My guess is that if Dr. Laura Schlesinger had gone on her 5 minute N***** rant a month earlier, no one would have noticed.

Actually, Schlesinger was making two points.  The first is that N***** is just a word, and that banning it gives it more power.  This was the point that George Carlin and Lenny Bruce made with curse words and it still holds true.

Her second point was that she was being discriminated against because she couldn’t use N***** on her radio show and African-American entertainers can use it on cable channels.  This point is almost paranoid.  There seems to be an effort on most conservatives’ part to portray themselves as victims and this effort doesn’t help the public discussion at all.

As a kid growing up, I learned that there were words that were considered an insult if I used them at all.  I learned not to use the words “Wop”, “Spic”, or “Polack” if I wanted to maintain friendly relations with my classmates.

Even today in my neighborhood, the word “Portagee” will bring a white person grief.  People of Portuguese descent, of course, use it all the time.

I think usage is important.  N***** shouldn’t be used as an insult, but it shouldn’t be censored when used in other contexts.  Schlesinger insulted no individuals during her rant.

But her advice to the caller, that she shouldn’t have married her husband if she was so “oversensitive” was cruel, insensitive and inexcusable.

The goal is to integrate African-American people fully into American social, political and economic life, and this obsession with a word is a harmful digression.

One of the silliest stories of this season is the campaign to change the 14th Amendment.    A new amendment is hard to pass.  Not only does it have to pass the House and the Senate with super majorities.  It has to be approved by 38 states.  The Equal Rights Amendment couldn’t pass muster.  Anti-Abortion activists have had 37 years to pass an amendment which would nullify the right of privacy, and haven’t even come close.

The USA is facing problems, but “anchor babies” aren’t even in the top ten.  This “issue” will dissolve on Labor Day.

A case in point the controversy over the plans to build an Islamic Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan. Conservatives are condemning the plans as being insensitive to the feelings of survivors of the attack on the World Trade Center almost 9 years ago.

My guess is that this controversy is going nowhere. Any decisions on this project will be made according to zoning laws of the City and the State of New York. While there are many reasons for denying the application, I doubt that they include “insensitivity”.

First, let me apologize in advance.  This little talk is going to ramble.  It’s going to take a while for me to get to the point.  I can only hope that the route to the point, haphazard as it may be, is worth the trip.

The trip starts thusly.

I’m Afraid that I have been spending much of my life looking for enlightenment in all the wrong Places.

I’ve never had a guru.  I’ve never had my consciousness raised.

The only relationships I’ve ever had with Erhardt Seminar Training, Silva Mind Control, or any other self-improvement program were contentious.  I never learned to pronounce Leo Buscaglia’s name correctly.  These days, when I flip to PBS and see someone smiling while lecturing an audience, I keep flipping as fast as I can.

I did start to read Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan”, but quit when I realized that it was about a different Don Juan.

If anyone starts to tell me they have “The Way”, I start looking for the way out.

No, I choose to get my enlightenment from reading mystery novels.

I will admit that it night be a little weird to learn about life by reading about death and murder.  It might be a little confusing to encounter someone who tries to learn how to make good choices by reading about people who make choices that are either wrong or very wrong.

But whodunits are about motives and about the choices people make when they are under stress.  The stories that resonate with me are character driven.  The detective spends most of his time interviewing people and figuring out what they have done and, most importantly, why they have done it. The good whodunits are really “whydoneits”.  Of course, according to the formula for such books, for every person who makes a bad choice and commits a murder, there are at least three people who make a good choice, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes by mistake.

These days, paradoxically, I’m reading a lot of stories by Alexander McCall Smith.  Smith has an interesting background.  He’s a byproduct of the British colonialism.  Personally, I consider colonialism to be the political equivalent of slavery and am adamantly opposed to it in all its forms and despite all of its excuses and rationale. That being said, McCall Smith is one of those byproducts I applaud.  Call him the silver lining of a very dark cloud, or proof that a broken clock is right twice a day.  Although a Scotsman, McCall Smith was born in Rhodesia and spent his childhood in Africa.  He went to college in Botswana and Edinburgh in Scotland, and was trained as a lawyer.  He helped create the University of Botswana’s law school, and co-wrote Botswana’s only legal textbook.  He became a professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Law School and an expert in medical law.  So while being a being a citizen of the European world, he knows the African World very well.

