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Later this morning I will be speaking at UT on the issue of privatization and what that will mean for the workers and students. This is what I intend to say:

It was Jefferson who said that democracy rises and falls with public education, and so we must be very concerned when the moneyed aristocracy launches what some have called a “stealth campaign” to privatize services at the University of Texas.

The University of Texas has undertaken a study of the possibility of privatizing such services as housing, food and parking. The same model was applied to Texas A&M where a similar group of business people showed how money could be saved by privatizing services. Workers were guaranteed that they would be able to keep their same jobs under the new private ownership for at least two years. As a formality, they would be asked to re-apply for their jobs, but the deal was presented as a win/win for everyone. When the smoke cleared, only 600 of the 1,647 employees were kept on and local businesses were replaced by cheaper resources from elsewhere.

The modern university was born out of humanism’s rejection of the feudal worldview where education was reserved for the children of aristocrats and the plentiful poor were, by cosmic design, uneducated pawns of the powerful. Have we now grown weary of the work required for the great dream of universal education? Have we now returned to another form of feudalism where the power of kings and queens is replaced by the wealth of a new aristocracy, and thrones have been replaced by the board rooms of those imaginary royal persons we call “corporations.’

When “public” universities are bought by “private” interests, there will be an unavoidable conflict of interest. Either the private owners will be asked to lose money for the public good, or the “public good” will be defined by those corporate entities whose only charter is to make money for shareholders. Inevitably, professors will spend more and more time doing research that brings profit to corporate sources of funding, and less and less time actually educating students. Before long, corporate sponsors will point out that food services and housing are beneath market levels and so prices will rise to be competitive with private institutions. As a result of being unable to meet market levels of spending, poorer students will return to their feudal role as uneducated pawns of the wealthy.

Please know that we must choose between these two visions of the human condition, the great dream of a democratic egalitarian humankind, or the fitful illusions of a new feudalism that believes some were born to lead and others born to serve. In many ways, the tracks have already been laid, and universities are already a painted harem for corporate interests. As we watch the privatizing of the public realm, we must realize that we are watching our democracy being sold at a yard sale. But also know that we are not helpless, let your voice be heard. This University belongs to all humankind, We will not allow it to be sold to the highest bidder.

I have given the better part of my life to religion. For me, religion is humankind’s shared awe before the mystery of the universe. What any of us know is always a small island surrounded by a boundless ocean of mystery. Religion, to me, means never forgetting to be moved by awe before that uncharted mystery. At the same time, I also hold that believing we should impose our feeble understanding upon others is the original sin of religion.

I live within a little school district that understands why the public arena must be protected from sectarian religious bias in its policies. The Pflugerville Independent School District courageously decided recently to provide health benefits to domestic partners and same sex couples. Their reasoning was unassailable: justice, in a democracy,  means giving others every right that we claim for ourselves.

Unsurprisingly, conservative churches in the area mobilized to support candidates who would overturn those benefits, and silence the view that every citizen deserves to be treated the same way.  I want to be clear in saying these churches have every right to gather in community and teach a moral framework based on their beliefs. If, in their community they want to withhold leadership from women, or to withhold marriage from same sex couples, they should be free to do so; but only at the level of their private gatherings. When such teachings are brought into the public sphere they become an assault upon our democratic understanding of justice.

Such assaults are bad civics; but, as a minister, I must also say they are even worse expressions of Christianity. We cannot take something Jesus did not address and assert that it is a central teaching of the church. To do so replaces Jesus’ teaching of love with our own understanding of morality. To say Jesus condemned homosexuality is to lie about scripture as well as to bear false witness against our neighbor.

Jesus’ command that we not judge one another cannot be taken out of the Christian message. It is a central warning label against imposing our Christian religion upon others. Anti-gay religious activists often quote the first chapter of Romans to justify their assaults on same sex couples, but Paul’s argument is that all of us fall short and therefore make bad judges. His summary statement in verse 2:1 is not a condemnation of homosexuality, but of religious judgment. To impose Christain teaching upon others is not only bullying, it is heresy to the message of love.

As clergy, I cannot not publically endorse any particular candidate; but I can and must encourage everyone in the area to vote. If you appreciate a school board that believes in equal justice for all, then please support them against a sectarian religious campaign seeking to impose one religious understanding upon the rest of us. Democracy hangs in the balance at times like this. Freedom for anyone of us to live out the religion of our choice also means we must be free from anyone else’s.

The trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should raise some very interesting legal questions.

After being pursued as a terrorist, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will apparently be tried in a civilian court. The defendant went through sixteen hours of interrogation before he was given his Miranda rights. Will the “public safety exception” hold up through an appeal process in a civilian court, or will the case be thrown out? After all, Miranda is not a law in and of itself but a crystallization of the constitutional principle that every accused person has certain rights and should be told those before being interrogated. If the right can be waived for any citizen simply because they are called “terrorist” what does that mean for the Constitution?

