Piling Stones by the Jordan—And Near Cheyenne

Old Blue's Grave circa 1900

This Sunday the Rev. Sean Parker Dennison of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation now in McHenry preached from the text of Joshua 3:1 - 4:24.  Several readers here will now have to pause to pick themselves off of the floor and recover from the shock of hearing of a UU minister preaching from the Bible.  For those of you who are not aware of our ways, although it is not uncommon to include biblical snatches and citations in sermons, it is rare to “preach to the text.”  The text of a UU sermon is just as likely to be taken from other world religion scripture, a poem by Mary Oliver, a book suggested by a congregant, a New Yorker article, or a Little Golden Book.

And of all Bible stories the barely remembered tale of Joshua’s copycat miracle.  You may be forgiven if you forgot or never knew that under the detailed instructions of the bossy Lord God Jehovah, A/k/A Yahweh, Moses’s former ramrod stopped the flow of the River Jordan so that the Priests could carry the Arc of the Covenant into the Promised Land without getting their feet wet.  They were followed by the whole of the People of Israel.

Once on the other side Joshua would eventually lead his people to nearby Jericho.  You probably know what happened there because of a song wherein Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho and the “walls came a tumblin’ down.”  In other words the Israelites were invaders who ousted the former residents of the territory.  Although a sermon could clearly be constructed around that and how it echoes in violence to this day, that’s not where Rev. Sean wanted to go with his sermon.

No, he wanted to talk about what happened just after the whole nation, which had been wandering in the wilderness without benefit of a GPS for forty years in punishment for one lousy wild night with a Golden Calf.

When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, “Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.”

So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, as the Lord had told Joshua; and they carried them over with them to their camp, where they put them down. Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in the middle of the Jordan at the spot where the priests who carried the ark of the covenant had stood. And they are there to this day.

The Bible, New International Version

The Book of Joshua, 4:1-9

Rev. Sean wanted to talk about miracles now that the Great Sky God does not come down and personally lay them on the table before us.  The absence of such showy stage craft leads many cynics to dismiss miracles all together.  Of course, looking at it another way, our very aware existence in the Universe is a miracle.  Everything and everyone we encounter every day is in some way a bleepin’ miracle.

The trick, the Preacher suggested, is remembering it.  For that we sometimes need reminders—like that pile of rocks by the Jordan.  He challenged us to go home and pick our own 12 miracles and in some way build a monument to remind us of them.

Well, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that.  Twelve was too many—or too few.  But it did start my mind on a rifle through some musty file cabinets in the old cranium.  And lo and behold I hauled this one out…

My Mom, Ruby Irene Mills Murfin, was Den Mother for our Cub Scout Den  of eight or nine squirrelly, squirming kids in blue shirts and caps and yellow bandanas.  I was a Bear so that made me what, eight or nine years old?  That would make it about 1957 or’58.

Mom liked projects.  Big projects.  Projects that were not necessarily in her Den Mother’s manual.  Projects that helped us learn about the country around us, which happened to be the environs of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Once she had cut up a prized possession, an old mink coat that was out of style with its Joan Crawford shoulder pads.  A furrier could have used the pelts for a fashionable stole or evening jacket, but she gave them to us.  We made Indian war shields trimmed in fur and lances dangling pelts like trophy scalps.  We all whooped it up, terrorized siblings and neighbor children, and massacred settlers to our hearts content for days.

We made all sorts of things from pine cones she collected every summer on picnic trips along Happy Jack Road.

But this day she heaved a peck basket full of rocks she had collected from the bed of a fast, high country trout stream that my father had fished the summer before.  They were smooth and oval or oblong all rough edges long ago knocked off by some old glacier and millennia of rushing icy water.  They were about the size of a good big Idaho potato.  They had satisfying weight and heft in a boy’s hand.  Our minds naturally went to what we could heave them at and satisfactorily break because we were, after all, boys which meant we were as wild and vicious by nature as any pagan hoard.

But before we could commit mayhem, Den Mother Mom sat us in a circle and read to us from a picture book—Old Blue the Cow Pony by Sanford Tousey.  [Note—I had to refresh my memory of this book by a Google search and was delighted to find a copy on Amazon beat up but intact of $80!]

Blue was evidently a ranch horse of extraordinary talents.  Rounded up among the free and wild horses of the high plains he was an Appaloosa, a nimble, sure footed horse preferred by the Shoshoni and the far off Nez Percé.  From a dark, almost black rump, his coat shaded to blue-gray in the forequarters.