When he was 48, he published his first novel.  He has published 25 novels in the last 12 years.  My favorite series is called the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.  Set in Gabarone, the capital of Botswana, the series follows the career of Precious Ramotswe, a woman who sets herself up as the city’s first detective agency even though she has no knowledge, no experience, no skill and no contacts.

The ten books in the series are literary comfort food.  All are short books, around 200 pages.  Ramotswe has never investigated a murder.  Indeed, she seldom gets involved in any crime at all.  Her clients are every day people come to her with every day problems, which she solves with wisdom and kindness.  The books are filled descriptions of every day life in Africa, small and gentle observations of life in general.

The ninth book in the series is entitled “The Double Comfort Safari Club”.  In it, Ramotswe is hired to find an anonymous safari guide who has been left an inheritance by an American woman who had taken a safari in the Kalahari Desert many years before.

The plot of the book is forgettable.  But I was entranced by the small details of McCall Smith’s writing style.  For instance, no woman in Botswana is ever fat.  Instead, she is of “traditional build”.  No one in the stories ever dies; he or she “becomes late”.  And third, Smith uses the adjective “kind” a lot, maybe more than all the other writers I’ve read, both fiction and non-fiction, put together.

Think about that for a moment.  How often in your life, say in the last month, have you ever described a person you know as being kind?  How often have you read about some public person, be it a politician, an actor, a singer, a writer, or an athlete, described as kind?  It almost seems as if the word has been deleted from the English language.

The only time in my memory that the word “kind” reached the headlines was in 1988 when newly elected President George Bush called for a “kinder and gentler America”.  But since he had just finished running a presidential campaign that was neither kind nor gentle, his words didn’t carry much weight.

Don’t get me wrong, my guess is that people as individuals are as kind as they have ever been.  Personally, I have been overwhelmed by the kindness that this congregation, my friends, family, and total strangers have shown to me.  My life would be much poorer if I were left solely to my own devices.  I can only hope that I am as kind to others as they have been to me.  I suspect that most of us would say the same.

Because kindness is natural and unconscious.  Nobody gets up in the morning and decides whether or not to be kind that day.  The decision was generally made long ago, often unconsciously and stems from a person’s perceptions of him or herself and of the world.  For instance, if a person believes that it is a “dog eat dog” competitive world, he will regard any act of kindness as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  Likewise, if a person feels himself to be a strong confident part of a generally good world, being kind could only make the world even better.

Kindness is a motive.  And quite often, motives can get muddled.  What could be an act of kindness in one situation could be politeness in another.  Or it could be an attempt to ingratiate, or call attention to oneself.  It could be an attempt to establish a debt or to repay a debt.  It could even be an attempt to gain advantage.

As an extreme example, I seriously doubt that any woman of drinking age would consider that a man’s offer to buy her a drink was an act of kindness, or stem from a concern that she might be dehydrated.

So, on a personal level, decoding kindness can get a little complicated.  And we, being people, can always complicate things further.  But in general, I think, and I think that most people agree with old Mammy Yocum “It’s nice to be nice.”

But I am aware that the world that I am in direct contact with is much smaller than the world or the country or even the city in which I live.  I am dependant upon newspapers, television, radio, movies, and the Internet to supply me with information beyond my reach.

And this is where the disconnect comes in.  While I see kindness in my own personal life all the time, I am never told about kindness in the larger world.  I am seldom shown acts of kindness or urged to be more like some kind person.

For instance, many adjectives could be ascribed to Rush Limbaugh, but “kind” is not one of them.  The same could be said for Rahm Emmanuel, Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, numerous rock singers, many politicians, and most sport stars.

Our society seems to value the person who is most competitive, the most driven, the greediest, the loudest, the most argumentive, and the most rancorous.

So what do we do to make the kind world more visible, more evident?  If I owned a newspaper or a TV station, I’d have an easy answer.  But since I don’t, I don’t.  It’s a little anti-climactic, I know.  The world is a big place and neither you nor I can change the overall picture very much.  We can’t perfect it, but on the other hand we can’t screw it up either.

All I can recommend is that you recognize the kindness that goes on all around you; be as kind as you can, and promote kindness as a virtue.  Your world, and by extension, my world will be a better, nicer and more pleasant place.

