Examining the Religion and Spirituality of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln summed up his view.

Note--On Abraham Lincoln's Birthday we reconsider his religious life.

Abraham Lincoln spent a lifetime wrestling with the deepest religious and spiritual questions.  He kept his personal beliefs generally close to his vest.  Although not a conventional Christian, he knew the Bible intimately from thousands of hours of reading and study and could quote chapter and verse with ease.  He was a deeply moral man who agonized over the consequences of his decisions and actions and never let himself off the hook with facile excuses. 

Back in 2009 the nation was in the grip of a wave of Lincoln mania in conjunction with the bi-centennial of his birth.  There was an avalanche of new books and articles examining every aspect of the Great Emancipator’s life, work, and connections.

The Religious Right—those who were not also neo-Confederates anyway—was busy, as usual, trying to retroactively adopt him as an Evangelical Christian.  On the other hand, the small world of the Unitarian Universalist blog-o-sphere and a spate of sermons, tried to lay claims that Lincoln was, at least in spirit, a Unitarian or a Universalist.

Scott Wells, then a leading Universalist and Christian blogger from a Southern background who has since left the denomination, claimed to be immune to the cult of Lincoln worship.  For his family Lincoln represented oppression, destruction, and the nightmare of Reconstruction.  He also scolded U.U.s for trying to appropriate Lincoln into our ever popular lists of famous UUs.

The following is adapted from my response to Wells.

Hagiography aside, there are many reasons to put your understandable regional bias aside and spend some time studying Abraham Lincoln.  As flawed and inconsistent as any man, he is still rewarding for the subtlety and depth of his thought and his life-long struggle to reconcile a true and deeply held idealism with both personal ambition and the need to act in a brutal and unforgiving environment. Even Harry Truman, a Missouri Democrat whose unreconstructed Confederate mother never forgave him for making Lincoln’s Birthday a national holiday, came to deeply admire his ancient tribal enemy.

At the dawn of modern Fundamentalism, this author tried to paint Lincoln as an Evangelical Christian despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Lincoln’s relationships to religion are not a murky as some suppose.  Certainly, any denomination that would attempt to claim him as its own is self-delusional. Here is some of what we know.

• At no time in Lincoln’s life did he ever claim to be a Christian as understood in his time or to be saved.
• As far is known he was never baptized and never became a member of any church.
• Among his earliest published writings were attacks on a political rival, Peter Cartwright, a fire-and-brimstone Methodist circuit rider who had accused Lincoln of infidelity and had used his wide Methodist connections to build a Democratic political operation.  The articles, which appeared under a nom de plume, mocked both the man’s religion and his attempts to use his followers as a political base.  Lincoln claimed never to have “denied the truth of Scripture” but did acknowledge that he was not a church member.  Lincoln defeated Cartwright for a seat in Congress, but Cartwright’s charges that he was an infidel—and his own tart responses—would dog him for years.
• Like most self-educated Americans who had literary aspirations and who were not versed in the Latin and Greek of the Eastern college educated elite, Lincoln had two primary sources to draw from for both inspiration and style—The King James Version of the Bible and the popular plays of William Shakespeare.  He knew both.  But his writing was infused with the cadences and majesty of the Bible. He could also, if the occasion called for it, usually in response to some hypocrisy from the mouth of a believer, quote verse with ease.
• He deeply admired Thomas Jefferson and treasured the Declaration of Independence as the essential founding document. He borrowed from Jefferson, and from George Washington, the language of Deism in public discourse. He frequently spoke of Providence, Creator, and other Deist constructions. He did not avoid the word God as they usually did, but he did not invoke an explicitly Christian God. One can search in vain for much use of the words Christ or Savior outside of the context of letters of condolence to the families of fallen soldiers often echoing back sentiments expressed by the bereaved. He was all for giving whatever comfort he could.

     ·   In Springfield he attended Mary’s Presbyterian Church and was friendly with its ministerbut never joined the church or partook in the Spartan Presbyterian communion.  That hasn’t stopped that congregation from calling itself “Lincoln’s Church” to this day.

Despite the claims by some, Lincoln was no Unitarian but did avidly read the sermons of Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and social reformer the Rev. Theodore Parker and famously paraphrased him in speeches.
 

