As Time Goes By . . .

Matthew Ies Spetter

I am working rather intently these days on assorted projects for Ethical Culture.  Most of this work is done under the auspices of the New York Society for Ethical Culture and the various programs in which I participate.  One of those programs is the Archives Committee, which I chair.  That can take up a lot of time now and then.  The other program is one which is going to take up a fair bit of time today and perhaps over the next few days.  The project of focus at the moment is writing a feature article for the new journal of the Ethical Culture Institute @ NYSEC:  The Annals.

The feature article is a "spotlight" of sorts on Matthew Ies Spetter, a leader for the second half of the last century and the first decade of this century.  My goal is to get several of his platforms, which have now been digitized, posted on the web for others to read.  I hope to do this with all of the leaders from NYSEC and from Ethical Culture in general.  The quality of the lectures, of course, varies.  Adler's own lectures were sometimes a bit of a mess, taking the long view of hindsight.  Even so, too many of our current members have little contact with people who have been trained in philosophy or the mainstream of our history of thought.  This is my effort to facilitate a little self-help.

And so I come to M. I. Spetter's platform of December 24, 1995:  "'As Time Goes By . . .':  Our Struggle to Connect."  Come September 15, it will be published online for all to read.  In the meantime, the first paragraph has already sparked my thinking about time. This post is not about Spetter, but about time.

Time is, I believe, a human construct.  Today is August 3, 2025.  We are taught where the "August" comes from (Augustus Caesar, not to be confused with Julius Caesar, who got July).  So, today we "honor" a dead emperor, who was also called Octavius.  This is the year 2025 by some accounts.  It has different numbers in other accounts.  This "year" is part of what sparked my thinking this morning:  We don't actually know how many times the earth has gone around the sun since this solar system came into being.  This could be the year 4,000,000,025 for all we know.  As for the 3, once you have the year and the month, I guess the actual day is pretty much, well, whatever.

Except.  When I typed the date, I mistakenly entered a 2 instead of a 3.  I corrected it and thought "Time really is flying."  The difference of one day, and yet I feel the pressure of the passing days.  Part of that pressure is self-imposed as I try to meet these self-imposed deadlines and goals..  Part of that pressure is the external deadlines that come from others, both near and far.  I have something to do on the 10th, so I have an obligation to others to honor my commitments to them by that date.  The State of Texas has assigned an expiration date to my drivers license, so I have to take care of that--in person--before that date.  The list seems to be quite long these days.  

Another pressure is life itself.  I'm not getting any younger.  The reality is that I am well past the halfway point in what is possible for a human lifespan.  These days the pressure that I feel from the passage of time says that I cannot waste what time I have left.  That in itself is odd.  What am I wasting?  Why not try to get the most enjoyment I can out of these last years?  Why not indulge myself in, say, the sensuous delight of vanilla ice cream with a sprinkling of crumbled Texas pecans?  

I feel this incredible pressure on my time because there is so little of it in any given day--and an unknown but definitely limited number of days left in this life.  I am performing a service for Ethical Culture in the work that I am doing.  At the same time, I am enjoying the hell out of it.  I love discovering something that has not yet been entered in the Bibliography.  I love the excitement of being able to add to that list, and I love searching the internet to try to find the book or article online so that I can see it, read it, and, very importantly, confirm its bibliographic history.  I love seeing a reference that I don't understand.  Well, of course, I want to understand it, so that means more searching and study.  I become a detective when searching for details of publication, of history, of connections to Ethical Culture, of connections among people and groups.  

At the same time, I find myself resenting interruptions.  The phone.  The door.  Even the cat.  Even my bladder.  Interruptions can interrupt my train of thought; then it might take time--even days--before I can return to the work that had me so absorbed prior to that interruption.  One consequence is a pile of "work in progress" projects that need my attention, sitting there waiting for me after that one interruption pulled me away.  It is my natural, probably human, attitude that makes me resent these interruptions, wanting to continue the pleasure of the work that I am doing.  Indeed, it might be compared to the delights of vanilla ice cream with a sprinkling of crumbled Texas pecans.  To indulge myself in that delight is to indulge in pleasure that, in some ways, will ultimately be harmful to my health (especially at this late point in my expected lifespan, given the effects of sugar and fat on my liver).  Indulging in my beloved work on the Bibliography--and the hoped for Ethical Culture Online Library--in important, not just to me, but, I believe, to others.  

