|
Student Honored with First Sermon Award
Alexandra McGee, a second-year M.Div. student, yoga teacher and ecovillage advocate, has won the first annual Starr King Unitarian Universalist Current Issues Sermon Award.
Open to SKSM students, the contest challenged them to respond with vision and passion, whether agreeing or disagreeing, to Davidson Loehr’s essay, “Why ‘Unitarian Universalism’ Is Dying,” originally published in the spring 2005 issue of the “Journal of Liberal Religion.”
In that essay Loehr wrote, “[Unitarian Universalism] has no ontology, no distinctive understanding of the human condition, its problems or the solution; in a phrase, there [is] no religious ‘salvation story.’”
McGee, who won for her sermon, “Ruined for Life,” said she wrote it because she agreed with a lot of Loehr’s critiques.
“But I wanted to see,” she said, “what shreds of hope I could come up with and speak from my own experience.”
In her sermon, which she delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Petaluma in February, she advocates that Unitarian Universalists establish a spiritual discipline, whichever they choose, to “keep the phone lines open to God.” Then she calls on Unitarian Universalists to refrain from blending the world’s religions and, instead, to practice a spiritual discipline deeply and share it.
“This process of responding to Loehr,” said the Rev. Alma Crawford, Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship, who coordinated the contest, “forced participants to engage in the possibility that our living tradition can die unless committed lay people, clergy and institutions actively transform it and are transformed by it. All nine of the sermon writers who entered the contest felt keenly that a great deal was at stake in their work for Unitarian Universalism and Unitarian Universalism’s work for the world.”
A Unitarian Universalist for the past five years, McGee came to Starr King after more than a decade teaching yoga (she leads a class at the school open to the Graduate Theological School community) and time living in Twin Oaks Eco-village, a Virginia intentional community, where she helped advocate for a sensible, respectful imprint on the planet. Her own spiritual life, she said, was shaped by living in a Sri Lankan Buddhist convent; serving in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps; working with Marie Fortune, founder of the FaithTrust Institute to combat sexual and domestic violence; observing pagan rituals at the eco-village where she lived for six years; and studying yoga. She’s currently taking a class in Sanskrit at UC Berkeley so she can read ancient texts.
“Ever since I was 12, I wanted to be a minister,” said McGee, who was raised a Presbyterian. “I feel called to ministry through yoga, which opens up a space for the Divine. When I move in my body and align it, that energizes and settles my breath, which makes more space for clarity of thought. And, when thinking becomes more clear and settled, then there’s space for the Divine to shine through.”
McGee plans to finish her SKSM academic work in June 2008 and serve a parish internship the following year, focusing on ministries of health and wellness. This summer she’ll serve as chaplain at the Unitarian Universalist Ferry Beach Camp and Conference Center in Maine. But her dream for the following summer, she said, is to organize a spiritual journey around the country for Unitarian Universalists -- a three-week bus tour of several eco-villages so people can see the different approaches of these intentional communities and their commitment to just and sustainable living.
This year, sermon contest judges included one Meadville-Lombard faculty member; Roger Jones, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sunnyvale, Calif., as well as Bruce Stowell and Heather Hyde, who generously created the award and funded the $5,000 prize.
“I’m so grateful for this award,” McGee said, “I’ve gone into debt to pursue my education. I’m also grateful for Alma Crawford’s preaching class, where I learned to nourish my listeners. And, I’m grateful for the role modeling provided by David and Leslie Takahashi Morris, ministers of my home church, Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Charlottesville, Va.”
McGee will deliver her winning sermon at the Pacific Central District Assembly, scheduled for April 27-29 in Foster City, Calif. Click to read the full text of her sermon, “Ruined for Life.”
Take one college classroom and fill it with 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds from the U.S., China, Indonesia, Russia, Croatia and other countries. Mix in the study of ethics, and, according to Rebecca Gordon, a 2003 Starr King M.Div. graduate, you have the perfect recipe for the development of a lifelong ethical foundation.
“It’s the time in their lives,” said Gordon, “when these students are trying to figure out their values, what matters, what do they care about?”
As an adjunct faculty member at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school, Gordon has taught a required ethics course for the past three years. It’s a job she loves and one where she helps lead students to ideas about their future beyond careers and salaries. It's also a job that allows her to sometimes explore with them the subject of the dissertation she just started as a Graduate Theological Union Ph.D. student – the ethical substructure of torture.
