What I Learned On My Summer Vacation

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 18^th of August, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here,
mindful that this time
is a more like a journey,
than a destination,
to worship, to remember the summer's peace
and unrest
and to so transform memory into hope,
that our present lives are the better for it.

(all) may our reason and our passion
keep us true to ourselves, true to each other
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Affirmation A poem by Carlo Martini

La vera vita
no e fatta di parole
-le nostre inutili parole
corrose d'ignoranza e d'odio-
e fatta di nuvole leggere
che transcorrono
silenziose per liberi cieli-
e fatta de limpidi suoni
d'acque erbe ucelli-
come nel minuto innocente
del primo respiro terrestre.

True life is not made of words,
our futile words, corroded by ignorance
and hatred….it is made up of
light clouds drifting silently through open skies-
it is made up of limpid sounds of waters,
grasses, birds-as in the innocent minute
of earth's first breath.

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

It is our quiet time, our time of silence.
In the silence we know that we are not all that very powerful… we cannot stop rain storms or raging rivers in Europe or Nepal or other far away places, nor can we make the rain pour onto droughted soil in other lands.

In the silence, we know we cannot at this moment magically create trust in places of the world where there is no trust, or erase war from the earth by our will and a snap of our fingers.

Thus we take time each Sunday
to remind ourselves that our power
is limited, that our dreams are greater
than our size, and that our best words,
however sincerely spoken,
have no automatic power to make
broken things whole,
or to cancel the real limits of time,
strength and humanity.

So I pray, may our promises always be real promises
made in the light of our limited humanity.

May our visions be lofty, yes, but not
so lofty that we are always disappointed.

May our silence serve to reconnect us
to the silent clouds and quiet summer earth.

May we remember in this central silent time
that our relationships to each other are more important than what we have or do not have,
and what we claim or do not claim.

Turning to those who turn toward us, we
remember those who enlighten us, or who care for us, or remember us, or do us the kindness of struggling with us, or those we remember deep in the embrace of our hearts. Let us set aside their names in the safe silence of our hearts, or say with our mouths the sounds that are or were their names.

(Naming)

It's summer, it's summer, and here we are together again in August, in the easy light of morning, in the light of our mutual caring, in the light of summer rest and unrest, and in the incandescent light that we call music.

(Summertime, from Porgy and Bess)

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a poem by the great Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, now in his 91st year. The title, Veni Creator, refers to an ancient medieval Latin hymn to the Holy Spirit.

VENI CREATOR

Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards, or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.

I am only a human being: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore, call one person, anywhere on earth,
not me-after all I have some decency-
and allow me, when I look at that person,
to marvel at you.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] Reading is a poem by Sandra Mortola Gilbert. Sandra was raised in an Italian, specifically Sicilian-America, family in Brooklyn and recreates in this poem her summer memories. Zia, by the way, is the Italian word for aunt, and socialisti is, I think quite obviously, the Italian word for socialists.

The Summer Kitchen

In June when the Brooklyn garden
boiled with blossom,
when leaflets of basil lined the paths
and new green fruitless fingers of vine
climbed the airy arbor roof,
my Sicilian aunts withdrew
to the summer kitchen,
the white bare secret room
at the bottom of the house.

Outside, in the upper world,
sun blistered the bricks of the tiny…
terrace, where fierce
socialisti uncles
chain-smoked Camels and plotted politics;
nieces and nephews tussled
among thorny blood-colored
American roses;
a pimply concrete
birdbath-fountain dribbled ineffectual
water warm as olive oil.

Cool and below it all,
my aunts labored among great cauldrons
in the spicy air
of the summer kitchen: in one kettle
tomatoes bloomed into sauce;
in another, ivory pasta
leaped and swam;
on the clean white table
at the center of the room
heads of lettuce flung themselves open,
and black-green poles of zucchini
fell into slices of yellow,
like fairy-tale money.

Skidding around the white
sink in one corner
the trout that Uncle Christopher brought back
from the Adirondacks gave up
the glitter of its fins
to the glitter of Zia Francesca's
powerful knife.

Every August day Zia Petrina
rose at four to tend the morning:
(her hair) drawn sleek,
she stood at the sink.