Nonetheless, I can (finally) see the harm that I do to myself by spending so much of my time immersed in this work.  By resenting the interruptions, I am also resenting the intrusion of others into my life.  By "burying myself" in work, I am burying myself away from friends and family and the relationships that are key both to maintaining my humanity and to growing my sense of ethics.  Yes, I can (and do) grow in my understanding of ethics by reading and studying the work of those who have contributed to the body of thought associated with Ethical Culture.  Yes, I am performing a service for others, performing an ethical action, if you will, by doing this work.  But this work, alone, will not allow me to practice my ethics in human relationships so that I can learn from the practical experience of those relationships, putting, as they do, all that reading and studying to the test.

In his second book, To Deny the Night:  Reflections on Life and Essence, Spetter wrote:

It is quite true that we are born and that we die, alone. But as we live, we exist within the reach of one another and thus can justify hope and the enjoyment of life by our deeds. The fact of solitary emergence and exit is not what constitutes human tragedy. Tragic is that life which remains in alienated abstinence of relationship and obligation.

The need to live in relationship to others--reciprocal relationships based on mutual respect, caring, and, importantly, sharing of self--is a constant theme in Spetter's writing and lectures, extending from the earliest works to which I have access to the latest.  I want to continue with this work--truly, madly, deeply.  But I also want to try to focus less on the passing of time and more on the opportunity that these interruptions provide.  To talk about the meaning of life with my grandson.  To share memories and laughter with a girlfriend.  To listen to the caller from a non-profit who seeks my support, giving them a listening ear even if I can't give money.  To see the humanity in the young fellow who knocks on my door, offering to mow my lawn.  These interruptions take time away from the work that I want to do, but they also, I believe, keep me connected to others, keep me human--and teach me the value of patience.  Time is a human construct.  To spend it with others is not to waste it, but to use it to build relationships, to share love and kindness, to nurture the seeds of the future.

Letting Go

 A recent colloquy discussion at the Ethical Society of Austin asked us to discuss "What would you save?" in the context of disaster or emergency.  Aside from needing a Go Bag, I hadn't given it much thought.  My thinking these days is more centered on Letting Go, not merely "decluttering," but detaching myself from the things that, yes, clutter up my space, but also take up needed space in my heart and mind.  

One thing I plan to let go of is a plate.  It's a pink plate with a rose on it.  When I received it as a gift, it was part of a set of four pink plates with various flowers in the center of each.  I'm not really a pink person.  Rarely is there anything pink in my wardrobe, and I am not drawn to pink objects when fighting my urge to collect knickknacks.  I'm not much of a plate person.  True, there are several plates around on various book shelves.  My mother was a plate person, so I saved a few from her collection(s) that interested me for one reason or another, but no plates hang on my walls nor have I, that I recall, actually purchased a decorative plate for my own pleasure.  The thing about this plate is that it holds painful memories.  The person who gave it to me has done some damage in my life.  I let go of three of the four plates in the set when I moved, realizing that I had no room to display them and little room to store them.  The remaining plate sits on a shelf in a display rack.  Every time I look at it, I think of how angry the giver would be that the other three plates are not also displayed--if by some remote chance she ever set foot in this house again.  I love her.  I carry her in my heart.  But I think that this object is making me hold onto negative thoughts that won't allow me to heal--or allow for any healing in a broken relationship.  I will let go of the plate today.

Another object that I am thinking about letting go of is an ebony carving.  This one holds memories of a time in my life when I--pretty much unconsciously--accumulated symbols of motherly love.  The carving is a representation of a mother holding an infant, vaguely "Madonna and child."  I believe that I bought it to give to my mother, but I don't think that I did.  Instead, I kept the "message" ("please love me?") to myself.  Now Mama did the best she good.  She was significantly handicapped.  I have no idea how she managed to carry me to term, but her determination in the things that she really wanted to do was phenomenal.  She had suffered so much in her youth that it is unimaginable that she would subject herself to a pregnancy that would lead to a cesarean birth--in the forties.  And yet she did.  As much as that might have told me about my mother's love, there were a lot of years when she was ill and understandably (to adults) cranky.  More directly affecting me was her critical insistence on high standards of behavior, appearance, and achievement.  I often felt that I was "no good," certain not "good enough."  In the last years of her life, when she had dementia, she often didn't know who I was.  Sometimes she thought I was one of her sisters, other times I was an inadequate maid who could be curtly dismissed:  "You're dismissed," as she said when some family friends were visiting.  