What a great phrase! I’ve been wanting to say that to the talk radio wingnuts for the last 10 months!

News Max.com, a conservative web site that features articles by Dick Morris and David Limbaugh, is giving away free copies of the book with a year’s subscription to their magazine.   Am I the only one who finds this offer wierd?

No wonder the book is already on the Best Seller list!

Good morning.

Why I sing.  First, I want to deal with the pretension in the title.  I don’t think I‘m enough of a singer my motivations are particularly interesting.  Maybe  B.B. King, Tony Bennet, or Nellie Furtado should be giving this talk; they aren’t here.

Rather, I approach it from the other angle.  I think that everyone has one or two good sermons in them.  These sermons could be titled “Why I _____” (fill in the blank.)  Why I am an usher.  Why I am on the religious services committee.  Why I run the Universal Thrift Store.  Those sermons are for other people.  I sing.

I’m not sure that there is such a thing as singing talent.  Singing, to me, is a skill, like playing golf, driving a car, or writing a sermon.  Keep doing it, and you’ll get better.  And in a society of listeners, it doesn’t take very long to get better than average.

My father was a very skilled singer.  He had lessons when he was in high school and sang a lot in church and in school.  He spent the summer between high school and college traveling around the country as a member of a German Baptist men’s quartet.  While in college and Divinity School, I’ve been told that Dad was the singer around Rochester, New York for weddings and parties.  Even in the 1960’s, he still had some of the sheet music from those days, two large file drawers packed tight.  Doing some rough calculating, it would have taken about 300 hours to sing every song in those drawers.  The songs went from the sublime, like Ol’ Man River, to the ridiculous, Stout Hearted Men.

The story goes that when my father wanted to show off in his college years, he would lie down on the floor and invite the largest guy in the room to stand on his stomach.  Then he would bounce that guy up and down, using his stomach muscles.  This was from a man who never intentionally did a sit up or an ab crunch in his life.  If a person sings correctly for a while, he or she will develop physically.

Another thing that Dad developed was a strong speaking voice.  To my knowledge, he never preached using a microphone.  In fact, one time he was guest preaching and the microphone was on at its usual setting and Dad caused it to feed back from fifteen feet away.

I have another story.  When I was a teenager, Dad sang in the church choir in Youngstown, Ohio.  It was the practice in those days for the choir to sing a “choral Amen” after the closing words.  This a just a little bit of music to give the minister a head start so that he could get into position in the back of the church to greet the congregation.  The choir had four or five, mostly from the back of the hymnal, which they sang in turn.  One of them called for the bass to sing a low Eb.  Now the church was constructed in such a way that it vibrated when that note was sung loud enough.  It didn’t happen on an E or a D: just on Eb.  And the windows would shake.  For many people in the congregation, that was the high point of the whole service.  The minister could spend hours working on his sermon and twenty minutes delivering it, and Dad could overshadow him by singing one note for about a second.   As I was at an impressionable age, this made an impression on me.

Neither of my parents stressed singing as a particularly worthy thing to do.  When we went on long trips, the whole family would sing.  My father would sing the melody, and I figured out how to sing the upper harmony because it was the only choice I had.  Nobody sang lower harmony to my dad.  Then my voice changed.

In my high school, the choir and the band both rehearsed at the same time.  I was in the band.  The band got into the football games for free, and they had these cool semi-military uniforms.  Besides, they almost always went to the state finals in the band competitions, which meant I could spend a night in a hotel, throw water balloons and generally go wild.  To tell the truth, the general feeling in my school was that the choir was for sissies.

In college, like many boys at that time, I bought a guitar.  It was from a pawnshop, cost   $15 and I got a raw deal.  Over a long period of time, I learned most of the grips and strums necessary to accompany my singing.   I always had roommates, so I developed a style of singing softly and weakly, hunched around the guitar so I couldn’t get enough air if I had wanted to.

By my late twenties, I was living in San Francisco and attending services regularly at the local Unitarian Church.  The minister was David Rankin, who some of you might remember.  He used examples from this church often in his sermons.  One Sunday, the Minister of Music took the pulpit to invite people to join the choir.  He made singing in the choir sound like it could be fun.

