I love that Norbert Capek re-invented Unitarianism for Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, and sought to create a new religion with a new bottom line, based on his understanding of Czech history and Unitarian history. The photograph on the front of your order of service of the organizing meeting of Unitarians in Prague in April of 1922 gives us a dramatic picture of the 1,200 people who came to the event. I just returned from another organizing event which drew 1,200 people – and it excites me as much as I imagine the Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia must have excited people in 1922. The photograph on your order of service, in fact, could easily be a picture of the All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington DC in May of 2006. The event I attended was the Network for Spiritual Progressives founding conference. Though held in a UU church, it was an interfaith event of magnificent proportion. I know I told you a little about it last week. This week, I’d like to tell you a little more about the content. The Network for Spiritual Progressives¹ has three main goals:

1. Challenge the misuse of God by the Right to justify militarism, the dismantling of social justice and ecological programs, and assaults on the rights of women, gays, and lesbians.

2. Challenge the anti-spiritual biases in some parts of the Left

3. Support a New Bottom Line of kindness, generosity, ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe to replace the dominant ethos of selfishness and materialism.

I met with aides for Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Debbie Stabenow to present the 8 central ideas of the Spiritual Covenant with America. This is a non-partisan group interested in challenging both major parties. I encourage you to read The Spiritual Covenant for America – I’ve provided copies, if you’re interested, to the Grove Street Bookstore the morning. Quickly, they are:

1. Create a society that promotes loving relationships and families

2. Take personal responsibility for ethical behavior (including sexual behavior)

3. build a social responsibility into our economic and political institutions

4. reshape education to teach love, caring, generosity, nonviolent communication, cooperation, compassion, environmental responsibility, awe and wonder, respect and thanksgiving

5. build a broader understanding of heath care while also pursuing a single payer national health care plan

6. be stewards of the environment

7. a spiritual foreign policy, homeland security and elimination of poverty: safety through a strategy of generosity and nonviolence

8. separation of church and state and science while bringing our new bottom line into the public sphere.

I also encourage you to read the entire Left Hand of God by Rabbi Michael Lerner which explains much more than can be explained on that handout in the bookstore.

Rather than talk about all of this all at once – you’ll be hearing more from me, you can be sure, all next year, but I want to tell you about my encounter with the aid for Mike Rogers. I was nervous, to tell you the truth.

Our appointments with the legislators had been made by the Network for Spiritual Progressives in advance of our arrival at the conference. I had been told to meet others going to this appointment outside the office door. I arrived early so we could strategize, but nobody else arrived. It was just me. (In contrast, I want to point out that when I met with Debbie Stabenow’s aid, there were twelve of us in the room!) I finally went in, and gave my card to the receptionist, who went to get the aid, who then took me to a room across the main office. She was a young woman who looked Latina and had a Spanish surname. I asked her if she had heard of the Spiritual Covenant with America, or the conference that I was attending and she replied honestly that she hadn’t. I gave her the 8 Covenants for reading, and then asked her how she wound up working in Mike Rogers’ office – if she was from Michigan, etc. It turns out she is from Grand Rapids and comes from a family of teachers, as I do – and so we wound up talking about education issues.

I asked her if she was bilingual and she said she was, so I told her I had been a bilingual teacher in Washington state. When she suggested that the Michigan Education Association of caring only about money for teachers, I didn’t tell her I was staying in the home of the Secretary/Treasurer of the NEA – a UU friend of mine from Utah – but I did tell her that I had organized the teachers in the only school district in the state of Washington that didn’t belong to the Washington Education Assoc. – and why. We were able to connect on issues of meeting the needs of students – and all I can say is that the meeting was radically different than I would have expected, eminently more hopeful.

And hope is what this is all about. As Rabbi Michael Lerner reminded us over and over again at the conference, and also writes in his book, cynicism and despair is popular right now. It’s easy. There is much to decry, much to be angry about. However, the religious position, the spiritual position, requires a harder stance, a deeper look.

I won’t speak for you, but I know that I am complicit with evil – that my own habits of consumption and lifestyle encourage the exploitation of others in the free market – and I could spend my time beating up on myself or on others – or, I could choose to discover a new bottom line, articulate a new bottom line, and begin to live a new bottom line.

That’s what Capek did with the flower communion – he emphasized the individual character of each member-flower and our common cause. He reminded his congregation of First Corinthians and the value of love over money, the value of compassion over power. We value people as ends of themselves, not as means to our own wealth and power. "Every person," he wrote, "is an embodiment of God and in every one of us God struggles for higher expression."²

This flower communion, which may seem quite innocuous to you, was not so to the rising Nazi party – for the declaration that diversity makes us stronger was as threatening to them then as it is now for some – those on the religious right who want this to be a Christian country, wanting to add an amendment to the Constitution to discriminate against loving couples that don’t meet their definition of family, misreading our history and our downplaying our beautiful diversity.

And I’m going to digress just a little here to explain how the Spiritual Progressives addresses this issue of family and the attempt to amend the constitution to discriminate against families with two parents of the same gender. We all know – or Ill speak for myself my husband and I know (OK, I’ll speak for my husband and myself)– that it is no threat to our marriage that homosexual couples be allowed to get married. While liberals dismiss that premise, they often miss that there really is a spiritual crisis in our families – and this covenant with America seeks to deal with the spiritual crisis. It’s hard work to stay a family –the Right may have scapegoated the homosexual, and wrongly identified the cause, but the disease – how hard it is to be a family and stay a family in the culture - is still there – and when we talk of the rights of individuals, we fail to acknowledge the real pressures on our families, the real difficulty of creating and sustaining loving, intimate relationships and raising healthy children in a toxic environment where money and power are valued over people…. That’s the reality we should be talking about.

OK, back to Capek and his fight against the rising fascism of his time. I want to read you the last poem that Capek wrote to his daughter Zora, written on the 31st of March 1942 one day before his trial that sent him to his death in a Nazi concentration camp. ³It’s a reminder to me that the religious position is not the easy route of cynicism and despair, but rather the harder work of cultivating hope and working toward our ideals.

Wrote Capek.

It is worthwile for me to live
and bravely fight for saintly ideals
although disappointed a thousand times
and perhaps even to fall in this fight
when everything would seem in vain.

blow, angry winds, through my stony body;
you will not conquer my soul.
I have lived in the center of eternity,
my soul will be eternal
My living was worth it.

Whoever has been set upon from all sides,
but with his soul has conquered,
is welcome in the chorus of heroes
whoever has broken his shackles
and given wings to his mind
is marching into a golden future.