“In my dissertation,” she said, “I’m focusing on what happens to our national character when we’re encouraged to develop attitudes or tendencies to react violently to events like the September 11 attacks.”
But first Gordon’s students start with “the dead white guys from the Western tradition,” as she calls them, guys like Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Aquinas, and the historical eras from which they sprang. Given that USF students often come from the country’s better public schools, Gordon describes herself as “astonished” at their lack of knowledge, as are other USF professors who work with this latest generation of college students.
“One of my students,” Gordon said, “wrote in a paper that Aristotle quoted Shakespeare. Another said Aristotle used to go to the movies because at one point in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics he makes reference to going to the theater. The only context this student had for the concept of theater was a movie theater. Sometimes I jettison my planned class and draw a timeline on the board, a brief history of Western civilization.”
Gordon has also found that when students first come to her class they boil down their ethical values to achieving a goal.
“The most important thing in life, they say, is having a goal and pursuing it as fully and completely as you can, which is not all that different from the etiological approach Aristotle taught,” she said. “Except the question is, what’s the goal? For them, it’s almost universally success in a career and probably one that will make them money.”
A third of her students come from other countries, three-quarters are people of color.
“There’s a huge cultural mix right in the classroom,” Gordon said, “which is wonderful because one of the big questions in ethics is whether you can legitimately make any kind of judgments across cultures. In other words, is it right for the members of one culture to make ethical judgments about the members of another culture? The immediate answer might be, no, of course not. But that becomes a problem when you want international codes of conduct that prohibit things like torture.”
Gordon has been writing about torture since 2001. A lifelong activist who spent time in Nicaragua during the Sandinista era, she was one of a small group who launched War Times in 2002, a publication that lasted three years, with a national circulation of 100,000.
“We started the newspaper,” she said, “when it became obvious that the U.S. government, on an official level, took the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse for military adventures abroad and repression of civil liberties at home. Since that time, there’s been an effort to turn us into a nation of cowards. We’ve been encouraged to believe we should be afraid. And, if we’re afraid, that we have the right to do absolutely anything to protect ourselves. That, to me, is the definition of cowardice, when you elevate your own survival above any other concern.
“In my dissertation, I want to look at whether there are places in U.S. society where people are being formed in the kind of virtues that would allow us to say no to the official intentions. One of the theses is the Episcopal Church and its liturgical and sacramental practices. If you belong to a liturgical Christian church, essentially, in every Sunday’s eucharist you are retelling the story of someone who was tortured to death for political reasons. In the process of eating and drinking, we say we’re constituting ourselves as the body of Christ--that tortured body. Then we are sent out into the world to be that body and to resist the logic of torture.”
A place like an Episcopal church, or a classroom, can encourage the development of virtue, understanding, compassion. Judging by the final papers in her class, Gordon has found many of her students make a shift in their concept of ethics and begin to understand how ethics permeate every moment of their lives.
“If it weren’t for Starr King School,” Gordon said, “I wouldn’t be in a position to do any of this—teaching or my dissertation—because I was lucky enough to get wonderful scholarship help and do my M.Div. here, which opened the whole world of the GTU to me. Starr King recognizes and appreciates the importance of lay religious leaders, and supported my growth not only as an intellectual, but also as an activist. Not having to separate those two parts of me has been a real gift.”
Hear Rebecca Gordon’s full discussion of these topics in the SKSM podcast, “Nurturing Ethics."
It’s interesting teaching a class in Unitarian Universalist history here at Starr King. I’ve got my own peculiar history when it comes to our movement. My parents sent me to an Episcopal church when I was a child, and, for some reason, I took going to that church seriously, even though my parents seldom went. Not only did I go through the expected sequence of Sunday School, confirmation and becoming an altar boy (the first scared to death something horrible was going to happen to me because I dropped the plate full of all the wafer-thin slices of the body of You Know Who on the chancel floor).
The church was on my way home from school and I often wandered in to poke around its Gothic sanctuary with all its secret places, like behind the altar! (Actually, there wasn’t much that felt sacred back there amidst the dust and mouse droppings.) But my mom’s mom had been a Unitarian, and her father had actually been among the founding deacons of the Unitarian church I eventually joined. So, becoming a Unitarian in the year before merger was like returning to my roots.