So on the next Thursday, I went and found the music room.  I made my way through the mass of people who were chatting happily and introduced myself to the conductor.  He was a cheery guy, who gave me his name then asked, “What voice do you sing?”  Oh great, you mean I’ve got a choice.  He must have read something from my face, because he said, “Why don’t you go and sit in front of the big guy with the mustache.”

I introduced myself the other men sitting near me and took a piece of sheet music as it was passed around.  Then the conductor rapped on his music stand with his baton.

“Okay, lets read through this music one time.”

I panicked.  Read!  What do you mean read!  I can’t read!  This was a huge mistake! I’m going to make a fool of myself!  There were only three reasons that I didn’t bolt from the room right then: the tenors, the altos, and the sopranos.  Everybody in the choir was between the door and me.

So the conductor started waving his arms and cacophony struck.  If music is the organization of melody, harmony and rhythm, there was no music in that room.  I played my role in the confusion, trying quietly to follow the notes and failing miserably.

Finally, the conductor stopped waving his arms.  “That was pretty good for the first time through.  We’re getting better.  Let’s try it again.”

The second time was better, marginally.  For one thing, the big guy with the mustache started getting some confidence, and sometimes he was singing the same thing as the piano.  By the fourth time through, I was gaining some confidence and adding my quavering folk singer’s voice to the bass section’s sound.

That first song established the rhythm of the rehearsal.  We went through 7 or 8 pieces of music, repeating each many times, improving a little each time.  Throughout the rehearsal, I gained more and more confidence as I realized that no one was listening to me.

After the rehearsal was over, the conductor asked me, “Well, what do you think.”

“It was fun.”

“We’ll have more fun at 9:00 on Sunday in the choir loft.  Drop by.”

Then big guy with the mustache invited me to join the choir for a beer at Tommy’s Joynt a block away.  I was in the choir.

It turns out that there are people who can pick up a sheet of music, and read it and sing it.  There are also people who can pick up 500 pounds or run for 20 miles without collapsing.  All three are rare skills.

As time went on, I started having fun singing.  But I was still one of the softest voices in the choir.  There was a bunch of people who were a foot shorter than I was and who weighed 50 pounds less who could effortlessly drown me out so that I couldn’t even hear myself.

One day, I asked the conductor what was wrong with me.  He said, “Let’s try something.”  He then sat down at the piano and had me sing various vowel sounds at various pitches.  Suddenly, he interrupted me.

“There, did you hear that?”

“What?’

“That last note you sang was twice as loud as the others.”

“It was?”

“Yes, you used your natural resonance on that note. I’m sorry.  I should have known better and gone with that sound first.  But if you sing like that you’ll never have any trouble being heard.”

So we repeated some exercises to fix this new way of singing in my head and in my muscles and then went for a beer. That was when I became a singer.  The entire session had taken 5 minutes.

Shortly after that, it was suggested that I probably should sit in the back row.  In essence, I became the big guy with the mustache who taught other people the part.

I really got into singing.  At one point, I was in two choirs, had a weekly music lesson, and was in an opera workshop.  I was singing six nights a week.  For fun, I would go down the Roundup, a bar on the corner, and sing country and western songs.

That was in San Francisco.  Since then, I lived in Tucson for eight years, Newburyport, Mass for ten, and here in New Bedford for another 10.  Every time I go to a new church, I can reasonably sure that someone will invite me to join the choir.  I’ve accepted every reasonable invitation.  I’ve also sung in barbershop choruses, at blues jams, and at folk music open mics.  I’ll take just about any opportunity to sing.

I really enjoy in this church’s folk choir.  With most choirs, a singer’s job is pretty simple: Figure out what the director wants and give it to him.  No less and certainly no more.  And people don’t become directors because they are shy and undemanding.   With this choir, every singer has responsibility for the end result.  We create our own harmonies and our own arrangements.  Mostly, I sing the bass part, but often sing the melody.  I’ve even sung an upper harmony part or two when the song needs it.

Singing for me is multi-tasking taken to the extreme.  I’m checking to make sure that I’m doing all the technical things right: back straight, chest up, breathing from diaphragm, opening mouth wide.  Next, I’m listening to the accompaniment; am I on pitch, am I someplace near the rhythm.  Then, I’m paying attention to the other singers; are we singing together, presenting some sort of coherent sound?  Are we jelling?  Then I’m interacting with the congregation, getting constant feedback.  Are they transported?  Are they interested?  Are they comfortable?  Are they resigned?  Are they awake?  And finally, I’m concentrating on the words.  I’ve learned that if I don’t pay attention to the words, no one else will and I might as well be playing a kazoo.

