentimental excess.  We come, just for a moment to try and comprehend the scale of what happened, the lives it claimed, the the scar it leaves on the face of human existence and the awful questions left for all of us, religious or not.

In the darkness, though, we light a candle, as an almost futile gesture.  Because, somehow, we do yet have some vestige of hope.  That, in itself, is a miracle.  We pledge ourselves to remember the dead, honor the living and work for a world in which such a thing can never, ever happen again.

Just before Christmas, I went to have lunch with my friend Magda, a survivor of these events, whom many of you were able to meet last year.  In the morning, we visited the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, to where with Student Activities we’re organizing a visit this semester.  She took me into a cattle car in the museum, one of the very cattle cars in which Jews were transported to their deaths, exactly like the one which took Magda and her family from northern Hungary to Auschwitz.  Standing the darkness, neither of us had any words to say.  I couldn’t even imagine what it brought to mind for her. 

Back home, sat round her kitchen table for lunch, she told me stories of her family, her most recent trip to Hungary, her plans for the holiday and her busy schedule for 2011, over goulash, dumplings and noodle pudding.  And it struck me that her very life was the only answer to all this evil, a life that Hitler wanted to deny her, and a life which resolutely refused to submit or capitulate.  If I find hope anywhere today, it is there.  The light in our world can seem very frail indeed at times, amid so much darkness, but it stubbornly refuses to go out.  May our lives, and the life of this university, be seedbeds for such hope, and places where the world may be mended through compassion, humility and courage. 

So long as we live, they too shall live,

                for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.

being’s source begins to be

The following is the homily I gave this morning at the University Advent service.

This time of year, I always miss my home town desperately.  It doesn’t have very much to recommend it – small, rural, remote, a little unglamorous and out of the way, perhaps – but it does boast one of the finest churches in Europe.  Over a thousand years ago, the resolute and saintly Queen Etheldreda decided that this damp, isolated place was the spot for her new monastic foundation.  Over a thousand years later, the citizens of Ely still flock to her great abbey church to worship God. 

Advent Sunday in the cathedral was the highlight of my worshipping year, and I miss it.  The service always begins with the congregation sitting in total darkness in the vast cavernous interior, until a solo treble breaks the darkness with a word of hope.  Slowly, through readings and carols, we trace the story of God’s unfolding call and promise, and the cathedral gradually becomes illuminated, inside and out, candles and lights bursting into brightness over the course of an hour or so until all is resplendent and glorious, ancient stone walls bathed in light, stained glass lit from outside, the gorgeous central lantern tower now a beacon for the surrounding farmland for miles and miles.  The drama and choreography always staggered me. 

The story of light overcoming darkness is just about the most powerful there is.  When told powerfully, when seen and heard, it is miraculous in its ability to transform us.  But, clearly, in this season of Advent, there is, if you will, a lingering shadow, a question that threatens to disturb the beauty of our celebration.  It is the central question of Advent, which we neatly sidestep or ignore most of the time in favor of trimming trees or sending gifts or organizing parties: the question about why, if God indeed entered this world in Jesus Christ, so much is left undone, so much pain and struggle and suffering and violence remain.  It is the question about how on earth, if the story is true, the mess is ever going to be resolved and the pain eased.  How is the light ultimately going to triumph over the darkness? 

It’s not a new question, of course.  The early Christians were faced with the difficult task of explaining, firstly why God would choose to enter the world in such a dirty and untidy and inglorious way and then live such an obscure life before dying a criminal, shameful death.  And then, secondly, they had to explain the gap between the promise of his coming and the state the world was still in afterwards, with so much undone, with God’s people still oppressed and persecuted, with nations still at war and people still in pain and grief.

 Some Christians have always suggested that progress itself, the unfolding of history, would bring with it, irresistibly, the fullness of God’s coming Kingdom.  We are moving inexorably, the thinking goes, towards the glories that Jesus envisaged and promised.  Good for us.  But, though technology and the standard of living have improved immeasurably for some, I’m left unconvinced that we’re any nearer to achieving justice, or kindness, or significant growth towards dignity, peace, our full human potential and a equal sharing of the world’s resources.  I’d be thrilled if you proved me wrong.