·         He read the published sermons of both William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker and appropriated or adapted words from each—especially Parker—in his speeches. But in practice as President, despite a personally cordial relationship with Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner, he found Abolitionist Unitarians to be pig-headed impediments to a practical prosecution of the war and a move toward healing a post-war, re-united country.  Despite this the UU congregation in Springfield proudly his name.

 

Maybe Abe was a prophet after all.

In the post-war years both the Abolitionist preachers with whom he sparred during the war and a generation of new Unitarian leaders bloodied on the battlefields of that war—Jenkin Lloyd Jones being a prime example—participated in the myth making that turned the martyred President into a kind of a Saint. They went too far. And rubbing the defeated South’s nose in it exacerbated the regional disdain with which continues to deepen.

But I think many modern Unitarians and Universalists can find much with which to resonate in Lincoln’s personal spiritual journey.  It so resembles so many of our own.

 

 

Once Upon a Time Before the Internet…

Note: Thanks to the stellar service of ATT, cursed be their corporate person hood, internet service at the World Wide Headquarters of Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout has been down a week.  Allegedly a repair technician will arrive to solve the problem late Tuesday afternoon.  But as I type this, I am still bereft of modern communications and research capacity.

Because of the miracle of the World Wide Web a writer now has at his or her fingertips pretty much the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, lore, and artistic production of human kind as long as he/she can figure out the right search term in Google.  This has made writing a regular blog immeasurably easier.  I can do at least a cursory research of any topic and generally put together an entry that can fool most people into believing that I know what I am talking about in a few hours.

It was not always so.  Not so many years ago any article of average blog post length was the equivalent of a semi-major college paper and require some times days of research in both at home and in libraries and the production of copious notes.  For a lone wolf writer without a research department at his or her beck and call and without copy editors the kind of daily production I now attempt would be impossible.

Let’s revisit those quaint times.  We will begin with resources kept at hand, preferably within arm’s reach of the writer’s trusty manual typewriter—that’s a whole other story.  Here are some of the basics upon which I relied.

·       Dictionary.  I used my mother’s old blue-bound Webster’s Complete Collegiate Dictionary for years until it literally fell apart.  I replaced it with a fat red paper back with tiny print—The Miriam-Webster Dictionary.  Both invaluable tools, but you often need to actually know how to spell something to successfully look it up—a draw back for a writer who never met a spelling test he couldn’t flunk.  Roget’s Thesaurus was a must to avoid using the same word in a sentence two or three times.

·       Style book.   A must for any writer, I dabbled in the AP  stylebook, the standard of newspaper journalists, but generally followed an old friend from college—The Elements of Style by William Skunk and E. B. White, the now dated Bible  of more formal writing.  However for narrative writing, both factual and fiction and of course poetry, I untethered by ship from any style anchor in the service effect.  Despite the scorn of modernists it has firmly anchored me to such requirements as the Oxford comma and two spaces after a period ending a sentence. 

·       Almanac.  These amazing versatile single volumes were a cornucopia of statistical, geographic, historical, biographical, and odd-ball assorted facts.  There were options available, but I preferred The World Almanac and Book of Facts which I purchased annually even when the $5.00 or so cover price for the paperback at the drug store seemed like an enormous sacrifice.  It also contained several nice, shiny pages of color plates including The Flags of the World and the United States, and a basic Atlas.  Each new edition also include noted obituaries and longer articles selected by the mysterious whim of the editors

·       Encyclopedia.  A must-have, but a forbidding expense unless you were willing to settle on a twenty to thirty year outdated version on sale at a garage sale for about a penny a pound.  Door to Door salesmen were still pitching the World Book, Book of Knowledge, and even the gold standard Encyclopedia Britannica on monthly payments that would stretch into the next millennia.  I settle on the basic but serviceable Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia which I bought one volume a week as a premium offer at Dominic’s Supermarket in Chicago.  I also swallowed hard and subscribed to its Annuals which I kept getting for ten years or so to more or less keep the set current.  Anything I need greater detail on required a library visit to the temple of the Britannica.

·       Atlas.  I had an enormous National Geographic World Atlas with that publication’s elegant and detailed maps and which included maps of the solar system and universe.  A treat for the eyes, but unwieldy.  I also had a more manageable Funk and Wagnall’s atlas from Dominic’s and for a time a relief globe of the world I had in high school.  The trouble with atlases and globes is, alas, that in the turbulent modern world geographic boundaries, place names, countries, and empires change continually.