Her quick shears
flashed in the silence,
separating day from night, trunk
from branch, leaf
from shadow.

As the damp
New World sunrays struggled to rise
past sooty housetops,
she'd look suddenly up
with eyes black as the grapes
that fattened in the arbor:
through one dirt-streaked window
high above her
she could see the ledge of soil
where her pansies and geraniums anchored.

Higher still,
in tangles of heat,
my uncles' simmering garden grew,
like green steam swelling from the cool
root of her kitchen.

Sermon: What I Learned On My Summer Vacation [Next][back to top]

It was in late summer that I began my third and last year of seminary. I had just come home from my six-month internship in Rockford, Illinois, and I was glad to be returning home. But, as soon as the plane touched down in San Francisco, I immediately felt what could only be called melancholy. I knew I had only two more quarters of classes at my wonderful seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, in Berkeley CA. After those fleeting months, I had to leave that place and start my work…probably in a place far, far away from the school that had come to symbolize comfort and home to me.

The melancholy didn't dissipate with the beginning of school, or even, later in October, with the wondrous turmoil of the first great falling-in-love experience of my life. Every day when I woke up I knew I was going to soon have to leave the warm nest of my school, where I felt supported each and every day, and go off into what seemed to me like the wild places of the universe. My support system, gone. My faculty advisor and the core faculty, gone. My colleague friends all living in far away places, effectively gone, although I didn't think the friendships would end.

But amazingly, Ron Cook, the professor who taught us the art of worship, led a simple chapel service mid-fall that sent my melancholy packing. He said to us in that chapel:

Some of you who are graduating at the end of this year are already feeling sad.

You've come into my office feeling blue that your Starr King School days are coming to an end.

But I am here to tell you that your Starr King School days are not coming to an end.

To believe that they are is to have misconstrued the whole purpose of this school for the ministry. You see, this school has no illusions that it can train you to be a minister in three years. No school can do that. It takes a life-time to learn such things. But that's the point. What this school does is to help you understand that the entire world is slowly becoming Starr King School for the Ministry. Every person you meet from now on is your core faculty, every church you serve is your classroom, every city that you move to is your Berkeley campus, every experience, you either positive or negative, is a chapel service to lead you to your own spiritual depth. You cannot leave a school that has grown to fill the world. All of you are students forever.

These were wise words. And many are the times during my years when I have gone back to that chapel service, and reminded myself of that wisdom.

Take this summer for example. I was in School all summer.

Yes, I did visit California for two weeks, and yes, I did actually visit my old school, but that is not where I took the courses. I took the seminary courses in my heart.

I took a course in God and the United States.

I took a course in Italian American history and bigotry.

And I took a course in love and loss.

Let me tell you what I learned in reverse order.

First, the course in love and loss.

For three and a half years, I have been slowly but surely making friends here in Central Ohio. I call this act "making family." This is always with folks outside the church who are not Unitarian Unviersalists, but with whom I can have relationships of family depth and support.

My friend William is first and foremost among these people, a man who is as much a brother as anything. For three and a half years, we have called each other every day, and seen each other at least three or four times a week. He has traveled with me, we have had supper together, we have drawn together, and when I was sick last year, it was he who took me to the hospital and sat by my side.

Some folks who clearly do not understand what I mean when I say making family have strangely assumed that when I call William my friend I am actually saying we are romantically involved, but that's foolish. The word friend has a high meaning to me, as I have said in the past, but that meaning is a clear one, and it's not to be confused with a life-partner or spouse.

I came to be closer and closer to my friend Jared, too, over these last years. I loved spending time with him, laughing with him, talking things through with him.

But this summer Jared moved to Fort Worth for work. And my dear William moved to Chicago for his career.

Now, like the aunt in the children's story this morning, who wrote to her nephew William who lived far away, I too am now going to have a relationship of infrequent visits and tender letters across the miles. My expectations of seeing William daily or going out to supper with Jared all have to be revised. My future does not look like what I imagined it would look like. I cried a lot this summer, in anticipation of their leaving. I felt a powerful melancholy deep in my bones.

