When I was asked if I would serve as Chair of the Board of Trustees, I was
reminded -- warned, really -- by a couple of my predecessors that toward
the end of my brief term of office I would be expected to deliver a sermon
to the congregation. I am not a natural sermonizer, by profession or temperament,
so this obligation has indeed weighed heavily upon me for the past year.
It really has. From the preachers in this pulpit I have received consolation,
gained wisdom and have been inspired to take actions and make choices that
have affected my life. What have I to add?
Sermons are, in one way or another, about God. Forrest, for one, will tell
you that he knows very little about God. And he is, in a manner of speaking,
in the business. What do I know about God? I'm a lawyer. If I said I did
know something, would you believe me?
How then to proceed? I will try to follow the advice the sage Emerson imparted
to fledgling sermonizers: speak of what you know, and from your own experience.
I know something about the City. And I know something about this church.
I was born, raised and educated in this City. I have been living here now
for half a century. As a lawyer, New York City has been my client. My family
and I have been worshipping here at All Souls for a decade, and my daughter
is getting her religious education here.
How has All Souls affected the way I look at and live in this City? What
has All Souls to teach us about the City?
Let me begin by stating that to me, New York City is a wondrous place, and
All Souls is the soul of the City.
There are many ways to look at and respond to New York; its problems can,
and sometimes do, consume us. The local economy is thriving for now, but
many are Jobless. Crime is down, but will it remain so? The demand for new
housing, hotels and office space is up, but homelessness persists. Welfare
reform and jobs programs are reducing our welfare rolls, but the lines grow
at soup kitchens. We can address public transportation, air and water quality,
government integrity, race relations, education and health. But for a moment,
let's step back, look around us, and exclaim: "My God, this City is
a miracle!"
The numbers are truly astounding. There are seven and a half million of
us, more or less (and we can and do argue about the number and how to go
about counting ourselves). We come from more countries, speak more languages
and worship God in more ways than anywhere else on the planet. We have 5700
miles of streets and highways (and fill 65,000 potholes a year), 714 miles
of subway track, a watershed of 2000 square miles. We consume -- drink,
wash with, flush -- 1400 million gallons of water a day. We generate 26,200
tons of trash a day. My own Law Department has 650 lawyers representing
the City. And nature abides in our crowded metropolis, in our parks, which
comprise 13% of the City's land area -- 26,369 acres (including 872 playgrounds
and six beaches), backyards (yes, backyards) and gardens (including our
own, which after completion of our access project, will still be a garden).
There are 498,000 trees on the streets the City (I have this directly from
Henry Stern, who probably counted them himself), and one of the best birding
areas on the Atlantic flyway -- and the subway runs through it! (Just an
aside: We visited the Outer Banks of North Carolina last Spring to do some
birding, and when, in response to the usual question, we said we were from
New York, we were asked what in the world we were doing there, when we could
be at Jamaica Bay.) Complain about the City as we will, the traffic moves,
the water is good, and we do manage to live with one another, though, unfortunately,
often uneasily and with fear and mistrust.
The City is ever changing and stable, and ever a place of hope and renewal.
We are now celebrating the 100th anniversary of the joining of Greater New
York, which came into being on January 1, 1898 (though I must admit that,
to date, the populace has not been swept up in Centennial fever).
Last May, to get a jump on the festivities, we celebrated the 100th anniversary
of the signing into law of the city charter for the new city. Someone, I
don't know who, got the inspired idea to celebrate by bringing to City Hall
twenty or so centenarians, people who were alive when tine city was joined.
The celebration was hosted by our own Schuyler Chapin, the City's Commissioner
of Cultural Affairs. Schuyler spoke of the City's history, then his family
history, and then he spoke of the need to fill time speaking while we waited
for the Mayor, who was uncharacteristically late. Standing in back of the
chamber, I must admit to morbid thoughts, as I looked at my watch and then
at the assembled centenarians. When the Mayor finally arrived, he did something
unexpected. Holding a portable mike, he walked among the guests and asked
them where they were from, and their ages. They were a diverse lot, from
the East Side and West Side and the boroughs. One ninety-nine year old woman
identified herself as "the swinging Swede." Finally, the Mayor
approached an African-American gentleman dressed in a gray suit sitting
with perfect upright posture. "How old are you?" the Mayor asked.