 Many of the first Christians supposed that Jesus must be about to return very soon and bring it all to a glorious apocalyptic completion.  The prophetic imagination went into overdrive amid some very difficult times of persecution and the very difficult Book of Revelation is the result.  It in turn has spawned lots of third rate Christian fiction about people being Left Behind and a good deal of foolish speculation about dates and times which Jesus said all along and from the first was pointless and a waste of time because even he himself didn’t know.

 So, what are we left with?  And how can we make any sense of all the years in between? 

Well, there’s something vital to me in the very problem that gave rise to much of this in the first place, that, when God did decide to enter this world, he did so, not in power and splendour, but in poverty, pain and enormous obscurity.  I’m not sure why, when he came that way, so counter-culturally, so unexpectedly and humbly and profoundly disturbingly, in the squalor of the manger and the scandal of illegitimacy, we look for him to finish what he started then in a profoundly different manner, or as we might say, in a way which denies the grace and truth of it.  He could have resolved the world’s problems by force in the first place, if he’d wanted.  He didn’t.  He came to an unmarried mother, to filthy shepherds, to a bunch of Zoroastrians on camels, to the compromised, struggling rabble that is people like me and you. 

But God, you see, was being consistent in arriving that way.  Over 500 years before Jesus was born, God’s people, Israel, were in the midst of a terrible crisis.  They had been comprehensively beaten by the Babylonians, their beloved, sacred Jerusalem had been destroyed and they had been taken into exile, far from home.  All was lost.  Their dreams of ruling the world in the name of their God lay in tatters.  Their hopes, of Israel at the center of a world which looked to her for guidance, wisdom and direction, were dashed.  They were homeless, stateless, destitute, refugees, their Temple reduced to rubble, their pride gone and their national identity devastated. 

But in the midst of this disastrous, dreadful calamity, a new word came through the prophet.  It was the word we listened to earlier, a word of comfort and renewal.  God wasn’t done.  And battered, grieving, forlorn Israel was to have a new future and a new identity.  No longer was her vocation one of control, or might.  No longer should she expect God to vindicate her through dramatic divine intervention.  Nor was future military conquest on the table.  Rather, Israel was to draw the world to her God, to the light, through the power of her example, the beauty of her common life, the sheer, winsome glory of her presence among the nations.  As Jerusalem was rebuilt, the people of Israel were challenged by the prophet to accept the leadership of the nations by becoming the servant of the nations.  God was at work in her life, on the inside, from within, drawing her from the brink of despair to the uplands of purpose and delight.  And it was in a manner entirely faithful to this prophecy that Jesus ultimately entered the world. 

This is light in darkness: not a God who enforces a solution upon us, but one rather who makes his unlooked-for presence known to us in the midst of our pain, in the depths of our despair.  A God who surprises us by appearing in the middle of it all with us, and invites us to share with him in the complex work of unpicking the Gordian knot we’ve made of the human condition.  A God who asks us to participate in the costly work of setting ourselves and others free.  Rather than looking to the heavens for our salvation, we find it at our feet, suffering, serving, drawing from us our full human potential and capability, and teaching us – painfully, slowly, patiently, refusing to be discouraged or disillusioned – the way of love, which is a light strong enough to blaze in every darkness.  At the cancer diagnosis, at the failure of the peace talks, in the depths of depression or addiction or despair, faced with the grades that shatter our idea of who we are, when all seems alien and strange and comfortless, the hymn writer reminds us, God “sojourns in this vale of tears, and Jesus is his name”.  God is born into the poverty, even of my heart, even of my existence.  And he transfigures it, gently, lovingly, humbly, from within.  There is light in our darkness, for we are not alone.  We have never been alone.  God is with us.

Two years ago, I found myself in a place called the ‘Grain of Sand’.  It was a place of poverty such as I’d never experienced before, a slum, on the edge of a shanty town, in one of the poorest parts of Guatemala City.  Its several dozen inhabitants, made homeless by civil war, built their flimsy shacks on top of the city’s sewage drains, clinging to the side of a steep hill and hoping that the rains would not wash them away.  I can call to mind the sight – and smell – of that place even now. 