·       Bible.  Even if you are not writing specifically about religion, the Good Book was an essential reference and a key to much history, philosophy, and literary references.  There were even then numerous available translations, but then—and even now—I stubbornly used the King James Version of the Bible with the Words of Our Lord in Red Letters.  This is a choice mocked by biblical scholars who regard it an unreliable second or third hand translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek and Latin.  But it is the edition I grew up on and as a poet I genially admire its majestic passages and cadences.  So many modern translations grate on the ears.

·       American History.  I needed a fairly comprehensive single volume U.S. history source.  Perhaps I would have been better served with James and Mary Beard’s New Basic History of the United States, but I chose The Oxford History of the American People by Samuel Eliot Morison published in 1965.  Morison was a Boston Unitarian most noted as a Naval historian, but his book took into good account religious, cultural, artistic, and technical aspects of American history as well as the usual parade of Great Men, politics, and Wars.  Later Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States provided a much needed bottom up view of history and took into account the real lives of ordinary people.

·       Telephone directories.  Modern life was impossible without them and they were magically delivered to your door annually.  In Chicago there were two enormous tomes—the White Pages and the H.H. Donnelly Yellow Pages.

·       Miscellaneous.  The Book of Lists By David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace was both a fun discovery and turned out to be a goldmine of trivia and obscurity—right up my alley.

·       Wish I had.  The reference I did not have and most wish I did was Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Oh, what countless hours of searching that might have saved me.

A writer also had to be versed in current affairs and periodicals were they key.

·       Newspapers.  I was always at newspaper junkie.  Back in the day I regularly got both Field newspapers—the Chicago Sun-Times in the morning and the Daily News, home of Mike Royko and famous for its worldwide pool of correspondents.  Alas, the News folded, Royko moved to the Sun-Times which also had Roger Ebert, Bill Mauldin, and a descent selection of op-ed columnists.  But when we moved to Crystal Lake more than thirty years ago I switched to the Chicago Tribune which offered reliable home delivery, despite its odious editorial policy.  Since then both papers have suffered deep cuts to reporters and editorial staffs, but the Sun-Times has been reduced to a mostly pitiful shell.  For local coverage out here in the boonies, our local daily, now known as the Northwest Herald provided essential community coverage despite various deficiencies.  But few sub-urban areas in this country still have the luxury of a daily paper.

I had been reading Time  regularly since at least 1963 when it crowned Richard J. Daley as the  Mayor of the City that Works.

·       Magazines.  A newsweekly was a must.  I had been subscribing to Time since high school.  Henry Luce was a reactionary you could be well informed if you kept in mind built in bias.  Time was still considered the most comprehensive alternative to the more liberal Newsweek or even more conservative U.S. News and World Report. I read Time weekly for so many years that my regular readers might notice the influence of some of its somewhat peculiar style in my own writing.  This is not a point of pride.  For more left leaning news and analysis I sporadically subscribed to The Progressive, The Nation, and In These Times often depending on deals offered by Publisher’s Clearing House so that my wife could enter the sweepstakes with a clear conscience.  In the same way I sometimes received childhood treasure The National Geographic and handsome hard-bound American Heritage.

If none of these resources proved fruitful it was off to the Library.  In Chicago sometimes the old branch library at Fullerton and Sheffield by the L would suffice before it was torn down to make room for DePaul tennis courts.  But often if meant a trip the glorious and inspiring old Main Library at Michigan and Madison where working in the elegant main reading room was a pleasure.  Later, however, it meant a trip to the dismal and depressing warehouse where the stacks were moved and kept for years before the Harold Washington Library finally opened.  That sucked the joy out of the trip. 

The magnificent old Chicago Main Public Library, a treat to visit for research, has long been stripped of its stacks and is now the Cultural Center.  Another loss was the huge news stand that stretched down Madison from the corner of Michigan to the side entrance of the building.  There you could find a newspaper from every important city in the world  with in a day or so of publication as well as a comprehensive selection of U.S. periodicals.