Once broken and tamed, he took to the rigorous demands of working cattle—the intricate dance of cutting calves or steers from a herd for branding, running at full speed over broken ground as his rider threw his lariat, knowing just how to taut the rope so that the cowboy could leap from the saddle and throw the critter to the ground.  He had endurance for long days and nights of constant work and the speed to win the Sunday afternoon races at the home ranch.

Blue was also extremely loyal to his cowboy.  Together they rode through many seasons until the horse’s muzzle grew gray.  He was the stuff of cowboy folklore yet he kept working.

Then one year—could it really have been 1886 the year of the Great Blizzard that buried the high plains from Colorado all the way up into Canada in several feet of white death?—Blue and his rider were caught in the high country near the Great Divide searching for strays when the storm hit.  As I recall the tale, if they could not make it to the safety of the home ranch, they would surely die.

Through the raging storm with winds blowing icy pellets sideways, in the dreaded white out the man lost all sense of direction.  But Blue knew.  He kept plodding on breasting drifts up to his shoulders.  Two, maybe three days, the rider insensible and barely clinging to the saddle.  When the storm finally broke they were in the midst of a featureless plain far from the Mountains. 

Finally they encountered riders from the home ranch not more than two or three miles away. When they reached Blue he gave up his burden to them—and lay down and died.

They had to leave him where he lay.  The body quickly froze and was covered by drifting snow.

But as soon as it cleared the cowboys rode out with their shovels and buried Blue where he lay.  But now there was a new danger…the hungry coyotes that would find the shallow grave and dig it up.  So they began to haul stones from a distant stream to build a cairn over the grave to protect it the same as they would do for any fallen comrade.

A small pile a couple of feet high would have done the trick, but they wanted something more—a monument.  They built the pile high and fenced the plot with split rails.  And on a tall board stuck into the ground they painted, “Erected to the memory of Old Blue, the best old cow pony that ever pulled on a rope. By the cow punchers of the 7 X L Outfit Rest in Peace.”

When Mom finished telling the story to us she said, “That was a long, long time ago and some of the stones on Old Blue’s grave have fallen.  But we are going to help.  We are going to bring new stones!”

She let us each pick a stone and broke out the Tempera paints and brushes.  She had us each paint our rock and decorate it with the brands we had designed for ourselves the week before.  Mine was the P-standing-A-T, the capital letter A standing on the top of letters P and T with a leg on each.

At our next Den meeting Mom loaded us into my Dad’s Wyoming Travel Commission station wagon and drove south of town onto the giant Warren Ranch.  We found the grave by a rutted dirt road not far from the Colorado line.  It was a raw and blustery day, the sky leaden, but the frozen ground clear of snow.  It must have been March.  The grave was there just like in the picture but the stones slipped along the ground on one side, the sign had faded, and the rail fencing long since replaced with wire.

One by one we each solemnly stepped forward and placed our stones on the pile.  Mom took some pictures with our old Kodak Brownie Box camera.  We may have said a prayer for Old Blue, or sung a song.  Or not.  We piled back into the station wagon and drove back to town in an odd silence, not a single boy trying to start a round of Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

And that’s the story.  Make of it what you will.  There may have been miracles involved.

Unitarians Plant a “Seed in the Wilderness”

The Independent Congregational Church in Meadville, Pennsylvania provide a first home for a new school.

Today there are only two recognized seminaries affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)—Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkley, California and Meadville-Lombard Theological School in Chicago.  Both of them have struggled to stay alive in recent years battered by high operating costs, the high cost of seminary education resulting in the need for scarce scholarship and fellowship money for students, and a movement by some on the UUA board to de-fund the schools in favor of giving aid to individual ministerial students, most of whom now train at non U.U. schools

 The theological school most identified in the public mind with Unitarian long ago abandoned ties to it for until last year went for over a decade without a Unitarian holding a tenured professorship.  Despite that many U.U. ministerial students continue to study there and the pink gown of a Harvard Doctorate of Theology still puts its graduates on the fast track for prestigious pulpits and leadership positions in the Association.  That puts ambitious students at the denominational (I know, I will be scalped for calling the UUA a denomination) no matter how gifted at a disadvantage in an environment where many more candidates are emerging from theological schools of all stripes than there are pulpits to fill.

But a lot of us feel that the affiliated schools play a role in preserving UU history and theology through their libraries and collections and in preparing students for the challenges of the UU ministry, which is very different than those of even the most liberal of Protestant Denominations.