The man replied: "I'm 110 years old and I'm still dancing." "Well,"
said the Mayor with a perfect New York response, "Let me introduce
you to the swinging Swede."
New York is, of course, more than 100 years old. As is All Souls, which
celebrated its 178th anniversary this past November. Since 1819 All Souls
has reflected, grown with, and contributed to the spiritual and material
well-being of our city. All Souls is far from a microcosm of the city, but
in our unity and diversity, we have been and can continue to be a model
for the city.
Just as New York City is a wondrous place, so is this church. Like New York,
it is big and growing and bold In its vision and ambition.
All Souls, from its founding, has mirrored the City. New York City, in myth
and actuality, has been and continues to be first and foremost a port entry,
a haven for immigrants and a place of new beginnings. This city has been
a haven for those who come from foreign lands to escape oppression and starvation.
It has also been a new home for people from abroad and from elsewhere in
the country who seek economic opportunity, intellectual and artistic freedom
and escape from narrow social restraints.
All Souls is a church founded by immigrants. Dr. Kring, in the first volume
of his history of the church, describes our founders as "strangers
from inland and outland." He quotes Catherine Sedgwick's description
of the early members of the church as Including "at least one of every
sort." Ms. Sedgwick was a novelist and may have exaggerated a bit the
diversity of the early church, but in reviewing the membership rolls, Dr.
Kring finds that not one of the founders of the church in 1819 was resident
in the city for more than ten years. Most were from New England families
and here to pursue economic opportunities. And like other immigrants, they
brought with them their religious practices and beliefs, and in time, were
able to found a church of their own down on Chambers Street amid considerable
suspicion and hostility.
As the City grew and expanded All Souls moved uptown, first to what is now
Soho, then to Gramercy Park and finally, in an act of faith, completing
this beautiful sanctuary in the midst of the depression. During this time
our congregation has served the City with acts of charity and through participation
in our City civic life. Most celebrated, of course, is the leadership of
Henry Whitney Bellows during his long ministry in the 19th century, and
his role in founding the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil
War, the founding of the Cooper Union by Peter Cooper and the editing of
the Post by William Cullen Bryant. I am inspired by the work of their contemporary,
Dorman Eaton, of whom I had never heard until Mary Ella Holst asked me to
co-sponsor a page in his honor in the program book for our 175th Anniversary
celebration.
I mention Eaton because he was a lawyer, a leader in the municipal reform
activities of the Bar Association and among those who were instrumental
in fighting the Tweed ring and achieving civil service reform. In the face
of the threat of communicable disease in our ever more crowded City, it
was Eaton, along with fellow All Souls members, William Cullen Bryant and
Peter Cooper, who led the fight for the establishment of our modern Board
of Health in 1866 -- an institution that has ever since been the model of
public health administration for the entire country and which now benefits
from the dedicated service of All Souls member and master 6th grade church
school teacher, Dr. Ben Mojica.
Today, our outreach programs -- PS 151, Monday Night Hospitality, the Children's
Task Force -- to name just a few, continue this tradition. Our Sister Church
and Across 96th Street efforts exemplify the need to draw communities together,
and our AIDS Task Force is truly a pioneering work in civic action and responsibility.
These activities amount to what I view as a civic ministry. The teachings
of our ministers and the example of those who preceded us inspire us to
go forth and participate fully in the life of our community.
Although scripture is not read in services at All Souls as regularly as
it is read in other congregations, those passages that are repeated with
some frequency in our readings and our ministers' sermons give us guidance
in living purposefully in the city.
I certainly do not advocate proceeding in municipal affairs with biblical
rectitude, with a fundamentalism of the right or the left. And since we
are all souls and not saints, few of us are able to conduct ourselves in
our personal, let alone our civic, relationships in accordance with the
teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. It just doesn't seem as if the last
are going to be first, at least not in the immediate future in New York
City.
I do not intend to be flip or irreverent in noting that lending without
expecting repayment will certainly not bolster the financial sector which
fuels the city's economy, and if someone takes my coat, I'm not likely to
give him my cloak as well. I'm much more likely to report the theft, a quality
of life crime. New York may be the nation's (and perhaps the world's) arts
capital, its finance capital, its Internet capital, and perhaps even in
some ways religious capital. But while this may not exactly be Babylon on
the Hudson, in no way is it the Kingdom of Heaven. In any event, New York
is not a city that ever had pretensions to being a city upon a hill. One
of the gifts Marj bought me this Christmas is a nice first edition of the
Columbia Historical Portrait of New York. Perusing the old prints and photographs
collected in that volume one comes away with a portrait of the city, then
as now, as often gritty, grasping, ad hoc and self-promoting.
