[Poster's Note: Many of these documents were received by e-mail, apparently having been scanned. Header information was removed, and the documents were edited for web presentation. Some liberties were taken with format, but none with content, except that obvious scan errors were corrected.]
[Poster's Note:
I am not on the list to which this letter was posted. It came my way from several sources, which need not be identified. It is reasonable to assume that they knew what I was likely to do with the letter.
Most of the first paragraph has been edited out. In this paragraph, a situation is described involving the author in which a person manifests seriously disturbed behavior and is hospitalized. The matters surrounding this situation are complex, and one of the people involved is labeled as evil by the author. The people involved are identified by name. The author ends this paragraph with:
I feel great sorrow and deep disgust. For all the hitlers of the world, the devil dwells among us and has won this round. I feel defeated.This paragraph was the trigger of the events that resulted in the subsequent material shown in on this web site.
Mike.]
Subject: [Announcements] more
Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 15:51:44 -0500
From: [Announcements-admin of UUCF]
Reply-To: [UUCF e-mail]
To: [announcements of UUCF]
Two personal stories -
But first an introduction. It may seem a bit odd to begin the New Year with a sermon about evil. After all, we usually start our new years with resolutions about goodness - losing weight, being more generous, doing good, being kinder and so on, and we say to each other 'Happy New Year' and wish each other well. It is often thought of as a time to quote the old Perry como song 'Accentuate the positive, elimintate the negative, and don't mess with Mr In-Between.'
So why evil? Well, mostly schedule, I guess. We are asking these 'big questions this year and evil fit in the sequence now, and I am preaching next week at our sister congregation in Sterling - filling in for their minister, Rev Roberta Finkelstein who is on sabbatical, and then the following week is Martin Luther King Jr weekend and that is dedicated to that - my sermon title will be 'Our Moral Assignment.' So it fell to this Sunday.
But maybe it is just as well. We know that January is named after the roman god Janus - the two faced god - looking back and forward. But maybe it fits with evil as well. Without good there is no evil, without evil, there is no good - the two of them must be thought of together - maybe two sides of the same human coin.
To the stories: I went to college from 1965-1969 to Lawrence Uninversity in Appleton Wisconsin. It is a small liberal arts college with a fine music conservatory and high academic expectations. Appleton is 20 miles south of Green Bay and just north of Oshkosh. It sits on the Fox River, which during my time there was terribly polluted from the paper industry - Scott paper had its headquarters nearby, as did Kimberley Clark, and they dumped all kinds of nasty chemicals into the river.
Lawrence sat on a bluff above the river. But there were paths along the river bank, particularly along a stretch oif old train tracks, and it was a popular place to go for walks, a palce to sit with friends and talk, smoke or drink, or to be alone with the sophomore blues.
One fall afternoon in my sophomore year, I took a walk down along the tracks. It was a grey day, beginning to get cold. I was wearing an old army jacket - they were very popular then - mine was my brother's jacket from Viet Nam. He had served in the Marine Corps in Viet Nam. I was smoking - I was a Camel smoker then, a pack a day, and I loved it. It helped with my melancholy and my image of myself as mature and sensitive, a poet in the making - that kind of romance.
Some ways along the tracks, just past a small trestle where the tracks crossed a creek which met the Fox , there was a cut out in the bank. Probably from erosion, a kind of cave had formed. Very shallow - not more than five feet deep, but 20 or so feet high, the cave, or depression in the bank was a great place to sit. Just at the mouth were a couple of boulders on which thousands of students had sat over the years. I turned, intending to sit and read my T.S Eliot [is there any better poet for melancholy sophomores than Eliot?!], when I was frozen in fear.
There, around the entrance to the cave was something dark, something very dark, something that was sucking the light out of the world. Nothing I could see but something I could sense, something I could feel. It was evil, in as pure a form as I could have ever imagined. I was frozen, maybe for just several seconds, then turned and ran as fast as I could back to Campus.
A second story - some years ago, perhaps 7 or 8, I was invited to speak before the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors about whether the Library should be allowed to have issue of the Blade - a gay and lesbian newspaper - for public access. This had originally been a concern before the Library Board, courageously headed by our own Linda Hathaway. A number of members of the religious right - their term - coalesced against this, and it finally came before the Board of Supervisors.
In my remarks, I referred to Jefferson and Lincoln and to our tradtion of freedom and equal rights. Uus have a 40 year record now of publically and actively supporting equal rights for all regardless of sexual orientation - a record we should be very proud of.
