Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Gratitude Reflections

Rev. William Short, Jr.

Nowadays most people look back at World War I and think it was a bad idea. It wasn’t necessary, the reasons most countries got involved turned out to be lies, and many millions of people died.

But at the time, almost everyone thought it was a good idea and there was very little tolerance for people who disagreed. Even years after the war ended, people who had argued against the war or had refused to fight were denied jobs and shunned by their communities.

One man who spoke against the war was the minister of this church. Actually it was the first Unitarian church in Palo Alto, which existed from 1906 to 1934. The Rev. William Short, Jr., was minister in April, 1917, when the United States entered the war.

Reverend Short was a pacifist. He believed that war is never the best way to solve a conflict, and that just as people should not hit each other when they don’t agree about something, countries needed to find peaceful solutions to their disagreements too. It is very hard for countries to do this, but war is hard too.

There were lots of other people in the church who were pacifists or who thought the United States shouldn’t be getting involved in the war. But the pressure in the community in favor of the war was enormous. When people like Reverend Short said they opposed the war, this wasn’t treated as just another valid opinion. They were told they were traitors hellip; that they didn’t care about their country hellip; that they didn’t care about doing what was right and fair hellip; that they were cowards.

Not long after the US declared war, Congress began passing laws saying that even disagreeing aloud with the war could result in a $10,000 fine or 20 years in prison. And the AUA, the American Unitarian Association, told every church that their minister not only couldn’t oppose the war, but had to speak up strongly in favor of it. Any church whose minister didn’t go along with this would not receive money from the AUA. One church that depended on support from the AUA was the church in Palo Alto.

When ministers become ministers, they promise to speak the truth as they see it. I don’t know exactly what went through Reverend Short’s head, because it was a long time ago and I have never read his diary, if he kept one. But maybe he felt he was hurting his church by being a pacifist. Maybe he knew these new laws were going to pass and he would lose the right to speak his true beliefs. Maybe he didn’t want his church to have to choose between supporting his right to speak freely and receiving funds from the AUA. Whatever his reasons were, he resigned. Given the choice between staying on as the minister of this church but being silent about his true views, or being free to speak his mind, he quit.

Now, just like most people in the US, we Unitarian Universalists look back on the time of World War I and we criticize people like the leaders of the AUA who put this kind of pressure on ministers. We are horrified at laws like the one that made it illegal to disagree with the government about the war, and we are proud of the people who stood their ground. Clarence Skinner, a Universalist leader during World War I who strongly opposed the war, is a hero to so many people that a UU social justice award is named after him. With this award, we are saying that we want to be more like him.

It’s never easy to speak up for what we believe when lots of people disagree with us. And it’s hardest of all when the people who say we’re wrong are the people we most care about and respect: when they are our friends, our parents, the members of our church. It takes a special kind of courage to quietly insist, “This is what I believe.” And that kind of courage is very important to us as Unitarian Universalists.

And so we give thanks for William Short, who stood up for what he believed in, and whose prophetic words and deeds call us to live lives of justice and compassion.

 

Wangari Maathai

Did you know that people can make a desert?
Africa used to be a country covered with forests and grasslands, but after years of cutting down trees, the desert grew and grew. People had trouble finding food to eat and water to drink. This is still sad and scary for many people in Africa.

The good news is that people can also heal the deserts that they have made. And we have a very special woman to thank for teaching us that. Wangari Maathai grew up in Kenya among the Kikuyu people in a place that was still filled with green forests and grasslands with water to drink. It was beautiful.

Wangari came here to the United States to go to college in Kansas, and got her doctorate in Veterinary medicine. She was the first East African woman to get a PhD. She also has 3 children, which is just as amazing.

So how did she become so involved in the environment? I will let her tell you in her own words:

In 1975 Kenyan women were coming together to discuss the issues that we wanted to take to Mexico for the first United Nations conference on women. Many women in rural areas said they were concerned about firewood, which was the main source of energy. They were concerned about water; there wasn’t adequate clean drinking water. They were concerned about nutritious food, and they were concerned about poverty, especially among women.

I immediately suggested that perhaps what we should do with these women is to plant trees. I saw the connection between land degradation and lack of water, so I continued with the program of tree planting. I started with a small group. Then it became two groups. Eventually, it was thousands of groups planting trees to restore the land and improve the quality of life.

Planting trees, per se, would not have been a problem. Nobody would have bothered me if all I did was to encourage women to plant trees. But I started seeing the linkages between the problems that we were dealing with and the root causes. And one of those root causes was misgovernance. The government had approved the clear-cutting of forests that were catchment areas for water and encouraged the cultivating of exotic plantations. It was the government that had allowed the people to go into the forests and to start cultivating food crops. All this had caused the massive destruction of forests, which could absorb water, which could give us normal rain patterns, and which could sustain the rivers. So I knew that even if I planted all the trees downstream, the stream itself was being destroyed by the government. It was important for us to address the government and to ask the government to stop destroying the catchment areas upstream.

But that got Wangari into a lot of trouble. She was even thrown in jail! She went in and out of hiding for many years, but she knew she was doing the right thing. Then in 2002 the old corrupt regime was voted out of office and In December 2002, Professor Maathai was elected to Kenya’s Parliament and was appointed by Kenya’s president as Assistant Minister for the Environment.

Over those 30 years, she lead a movement in which 100,000 women in 6,000 groups planted over 30 million trees.

This is why in 2004 she became the 1^st African woman ever to win the Nobel peace prize “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”.

