Let me begin with an admission. Today is not All Souls Day. Today is Halloween. In fact, tomorrow is not even All Souls Day. Tomorrow is All Saints Day, All Hallows Day, hence Halloween the night before. Halloween interests me, but not enough to devote an entire sermon to the subject. All Saints day doesn't interest me at all. All Souls Day does. To begin with, you will notice that this church is named All Souls Church not All Saints Church. That is a very good thing, for otherwise it would be empty this morning. If we were to take the name seriously, I would not be preaching; you would not be listening. On the other hand, we may not fully appreciate the name we do have. It is as large and fine a name for a religious institution as anyone could imagine. The Congregation of All Souls. So this morning I shall talk about All Souls Day.
First, a little history. As a holiday, Halloween is a hybrid, the Catholic Church having repackaged a popular Druid festival marking Winter's coming reign of darkness with a festival of lanterns, ribaldry, dancing, later costume parties and dare-devilry to mock death at the outset of death's season. Powerless in its attempt to discourage pagan ribaldry and dare-devilry in appropriating All Hallows Eve for ecclesiastical purposes, with All Saints Day the church appended a more stately and pious occasion, trumping the devil's business with a commemoration of those whom the church had anointed as beyond all temptation, the small, exemplary company of Saints, the disciples and church doctors and miracle workers. A little later, they added All Souls day, not to commemorate the rest of us, but to raise money, the so called indulgences. You see, these souls they were talking about were all dead, dead and in purgatory. On All Souls day, the faithful were encouraged to pray for the dead to help unlock their souls from the twilight world between Hell and Heaven. Other than Christmas, All Souls day was the only day in the Christian calendar when Catholics were obliged to go to Mass three times. You will note that this involved three offerings. Prayers for departed loved one's had more efficacy it seems when backed up with a little hard cash. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican monk from the sixteenth century who enjoyed unprecedented success in the soul-brokering business, is said to have put it this way: "When in the box the money rings, the soul from Purgatory springs." Clever, you must admit, so clever and perverse that it surely can be traced not to Tetzel himself, but to the Protestant propagandists who established their faith in direct response widespread abuse of the indulgence system. Regardless, when Henry Whitney Bellows named this place All Souls Church in 1855, he was not thinking of dead souls but living ones. His inspiration was most likely a line from the pen of William Ellery Channing, whose visit to New York in 1819 led to the founding of this congregation. "I am a living member of the great family of All Souls," Ellery Channing proclaimed. As am I. As are you.
Let me tell you a little about Bellows. For 43 years minister of this congregation, Henry Whitney Bellows was one of the most influential and among the most effective proponents of liberal religion in the mid nineteenth century. Above all, he was a great institutionalist, not just within but beyond these doors. With Horace Mann he founded Antioch College, serving as the first Chairman of the Board, with the original Board itself composed of All Souls Members. At a time when our fledgling denomination was poised to split apart, with the Western free-thinkers at almost irreconcilable loggerheads with the Boston-based traditionalists, Bellows, a self-described "large churchman" demonstrated remarkable diplomatic skill in bringing the parties together. Against all odds, he founded the Unitarian Ministers Association, insisting that there was room beneath its tent for all.
Bellows also joined forces with All Souls member William Cullen Bryant to lobby for Frederick Law Olmsted's design for Central Park. In fact, it was Bellows article in the Atlantic Monthly that helped to turn the day. And most impressively I've mentioned this before but it stands repeating again and again - following the lead of the women in this congregation (Mrs. Peter Cooper, Mrs William Cullen Bryant, and Miss Louisa Lee Schuyler), Bellows went to Washington in 1861 and convinced President Lincoln to establish the United States Sanitary Commission. Precursor of the American Red Cross, the Sanitary Commission offered medical assistance to the wounded soldiers throughout the Civil War. Bellows kept his pulpit, but for three years, as President of the Sanitary Commission, he devoted almost full time both to the fund raising effort and the administration of this vast undertaking. Intellectual historian George M. Frederickson calls the United States Sanitary Commission "the largest, most powerful, and most highly organized philanthropic activity that had ever been seen in America." To give you a sense of its size, tapping business leaders and philanthropists from around the country, Bellows raised a staggering six million dollars that is, six million 1860's dollars to fund the Commission's work. An interesting footnote, whenever he traveled away from New York City on this or any other philanthropic errand, Bellows sent his sermons back to be preached in his absence. He would trust no one with this sacred task save his wife. During this period, and throughout another stretch when he spent six months filling the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco following the death of the great Thomas Starr King, Sunday after Sunday Eliza Townsand Bellows would climb the steps up to the high pulpit and do something that almost no one had ever heard a woman do before, preach the gospel, and this to a crowded church.
Ours is the first church in this country to go by the name All Souls.
Subsequently dozens of Unitarian churches adopted this name, some twenty extant still today. All Souls is our third name, by the way. We were founded as the First Congregational Church (Unitarian), an appellation that underscored both our polity (congregational) and our theology (Unitarian). In 1845, the congregation voted to call itself at least to call its meetinghouse --"The Church of the Divine Unity." Bellows soon tired of this. Five years later, he anointed his home the "All Souls Parsonage." And then, in 1855, when our third building was dedicated, at Bellows urging the congregation named this monumental if also monumentally ugly structure on 20th Street, "All Souls Church," our name today. Believe me, I'm not exaggerating our third building's ugliness. One prominent architectural critic pronounced it "the most unfortunate ecclesiastical edifice ever to be erected not only in New York, but anywhere else in the world for that matter." This is off my topic, but I've got to tell you why. In fashioning the first major example of Byzantine Revival architecture in the United States, the architect employed two radically different kinds of brick, the reddest possible Philadelphia brick and a light yellow brick (Caen stone) from Italy. He juxtaposed the two in broad alternating stripes from top to bottom. Hence the church's nicknames: the Beefsteak Church, and, soon thereafter, the Church of the Holy Zebra.