 Most remarkable about those who lived there were their hope and joy, which gave the lie to who was rich and who poor in our relationship.  The women were members of a co-operative which, by their common labor, made possible a better life for their children and their community in the future.  Their craft-making had paid for a school, a healthcare center, and job training for themselves and their neighbors.  Families were slowly being enabled to move out of the Grain of Sand and into the safer homes in the town.  They treated us with infinite generosity although we were from a country which had done much to create their poverty.  And they were Christians: strict Catholic and evangelical Protestant, and everything in between, bound together by the same firm conviction that God in Christ was in the mess with them, in the pain and the poverty and the injustice, promising that their struggle was his struggle, their fight his fight, and their vision, his vision. 

I asked one of their leaders, Esperanza – her very name means ‘hope’ – why they called this place of destitution ‘The Grain of Sand’.  “Because”, she replied, “we have a saying.  Where there is hope even as small as a grain of sand, miracles will follow.  God is with us: and so we have hope.” 

Charles Wesley wrote:

Emptied of his majesty,

Of his dazzling glories shorn,

Being’s source begins to be,

And God himself is born.

“And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never been able to put it out.” 

Amen.

broken glass

Tuesday and Wednesday mark the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the dark November night on which Adolf Hitler finally unleashed the whole ferocious might of his venom – and the Nazi party’s violent machine – against Germany’s Jewish population.  Synagogues were razed to the ground across the country; sacred scriptures were dragged into the street and trampled; Jewish shops and businesses were smashed and set alight in an orgy of destruction and hatred; Jews were hauled from their beds, beaten, humiliated, saw their homes destroyed and their last hope of continuing to live as citizens of a free Germany dashed.  The scale of desecration, the level of Nazi vitriol and its easy acceptance by the bulk of the German Christian population, and the grief of German Jews on that night are inconceivable.  Hitler’s ‘Night of Broken Glass’ showed as never before his real determination to eliminate the Jewish population from Europe.  It opened the floodgates of hatred, bile and furious action against the Jews that was soon to culminate in the death camps of the Reich and the deaths of 6 million people.

It’s hard, faced with this unimaginable horror, to make any sense, or to find any future hope in it all.  But the voices of 6 million dead, as well as the soul of an oppressed people, urge us to remember them, and never, in Emil Fackenheim’s wonderful phrase, to grant Hitler any posthumous victories by forgetting those whom he sought to destroy.  I found some hope last week in Philadelphia, at the annual meeting of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations.  The Wackerlin Center at Aurora University is a founding member, and we have pledged ourselves to work with others to pursue reconciliation and seek peace, in our local communities and the world.  Some participants spoke of the ‘dialogue of action’, stronger than words, in which people of all faiths and none come together in shared service to the world, a powerful testimony to the might of what unites the human family, and a stern witness against those who would divide it.  That vision is certainly at the heart of our work.  On Thursday, we’ll welcome Magda Brown to the university, a Holocaust survivor whose poise and grace are miraculous and whose very life, kindness and friendship are signs to me of the ultimate defeat of Hitler’s pathological hatred.

Sometimes too, the best of our history can still speak to the worst.  I’m preparing a collection of the works of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer just now.  Cranmer’s essential generosity and breadth of spirit, which often stand in contrast to the ferocity of Henry VIII’s court, in which he existed, are well expressed in his gorgeous prose.  Writing of the Jews in a sermon on faith, he said: “for as the Holy Ghost doth teach us to trust in God, and call upon him as our Father, so did he teach them to say, as it is written, Thou, Lord, art our Father and Redeemer; and thy name is without beginning, and everlasting.  God gave them then grace to be his children, as he doth us now.”