The Chicago school traces its roots far from the gleaming building on Michigan Avenue where it now rents space from the Jewish Spertus Institute.

By the 1840’s Unitarianism was well established, if still controversial among conventionally orthodox Christians.  They were firmly ensconced in the Boston, the Hub of the Universe and its nearby environs and among their ranks counted the cream of the very active New England Renaissance.  They had spread across most of New England and into New York State.  Boston merchants had even established congregations in the ports, trading centers, and political capitals—New York City; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Charleston, South Carolina; and New Orleans, Louisiana.  Hardy members of the New England diaspora had even founded congregations inland on the great rivers—Cincinnati, Ohio in 1830 and St. Louis, Missouri in 1835.

But the rest of the great continent stretching west of the Appalachians was utterly devoid of Unitarian worship.  But that same territory was being flooded by fervent evangelical missionaries as the country was plunged into one of its periodic Revivalist Frenzies. Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, and home grown sects led by Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell were saving souls at every village, cross roads, and riverboat landing in the west.

The high minded ministers in Boston were aghast that these folks could not hear the good news of a calmer, more rational religion of the cultivated mind.  But neither they nor any of the new graduates of Harvard were personally willing to forgo the comforts of civilization and plunge into the “wilderness” like the saddle-bag evangelists of the other denominations.   

Then suddenly, as if manna from heaven itself, an unexpected donation by Dutch born businessman Harm Jan Huidekoper made it possible for to establish a new theological school west of the mountains just for the “rustics.”  Raised a Calvinist Huidekoper was a late “convert” to liberal religion and Unitarianism.  Earlier he had helped move the Independent Congregational Church of Meadville, Pennsylvania, which his family had helped found in 1830, into theological Unitarianism.  Now he was prepared to donate a substantial sum of money if the Unitarians in Boston would agree to establish a seminary in his town.  The Congregationalist Church would provide its first home and support such as lodging for masters and scholars.

On January 27, 1844 James Freeman Clarke, one of the leading Unitarian ministers in Boston, announced the launching of the new Meadville Theological School.

In addition to the local congregation the new school had one more initial partner, the infant denomination known both as the Disciples of Christ and The Christian Church, made up of the followers of Stone and Campbell, also wanted a formal school for their ministry, which had never had on before, relying on lay preachers ordained by consensus when they had proved worthy.  This group was relatively religiously liberal although evangelical in style.  But like the Unitarians, they fancied themselves beyond denominational divisions, re-creating the community of brotherhood of the early church.

The association did not last past the earliest years of the new school.  The theology of the Unitarians and the Disciples was too different and for a tradition that espoused universality, the Campbellites, as their detractors called them, showed a remarkable talent for schizmatizing over minor points such as the use of instruments for worship music or whether to support missionary societies.  Eventually the main body abandoned Meadville and established their own school at Hiram, Ohio.

The new school struggled, but persisted.  Unitarian congregations in the East failed to subscribe to regular appeals for support and the loose American Unitarian Association consisting of individual members interested in tract ministry and missionary work struggled to make annual contributions of support.

But the school did its job, and in a few years its graduates were filling new pulpits dotting the old Northwest Territory—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and across the river into Iowa.  But graduates were looked down upon by the Harvard educated elite in the east few, very few, were called to pulpits on the Coast.  And when they were it was generally to congregations too poor to support a gentleman minister and his family or ones in crisis and turmoil.

In 1852 there was enough growth in the West for the establishment of the Western Unitarian Conference to support congregations and reduce reliance on Eastern “charity” for support.  Ironically the leader of the movement and its first President was William Greenleaf Eliot the minister of the prestige pulpit in St. Louis, a Harvard graduate, and a member of the extended Eliot and May clans that would cut such a wide swath through Unitarian.  Eliot was one of the most conservative of Unitarian ministers and fought encroaching heresies like Transcendentalism and the freethinking of the rebellious Free Religious Society tooth and nail.

Unfortunately for Eliot, it was a battle he was destined to lose, big time.

That was largely the work of one man, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a Welsh born Union Army veteran who graduated from Meadville in 1870 at the age of 28.  5 years later while serving a congregation in Janesville, Wisconsin he took on an additional part time job as Missionary Secretary of the Western Conference and by 1880 was working there full time.  He also energetically founded Unity a parallel organization for discussion and exploration of social ideas whose chapters usually met on weeknights at Unitarian churches and launched Unity, a magazine of radical ideas and reform and a publish house which was soon turning out hundreds of tracts an pamphlets on religious  and social reform issues.  Under Jones’s long leadership the Western Conference became not only more independent of Boston, but pushed the theological boundaries of Unitarianism beyond Christianity and embraced activism on behalf of the poor and oppressed—a muscular reading of the social gospel.