Of late, we waive Miranda rights for people accused of being terrorists, but a trial may raise the question why Muslim killers receive that label, but not white Christians like the killers at Columbine and Sandy Hook? Will the principle of “equal treatment before the law” surface in this trial?

Will anyone ask what constitutional sense it makes to interrogate someone as an “enemy combatant” when no war has not been declared?

It would be a terrible thing for a dangerous killer to walk free on technicalities. It is also a terrible thing when core constitutional principles have to be gutted to prevent that from happening.

A young minister fresh out of seminary went to a new church and made all kinds of changes. He fired the church organist of thirty years and replaced her with a much better musician. In the church library, he replaced the King James Bibles with a newer more accurate translation. He insisted that people use the proper theological vocabulary he had learned in school. Soon, he was out of work.

Baffled, he consulted his friend Texas Buddha.  “Everything I did was right. Those were all changed that needed to happen. How did I get fired?”

TB put his hand on the young man’s shoulder, “Human groups are not like automobiles where you can simply remove and replace parts. They are more like aquariums. In an aquarium, you cannot simply buy the fish and put them in water. You must wait until conditions are right and the water is a balance of  acid and base. The water must have time to develop bacteria or the fish die in their own waste. Whether it is your family, workplace or church, remember the three laws of an aquarium:

-It’s not what the fish look like in the store, that matters but how they mix with each other.

-If you try to make the water too pure, the fish die.

-It’s usually the imbalance you can’t see that kills you.”

Before our white brothers and sisters arrived to make us civilized,

we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents.

Without a prison, there can be no delinquents.

We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves.

When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket,

they would, in that case, receive it all as a gift.

We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property.

We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being

was not determined by wealth.

We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians,

therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another.

We were really in bad shape before the white people arrived and I don’t know

how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things

that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

John (Fire) Lame Deer

Sioux Lakota – 1903-1976

When all the trees have been cut down,

when all the animals have been hunted,

when all the waters are polluted,

when all the air is unsafe to breathe,

only then will you discover you cannot eat money.

Cree Prophecy

We do not want schools….

they will teach us to have churches.

We do not want churches….

they will teach us to quarrel about God.

We do not want to learn that.

We may quarrel with (human beings) sometimes

about things on this earth,

but we never quarrel about God.

We do not want to learn that.

Heinmot Tooyalaket ( Chief Joseph), Nez Perce Leader

When one sits in the Hoop Of The People,

one must be responsible because

All of Creation is related.

And the hurt of one is the hurt of all.

And the honor of one is the honor of all.

And whatever we do effects everything in the universe.

passed down from White Buffalo Calf Woman

The True Peace

The first peace, which is the most important,

is that which comes within the souls of people

when they realize their relationship,

their oneness, with the universe and all its powers,

and when they realize that at the center

of the universe dwells Wakan-Taka (the Great Spirit),

and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this.

Black Elk, Oglala Sioux & Spiritual Leader (1863 – 1950)

My Grandparents were morticians. As a child I often had nightmares about the funeral home.  Some nights, a corpse would hide under my bed.  Occasionally, a second corpse made noises from my closet.  When I tried to crawl into bed with my parents, my father took the scientific approach.  He opened the closet door or lifted up the bedspread and pointed under the bed.  “See?  There’s nothing there.”

Dad did not seem to realize that monsters can always anticipate where adults are going to look and change hiding places.  I pretended to be convinced by his demonstration until he fell asleep and then crawled back into my parent’s bed on my mother’s side.  Mom would hold me a bit and then tell me a story; sometimes from old southern folk tales, and, often times, from the Bible.

It did little good for my dad to tell me there weren’t corpses under my bed – I was certain I had heard them.  But stories about a clever rabbit tricking a fox or a little kid defeating a giant with a slingshot convinced me that I could face whatever was under my bed.  At some level, I knew that there probably weren’t really monsters under the bed, but I was genuinely afraid and needed to be reassured.  The stories lifted me to my own courage.

Some people say that religion is a trick to frighten people, but my mother never told me religious stories to frighten me into being good.  I was already afraid when she began the story.  If I questioned the details of the story, mom just shrugged.  Although she wouldn’t say it, I could tell my questions were missing the point.  At some level I knew she was sharing a different kind of truth than history or science.  It was like a special code that unlocked the secrets I needed to be wise and brave. The religion I learned from those stories was a call to courage, but it was spoken in stories that a frightened child could hear.  After listening to the story, I would go back to my bed unafraid.  Eventually I could even look under the bed to see that there really was only dust.

I am so glad my father taught me to be scientific and to test every belief for superstition.  But I am also grateful to my mother for the stories that speak to my deeper emotional being as well.  Today I hear the biblical stories as calls to wisdom and courage perhaps because I first heard them while wrapped in a blanket and spoken in the raspy voice of a weary parent half asleep.

My grandparents worked at a funeral home, but even after that upbringing, and thirty years of doing funerals myself, I still find funeral homes  incredibly strange.