After the meeting I was in the cavernous lobby orf the county building, talking with some church members, when one of the people who had testified for the other iside came up to me. A TV camera was nearby, though I don't think he noticed that. He came up to me, right up to me, his nose no more than two feet from my nose - this far [this is very close for a Minnesotan - talk about invading personal space!] and said to me, and I quote 'The trouble with you people is that you don't believe in sin!'
To which I immediate replied 'Oh but we do.' I don't know if this surprised him or our members more. I went on to say that the original meaning of sin is separation, that whatever breaks our relationship with what is holy is sin. I said that sin was whatever we did that breaks the creation, that evil resides in breaking relationship, severing our connection with others and the world and with God.
What do these stories say? At least two things - evil is real and evil is in the world by the result of our doing.
The best book I have read in preparing for this is 'The Death of Satan: How Americans Have lost the Sense of Evil' by Andrew Delbanco. I really recommend it to you. It is a brilliant book and one of the best discussions I have ever come across for thinking about our world and how we live in it. Delbanco traces the image of Satan - the idea of evil - from Puritan times to our time and argues - rightly, I think - that we have lost the ability to understand evil, and losing that ability we are losing our ability to confront it effectively.
I typed in the word evil into Google - my favortite internet search engine and it came up with about 10.5 million entries [this in.09 seconds], Yahoo came up with 10.6 million. I don't know how fast, slightly slower I think. For both the number one entry was a notice that someone has taken down the 'Bert is evil' poster on their website. Bert, here, being the Bert of Bert and Ernie from sesame street. I think this proves Delbancos point].
How many of you believe in God of some kind? How many believe in a Satan of some kind? Nationally about 90% believe in God, only 40% believe in Satan. We have heard the word 'evil' used a lot more in the past year. The evil doers and the axis of evil from the current administration; the willingness to label Bin Laden as evil incarnate; terrorism as evil. Thisa is all good, I believe - a public use of the word is more likely to bring it back into public discussion and force us to ask what is evil and where does it come from.
Wislawa Szymborska, the Nobel poet from Poland, and as good a poet about evil as I know, says that evil comes from 'intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned. Wendell Berry says that evil comes our inordinate desire to be superior to our condition. Hannah Ahrendt coined the famous phrase the banality of evil in describing Adolph Eichman and the systermatic and industrialized killing in the death camps of the Nazis. Elie Wiesel suggested that evil lay in the passivity of bystanders as much as in the perpetrators themselves.
The face of evil - Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge, Idi Amin, the Duvaliers, the Taliban, the killers of Capote's 'In Cold Blood, Timothy McVeigh. The faces are all too readily available.
But as my friend Gary Smith wrote in a sermon:
What is evil? It is the -not me,- or so we think, until we can come to admit the evil that lurks within our own selves, and that often the line between good and evil inside us is a fine line, indeed. Kathleen Norris says, -sometimes murderers help me recognize that my own anger feels like murder; I can comprehend all too well how my own rage, left unchecked, might translate into a truly terrible act meant to destroy another.- Or Solzhenitsyn, -the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.- -The only devils in the world,- Mahatma Gandhi said, -are those running around in our hearts.- -Evil is unspectacular and always human,- says the poet W.H. Auden. -He shares our bed and eats at our table.- -I cannot think of taking the speck of dust out of my neighbor's eye,- says Jean Vanier in the second reading today, -unless I'm working on the log in my own. Evil is here in me.-
We have met the enemy and it is us.
Evil arises and becomes real, becomes that darkness in the cave, when we believe ourselves to be better than we are. This is Wendell Berry's point; Delbancos, too - when we begin to think ourselves, whether as an individual or as a group, as better than, then the fertrile soil for evil is tilled.
The Nazis defined the Jews as other; we defined Blacks as less than us, as other; some define gays and lesbians as other; Hutus defined Tutsis as other; Israelies define Palestinians and Palestinians defined each other as other; the Taliban define women and non-Muslem as other.
And when we define others as other, we define ourselves are being more, being better and morals and ethics are lost. Berry says this grows out of our dsire to be superior to our condition. And our condition is one of contingency - we depend on others, we depend on this world - we are not superior. Pride goeth before the fall; arrogance leads to destruction.
Delbacno says that we have lost much of our ability to worship anything beyond ourselves, that the history of this country is partly the history of the loss of transcendence. But we keep, he says, looking for something beyond us, something against which to judge who we are and who we might become. This is the religious task and why we so desperately need a strong and vital religious imagination in our world.
But all of this is the easy part - it is easy to see evil, oir see the devil in the traditional grab - Hitler is our modern favorite, and clearly that is evil at its profoundest.