Theological training at Meadville adapted to preparing ministers for this new kind of vision and Jones would help match them to congregations.  By the turn of the 20th Century Meadville graduates were changing Unitarianism forever.  I have long argued that UUism of today with its emphasis on progressive activism and its comfort with many religious traditions beyond liberal Christianity owes more to Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the Western Conference than to the Broad Church respectability of the respectable eastern establishment.

Whatever its successes in filling hungry pulpits with I-mean-business liberals, the little school at Meadville with no endowment to speak of was always skating on thin ice. Crises came and went with alarming regularity.

After years of acrimony and holding each other off at arm’s length, the Western Conference and the National Conference, the Unitarian body made up of congregations rather than individuals, finally reunited in in 1894, although the mostly Midwestern congregations retained their distinctive liberalism and style.  The National Conference was able to raise contributions from member congregations, most of which it turned over the AUA to use in support of missionary work, tracts and publications, and support for the education of ministers.

With the rise of central authority in the person of Samuel Atkins Eliot II, first executive President of the old AUA, Meadville found itself mortally endangered.  Eliot was a classic Brahmin who wanted Unitarianism to conform the supposed meritocracy of the Eastern elite. That meant pressure to get into line for the scruffy, independent westerners nearly matched by his mission to drive women from the ministry.  Since the AUA was a primary funder for the seminary, this was an existential threat.

In 1925 Elliot completed his mastery of the Unitarian universe by merging the AUA with the National Conference, retaining the older name and organizational style and imposing it somewhat clumsily on an association of congregations.  Elliot stayed on as the powerful President of the new AUA.  That meant Meadville would be doomed unless it could upgrade to what Elliot considered the professional standards set by his beloved Harvard.

In 1926 the school abandoned its old Pennsylvania home and relocated to Chicago where it was granted the status of an affiliate theological school with the already sufficiently prestigious University of Chicago.  As a further inducement to move the State of Illinois offered the school a nifty break “full tax-exempt status in perpetuity for all college-owned property”, a status shared with only two other schools, Monmouth College and Northwestern University.

Work soon started on Meadville’s new home, a handsome gray stone building across the street from the “Unitarian Cathedral,” First Unitarian Church of Chicago.  Enrolment surged. 

But the reborn school did not blindly follow the Eliot’s vision.  It still retained the scrappy independence of the old Western Conference.  It became the primary source of newly minted Humanist ministers who over the next twenty years would overwhelm traditional theists and come to dominate Unitarianism for two or three generations.

The Crash of ’29 and subsequent Great Depression plunged Meadville back into crisis mode. 

It was even harder on a downstate Illinois Universalist school.  Lombard College, founded by the Universalists in 1853 in Galesburg was perhaps best known at poet Carl Sandburg’s alma matter.  When it collapsed in 1930, Meadville absorbed its seminary, the Ryder School of Divinity and a comfortable purse of Universalist endowment.  Re-Christened the Meadville-Lombard School of Theology was thus officially the first school to train ministers in both liberal denominations.  But it must be said that the Universalists quickly took a back seat, and as would happen again and again, the Unitarians took the money and took over.

The AUA and the Universalist Church in America consolidated into the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961.  The new organization suddenly found itself with “too many seminaries.”  After a still controversial study, the UUA decided to close the Universalist schools Crane Theological School at Tufts University and the theological school of St. Lawrence University in Up State New York leaving on Meadville-Lombard and Starr King with unaffiliated Harvard Divinity School an unspoken elephant in the room.

In the 1950’s and early ‘60’s despite over 100 years of history and the rise of Humanists to almost unquestioned domination among Unitarians, Meadville graduates were still passed over for plumb pulpits and denominational leadership.  It was not until the election of O. Eugene Pickett as President of the UUA in 1979 and his successor William F. Schulz in 1985 that graduates finally entered the top ranks of denominational leadership.

Both of the surviving schools have fallen on hard times lately under the pressure of possible de-funding by the UUA Board.  Meadville-Lombard floundered and desperately sought partners.  A proposed merger with California based Starr King fell through when both parties withdrew from talks in 2006.  Latter a proposal to create a new theological university in cooperation with the United Church of Christ’s and American Baptist’s Andover Newton Theological School with other possible partners in the wings collapsed in 2011.