There are, however, Biblical passages that go directly to the heart of our
life in the City. Paul's metaphor in First Corinthians of a body of different
parts, each vital to the whole, may have been meant as an admonition to
fractious church communities to pull together in the face of adversity,
or as a lofty vision of cosmic unity, or possibly both. I certainly don't
know. But it is difficult to surpass as a metaphor for the interrelatedness,
the interdependence, of the neighborhoods and communities that make up this
city.
A few months ago, the Times Sunday Magazine published a special issue that
was titled "New York's Parallel Lives." The cover photograph depicted
a group of people together in a subway car -- an Asian-American teenager,
a woman in a sari, a philanthropist, the Reverend Floyd Flake, and a white
guy in khakis. They are together in a confined space, but not one of the
people in the picture is looking at another.
The message of the picture and the accompanying articles is clear: we live
our lives side by side but we are separated by race, class and profession.
Separated we are, our awareness of others severely limited. But our lives
in the City are not parallel -- they overlap and intersect at unexpected
times and odd angles. And they converge. Not only in the perspective of
the infinite, in our mortality, but here, now, in the living of our everyday
lives in and around the rock and filled marsh of a few coastal islands that
we have transformed into a wonder of the world, all the souls of the City,
seven and a half million of us, more or less, whose lives, by choice or
necessity, converge. "The eye cannot say to the hand, `I have no need
of you.'" "If one member suffers, all suffer together...."
The prophet Micah tells us what the Lord requires of us: To do Justice,
love mercy and walk humbly with our God. Our neighbors require this of us
as well. This prophetic admonition translates into the open hand, open heart
and open mind that form the central motivating force of our liberal religion.
It guides us in our civic ministry. Our zeal to do justice must be tempered
by mercy and humility, by the acceptance of imperfection in ourselves and
others.
In pursuing our civic ministry let us try to cultivate an experimental,
open minded approach to policy, one that recognizes uncertainties and ambiguity,
and be willing to accept the real possibility of failure. Let us in our
civic affairs, as Galen has taught, have the strength and ultimately the
freedom to say, "I don't know."
And let us try our best to avoid cynicism. This is particularly difficult
for the educated and media saturated mind, but absolutely essential to our
civic health. A cynical attitude about civic affairs, very familiar to us,
often mistakenly passes for sophistication, worldliness and even liberalism.
But cynicism must be avoided because it leads to resignation.
Instead, let us recognize the limitations of the political process -- and
the
imperfections and honorable efforts of those whom we elect -- and in so
doing take
courage from the work of All Souls and other active congregations over the
history of
our City.
A few Sundays a year I am AWOL from All Souls, attending services at Plymouth
Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn Heights, a Congregationalist Church where
Julia and a few of her friends sing in the Boys and Girls Choir. It is an
inspiring place. This is the church that Henry Ward Beecher built, that
served as the Grand Central Terminal of the Underground Railroad, sheltering
runaway slaves in the years preceding the Civil War. It is a church whose
central stained glass window depicts Abraham Lincoln; he is flanked on the
right by Beecher and on the left by a window depicting women who fought
in the Nineteenth Century for the right of women to higher education. All
Souls, Plymouth, so many other institutions -- churches, synagogues, charitable
foundations, good government groups, bar associationsthis is the soul of
the City --they show us the way to a meaningful civic ministry in which
we can, as Forrest reminded us in an election day sermon a few years ago,
elect ourselves. The towers of Manhattan and the steel of Pittsburgh, said
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, are built on Spirit.
Our challenge today is a city whose demographics are changing more rapidly
than at any time since the great Immigration of the last turn of the century.
A recent study by the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
at NYU reveals just how rapidly the City is being transformed.
Immigrants account for fully 34% of our population -- and the number rises
to 56% when you include the children of foreign born New Yorkers. While
we are still nowhere near to healing the tensions between black and white
New Yorkers, we are faced with a new dynamic. Hispanics have replaced Blacks
as the second largest ethnic group. More than 10% of us are from Asia. White
New Yorkers now comprise 38.5% of the population. Immigrants account for
27% of white households and 35% of Black households.