Children of the same parent: a vision that underpins our shared work of mending the world, seeking peace, pursuing justice and growing together in friendship, common humanity and deeper understanding.

to strive, to seek, to find…

One of my students took me on the other day.  I was talking to the class about the ‘choice’ they had made for a college education and for its distinctive method and content.  One of them objected that his choice was nothing to do with wanting any particular style of learning (or indeed any more learning at all).  Rather, his decision to be investing in this was motivated purely by the fact that it would pay dividends later when, as a graduate, he could demand a higher wage packet. 

I’ll confess I was a little sad.  I’m idealistic enough to think that education should be its own reward.  It should be a treasure to be prized for the vistas it opens, the growth it fosters, the ways it challenges and changes us, teaches us how to learn, and literally ‘leads us out’ of so much that limits and threatens us – ignorance, poverty, unwillingness to encounter difference, arrogance – and into a more fruitful life.  I could see his point; I just thought he’d missed another one even more greatly to his profit.

The public conversation about education seems particularly sharp just now.  In Illinois, higher education spending seems an easy target in the gubernatorial contest.  In the UK, the coalition government is preparing to ratchet up tuition fees in order to balance the books, the Liberal Democrats gritting their teeth as they renege on a clear election promise not to do so.  Listening to the politicians, you’d almost think they see higher education as a luxury, a privilege for those who receive it and for which they should pay, sometimes dearly.

I suppose I’m very fortunate, part of the last generation in Britain whose university education was almost fully government-funded, not just as an exercise benefitting me, but as a public good, an investment in society and a down payment on the better world I and my peers would sculpt after graduation.  Widening access to higher education inevitably means some fees, without great rises in tax: but I hope we never lose that ideal about what university does and is for. 

In Aurora last week, at convocation, we heard from Jack Frohn.  He told a remarkable story of the transformative power of education: of a young man without a family, working hard as a short order cook to support himself, coming reluctantly to college.  He was swept away, finding there his purpose and his life and choices he never dreamed of.  He met a young woman the first day – and yes, reader, he married her –but he was met by so much more: new options, fresh hope, an unlooked-for family, a community of enrichment, a world of ideas, a universe of possibilities.  There could have been no better testimony to what we’re still about, fifty years after he arrived.

All significant social reform, religious or secular, has centered on the transforming power of an education.  Amidst the clash of economic pressures and political exigencies, I hope we’ll never lose that vision, nor the notion that truth really does make us free.

take comfort in rituals

I see that the good folks at Starbucks have a new advertising campaign: beneath a steaming cup of joe, they’re inviting us, “take comfort in rituals”.  It’s a characteristically clever idea.  My early weekday starts are certainly made less dreadful by the presence of fresh coffee, luring me from a warm bed when, frankly, not much else does at that precise moment.

My pre-6am coffee has the added bonus of building into my routine a space – albeit brief and sleepy – for reflection before the day begins.  I value that too, in my new, and already favorite, armchair.  Yes, I take comfort in rituals.  Indeed, it seems to me that that’s partly their point.

In that respect, I wonder whether the Starbucks people are reminding us of an important religious principle too.  Our religious rituals ought to offer us comfort: places in which we feel connection, enjoy reflective space, encounter divine grace and peace, re-order and recalibrate ourselves and our lives, and maybe even allow ourselves to be opened up to a wider world and bigger truths than we’ve so far encountered.  Of course, spiritual practices are a discipline – whether going to the synagogue, dragging ourselves to church, praying five times daily, fasting, meditation or whatever – but a discipline with a comforting, purposeful end in view.  Parting with our five bucks at the coffee shop is worth the pay-off, right?

John Betjeman wrote a deeply-felt and deeply moving poem about an old nun in the British port of Felixstowe, the last surviving member of a religious order.  As she reflects on her utter loneliness, left abandoned by her dead sisters and now a sad relic of a vanished world and a faded zeal, she makes her solitary way to evensong at the parish church, while the seaside town closes down for the night.  It is the most profound reflection on taking comfort in rituals that I know:

“Thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising”

Here where the white light burns with steady glow

Safe from the vain world’s silly sympathizing,

Safe with the Love that I was born to know,

Safe from the surging of the lonely sea

My heart finds rest, my heart finds rest in Thee.