And, if everything goes well, a strange and wonderful thing happens.  I forget who I am.  I overwhelm that sound track that’s always going in my brain.  The one that says,” I’m Ted Schade, I’m at church, I’m a little hot and sweaty, I wonder what kind of cookies they’ll have at coffee hour, my knee itches.”   I take a short vacation from myself.  It’s the exact opposite of meditating.  With meditating, you try to empty your mind.  When singing, I try to fill my mind to overflowing.  When I finish singing well, I really have no sense of time passing and have to make a conscious effort to get back into the world.

In this talk, I’ve tried to do two contradictory things.  I’ve invoked the magic of music and I’ve attempted to demystify it.

I do think that music is magical.  A person’s voice box vibrates, which causes the air to vibrate, which causes a person’s eardrum to vibrate which can cause that person to feel the whole range of emotions that person is capable of.  But singing is also a skill, a skill that almost everyone has.  Babies will sing to themselves long before they learn to speak or read or even to go to the bathroom.  Personally, I find it worth the effort, physically, spiritually, emotionally and intellectually.  And it’s not bad for the ego, either.

WELCOME AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Welcome to the First Unitarian Church of New Bedford.  As a congregation, we try to ignore those arbitrary barriers that our culture has traditionally erected to keep people apart.  If you are here and are interested in liberal religion, you are welcome.

FIRST READING

“When the dung beetle moves, know that something has moved it.  And know that it movement affect the flight of the sparrow, and that the raven deflects the eagle from the sky, and that the eagle’s stiff wing beds the will of the Wind People, and know that all this affects you and me, and the flea on the prairie dog and the leaf on the cottonwood.”  That had always been the point of the lesson. Interdependency of nature.  Every cause has its effect.  Every action its reaction.  A reason for everything.  In all things a pattern, and in this pattern, the beauty of harmony.  Thus one leaned to live with evil, by understanding it, by reading its cause.  And this one learned, gradually and methodically; if one was lucky, to always “go in beauty”, to always look for the pattern, and to find it.”

SECOND READING
“The way it works with Navajos, witchcraft is the reversal to the Navajo Way.  The way the Holy People taught us, the goal of life was houzro.  No word for it in English.  Sort of a combination of beauty/harmony, being in tune, going with the flow, feeling peaceful, all wrapped in a single concept, basically.”

SERMON
Hi.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, today I’m going to talk about certain aspects of the Navajo way of life.
Let me say right at the outset that I’m not a scholar, and I haven’t spent a lot of time in libraries learning about the Navajo tribe.  My knowledge is not exhaustive and it may not even be always correct.  What I know, I have gained from conversations with Navajo friends and acquaintances in Tucson, Arizona and from reading the mystery stories of Tony Hillerman.  But my purpose today is not to turn all of you into Navajo experts in fifteen minutes.  Rather, my aim is to introduce a couple of concepts from the Navajo way of looking at things, compare and contrast them to the Unitarian Universalist perspective and see if we can learn something.

Many people consider that the Navajos don’t have a religion.  They don’t hold regular worship services.  There are no rituals analogous to baptism, christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, or funerals in the Navajo way.  They don’t believe in a single God, the afterlife, Heaven or Hell.

But, it depends upon how you define things.  If you define religion as the worship of God, then maybe the Navajos don’t have a religion.

But I define religion a bit more broadly.  Religion is the way we deal with the unknown and the unknowable.  Where did come from?  Where am I going? What am I doing here?  What is the nature of life?  These are some of the religious questions.  They can’t be answered by research.  They can’t be answered definitively.  Some religions try to define the answers.  Some will even try to force others to accept these answers.  But at some point in life, just about every person will need to answer the unanswerable for him or herself.  If you like, life is a multiple-choice test and I want to have as many choices as I can get.

So.  Now to the Navajos.  Most of us have learned about the Navajos and the other Native American nations from TV, the movies, novels and other forms of fiction.  These sources often depict Navajo life as simple, close to nature.  The Navajos may live close to nature, but theirs is not a simple culture.  There is a whole web of taboos and customs woven together into a rather strict structure for the good life.