In Crystal Lake it most often meant a 45 minute walk each way to the library.  Nice folks and a very well informed Reference Desk.  It meant combing the endless drawers of the card catalog with a slip of paper and a stub of a pencil in hand to note my discoveries then searching the shelves for them.  Of course scanning the shelves often tuned up unexpected discoveries and I often went home with unintended books.  Often older or more obscure books were unavailable locally, but I could often get them after a few days wait through the state-wide inter library loan system.  I remember finally getting a copy of the first volume of Henry Adams’s The History of the United States in the Jefferson and Madison Administrations in just such a way.

Of course sometimes even greater depth was required.  But access to university and specialized libraries was often difficult or impossible without academic credentials, verifiable employment with a recognized publication, or sponsorship by an established scholar.  All mostly insurmountable hurdles for an independent scribe without a degree or pedigree.  Even if permission could be obtained it usually involved travel to the institution.  That was tough when I sometimes barely had bus fare.

Locating an out of print book without haunting used bookstores was a real challenged particularly in specialized areas like labor history.  The book was likely out there someplace, but damned if you could find it.  After the Industrial Workers of the World ran out of copies it took me 15 years to run down a copy of the book I co-authored—The IWW—Its First 70 Years: 1905-1975.  Copies were out there languishing on the shelves of obscure radical book shops and used bookstores from San Francisco to Timbuktu but damned if I could find them.

Of course, all of that was then, the very quaint then dimly remembered by a grizzled few.  Tomorrow thanks to the blessing of the gods Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and the mercy of ATT I will compose and post a blog entry probably without getting off my ass in a tenth the time the same piece would have required if I had researched and written in back in the Stone Age.  So it goes.

Gutenberg—The Man Who Changed Everything

It is hard to imagine the startling changes the Johannes Gutenberg unleashed on the world when on February 23, 1454 he reportedly pulled the first sheets of his new edition of the Bible off of his printing press in Mainz, Germany.  It would take two years to finish running off—it that term can be applied to the laborious process—about 160 copies of the 1,272 page book with 4 pages per folio-sheet, 318 sheets of paper, and 636 impressions for each copy.  About three quarters of the volumes were printed on high quality imported Italian paper and the balance on the calf skin vellum still used by scribes making books by hand.

The German craftsman did not invent either printing or moveable type.  The Chinese had been producing documents by printing for centuries and had employed hand cut moveable type at least two hundred years.  Because Chinese is represented in pictographs representing whole words, each piece of type represented a word rather than a letter in a word.  While there are thousands of pictographs, only a few hundred were commonly used.  Each image had to be hand carved from wood, but only a few of any would be required on a single page.

Europeans had long been familiar with the process, but ran up against the problem that scores of the same letter had be used on each page and that it took a master craftsman a day or more to carve each individual  letter making the production of books unaffordable.

Guttenberg solved this and two other critical problems.  First he devised a way to cast multiple copies of each letter from molds made from original carvings. 

Second, he essentially invented the printing press which allowed uniform impressions to be made from locked and set blocks of type.  Previously images were struck by patting the paper against the type by hand, striking it with mallets, or drawing a wooden blade across the back of the paper.  The new method not only improved the uniform quality of images, it was faster on each sheet.

Finally, Guttenberg experimented until he found an oil based ink blackened with carbon that also contained high concentrations of metals including lead and copper.  This thick mixture adhered to type, spread evenly under pressure, and dried satisfactorily leaving a sharp black image.  Previous experiments with printing had found that the thin water based ink used by scribes unsuitable.

Guttenberg had been experimenting with these elements for at least five years when he began production of the book to perfect the process.  He had produced single page broadsides, short double or triple folio works, and short prayer books—pamphlets really—before undertaking the massive Bible project.

All of his hard work paid off.  The book sold out almost immediately.  Copies went to universities, monasteries, libraries, and public archives across Europe.  The cost—60 Florins for an edition printed on paper and much more for a vellum edition in special hand-tooled bindings—was far beyond most individual purses.  In fact only one is known to have been purchased and kept a single person, although very wealthy individuals bought copies as pious gifts for institutions.  Still, this was much less than the cost of a hand inscribed and illuminated volume from a monastery scribe.  And the quality was excellent.  The best velum editions were even decorated with hand color illumination as well.   Guttenberg’s success spawned imitators and competitors.  Within decades a small printing industry sprang up, first centered in Germany then spreading across the continent.  With the supply of books suddenly increasing, literacy took an upswing as well.