But the evil we often miss, the devil in disguise, is the one in all of us, the one who charms and is satisfied with just about anything - that devil which convinces us that things matter more than people, that one more drink or another cigarette won't hurt, that brintgs pleasure when we beat someone off the line at a stoplight, which lets us believe that driving cars without regard to gas mileage ios OK.
It is the devil in us - the devil of apathy, of pleasuere seeking, the devil of addiction, to things, to substances, to unhealthy relationships. The dapper devil who helps us believe that money can indeed solvce problems and that, well, it donesn't really matter anyway.
These are the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who knew evil: -It seems that I can hear the almighty God say, 'stop preaching your loud sermons and whooping your irrelevant mess in my face, for your hands are full of tar. For the people that I sent you to serve are in need, and you are doing nothing but being concerned about yourself.' Seems that I can hear God saying it's time to rise up now and make clear that the evils of the universe must be removed.' And that God isn't going to do it all by himself. The church that overlooks this,- says King, -is a dangerously irrelevant church.-
Subject: [Announcements] PLEASE READ IMMEDIATELY
Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 16:22:23 -0500
From: [Announcements-admin of UUCF]
Reply-To: [UUCF e-mail]
To: [announcements of UUCF]
By mistake I sent an email with personal information. Please delete, without reading the announcement labeled 'more.' This is an enormous error on my part and could be damaging to individuals. To those mentioned, if it is read, I offer my deepest regrets.
Please, everyone, simply delete the announmcement labeled More
Dear Friends,
I would like to take an opportunity to respond to the letter you sent to me in April. I had not done so earlier because the letter indicated I should respond to Susan Blasko, but also because I felt it important to at least be in conversation with the Board about the report prepared by Rev. Ed White.
Since your letter to me will become available, I would like to respond to your comments. I do not wish this to be or sound argumentative or defensive, but simply my thoughts on your letter. I want to thank so many of you for the kindnesses and support you have often showed me.
I also want to acknowledge the positive comments you made about my ministry here. Indeed, much has changed in these ten years and many of you can take credit for much of what has happened. For me the following are some of the highlights:
Please understand how much I realize that these accomplishments have happened because members made them happen: to the extent I lent encouragement or counsel and even help, I am pleased to have been a part of a congregation always looking to become better.
I am puzzled, however, by the claim that I am unable or unwilling to recognize lay leadership and that I believe I am accountable to no one. The above accomplishments speak, I believe, to the opposite. I believe I have always said that I am accountable to the congregation, just as the Board is. In all of our organizational charts, this is reflected. Different UU congregations are structured differently, but UUCF is not outside of any norm in this respect. I have always submitted monthly reports to the Board and a yearly report to the congregation.
I have often asked for evaluations and have suggested on several occasions means of doing so. There have been several large surveys about worship. For the past several years we have had a review session in May, and tlie R&R committee is looking at the ministry of the church. To my knowledge all raises I have received have been either for parity with local colleagues or COLA raises and the Board has consistently argued that parity is very important.
The decision to move to one service in late spring was a consensus by the worship group, which includes me and Bill, Judy and the lay ministers for worship along with about 4 members of the congregation. It was made in response to the decision by Bill and the RE leadership to end regular RE programming the week before Memorial Day. Since Memorial day has normally been a difficult day for RE, and the following Sunday is the Spring retreat weekend, it seemed best for RE to conclude on that Sunday before Memorial Day. My memory is that the Board was pleased with this change as it was thought to help facilitate a larger attendance at the annual meeting.
My office hours have been the same for 20 years in ministry; I have been in the office for most of Tuesday and Wednesday and have made myself available regularly by appointment. I am not aware of any concern about my unavailability. My one Sabbatical was approved by the Board and I reported on it to the congregation when I returned. I am not sure what an unprofessional attitude to vacation time might mean.
I have tried to respond to the Board's requests regarding the email incident of January, and I did not come to the one meeting for compelling personal reasons, and requested that we find another time to meet.
I am as concerned as you are, I believe, about the continuation of conflict within the congregation. No one has sought this and I believe everyone has tried to avoid it. The UUA consultants concluded in their report of several years ago that the congregation was "conflict habituated." To the extent this may be true, the responsibility falls on all of us. Many of the complaints from several years ago were directed to the whole leadership and not just to me. I am not by any means saying I was not a significant factor, but some of the concerns had to do with leadership as a whole and the kind of congregation we were.
I believe I was as saddened by Mary Foster's resignation as anyone; she served us well and she obviously loved the church. I tried to be supportive of her presidency and am sorry I was unable to be more so.