Take, for instance, the house.  A traditional Navajo will live in a Hogan.  There are strict rules as to the size and shape, although the materials can vary according to the landscape.  But the doorway of the Hogan must be pointing due east facing the rising sun.  The traditional Navajo man will greet the dawn with prayers and with a pinch of corn pollen.  He gets the pollen from his medicine pouch, which he keeps with him always, tied to a deerskin thong which is tied around his waist and then hangs under his clothes close to his genitals.  I don’t know what women do with their medicine pouch.

All Navajos belong to clans.  There are something like 60 clans, some large and powerful, some small and facing extinction.  Every member of a clan is considered to be a relative of every other member of the clan.  Since there is a very strong incest taboo and some of these clans can have thousands of members, sometimes this can lead problems in finding a suitable mate.  Imagine the problems if just about everyone you knew were a relative.

When meeting someone for the first time, a Navajo will tell his or her place in the tribe, giving his born of (or mother’s) clan and his born to (or father’s) clan.

All of this is interesting, but not particularly germane.  Such clan distinctions are important to a sedentary culture.  The USA in the 20th and 21st century is not sedentary.
My father lived in different seven states; my mother lived in eight.  So far, I myself have lived in 7 states and my brother has lived in 8 states.  My sister is the black sheep of the family; she’s only lived in three.   The chances that any of us will unknowingly meet a relative are pretty slim.  And my guess is that the same holds true for many of you.

I mention these few aspects of Navajo life to point out the lengths that the Navajo Way goes to preserve houzro or harmony.  By the way, since the Navajo Religion is a spoken one, there is often a problem with spelling and pronounciation.  I have no assurance that I am spelling the word houzro correctly, but I don’t worry about that since you can’t see my text.  I don’t know how to pronounce it either.

Starting the day with a prayer centers one.  Using corn pollen in that prayer affirms life in a region where life is pretty sparse.  The web of rules about clans and incest guarantees that the tribe will not be genetically weakened.

In first reading, we learned about the Navajo approach to the world.  We learned of the belief that everything is connected, that every cause has an effect, that every effect has a cause.  In Anglo society, this is called chaos theory and is considered speculative; a theory that hasn’t been proved, but could lead to interesting developments. But in the Navajo way, this belief comes as result of other beliefs and leads logically to other beliefs.

As an aside, this belief is real convenient for the mystery writer.  One of the questions a writer has to answer is “why bother?”  In the story, the detective goes through a whole bunch of adventures, meets a bunch of unsavory characters, and usually confronts danger.  The reader is justified in asking the question: “Why doesn’t this guy just say ‘to hell with this’, clock out and go home, have a nice dinner and watch TV?”  This question must be answered in some way in every story.  Tony Hillerman answers it by saying it is part of the detective’s system of beliefs – his religion, if you will.

In the second reading, we got the basic definition of houzro:  The belief that the goal of life was harmony – to be at peace with yourself, your community, and the world.  Taken with the first reading, it becomes clear that houzro is all encompassing.  It’s not just the feeling you get after you’ve had a good meal, or read a good book, or have been complemented extravagantly.  But it is a condition of life, temporary but which can be sustained for years, even decades, and is ended only by some definite, definable reason.

The essence of houzro is cooperation, as opposed to competition.  It is the state you achieve when you follow the Golden Rule, and treat others as you wish to be treated.  Of course, all of these concepts and actions lead to other concepts and actions.  For instance, some teachers who are new to the Navajo reservation have to learn not to ask questions of their class.  No one will ever answer.  No good Navajo student would ever make his classmates look bad.  There are limits to even this rule.  Jacoby Ellsbury, the Red Sox center fielder is a Navajo.  He has 52 stolen bases so far this year, so he evidently has no trouble with making the opposing pitchers and catchers look bad.  But maybe he needs an Enemy Way sung at the end of the season.

Navajos believe in evil.  There are two sources of evil: witches  (or skin walkers) and ghosts.
Here’s a reading from Tony Hillerman’s Children of Darkness:

“You get to be a witch by violating the basic taboos – killing a relative, incest, so forth.  And you get certain powers.  You can turn yourself into a dog or a wolf.  You can fly.  And you have the power to make people sick.  That’s the opposite of the good power the Holy People gave us – to cure people by getting them back into houzro.  Back into beauty. So, to make a long story short, a witch wouldn’t have to have a motive for blowing up an oil well.  It’s a bad thing to do, blowing people up.  That’s all the motive a skin walker needs.”
So a witch is pure evil.  The Navajos believe that the only way to free oneself of a witch’s power is to kill it.

