December 2006 Archives

Yesterday, we remembered Marjorie's life in a memorial service at Community Church of New York. Marjorie would be pleased, she planned the music and designated certain people to speak and hinted at what they might want to speak about. Below was her draft.

When Community Church was chosen we made it more concrete. Thanks to so many who made it possible.

Order of Service

Prelude

Come Sunday, Edward "Duke" Ellington
Sylvia Wells, piano; Lloyd Goldstein ~ double bass

Chalice Lighting

Invocation

The 23rd Psalm, Jubilee Singers
arranged by Cissy Houston, degenderized by Bobby McFerrin

Opening Words

[why we are here €¦ include reading of Maya Angelou's "Spirit"]

Responsive Reading €" "We Need One Another"

We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted.

We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.

We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation, and need to be recalled to our best selves again.

We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose, and cannot do it alone.

We need one another in the hour of success, when we look for someone to share our triumphs.

We need one another in the hour of defeat, when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.

We need one another when we come to die, and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey.

All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.

George E. Odell

Hymn 123, Spirit of Life

Obituary (read in silence)

Everything Must Change, Quincy Jones

Reading

Let Me Die Laughing, Mark Morrison-Reed

Solo

Eternal Life, Olive Dungan, arr.

Eulogy

Rev. Rob Hardies / Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt

Tributes

Family - Talibah (aka Tonya Edmonds) and Marcus Alan Wells
and Clyde Elliot Grubbs

Solo

Precious Lord, Thomas A. Dorsey

Tributes

A Time of Silence

Musical Meditation

Don't Cry for Me, CeCe Winans

Benediction
Postlude - Claire de Lune, Claude Debussy

Thank you to all who contributed comments to Breaking the Rules. I believe that the encounter between the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and the Reverend Martha Niebanck's pickup chorus at Starr Island back in 1997 illustrates the spiritual practice that we have come to call "Staying at the Table." The practice involves patiently challenging the assumptions of the dominant culture by inviting a cross cultural conversation based on emphatic engagement. (Breaking the Rules is a selection of a sermon by Martha Niebanck.)

Staying at the table involves self awareness for those engaged in confronting oppressive social constructions because if one is to practice it one must accept that many dominant culture folks will reject the opportunity to discuss their experience and their assumptions and refuse to get in touch with their own privilege and their own familiar and personal experience of oppression. And for many who experience systemic oppression, whether that oppression is patriarchy, racism, cultural domination, imperialism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism or some other form of oppression to stay at the table seems to invite more insults and misunderstanding. Better leave the conversation and find some like minded people to share in the strength of one's own kind.

(In plain English, the invitation to deep conversation may be rejected in a less than courtesy manner and so why take a chance? Because we can not escape oppression, we can only overcome it.)

Staying at the Table is personally difficult, that why it is a spiritual discipline. Still if we are to overcome racism and cultural domination we must stay engaged and invite transformation.

Gandhi read Jesus and discovered what many others have discovered, a form of engagement with violence based not on returning violence or fleeing the violator, but on loving resistance. I believe staying at the table involves a similar stance.

How different this approach is from some of the discussion of cultural misappropriation that I hear and read from my fellow Unitarian Universalists. On the one hand we have the cosmopolitans, who argue that music is music and African Americans don't own African American music. They the cosmopolitans can sing it because it is "human expression" and they are human and by singing they expand their playlist and "celebrate their diversity." On the other hand we have the censors, which argue that under no circumstance can dominant culture folk sing songs of the cultures of the oppressed without engaging in oppression.

Clearly Marjorie's invitation to Martha's group was to appropriate consciously and emphatically. But to make that invitation required the practice of staying at the table despite the protests of those who dismissed her concern as "politically correct" and "denying me a good time of just singing."

Yesterday I travelled by way of the Number 3 train to 72nd and Amsterdam by subway, then walked from the subway stop over to Fourth Universalist Church (76th St and Central Park West) to pick up some items that I had lent Rosemary Bray McNatt,. I walked back to the subway and took the train to 42nd Street and then transferred over to S train and took it to Grand Central. I then walked to the Community Church at 35th and Park. I met with Janice Marie Johnson about some details for the Memorial Service for my late wife, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley. Then I walked over to Sixth Street and got on the N to bring me back to Court Street in Brooklyn. The subways are wonderful ways of getting around the city, but the haven't been updated for ease of use, upstairs and downstairs and long corridors for transfers.