Finally, I am sorry that not one of you who signed the letter talked with me about the concerns mentioned in your letter. I had conversations with several of you about other issues, but nothing that would have led me to believe that the concerns were so deep and seemingly intractable, and so I was completely surprised when this was delivered to me.
I do want to make myself as available to any of you as much as I can to talk or listen. I would prefer to continue my ministry at UUCF but if that should not be possible, I would rather conclude it with relationships repaired than broken. I am sure you can understand that I might not be able to meet with you immediately; this has been devastating to me and my family, and we are still trying to recover from the shock.
I thank you in advance for reading this,
Rev. Jim Nelson
Dear Friends,
This is not an easy letter to write, and please forgive its length, but I hope that what I have to say is important and also cause for reflection. I am writing this with both the deepest concern and the deepest gratitude.
As you should all know by now, tensions within the leadership exist and a group of people sent me a letter in April asking that I negotiate my resignation with the Board. Many of the people who signed this are current and former leaders, and people I hold in the highest regard. The letter came as a complete surprise to me for no one had spoken with me about the depth of concern or even about the specifics mentioned.
At the same time, the Board and I were working with a consultant from the Alban Institute, paid for by the UUA, to seek creative and constructive ways of addressing the concerns. I am still committed to engaging in a process to resolve whatever difficulties exist. Whether this would be effective depends on all of you and whether the members and leaders of this congregation are willing to commit to a process as well.
For me to leave now would seriously jeopardize my ability to find another church settlement. Given the current economy, a daughter in college and one about to begin, and my age, this is daunting for me and my family. A conflicted end to my ministry here would also make settling a new minister more difficult for you. This could be an opportunity to break the pattern this congregation has had with its ministers. This could be a chance to break what UUA consultants found, after the most broad based investigation and deepest research, to be a "conflict habituated" culture. This coming year could be a time for both of us to see whether we might come to a new and better covenant about ministry and leadership. I would take time to make a decision for myself about my own future. I am not sure that I want to continue in ministry, but do not want to rule that out either. If I am to seek another church settlement, being in place would greatly increase my opportunities.
I do, though, want to thank so many of you for so many kindnesses over these ten years; I have dedicated your children, celebrated weddings and mourned as loved ones died. We've had fun and been through sorrow. We gathered in huge numbers the Sunday after September 11 and in small numbers in homes and classrooms and my office. I am proud of the congregation we have created together.
It has been an enormous privilege to work with our staff. Helping create a staff team was a priority of mine and we do indeed have a wonderful staff team. It has been a great pleasure working with Judy Harrison Sunday after Sunday to provide inspirational and meaningful worship. We have been a great team together. Patty Girman has been an administrator without peer and a close and a trusted colleague; we have also been a great team serving the backside of the church. The rest of the office - Linda Powell and Marge Javins, Marian Forte and Carol Jensen - and those who are not here any more - they have been wonderful - dedicated and caring and fun. Bill Welch has been a special kind of colleague and he is a man of great integrity. Since there had historically been tension between the parish and the RE ministers. Bill and I covenanted with each other to be supportive and collaborative. We have.
There is a lot to remember: here are some of the highlights for me:
Credit for all of this goes to you, and the extent to which I was able to encourage, counsel or help, I am privileged to have been a part of a congregation always looking to become better.
There has been much change, and, as we all know, change sometimes brings with it tension and sometimes conflict. I have been a part of that, and for what was unnecessary, I offer my sincerest apologies. I am sure that over ten years I have been intemperate enough, rash enough, stubborn enough - but I have loved this congregation and tried to serve it well. I had always thought that I had done more good than ill.
And I have tried to lead it as well. That is what I understood your call to me was - to lead, and I have tried to lead well in accordance with the principles of our faith.
What I want to ask of all of you is to spend this next year with me looking to the future. If I am to leave or to stay, I want it to be with relationships repaired, not broken. I want very much for UUCF to continue its growth and health and want us to be together in a way that makes that most possible. I want to extend my hand to every one in gratitude and for all of us to join hands in healing and in creating a better future.
So, what to say, finally? Perhaps this: our faith calls us to be the best we can be; to uphold what is most honorable and compassionate in the human spirit. Our faith calls us to always stand on higher ground and seek what is holy in how we live together. Our faith calls us to be free - free of hatred and bias, free of what is petty and small; it calls us to be free to a deeper humanity. Our faith - well, our faith calls us to hope, and, in the end, to love.
I love you all,
Rev. Jim Nelson
Dear Friends,
In the last several days, you received a letter and information from the Board about what is currently occurring in our congregation. I appreciate, like the Board, all the effort members and friends have put into this, and want to confirm my sincere desire to find a way out of this that is good for us all. I believe this is possible and pledge my efforts to that end.