Ghosts are separate.  Here’s a quote from Hillerman’s Listening Woman:

Among the traditional Dinee (or Navajo), the death of a fellow human being was the ultimate evil.  He recognized no life after death.  That which was natural in him, and therefore good, simply ceased.  That which was unnatural, and therefore evil, wandered through the darkness as a ghost, disturbing nature and causing sickness.

And this from The People of Darkness:

…Everything about the white man’s burial customs seemed odd to Chee.  The Navajos lacked this sentimentality about corpses.  Death robbed the body of its value.  Even its identity was lost with the departing chindi.  What the ghost left behind was something to be disposed of with a minimum risk of contamination to the living.  The names of the dead were left unspoken, certainly not carved in stone.

So like the rest of us, the Navajo fear the unknown.  When possible, the family will take steps that a dying person will expire outside, so that his ghost can escape and be free.  If a person dies inside a Hogan, a large hole is made in the North Wall of the Hogan so that the ghost can escape and no Navajo will ever enter that Hogan again, for fear of getting ghost sickness.

A Navajo stays in houzro by living the good life, by staying within the bounds of Navajo tradition.  If one does lose this harmony, there are always ceremonies.  At one point, there were over 60 different ceremonies or sings.  These are dying out, partially because of the encroachment of the dominant culture, and partially because the training is so rigorous.  The Blessing Way, for instance, takes nine days.  There are numerous chants and sand paintings and everything has to be word perfect and grain of sand perfect or the ceremony won’t work.  One doesn’t learn to be a hatayii or singer in his or her spare time.

When a traditional Navajo joins the Armed Forces, he should have a Blessing Way sung for him before he leaves to keep him in harmony, and an Enemy Way sung for him when he returns to bring him back into houzro.

So that’s a couple of pages of the Cliff Notes version of Navajo religion.  Let’s apply it.

Is the dominant culture of the United States in houzro?  It’s a big country; it depends upon where you look.  Certainly, if you listen political radio, you’d have to conclude that we are out of houzro.  A person whose job it is to be outraged 3 hours a day, five days a week can’t be in harmony.  Neither can the people who listen to him or her.

Our whole economic system is based on competition.  In school, we are taught the importance of winning.  We are taught that the goal of life is to gain power or money, and the way to gain these is by winning, by showing other people up, either in the marketplace or in voting booth.

But I think in our daily life, we do try to achieve houzro, whether we have ever heard of the term.  We have to compete for jobs, but usually we never see or even think about other candidates.  And when we get the job, we try to cooperate with our fellow workers.  Indeed, if we are too competitive and try to show up our coworkers we are seen to be “disruptive” and the boss may have to conduct a ceremony to bring you back into harmony.  These ceremonies aren’t like the Blessing Way or the Enemy Way. They are usually called “counseling”, or “a bawling out”, or even a “come to Jesus meeting”.  Of course, if such a ceremony takes 9 days, the boss will probably engage in an entirely different ceremony.

But we generally try to get along with our neighbors, in-laws, fellow church members.  If we see evil, we generally try to stay away from it.  If we can’t stay away, we call 911 and let someone else handle it.  So we generally tend toward houzro subconsciously, even though it is not a goal.

Finally, I want to read you another passage, this one is from “The Dark Wind”.
“Someone who violated basic rules of behavior and harmed you was, by Navajo definition “out of control.”  The “Dark Wind” had entered him and destroyed his judgment.  One avoided such persons, and worried about them, and was pleased if they were cured of this temporary insanity and returned again to houzro.  But to Chee’s Navajo mind, the idea of punishing them would be as insane as the original act.”
Obviously, if the United States followed the Navajo Way, we would have a very different criminal justice system.  We wouldn’t lead the world in number of people in jail per capita, we wouldn’t spend as much tax money, and we would have fewer lawyers.
I’m not at all sure that we wouldn’t also have less crime.