I think I might have walked four miles during the course of the afternoon plus at least 12 flights of stairs. I am not in terrible shape, but not ready to hike up a mountain either - but New Yorkers do this kind of thing everyday.

One can be car free in New York, get a good workout, and spend the money one would on a car on taxis when time is pressing. And save enough to retire to the Sun Belt, I can' t imagine doing those stairs for many more years.

Of course I might have walked a few less steps if I had my sense of direction up and running. Marjorie always told me I could find my way anywhere, but I have found myself turned around more than once in this city. I got to corner of the 35th and Park Ave. yesterday and lo there was no church! I called Janice, and she told me to cross the street. Community Church is one the West Side of Park, not the East as I had remembered.

I am looking out over the Manhattan skyline from a Brooklyn Heights parsonage. I can see where the Staten Island Ferry docks, and where the Brooklyn Bridge enters Manhattan and I can see the Empire State Building further up Manhattan. Beneath the Empire State Building is the location of community church.

I am in New York until the Memorial Service for Marjorie on Saturday. My New York City visits go back to the early 1960s. I was here when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and I was part of the huge demonstration the next day, I was here for anti Vietnam war rallies, and large meetings in solidarity with the overthrown democratically elected government of
Chile. Most of my New York adventures were on the upper West Side in those days.

Later I lived a few months in Chelsea, and visited friends here frequently driving from Boston and parking in the space of a friend who lived in a co-op who had a parking space but no car.
When I meet Marjorie I got to know the East Side a little better, I would come down from Quebec and we would see the city. I remember the trip to Union Theological School for a lecture, it was cold and it involved a lot of transfers. The lecture I have forgotten, but that trip was an adventure. Marjorie travelled all over the city.

I know Boston so much better, but this city has been very much a part of my life. I will consider the next few days as if it were a pilgrimage, reconnecting with so many events over so many years.

Boston's Arlington Street was not my first church experience. I didn't begin to attend Arlington Street until I was nineteen. I had been part of at least four Unitarian churches before that, not counting the one I was christened in. But in those churches I was always Clyde and May's son Clyde Elliot.

Arlington Street was a place where no one knew my parents, and I was one of the young people. Jack Mendelson was minister then. I was not a loyalist. I went to King's Chapel, First Church and Charles Street Meeting House. When I went to San Francisco to finish to college, I went to the Bay area UU churches. When I came back to Massachusetts in 1965 to go Crane Theological School I did my student ministry at Second Church of Boston up in the Fenway.

But I always came back to Arlington Street when I had to think about my life. I first made the decision to go into the ministry there sitting in a pew. It was sitting in that same pew that i decided to leave theological school in 1966 and throw myself into trying to stop the Vietnam war. When I became disillusioned with the leadership of the Unitarian Universalist Association during the Black Empowerment Struggle in 1969 and 1970, I found folks at Arlington Street who agreed with me, and was able to "keep the faith" despite my anger with those who we had designated to lead us. For years I travelled as an organizer, kept myself busy as a justice advocate, and experienced that Arlington Street was there when I had a free Sunday, when I needed to touch base with that childhood faith that kept calling me home.

Finally it was at Arlington Street all most twenty years ago now that I again felt the call to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. At the time, I had so many commitments and it seemed totally out of the question, so many people depended on me. But I was yearning for a way to combine my commitment to social justice and peace with a spiritual understanding. I read for a few years, trying to reconnect with the theological and religious studies that I had given up as irrelevant in the late 60s when the realities of war and racism confronted my liberal faith and found it wanting. Over the next years I began to reconstruct a theology, Unitarian in ancient simplicity - bring God's beloved community to realization, it is present and among us, but we do not see it.

It was at Arlington Street where I was ordained. And I have returned at least once a year.

During this last week I have been there three times, twice for public worship and once for a conversation with my home church's minister. Kim Crawford Hardie and I shared stories of Marjorie. I experience myself as a congregant with her, a colleague and peer to be sure, but she is still my minister. It was good to go home.

A 1997 sermon by Martha Niebanck recalls Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley:

Breaking social rules, sometimes just even talking about our culture and the meanings of what we say and do takes courage. I had an experience this summer at Star Island that brought this message home. I still haven't learned all there is to learn from the experience.