With the new immigration, we witness with horror sweat shops and living
conditions reminiscent of Jacob Riis's photographs, but also vibrant neighborhoods
where once there was abandonmentCaribbeans in the brownstones of Crown
Heights, Russians enlivening Brighton Beach, formerly decaying subway resort,
communities in all of the five boroughs rejuvenated, crucibles for the new
America of
the Twenty First Century.
All Souls will have to respond to these changes.
I realize that the response of Unitarian reformers to immigration has unfortunately
not always been one of unalloyed acceptance. I still recoil from the sting
of anti-Semitism one encounters in the pages of The Education of Henry Adams.
Some in our movement openly expressed anti-Catholicism well into the middle
of this century. Millard Fillmore, one of the four Unitarians to serve as
President of the United States, was later the presidential candidate of
the xenophobic "Know Nothing" Party. Henry Whitney Bellows himself
uttered a few sentiments on this subject that definitely do not bear repeating.
But if our recent history is a guide, All Souls will respond to our changing
New York with dedication, imagination and courage.
All Souls can provide a model for the new New York. Not that we are a microcosm
of the City's population. Far, far from it. In truth, we are, for the most
part, a very small slice of the socioeconomic pie. Still, we are diverse.
Of the 1400 members of All Souls, I would estimate the number of different
religious viewpoints at about 1400--maybe more. But we join together, often
arriving here by circuitous and difficult paths, to worship in our common
humanity and joining in a simple Bond of Union, even if not all of us are
pleased with its every word. For 178 years the members of this church have
united in worship and reached out in service to others with open hearts
and minds. With our capital campaign to fund the opening of our doors to
people of all physical abilities, and the startup of the Life Lines Institute,
we move forward in the spirit of All Souls.
Many mornings I find myself running or walking along the Brooklyn Heights
Promenade, a magnificent park that exists only because concerted civic action
by
local residents forced the re-routing of an ill-conceived Robert Moses highway
project. We all know the view, represented In the 19th Century in thousands
of
lithographs by Currier and Ives and others (one of which, by J.W. Hill,
in fact, hangs in
the entrance to Wiggin House), in the early 20th Century in sharp black
and white
photographs, later in establishing opening shots of movies. The lower Manhattan
skyline, the harbor, the islands, the ferries, the Statue of Liberty, and
the Brooklyn
Bridge, the poetry of the gentle horizontal of its arc spanning the river
and the vertical
of its towers with their reaching Gothic arches. It is beautiful -- breath-takingly,
heart-
stoppingly beautiful. Before this, in the meditative hours of early morning,
I cannot
but be moved to prayer. In the words of our benediction: "May God bless
and keep us.
And there is the light. Passing over the low houses that border the Promenade
and shining on the buildings across the river so that for me, in this moment,
the dawn breaks not in the East, but in the West, the sun rising on the
glass and steel and masonry of the skyline, shining on the river, shining
on me. "May God's light shine on us, and out from within us."
Stand for a moment in simple awe. Stand for a moment in peaceful contemplation
of our creation. Let us forget for this moment the teeming, chaotic City,
and the work that needs to be done.
Let us forget and not forget.
In place of the energetic port known to Melville and Whitman there is the
South Street Seaport. The Customs House is a museum. Most shipping has moved
to New Jersey, and if the harbor is not dredged soon, that which remains
will be lost to Halifax and Norfolk. The river and the harbor are much cleaner
than they have been for a long time, but we're still in court and subject
to decrees mandating a further clean-up. We're in the Supreme Court of the
United States battling New Jersey over jurisdiction to Ellis Island. Governors
Island has been abandoned by the Coast Guard, and depending on our vision
and will it will either lie derelict or be preserved and transformed for
future generations. The magnificent bridge and its sister spans are in need
of serious maintenance. Lower Manhattan itself is being given new life by
innovative zoning, tax incentives and the imagination of civic and business
leaders, that are transforming corporate headquarters to residential rentals,
new homes for non-profit agencies and start-up high tech companies.
All of this concerns me in my day to day work. But I stand in awe of the
City, for a moment and I really have only a moment. And the object of my
awe, the skyline itself, the towers of glass and steel and masonry, I know
that even this someday will be effaced.
But today, in this day we are given, we're still dancing. And this City,
this church -- they're ours to keep. Copyright AllSouls 1998