When the Board and I met with Rev Ed White on May 1,1 indicated my desire to enter a process of reconciliation with church leadership and to engage the congregation in a process so that you could make decisions about the kind of ministry that might serve you best. I was ready to work with the leadership and an outside consultant to effect a process and work it through. However, neither I nor my Good Offices person [a colleague who acted as my advocate] felt there was enough will or desire on the Board's part to enter such a process. I then suggested other alternatives - one of which was my seeking another settlement during this coming year.
I relayed all of this with the Board with the understanding that this was privileged information and a part of our on-going discussion about what we felt might best serve the congregation. Our president, Susan Blasko, shared the letter with me to be sent to the congregation before it was mailed. I requested that it be amended to reflect my desire to work with the congregation in a process and asked that mention of other alternatives - as my seeking a settlement - be deleted because it was shared in confidence. Unfortunately that request was not honored. At the same time, I am not ready to make any decision about what 1 want for my future and look forward to conversations with many of you to help inform that decision.
I want to assure everyone that I am committed to working towards a process which is most beneficial for the whole congregation, and that I have not decided what I think is best for me and for UUCF. It may be that we decide the kind of ministry I can provide is not what would best serve UUCF, but I do not believe we have arrived at that point yet.
My sincere hope is that we will continue to be in conversation and that we not come to a premature decision. I appreciate the Board's efforts in scheduling forums for members to talk, and 1 trust that this is a process that will continue.
I will be in California from May 31 through June 8 with my family to officiate at a wedding for some very dear friends and wish to have that time to rest, and to reflect on what might be best. 1 look forward to our continued conversations.
Rev. Jim Nelson
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 08:45:03 -0400
From: Jim Nelson
Dear Friends,
I wanted to let you all know that I have decided to resign from UUCF, and have come an agreement with the Board for a year's severance. I had a good chance to think and talk with my family when we were in California and we believe this is the best for us.
I want to thank all of you for all your kindness and support. These last couple of months have been among the hardest of my life and if it hadn't been for all of you, it would have been unbearable. I've been in the ministry for 20 years, and it is the kinds of actions you all have undertaken that makes it worthwhile. I believe it was your efforts that helped the Board be somewhat generous.
I am sure there are all kinds of lessons to be learned in this. If a story is told long enough, it becomes true. For the most of my time at UUCF, I had quite good relations with Boards, and it began to become more conflicted in the last three years. There have always been disagreements - that is to be expected in a group of UUs - but the fact that the church is strong and has become stronger is, to me, a strong argument that leadership has worked. I am sorry that more of the congregation didn't want to push this through and find where the problems lay and how to address them. If that is to happen in the future, it will be in large part to your efforts in slowing this train down and insisting on dialogue. Another lesson is that personal relations matter so very much and that dialogue is the way communities are built.
For me personally, your support has meant the world, and for my family, too. We will carry the stories and knowledge of your efforts, the emails and notes and phone calls you sent with us forever.
Again, my deepest thanks to all of you.
Jim
Dear Friends,
As we both begin to look towards the future, I want to take the opportunity for a final note to all of you. These past several months have been very difficult ones. No one of us wanted our partnership to end like this. But it has, and in an agreement I believe is best for me and for UUCF.
I do want to thank you for so much over these ten years. I am leaving with some wonderful memories that will stay with me forever. We have worked hard together and have created a liberal religious community of depth and of great possibility.
I go forward from here saddened but hopeful. I have learned much and believe that my future will be fuller because of my time with you. My great hope is that you will take this time and this opportunity for a deep and open and honest conversation about the direction of UUCF and the nature of the leadership you need. The experiences of these ten years, and of the last several months, can be the basis for a dialogue that can help you move towards a better future. If you involve the whole community listening and speaking with each other, then you will give yourselves the opportunity to learn and grow from this.
It should be a conversation among all of you, not a conversation between groups or sides. This is your chance to come together in the spirit of the faith we profess, affirming that out of the diversity of viewpoints and hopes, a deeper unity of purpose might emerge. Trust each other; be kind in your listening and honest in your speaking to each other.
These past few months have been hard, hard on me and hard on you. It will be the measure of each of us how we respond and create something better; to rise above where we are in even a small way is to touch the transcendent. On our different paths, I pray we both do so.
The root meaning of religion is to reconnect. Now is that time. I will do that within myself as I look towards my future. And it is a time of reconnection for you, too. I wish you all the very best. In the words I love so much - love mercy and do justice and walk humbly with your God. And, give them not hell, but hope and courage.
May you do well.