Two weeks before I went to Star Island for a week with religious educators I was driving home from the Doolittle Home one Friday and went into Building 19. That's my Friday afternoon ritual. I saw a CD of Sweet Honey in the Rock, called Sacred Grounds and played it when I arrived home. The first song, "I Remember, I Believe" left me in tears the first time I heard it. I couldn't explain it but I was drawn to that song. I played it again and again for the next two weeks, imagining getting a singing group together to sing it for the talent show. In my past years at Star Island, I had always waited to be invited to sing with other people, so to initiate a singing group was new for me. I wasn't sure of the rules, the conventions involved in inviting singers, of ignoring the choir director, of getting men and women to sing together instead of the usual women's singing group. I didn't think about it consciously, but the sense that I was in new social territory gave me a vague uneasiness.

The theme speaker that week was the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatly, an African-American woman who is the affiliate minister at the Community Church in New York. She spoke each morning about the challenges of making our communities diverse. She spoke about the need for African Americans to define and control their own culture rather than to simply disappear into the white-western culture. What she said wasn't new to me but I got more and more uncomfortable about singing a Gospel tune in her presence. I proceeded with asking people to sing and one night, over dinner, I asked Marjorie to sing. She told me that she had taken lessons with Sweet Honey and that she might sing with us if she had the time. I felt encouraged to get the group together, assuming that Marjorie would teach us to sing it authentically. I thought to myself , "She would give it soul."

I got a group together, men and women, and we practiced, and we decided we were good enough to be in the musicale. I was learning how things got done in this new cultural context of Star Island. Marjorie wasn't able to join us until our very last rehearsal. She slowly walked into the room and asked a question. "How do you understand yourselves to be singing these words."

I swallowed hard, feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable and spoke about the theology of remembering and believing. I looked her in the eye and said, " I believe that I can, by singing this song, learn in my body the kind of courage and faith of the African Americans who have survived slavery." When I said those words I thought of myself as honoring those people and their courage. She didn't overtly respond with approval or disapproval but instead asked each person for their understanding. One man walked out of the room without a word, the others began to talk all at once, defensiveness in their tone. I heard my own defensiveness in my voice that sounded aggressive and pointed and realized that we were being forced to have a real conversation about something uncomfortable. Until Marjorie had the courage to break the rule of silence, we had practiced good manners and kept quiet about our understanding of how a group of Euro-Americans could sing this song with any authority of their own experience. In our discussion we learned that each of us had a sense of our own slavery or an oppression that a family member had endured.

But I make it all sound clear in my telling, when it was not clear in the moment. Some folks felt that we were being told not to sing the song. Some folks thought Marjorie was accusing us of being racist. There was anger and frustration and tears. The man who left told me," I come to Star Island to get away from arguments. I am in charge of how I spend my time and I didn't want to spend my precious hours fighting-even if it was a good fight. I just wanted to sing." Marjorie stood her ground, even as the second member fled the room, she insisted that we needed to talk rather than to keep silent. She insisted on breaking the rule of polite silence we had been practicing. She insisted on breaking the social convention that allowed us to borrow African American culture and use it for our own, undiscussed purposes.

Our conversation did not resolve itself but we agreed to sing anyway. I promised to introduce our singing with a statement that allowed the audience into our discussion. I said, " We are singing a song tonight that comes out of the suffering of slavery. It took us a week to have a discussion about how we have the right to sing it. We are doing the work of diversity that we came to Star to learn and we ask that you hear us sing and know that it is a prayer for our healing.

I am still in the process of learning from my experience at Star this summer. Today I am aware of the silencing oppression of good manners -the fear of making a fuss, going along with the status quo, in the service of behaving "properly." Like the hemorrhaging woman we are expected to stay in the privacy of our homes if we are bleeding.

The Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley taught me something about challenging the etiquette of silence.

I have been in Boston for a week tomorrow. I have been visiting friends. I have been checking in at the UUA. I came up to Boston just after the funeral last Saturday.

When I came I was disoriented. Grieving. Tired. Very tired. I was coming down with a cold. The cold lingers. I am less disoriented. I have embraced the grieving, it doesn't possess me like last week. I experience myself owning the grief, and being deliberate about the process. I know I will still find myself overwhelmed and taken by aching sorrow. But right now it is more a sweet sorrow, a contemplative sigh.

Talking to people who knew Marjorie is good for the soul, good for the grieving. Thanks to all who gave of their time. One good friend observed that those I meet with, knew Marjorie as well, and that the sharing of stories with me was part of their grieving as well. She asked if that was difficult for me. I answered no. I find being alone more difficult, talking with others about Marjorie is healing.