With literacy moving beyond a small circle of clerics, scribes, court functionaries, clerks and physicians to the new growing class of Burgers—the merchants, master craftsmen, and guild members who were gaining influence in the cities of plague depopulated Europe—big social changes were in the offing.

The first were religious.  Bibles fell for the first time into the hands of laymen who could read and interpret it on their own.  What many discovered was at variance with what the Church had been teaching.  Result—a little something called the Reformation.  Within a hundred years men and women were being burned at the stake for books they wrote or read.

And of the making of books, there seemed no end.  Soon topics other than religion were being covered.  The new printing presses of Europe eagerly disseminated the news of voyages of discovery around Africa to the Orient and across the Atlantic to a new world.  Works on philosophy re-introduced the ideas of Aristotle and Plato then expanded on them.  Observation and inquiry into the natural world increased.  The very heavens opened up.  The songs and poems of bards and minstrels were finding their way to printed pages and popular literature in national languages was springing up.  Result—the Renaissance. 

Within two hundred years literacy had spread to the level of journeymen mechanics, petty shop keepers, professional soldiers, mariners, and was virtually universal among the gentle classes.  Result—the Enlightenment and political and social turmoil.

If this seems like a long time to us who have seen revolutions in communications come and go like revolving doors, it was but a trice in the long history of humanity on the globe.

To paraphrase the father of a latter communications breakthrough, “What Guttenberg hath wrought.”

Sophia Lyon Fahs—Not Torturing Children on Sunday Morning

Note:  I missed her birthday yesterday, but Sophia Lyon Fahs rates an entry, even if it is a day late. Adapted from the biographical notes for my worship service/readers’ theater piece 400 Years of Unitarian and Universalist Poets from John Milton to Sylvia Plath.

Sophia Lyon Fahs is now revered among Unitarian Universalists as the dynamic innovator who revolutionized religious education by making it child centered and incorporating modern educational precepts.  She started her life on another journey entirely.  

She was born in China on August 2, 1876 to Presbyterian missionaries David and Mandana Doolittle Lyon.  All through childhood she dreamed of nothing else but becoming a missionary herself and bringing the Christian gospel to the unsaved slaves of false religions.  While a student at Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio, she enthusiastically signed the pledge of the Student Volunteer Movement which read, “It is my purpose in Life, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary.” 

 

After graduating from college and spending two years teaching high school Latin, she enlisted in the Student Volunteer organization, visiting college campuses and promoting the Pledge.  In 1901 she took a part-time job as a YWCA secretary to pay for her further religious education at the University of Chicago.  Warned that William Rainey Harper’s new university was a hot bed of unsound doctrine and radical intellectualism, Lyon wrote to friends that she felt secure in her Christian faith against any temptations. 

 

She was wrong.  The heady temptations of Biblical Higher Criticism and modernism would slowly batter her old time religion.   At Chicago she was exposed to giants like Harper and especially John Dewey, father of the progressive education movement.  

Still, there were things to tie her to tradition.  In 1902 Lyon married fellow Student Volunteer Movement activist Charles Harvey Fahs, whose fragile health prevented his being posted on for overseas service.  Instead the young couple moved to New York City.  Her husband took a job with the national Board of Missions of the Methodist Church and Sophia enrolled in another progressive institution to complete her graduate education, Columbia University Teacher’s College.  Two years later John Dewey would follow Fahs to her new school. 

She had to crowd her studies in-between raising a family.  Five children were born between 1905 and 1914, some of them sickly.  The realization that her children possessed independent minds and were capable of rational exploration of the world around her did more to revolutionize her thinking about religious education than all of her college courses.  While her husband frequently traveled for the Methodists, Fahs observed the techniques of the teachers at Horace Mann School, the college’s practice school.  

She was impressed by the experimentation she found there and yearned for a way to bring the techniques she learned there to tradition bound, Bible based Sunday School.  Fahs was convinced small children could get little out Bible study until they were old enough to really grasp the concepts of history in their early teen years.  Instead she was convinced that children would respond to vivid and detailed stories about people who mattered.  Recalling her own obsession with missionaries, she decided that the lives of contemporary foreign missionaries would make excellent study material.  Her first book for children, Uganda’s White Man of Work, about a real life missionary was published in 1907. 