We give thanks for Wangari Maathai, who is helping to heal the land and the people in Kenya and across Africa, and whose prophetic words and deeds call us to live lives of justice and compassion.

 

Martha and Rev. Waitstill Sharp

What would you do if you found out that people were being locked up just for being Jewish, or for speaking out against the government? Well, that’s what the Nazi’s were doing in Europe when some of the elders in our congregation were children. Back in 1938, the Unitarians and the Universalists spoke out about what was happening in Europe. Refugees were flowing in from all over Europe to Prague, and many were coming to the Unitarian church there. The American Unitarians wanted to help. They put together a group to see what they could do for all the people who were trying to leave countries where there was war and the people who were afraid of being locked up just because of their religion or politics.

The American Unitarian Association chose the Rev. Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha (who was a professional social worker) to go to Chakenslavakia and see how they could help. It was a scary thing to do because there was a war happening, and they were parents so that meant being away from their two children who would be taken care of by good friends. But they knew it was important that they help children and adults called “refugees” which means you have to leave your home because you lost your home in the war, or because are afraid of the war and what might happen.

Martha said “We realized that we were living at the front lines against Nazism. We had never felt such an urge to act before it was too late — to serve these brave people, to help them save their world and our own.”

Martha tells the story of one time, when she was helping an important anti-Nazi leader to find a safe place to stay at the British Embassy. It sounds like a spy movie, but it really happened. Martha says: “I found a taxi in the early darkness, and noting that the driver had a companion in the front seat, gave an address which was near but not actually the one which was my destination. The “extra cargo” tried to engage me in conversation, but I parried his questions. Arriving at the place, I hastily paid the driver [and walked] around the corner, hiding in the first doorway to watch and see whether I was being followed. The ‘companion’ came around the same corner, looked up the street, down an alley or two and then walked along the street. The driver honked. My heart raced as I realized that my follower must be a Gestapo agent. I flattened myself against the entrance and, in the darkness, he walked right by and then headed back toward the car.”

The Sharps went back and forth between Europe and America several times helping refugees find places to go. On one famous trip Martha helped and 10 adults and 29 children sail to Lisbon, from where they could travel safely to the United States.

The Sharps’ grandson remembered hearing stories about what his grandparents had done, and so he did some research and found out about their history. Just last year, the names of Martha and Waitstill were engraved on a wall in the Garden of the Righteous. All of the 21,000 people named on that wall were awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem who remember the people who were brave and put themselves at risk to help others during that horrible war.

We give thanks for Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who helped so many people, and whose prophetic words and deeds call us to live lives of justice and compassion.

 

Jessica Govea

Imagine waking up every morning before it’s light. You go out into an enormous orchard and pick peaches. The rows of trees extend as far as you can see. When you come to the end of one row, you turn and begin the next one. When you finish that orchard, you go to the next one. You’re tired and aching from reaching, picking, bending, carrying, but the orchards and fields have no end. If it isn’t the time of year for peaches, you’re working in the lettuce fields, the cotton fields, the vineyards full of grapes. In summer, it’s so hot you can’t bear the sun, but you keep working.

Every once in a while, a plane passes overhead and sprays everything and everybody in the field with a foggy chemical that burns your lungs and your skin. You have a terrible headache, you have to throw up, and your eyes run with painful tears. You want to run off the field, wash this stuff off your skin, stop breathing it, but you’ll lose your job and then who will support your family?

You are only four years old, but everyone who works in the field is paid so little that you have to work or your family won’t have enough food or clothing.

This picture is of Jessica Govea. She began working in the orchards, vineyards and fields around Bakersfield, California when she was four. It wasn’t until she was in high school that she realized that wasn’t what most kids did.

But long before that, she started working to make things better for her family and other farm workers. Some union organizers had begun coming to the fields to tell the workers about banding together. If one person complained, he would probably just lose his job. The company figured there was always someone else who wanted it and the work would continue. But if hundreds of workers complained, then the company didn’t want to fire them all. If it tried to threaten them into being quiet, they could go to the newspaper and the company would look bad. And if the workers complained to the people who bought the cotton, and the grapes, and the lettuce, and those people told the company it had to change the way it did things or they would boycott it--they wouldn’t buy things from it anymore--then the company really listened.

To do all that, the workers needed to band together. So they formed a union. And one of the founders of this union was Jessica Govea. It became an official new union called the United Farm Workers when she was only 15 years old. She had already been helping put up flyers and even speaking to big crowds for years. When she was still a teenager, she was organizing boycotts and strikes and union elections, and establishing clinics where workers could go to a doctor. She did this kind of work for the rest of her life.

She got cancer when she was only 46 years old, probably because of all the pesticides that were sprayed on her for all those years, and she died of the cancer last year. Thanks to the work she did all her life, farm workers have more power to insist on safe working conditions, and fewer people will die the way she did. But there’s still a long way to go. Many farm companies are still spraying people with pesticides and keeping workers from joining a union. So the farm workers need other Jessicas to keep leading the way. Maybe you’ll be one of them, and maybe when one of them asks you for your support, you’ll give it.

Jessica loved to sing, and she loved a song that had the words, “freedom is something that every generation has to win again and again.” It’s true. There’s never been a generation of people who didn’t have to work hard to win more freedom. We can look back at all those generations and give thanks for the freedom they won for us. And we can win freedom for the people to come, even if we are just children ourselves.

We give thanks for Jessica Govea, who helped so many people, and whose prophetic words and deeds call us to live lives of justice and compassion.