I lived in Boston and its vicinity for most of my adult life. Being here, trying to navigate by rapid transit and bus, walking from the bus to this church, and that headquarters building has been a revelation. My body has become accustomed to a warmer, dryer winter than Boston presents. This is a warm day for Boston, but it is too cold and damp for me.

My soul loves Boston, but my body wants to be in LA. I think I will schedule my Boston visits for the warmer times in the future.

The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations announces the creation of The Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley Fund.

"This fund will be used to support Unitarian Universalist congregations and their lay and ordained leaders who are committed to the transformative work of creating inclusive multicultural communities of the spirit."

The UUA web page that is devoted to this fund has information about credit card contributions, snail mail contributions and even transfers of stocks and bonds to the fund.

Grants from the fund will be made with the approval of the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and members of the Bowens-Wheatley family.

For tax purposes: The UUA is a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax-exempt I.D. number is 04-210-3733. Your donation to the Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley Fund qualifies as a tax deductible charitable gift. Please consult your financial and tax advisors regarding your particular circumstances.

"I continue to be nurtured by my ministerial colleagues, but when I go into many of our congregations, at a cultural level, it often feels like all the healthy juices in my body are being drained out of me.

What continues to challenge my personal faith is wondering whether I will ever see the day when our religious movement moves beyond its Eurocentric norms. We would probably all agree that a life of faith cannot be nurtured in the face of endemic evil. But it's more difficult to see that it is also impossible for many people from non-European heritage to be nurtured by an upper middle class Euro-centric norm blessed by self-satisfaction.

Someday, I'm going to update W.E.B. DuBois' book, "The Ways of White Folks," that will focus on the cost of Euro-centrism and of cultural indifference in a multicultural society."

From the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley
address to the Birmingham Minister's Convocation 2002

A DRUUM meeting in San Diego, California

We are planning the memorial service for December 30th at Community Church of New York at 2 pm. It took a little bit of coordinating to find a common date.



"Ministry is what we do together - clergy and the laity. It flows from a religious
conviction that invites people to become more of themselves, more whole, as we give
witness to a vision of a world transformed by our care."

Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley - January 2005
from an eulogy delivered at her father's funeral

This is a photo of the Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Janice Marie Johnson sharing in the ministry of JUUST change. (An UUA effort to help congregations in the transformative work of overcoming racism and embracing multiculturalism.) It was taken by JUUST change consultant Annette Marquis

Marjorie and I chose to celebrate her life at The Community Church in New York. To gather all that we hoped could participate means that the service will be in January. Some have assumed that the service would take place right away, but Marjorie thought big and her service will reflect her spirit.

Marjorie passed to glory yesterday morning.

Her sister, her daughter, her nephew, a good friend and I were with her. We prayed and wished her peace and breadth from the dawn to about ten in the morning and then she left us peacefully. It was a gentle crossing.

I sat with her till the late afternoon when the men came to take her, and the family gathered on the street as she was driven away.

Our good friend Hope Johnson was installed as minister of the congreation in Garden City (Long Island) New York and many of her friends and colleagues were there and they tell me that Marjorie's name was lifted up as part of the celebration.

The family gathered here and we shared my photographs of her and memories into the late evening

Marjorie said "my life is a prayer. She witnessed Jesus with her life, praying always.

We are in New Jersey. Family and friends are coming to share their love with Marjorie and the family. She is so happy to be here.

(This is dial up and this is Windows, so being on line will be once and while and knowing what the computer is doing will another damn growth experience.  I think I will take the MacBook to a coffee shop.)

Marjorie wants to be with her family in the Greater Philadelphia area, so we are going to stay with her sister in New Jersey. She is much to weak to fly on a commercial flight, and thus our friends from this loving faith community have worked a miracle in the last few days.

Marjorie, her daughter and I will leave for New Jersey on a medical transport flight this afternoon. It would not have been possible with out these friends and our Unitarian Universalist community. Thank you.

Marjorie's daughter tells me that her aunt doesn't have internet, so for what I hope will be a long time I may not be on line.

Preaching is done by embodied beings.

The last time I wrote was just before the oncologist told us that Marjorie's cancer had spread to her stomach, and that she had five months to live. She was being optimistic.

It is six weeks, and Marjorie is failing rapidly. It is a sad time.