But then I remembered Ron's sermon, and I felt a sudden rush of openness to what is to come that I cannot imagine. I decided not to let the loss and changed expectations define me, but to let openness define me.

And wouldn't you know it…already I've met people, quite by accident, who show every sign of being part of my life as friends for long times to come. Not as replacements for far away friends, no, that's impossible…but as good friends, that is core faculty members in the seminary of life. Teachers. Harbingers of home.

Secondly, I took a course on Italian American history. I did this in the traditional manner by reading books, yes, but I read those books for untraditional reasons. I read them as ways of meditating on the answer I give to a certain question. You see, sometimes people ask me, presumably because of my Italian American last name, if I watch the top-rated cable television show, The Sopranos, and I say, "No, I won't watch it. I watched it once," I tell them, "and I noted it was a finely written, finally acted show. But look, I won't watch one more show which, with hundreds of other shows, depicts Italian Americans as nonchalant murderers and killers. I won't watch the Godfather movies again either, though I know very well that in many quarters they are considered cinema classics. In the whole history of Hollywood, the only film that ever portrayed Italian-Americans in a way I recognized from my own life was Moonstruck. That family was my family, complex, rich, fractured, petty, joyous, loving. It was honest, like the poem by Sandra Gilbert is honest…a portrait of complex family realities. A portrait of political debate and summer kitchens with sauce "blossoming" on the stove hidden in the cool basement, wrestling kids on the patio, the told and retold stories of lovers and immigrants crackling staccato in the hot summer air. This is the reality I know too.

Are there Italian American killers? No doubt. Out of five million people with Italian ancestry, that's true just on the basis of statistics alone. But it's just as true that there are brutal crime-lords in any neighborhood, including the rather tony white suburban neighborhoods where CEO's of a dozen companies recently remorselessly destroyed the lives and futures of millions of people by their criminal greed and sense of entitlement. But trust me, you will never in your whole lives see a classic film series called "The CEO Father" with Marlon Brando mumbling "Make my day" while watching the Nasdaq numbers race across the television screen. This is because there is no culture in this country which permits the wholesale and consistent depiction of such men. But there is a culture in place in this country which permits the wholesale depiction of Italian Americans as killers…in film, after book, after television show. Why does this stereotype exist? Laurence di Stasi, in an article I have made available to you outside when you leave the Meeting House, (*from MultiAmerica- essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace…Ishmael Reed, editor, Viking Press, 1997) confirms that this whole culture is based ultimately on American Government policies dating from the Second World War. My grandparents were citizens and perhaps thus escaped internment, but many Italian immigrants on the way to citizenship were interred within hours after Pearl Harbor on Ellis Island and at a place in Montana. Curfews, bans on speaking Italian… the civil rights laws of Italian Americans were violated hundreds of times during the war and the years that followed. My grandparents, interestingly, and my parents, told me little about this as I was growing up, hoping, I suppose, to spare me from fear about such things as I was growing up in slightly less jingoistic times. Most modern Italian Americans don't know much about this time in American history…the curfews, the government terrorism, and even media like the trusted New York Times using words like 'dago" and "guinea" routinely in its texts for decades. And I'd wager if we don't know much about it, few of you do too. And, thus, this whole thing has me wondering about Mr. Ashcroft's attitude toward the civil rights of certain American citizens with Middle Eastern backgrounds from a variety of nations…No one much protested when the Italians or Japanese Americans were arrested, terrorized and harrassed…will we notice when similar things happen in our own day and age?

How easily do invisible forms of bigotry insinuate themselves into our hearts because of social programming that is unconscious and mindless?

How vulnerable are we to this insinuation, we who claim religious liberalism as our heritage? Do we really think we are immune?

I, for one, don't think we are, and I urge us to vigilance and healthy skepticism. And part of that vigilance, part of that consciousness raising for me, is to refuse to watch The Sopranos or The Godfather movies or media events of their ilk, and to read the rare and honest poems by Gilbert and articles by Di Stasi as an antidote to all the distortions. Ron's classes in Seminary back in the seventies used to remind us that unlearning was just as important as learning. I agree. And in this summer's seminary class on Italian American culture, that tradition continues in me.