More important, of course, were the congregants themselves. In 1855, Bellows described his flock as follows: "On the whole, I know not where a body of more genuine, active and thoughtful persons could be found . . . than in my own parish. And I have come to see this very peculiarly during the last year or two. The young people who have grown up, with and under me, seem promising, and I find, at length, a very general adoption of the special notions and current spirit of my religious and philanthropic views in the parish; so that we are a united, free and genial body of folks, with no ecclesiastical ties and little machinery but a strong spiritual bond." This is no less true today of the living members of the great body of All Souls than it was a century and a half ago.
I celebrate All Souls day in this manner at this time with a special purpose in mind. With our new Lifelines Center, we are now embarking on what Charles Bell in the Daily News calls "the congregation's most ambitious project since the Civil War, when the Rev. Henry Bellows, who named the church All Souls, and his flock founded the American Sanitary Commission." On the surface, what we are creating here may hardly seem that imposing: weekly lectures with dinner and discussion following, a nascent web site, nothing visible so far that is any way out of the ordinary. So this morning, with Bellows as my witness and my inspiration, let me briefly sketch for you the span of our vision, one I truly believe is worthy of the spirit of All Souls.
I've told you before about BHAG. A BHAG is a "big, hairy, audacious goal." In conception, the Lifelines Center is a BHAG. It is a big dream, and may not come true, but only big dreams come true in big ways, and I have a hunch about this one: Right mission; right place; and right time.
The Center's mission is to connect people with one another for mutual enrichment in community based programs relating to love, work, society and spirit, not just here in New York, but around the country. The key is the World Wide Web. First, a word about the web. Every communication medium is value neutral. Our utilization of every breakthrough in technology either ennobles or degrades us, both individually and collectively. When it degrades us, the first temptation is to curb freedom in the medium. Lost in the discussion is the potential for transformative good facilitated by the very democratic nature of the medium in question. Thus far the Web has been most successful utilized for commerce, pornography, and letter writing. In each place, its communicative power is unprecedented. By connecting anyone around the world who wishes to be connected, for good or for ill there are no discrete backyards any longer. This can lead either to a breakdown of civility (even fences serve to create civility in a way) or to a new model for neighborliness. The latter is my goal.
Again, I go back a hundred years or more. In the 19th Century, many communities throughout the country united in sponsoring traveling speakers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Jennings Bryan, etc.), and developing cultural and educational programs drawing from national and local talent. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle enrolled at least a half million readers and at one time sponsored 10,000 reading circles throughout the country, this in an age of snail mail, no radio, no video, no Web. Our goal is to adapt this model by taking advantage of modern Internet technology.
Creating a 21st century Chautauqua, based in New York and utilizing the Internet to facilitate connections, foster dialogue, and spark creative interchange, we hope to establish at least one hundred chapters by the end of next year. To supplement local programming, each chapter will have access to video copies of our 18 lectures a year, leaders' guides for discussion groups on Center-sponsored topics, and an opportunity to co-create future Center offerings and the developing Center vision. Individuals can also participate by viewing the lectures on line, conversing on Center topics in chat rooms, and joining in any action agendas that may emerge from Center programming or brainstorming sessions. Our goal is to utilize the almost unlimited potential of the Web (which can be an isolating medium) to enhance civic and moral values and to facilitate the creation of meaningful community.
Again to follow in Bellows' spirit, with major financial support from charitable foundation and other corporate sponsors who share our commitment to moral education, community building, and the ideals of American pluralism and respectful, open-ended dialogue, we hope to make the internet as promising a medium for value creation as it is beginning to prove for business innovation. Again, as with any new technology, the Web is value-neutral. It can be employed for almost every imaginable manner of commercial and not-for-profit interchange. Today, the Web's promise for the cultivation of moral and community values is largely untapped. With the creative help and imagination of those who share the Lifelines Center vision, we see no limits to the potential development and expansion of a Web-facilitated community. That is our BHAG.
This week I shall be reaching out to Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web and fellow Unitarian to seek his help, advice and inspiration. Berners-Lee sees the Web as a quintessential Unitarian medium. In his new book, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor, he describes his creation of the Web as having taken place in an environment "that Unitarian Universalists and physicists would equally appreciate: one of mutual respect, and of building something very great through collective effort that was well beyond the means of any one person without a huge bureaucratic rage. The environment was complex and rich; any two people could get together and exchange views, and even end up working together somehow. This system produced a weird and wonderful machine, which needed care to maintain, but could take advantage of the ingenuity, inspiration, and intuition of individuals in a special way. That, from the start," Berners-Lee concludes, "has been my goal for the World Wide Web."
It is our goal for Lifelines too, and the environment we wish to foster as a laboratory for its creation. Over the days and weeks ahead, Executive Director Nancy King Bernstein and I and the Center Board members shall continue to reach out to you, the living members of the great family of All Souls, for your help. Bring us your thoughts and your dreams. Come on Thursday evenings to make sure that the foundation we are building upon will be as strong as possible. The creation of Lifelines is both almost limitlessly promising and tremendously daunting. For me, as I said to Charles Bell, right now it's like learning the music while tuning up the orchestra. But what an orchestra we have. The All Souls Orchestra. Happy All Souls Day. Amen. I love you. God bless. Copyright AllSouls 1999.