 

It was just the first in a long line of books, articles, curriculum guides and worship materials, including finely crafted poetry that would pour from her in the coming decades.  It was not easy.  Two of her children died, and her ailing husband was often out of the country.  Her personal theology became ever more liberal and she looked for new sources for instruction materials for children drawn on the natural sciences, the religions of primitive peoples, and world religions.  She wanted to find ways for children to connect with the experiences of life—birth and death, the sun and stars and evolving life on earth and out of that experience begin to develop and articulate their own faith lives.   

She tried to put these theories into practice in a series of jobs as a Sunday School superintendent, but she was frequently at odds with both ministers and parents who demanded a traditional Bible study curriculum, even if they were modernists.  In 1933, however, Fahs was invited by the great modernist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick to head up the Sunday School at his brand new Riverside Church.  It was there that she was able, finally, to develop the kind of progressive curriculum for which she became famous.  

Unitarian religious education leaders had been following Fahs’s work since in 1928 article How Childish Should a Child’s Religion Be.  They were impressed by what they saw.  In 1930 she was invited to lead a Unitarian religious education conference at the Isle of Shores.  Thus began her blossoming relationship with the denomination that would finally lead her to leave conventional Christianity behind.  

In 1937 Fahs was appointed Editor of Children’s Materials for the American Unitarian Association (AUA).  She was given a free reign, within the limited budget of the Depression ravaged Association, to completely remake the Beacon religious education curricula.  Fahs edited all the resulting New Beacon series and she was frequently the principle co-author.  

From the first hand experiences of her Martin and Judy books for primary children to explorations of nature in How Miracles Abound, to broadening understanding of other cultures and past experience in From Long Ago and Many Lands and Child of the Sun, to the practical comparative religion of The Church Across the Street Fahs was innovating and even daring.  

Of course, not everyone was ready for change.  Many congregations clung to the same Bible based Sunday School materials that were being used in mainline Protestant churches.  To provide a Bible based course in which children could grasp that scripture was written by fallible human being over hundreds of years, Fahs wrote her popular The Old Story of Salvation.  

In 1952 Fahs presented the underlying philosophy for the New Beacon Series in her book for religious educators, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage: A Philosophy of Creative Religious Development.  Other materials to teach the teachers followed.  The post war years really proved the popularity and durability of what Fahs was doing.  

When she had been hired, Unitarianism was a dwindling denomination.  Largely on the strength of its dynamic new religious education program, young families flocked to the congregations.  New congregations and fellowships sprang up far from the traditional strong holds of New England, the upper mid-west and California.  The Beacon curriculum books were also being used increasingly by other denominations and even by private schools.  

Despite advancing age and a crushing workload, nothing seemed to slow Fahs down.  In 1959 at the age of 82 she was able to fulfill a life-long dream when one of the new congregations built largely on her sound basis of Religious Education, the Montgomery County Unitarian Church of Bethesda, Maryland, ordained her into the ministry.  

Fahs finally took retirement at age 88 in 1964 and died honored and beloved in New York City in 1978 at the age of 101.  

Fahs legacy lives on in every Unitarian Universalist church school.  The curricula that she introduced may no longer be taught, but the spirit that created it lives on.  Much of that spirit comes from the remarkable poems and reading Fahs left behind and which are included in the UUA’s Singing the Living Tradition.  Not a Sunday goes by but that somewhere a congregation does not share the loving words of Sophia Lyon Fahs.

By far her most popular poem is often used in child dedications services and Christmas worship:

And So the Children Come

    And so the children come

    and so they have been coming.

    No angels herald their beginnings.

    No prophets predict their future courses.

    No wise men or women see a star to show where to find

    the babe that will save humankind.

    yet each night a child arrives is a holy night.

    Fathers and mothers—

    Sitting beside their sleeping children’s beds

    feel glory in the sight of new life beginning. They ask,

    Where and how will this new life end?

    Or will it ever end?

    Each day a child arrives is a holy day.

    A time for singing,

    a time for wondering,

    a time for worshipping.

    —Sophia Lyon Fahs