Yesterday my family did funeral preparations for mother’s service. The mortician was very nice but I kept looking around the room at the strange paraphernalia of his trade. There was a lock box that mounted on the inside of the casket so family members could file important documents for safe keeping, presumably so the deceased could refer to them later. I wondered if the deceased would get to have a key to the lock box, and whether thieves after bothering to dig six feet through the ground to open the casket, would not think to look in the pockets.

I also marvel at the decorations of most funeral homes. They usually look like the stereotype of a brothel in a movie about the wild west. They usually sport garish wallpaper, chairs that do not match, invasive potpourri and paintings that look like they were pulled from a dumpster.

I am glad the family has decided not to do a viewing of mom’s body. Whenever someone leans over the casket, looks into the waxy face of a embalmed body and says, “she looks like she’s asleep,” I always think to myself, “No, she looks like a fricking candle.”

I have to think the artificiallity of our funeral customs plays a role in our cultural fear of death. Perhaps if we saw our own deaths as part of life, the self-described “home of the brave” would not waste all of our resources on defense and wet ourselves every time another nation wants  the same weapons we have pointing at them. If throughout life we could remember that our bodies come from and return to the earth, perhaps death might not seem like such a terrifying travesty.

A spiritual seeker was always starting over. He was excited to convert to a new religion but, before long, he would always find some imperfection in the people or in the teaching. Eventually, he would always leave and seek out something new. For a while, he became an atheist, but found flaws with them as well.

Late in life the seeker found himself alone and without a practice. He decided to confront Texas Buddha, “You said every road leads to God, but I have tried them all and found nothing.”

Texas Buddha, who was digging a well, looked up to study the seeker for a moment. “Every road does lead to truth, but you must choose one as your life practice. Life is too short, and we are too small, to walk every path. If you dig one hundred shallow wells, you will not find water. What you are seeking can only be found at a certain depth of living. Choose a loving form of religion, or a loving form of atheism, but give yourself entirely to some path to love. It is a vicious cycle to always seek truth as something new, something we do not have. So long as we are driven by this self-contempt, we are not seeking truth but fleeing ourselves.”

I learned just now that my mother has passed away. I did not need to be told. The phone ringing in the middle of the night was enough. And because others have opened their hearts to me in times of their own death, I am not in uncharted territory. Thanks to them, I recognize this sad and beautiful land all too well.

I’ve learned a few things about death over the years. Death does not seem such a mystery to me. I am not so much comforted by static images of heaven as in that cosmic process to which the symbol “heaven” refers. We are born out of it and we dissolve back into it. What we think of as life and death are modulations of something deeper than either. Whether we call that mystery “matter” or “spirit” is a matter of semantics. The experience of life is surely beyond either of those categories.

As my mind fills with grateful memories to the woman who taught me so much, feel the need to sing a silent anthem to the river of life who gave such a gift. We do not belong to each other but to life. To love nature does not mean only to love trees and animals, we must also learn to love our death as well as our birth, for life is endless change.

We are not the flickering consciousness that hovers above such living and dying. We are not some static observer left behind by the flow of the river. We do not stand at the shoreline watching everything else change, we too belong to the flux.

As a fish might, in times of storm, find peace by going deeper into the current, so may we in times of grief and pain go deep enough into our grief to find that life and death are threads in a seamless garment. Above all, we must not hover above life as an imagined observer, we must go deep.

There in the depths of life we are comforted by the universality of death. And so it is with any grief. This is not my grief, it belongs to us all. Grief is the painful trophy given to all who have had the privilege of loving. I have been by the side of those whose greatest wish at the end was to make their death into a gift to others. They shared their fears and their acceptance with me at that most intimate moment. And now at this sad time, in the dead of night, I hold their precious gift.

I, too, want to share the gift. I want to learn and teach that when we receive the call, as we all eventually do, at the death of the dearest of friends and especially as we approach our own death, we must remember to go deep.

Reverend Clovis Jones had taught his daughter bible verses since she was young enough to speak. He had aspirations of her becoming a great biblical scholar some day. He imagined her having a biblical answer for every question anyone might ask.

When his daughter Amy got to be a teenager, she refused to learn any more bible verses. She began to object to his answers for her life. Eventually she moved out and stopped going to church. The minister was crushed.

Turning to an old friend, Reverend Jones asked Texas Buddha for advice. Pulling out a Lone Star Beer to offer his friend TB began to speak:

“Math books sometimes have answers to homework assignments in the back. A student who spends the semester copying the answers in the back will have no idea how to respond when the actual exam comes because he or she has learned answers instead of the principles of math.

“I know that you look at the bible as an answer book, but think about it. When believers are told not to think or struggle, but just to memorize the answers, they are helpless to respond when life presents its exams. Answers have no meaning if we have not first learned how to ask the questions.

“Go back to your daughter and ask her what is happening in her life that has made her outgrow your answers. Your daughter has grown up. The only way you can influence her now is to become her student as well as her teacher.”