There has been much descent among faculty, students and alumni as the school seemed to be teetering on the edge of extinction.

After years of study, the school announced a new curriculum called the Meadville Lombard Educational Model which began for students entering the Masters of Divinity degree program in Fall 2009. The model de-emphasized residential study with options of distant learning and blends traditional rigorous academic learning with experiential learning in community and congregational settings.

Some feel that the reduction in traditional class time will weaken the rigor of academic preparations.  Others feel that the hands-on-in-the-field approach will better prepare ministers for the demands of the modern religious environment.

With reduced residency and the high cost of maintenance of an 80 year old building, Meadville-Lombard decided to sell its Hyde Park campus and move into two rented floors of the new Spertus Institute building earlier this year.

After years of dizzying change and dissent, a venerable institution looks forward to supplying ministers for a new kind of wilderness. 

Rocky Shuffles of this Mortal Coil

  

I’m sorry.  I just can’t help myself.

On January 26, 1979 Nelson Rockefeller, former Vice President of the United States, Governor of New York, Assistant Secretary of State, one of the richest men in America, patron of the arts, philanthropist, and Baptist collapsed with a massive heart attack at the age of 70. 

Unfortunately for him, he collapsed on 27 year old Megan Marshak, an aide to the political powerhouse.  He was naked.  So was she.  She struggled to get the large, heavy man off her.  In doing so she may have pushed him off her bed and onto the floor.  Anyway, that’s where he was found by a responding ambulance crew. 

In the town house at 13 West 54th Street where Rockefeller theoretically kept a secondary office, but was really Marshak’s residence, the young woman went into a panic.  The affair between the two had been a very well kept secret.  Rockefeller was very publicly married to his second wife, the former Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, herself a one time aide when Rockefeller was governor.  Not knowing what else to do, Marshak phoned her close friend news reporter Ponchitta Pierce.

When Pierce arrived, she found Rockefeller unconscious but still breathing.  The two finally decided to call an ambulance after determining that they could not get the man dressed.  The ambulance arrived after a delay of around an hour.  Rockefeller died in the vehicle on the way to the hospital.  Opinion remains divided on whether, given the state of medicine at the time, he could have been saved if he received immediate attention.

His family scrambled into a protective mode.  The first press announcements said that Rockefeller was found collapsed at his desk at his main office in Rockefeller Center by a security guard.  That tale unraveled quickly.  The family acknowledged that he was with Marshak, but claimed they were working together in the second office.  The press pretty quickly surmised that this was a ruse and began hinting, as broadly as possible in those more discrete days, that there might have been hanky-panky going on.

The widow Happy hastily arranged for her husband’s remains to be cremated.  But an official autopsy confirmed that Rockefeller died after a heart attack during or shortly after coitus.

The family and close friends gathered for a funeral on January 29 and the ashes were interred at the private Rockefeller family cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York.  On February 2 a public memorial was held at the famous Riverside Church attended by more than 2,200 people including President Jimmy Carter, former President Gerald R. Ford, more than 100 current or former members of Congress, as well as official representatives from more than 70 nations.  Among those in attendance was Senator Barry Goldwater, whose insurgent campaign against Rockefeller and the hated Eastern Liberal Republican Establishment in 1964 denied Rocky his second shot at the Republican Party nomination for President—the one that was probably doomed by his hasty divorce from his first wife and equally hasty marriage to Happy, who had just dumped her own long-time spouse.

Conservatives could hardly contain their glee at Rockefeller demise and the embarrassing circumstances.  They considered it the death knell of liberal Republicanism.  And it pretty much was.  It took a while, but the species Rockefeller represented is now as extinct as the dodo.  Even today a Google search of Rockefeller’s death will turn up dozens of right wing web sites still gloating and many consigning their old foe to eternal damnation.  These folks never give up a grudge.

As for the hapless young Megan Marshak, she held up for weeks in the town house, never leaving, answering the phone, or granting any interviews.  When Rockefeller’s will was read, Marshak was left the deed to the now infamous townhouse. 

Then she essentially vanished.  Only two know photographs, both taken before the death, are known to exist.  Despite enormous press interest she was able to disappear.  In 1992 it was reported that she was living in New York and working quietly as a TV news writer and producer.  In 2008 that pillar of journalism Parade Magazine reported that she had married and was living quietly in southern California.