Maybe that’s why I like history. It’s like poking around in a much more sacred place for me than that Episcopal church of my youth. I know not all of the students I teach feel this way. They’re thinking – and should be thinking – more about inventing the future of our movement than exploring its past.
Except it’s a really rich past. For instance, in a recent class I had them do a reading from “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.” In it Waldo asks Henry what he’s doing “in there,” that is, in jail. Henry fires back at Waldo about what he’s doing out there, in all those lecture halls that have taken the place of his former church. It’s a good question both ways, and they both have good answers. The setting of “TNTSJ” was at the time of the War With Mexico, a war both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau opposed. It was written during the Vietnam War as a way of using history to raise questions about what people were doing then about “in there” and “out there” in response to a conscience that questions war itself as a legitimate means to an end.
These are still questions that need to be asked. Reading about the Transcendentalists, and about Parker, Channing, Ballou, Judith Sargent Murray and all the rest, are ways of thinking about these questions – and about why it is after all these years we’ve still got to raise them.
Meanwhile, our faculty and staff have been hard at work doing the preparations necessary for developing a strategic plan. Our board will be working on this plan in April, and we hope to involve our grads and supporters in helping us to imagine what Starr King will be like five or six years from now, and how we’re going to get there.
Theological education is changing as costs accelerate and technology evolves, so the way we do things here at the school will change some, too. Being educationally innovative is something Starr King has been good at, which is one thing that isn’t going to change. Nor is our goal of providing graduates who will be leaders in our liberal religious movement. A sense of our students' commitment to preparing for this role is one of the things that provides energy in the school – something which we’re never lacking, even when we’ve got problems to solve.
And… I was invited by the UUMA CENTER Committee to meet with them and others concerned about providing resources for the continuing education of ministers and lay leaders of the Unitarian Universalist movement. This is something about which Starr King is deeply concerned. Our soon-to-be-launched “Seminary for the Laity” is an example of our response. You can look for a lot more online and distance learning opportunities from all sorts of different groups within our religious movement in the very near future. This, too, is exciting.
Rev. Dr. Dave Sammons
Clifton Phillips, Starr King School's oldest living graduate, passed away in March. Phillips graduated in 1944 and went on to academia, eventually retiring from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where he taught history for 30 years.
He spoke frequently at Unitarian Universalist churches throughout Indiana.
Ever the historian, Phillips had been working on his memoirs and writing about local history. He also contributed his memories to Arliss Ungar's book, "With Vision and Courage: Starr King School for the Ministry, The History of Its First Hundred Years," published in 2006.
Thomas Starr King lives! It’s true. We recently receive a generous annual pledge of $1,000 a year from the great-great-great grandson of Thomas Starr King.
Tom, as he is called, e-mailed out of the blue this year to say that he is the fifth generation of his family to be named in honor of the Unitarian minister, our school’s namesake, who was known for his eloquent and tireless advocacy for preserving the Union during the early days of our democracy. When I asked Tom why chose to support Starr King School, he named two reasons--his family’s wish to honor and propagate the memory of their beloved relative, and their belief in the mission of Starr King School: to educate liberal religious leaders for Unitarian Universalism and the larger world.
Tom is also taking advantage of his employer’s 2-to-1 match program in future years to make the most of his family’s gift. We’re honored to receive this gift and reestablish our ties to the family legacy of Starr King–religious liberty, compassion, justice and love.
Rev. Kelly Flood
Vice President for Advancement
“Your old folks will dream dreams and your young folks will have visions”--Joel 2:28
Over the next several weeks, the ECO Steering Committee invites you to reflect upon the joys and challenges of intergenerational community. How does ageism function multi-dimensionally? How do preconceived expectations about someone’s skill, knowledge, capacity or “wisdom” serve to dismiss those who are younger or older than yourself? How can internalized assumptions about one’s “own generation” lead one to be entrenched in oppressive structures? What would a just community look like that embraced and challenged all people, from children, teenagers, young adults, to seniors?
We invite you to consider what actions the school, your congregation, or you as an individual might take to address these concerns.
Back to Top
|
|