Third and last, I took a seminary course called "God and the United States." I took this course in San Francisco, but I could have taken it here as well. I took this course, naturally, after noting all the folderol about the removal of the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance.

Never mind that the man who wrote the original pledge was something of a socialist in his views, and had the most radical intentions in writing the thing in the first place. Never mind that the phrase "under God" was rudely added to his words many, many decades later. Never mind that the use of the religious word God in a set of words expected to be uttered by classroom children to a flag of state confuses church and state in a way that would have infuriated Thomas Jefferson. Yes, that Thomas Jefferson who would not even proclaim Thanksgiving Day because he felt it was wrong for the US Government to ask folks to call on God.

Never mind any of those things.

I wanted, in my seminary class on God, to imagine what the United States would look like if it were what it has claimed itself to be until recently, namely, "under God." Now look, you and I don't have to get into all the theological niceties either, like circular debates on the virtues or meanness of the preposition "under." We don't have to even have self-serving philosophical discussions about the negative or positive connotations the word God, however defined, has for many. I just want us to imagine, for the sake of a mental experiment, the best possible understanding of the word God. Not God the warrior or God the cruel judge who hurls unbelievers and children into hell, but the God who is Love itself, according to the gospel, or the God who is a doting "mother hen," according to the Hebrew Scriptures, or the God who expects fairness and justice on earth, according to the Qu'ran.

If the United States were "under" such a God, I bet I wouldn't see fifty homeless men and women on every single block downtown in San Francisco. I bet if people really meant it when they said "under God" in my sense of the term, we wouldn't have to cook for Faith Mission because families would already have shelter and food worthy of their dignity. It seems to me that if this nation were really "under God" it would mean equal health care for all, no matter what, and it would mean companies that put their employees' real lives first and maximizing profits second. It would mean whatever color your skin happened to be, whatever culture you were part of, you could contribute to the common good and receive from it in good measure without anyone saying to you, "yes, but." It would mean taking literary and science education seriously, and it would include non-embarrassed sex education for adults as well as children. It would seem to me that if we were under a Love God or a Mother Hen God or a Just God, then forthright honesty would actually thrive at the top, excuses wouldn't see the light of day, and politics would only be about the good life in the polis, the city, and not about lying, twisting truths and this sorry business they now call "spin."

It seems to me that if this country were really "under God," we would respect God's green earth, revere the first peoples here who once were nurtured by its prairies and forests and who nurtured them back, and we'd cheerfully recycle everything. It seems to me, that if this nation were under God, who said, according to Jeremiah/Yerimiyahu in the Hebrew Scriptures: "Practice justice and the good, and help those who are oppressed, do no wrong, do no violence to anyone: the stranger, the orphans, the widows; and stop shedding the blood of the innocent…" then the United States would look a lot different than it does. So would a lot of other nations in the world if they were "under" a God of love, devotion and fairness.

So I learned that though the words "under God" will probably be restored to the pledge by the sheer power of popular outrage, I myself will never say them again, for to say them is not only to belittle the best possible meaning of the ancient word "God" but is to engage in flagrant dishonesty about my country, the United States of America. And who, I wonder, would be so foolish as to actually want any other kind of God than one who expected such loving caring and just practices from a nation with so much promise?

So there you have it. I had two weeks of vacation this summer, and during them, I took three classes at Starr King Seminary. Not at a small round building in California, but in that classroom inside my heart which shall be the site of my continuing education for the rest of my days, if I can remain faithful to Ron Cook's great vision back in 1978.

And what, I wonder, did you learn this summer in your school?

Summer Thanksgivings [back to top]

I am grateful for morning sunlight splashing on
the walls of the place where I live.

I am grateful for tears, and what they do for me.

I am grateful for corn on the cob and
summer meteor showers and fireflies.

I am grateful for the elusive music of cicadas.

I am grateful for the capacity to open up to the future
without thinking I can control what shall greet me there when I arrive.

I am grateful for the capacity to grapple with
change, to resist and welcome, resist and welcome like the ins and outs of the breath of my own life.

And I am glad for thee, O Spirit, O Mystery
that hauls bee and butterfly, sun and rain,
friendship and loss, heat and breezes, hopes
and memories into one singular schoolroom called summer.

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