That’s all I got.  The Navajo religion is a beautiful one, and certainly not simple.  I didn’t even condense the religion to fit the time period.  I just pulled out a couple of ideas that suited my purpose.  The creation stories, for instance, are wonderful, very extensive, and instructive.  They make Genesis seem like a short children’s story.
I hope I gave you something to think about.  Are you in houzro?  Are you in harmony with the universe?  If not, how can we as a congregation help?

If you count church and community choirs, blues jams, and the occasional gigs, I’ve probably performed with over 1000 musicians.  So far, the best of the bunch is a guy whose parents called Dennis.

Dennis was a musical prodigy in elementary school, and  the musical director of his brother’s very popular soul band in high school.  After high school, he went to New York and became a working rock and roll musician.  He was successful  for about 15 years.  You have heard his guitar work on many records over the years, he had a bunch of gold records in other people’s names, and one in his.

His guitar playing got him hired a lot; his personality got him fired a lot.  Politely stated, he was a spoiled brat.  Finally, he threw one tantrum too many and came home to Eastern Mass.

He got a gig in a bar in his home town hosting an Open Mic on Thursday Night.  I heard about him through the grapevine and went and played three or four times.  At my request, he played with me.

Believe me, I never sounded as good as when Dennis played with me.  The supportive vibe and the musical solos were more intoxicating than anything the bar served.

One night, we played Willie Nelson’s “Night Life”.  Its  a simple 8 bar blues, but I learned a rather complicated arrangement that had a bunch of jazz chords.  I didn’t go over it with Dennis: he would have been insulted.  I played the rhythm part and he played lead.   When it came time for his solo, he took off on a flight of fancy that was incredible.  I stopped to listen.  And forgot where I was in the song.  I was lost, but Dennis heard the problem, quickly changed his solo, played my chord for a beat or two and put me back on track.  I doubt if anyone in the audience even knew we had a problem.

After the set, I apologized and thanked him for helping me out.  He told me not to think about it and said that that was what real musicians do.

At some point playing or singing music moves from being about playing and more about listening; more about what you hear than what you try to do.

Lescroart also sets a big table.  He has a large number of recurring characters.  At the center of the cast are Abe Glitzky and Dismas Hardy, who were partners when they were cops in San Francisco while  in their twenties.  Hardy has gone through a series of tragedies and other learning experiences and has become a defense attorney.  Glitzky has stayed with the police and has risen in the ranks.  So far, the highest rank he’s achieved is Assistant Chief of Police.  In addition, both of them have families, other friends and business associates.  These other characters generally get introduced in one book, stay around for two or three others, having a major role in at least book, then retire to the sidelines to be used when the author needs them.  Lescroart has created almost his own world and made this a real series rather than a bunch of books with the same protagonist.

Third, Lescroart pays attention to the real world.  In this book, he writes about the defense contractors in Iraq.  In other books, he has covered the “health care”, industry, child kidnapping by their parents, misconduct in the “energy” industry, misuse of the grand jury process by prosecutors, and others.

Finally, these books are solidly in the noir tradition.  Concepts like fact and truth, justice and morals and law become squirmy things, twisting around each other in interesting patterns.

Betrayal is divided into four parts. The first section takes place in and around Baghdad, Iraq in 2003.  It is portrayed as a place where a person with a military background, lots of contacts and no scruples can get away with just about anything and be well rewarded in the process.  There is a scene where the head of a defense contract firm and his top lieutenant are talking strategy while killing a bottle of single malt whiskey and tossing around a shrink-wrapped packet containing 500 $100 bills.  The second part takes place in a suburb of San Francisco where the  moral quagmire of  the Iraq war has  spread its influence.  Someone gets killed, and a man involved in the whole scene gets arrested.  The third  covers the trial of the arrested man.  The fourth section finally gets the regular cast of characters involved and the case gets solved.

This book might disappoint Lescroart’s regular readers.  The pace slows to a crawl in the third section.  While there is a lot of legal strategy and tactics  involved in the trial, the reader won’t care much because the author has already told him the outcome.

Other than that, Betrayal has all of the elements I have come to expect from Lescroart.  The pace is good.  The writing is good without being self-indulgent.  The characters are strong, some even memorable.  There are a lot of plot twists.  Lescroart is a master at hiding clues.  The story deals with moral questions in ways that are both timely and timeless.