In the ten years since my mother passed away, I have had plenty of time to revisit these moments of pain and doubt.  I have also looked through masses of greeting cards and journal entries and letters.  Over time, the pain has lessened enough for the joy and delight to come through.  Mama was fun.  She was brave.  She was compassionate.  She was beautiful.  That may sound vain, when I point out that I glanced in the mirror one day not too long ago, pleased about something or other, and saw my mother smiling back at me.  I might have a little too much of my father's nose (bless the Parkers), but I have Mama's smile, which came to me as part of the healing that these past years have brought.  Mama did love me; she did the best she could.

I am more or less cleaning and clearing these days (mostly "less" on the cleaning bit), so I picked up the ebony carving to dust and polish it.  At that moment, I realized that I had already let go of all of those feelings of insecurity about my relationship with my mother.  Then I thought I might let go of the carving.  I have a friend who lost her daughter and is going through some hard grief.  Could this carving of motherly love help her?  I will think about it some more, but I don't think I need the carving any more.  I can just smile at the mirror and see Mama smiling back.

One more thing for me to think about is the memorial webpage that honors my late husband.  Every year I am asked to pay a fee to renew that webpage.  Every year I think about letting it go and decide that I can't do it.  I have a link to his memorial site on the address-bar-thingie of my web browser.  I often glance at his name there and am comforted by his presence.  Now and then I click the link and visit the site.  Nothing has changed in all these years, but sometimes I just feel the need to visit.  I did that a few weeks ago, rereading the statement that I had written for the site.  I was actually surprised to realize that I was reading about an Ethical man.  Of course he was!  Even though we had never heard of Ethical Culture before, I should have realized that he was exactly the kind of person that we are all striving to be in EC.  Not that I'm saying he was perfect, but he certainly practiced the compassionate service that we often attempt in EC.  It pleased me to read that statement and come to that realization.

Imagine my shock, checking the site a few days ago, to find it gone.  The tenth anniversary of his passing is coming up in November.  I expected to be asked to renew the site, and I was thinking that, while it serves no one else, it comforts me.  I clicked the link, thinking that I would renew early, just in case my travel plans might make me miss a deadline.  The link, instead of taking me to his crinkly smile, goes to a search page for obituaries.  I was devastated.  Panicked.  

Eventually, I found him again.  Legacy.com has restructured their website.  They apparently did try to notify me with a message that went to the Promotions folder (which I mostly ignore).  The information is still available--after much clicking--but it is broken up into multiple parcels rather than all together.  Will I be forced to let go of this comfort?  The link is still on my address bar with the other important bookmarks--it just doesn't take me to my husband.  

I guess we don't have eternal life on the internet either.    

Seeing injustice is an ethical obligation

As ethical humanists, we talk about injustice and its many faces and the choices we have to correct it.  As humans, we bog down on priorities and strategies and "getting it."

In the past weeks, I have been much involved in these discussions--observing, listening, talking, and writing.  My correspondence has grown substantially, and now it is time to come back home to the Hoedown to work it out in my own mind, at my keyboard.  The weeks have been full.  St. Louis for the 101st AEU Assembly. The Mountain near Highlands, NC, for the AEU's 2016 Lay Leadership School. Family.  Adventures in travel.  Making connections with other ethical societies and with the roots of the movement.  Throughout all this busy-ness have run the threads of social justice--specifically racial justice, criminal justice, and the occasional stray mention of feminism/womanism.

Where do we start to act?  Why, indeed, must we act at all, especially when our own lives are not affected by these conflicts but rather by others, perhaps based on economics or age or some other damned thing?   Here's a thought:

As ethical humanists, we commit to making the world a better place so that in and by that process we make ourselves better humans.  We are, then, obliged to look at the world around us--our home, our neighborhood, our community, our country, our world--with eyes that appreciate what is good and just but also identify what is corrupt and unjust. 

The first step in fighting injustice, I would say, is first to see it.

We often wear blinders in our daily lives, protecting ourselves from pain, getting in ruts with our comfortable routines, not seeing the suffering of others unless we are slapped with one of those late night commercials about hunger or animal abuse.  I change the channel, so much do I resist feeling that pain. But there is injustice all around us, begging to be seen. 

• Why does my neighbor keep having broken bones, falls, bruises, depression? 
• What does this article I am reading about black people being shot by police mean for my community?  Does it happen here?  
• If water scarcity and drought is a root cause of the violence in Syria, can such a thing happen here?  
• I am doing a good thing by serving meals at the homeless shelter, but why are these people homeless?

Simply being aware of the signals that something might be wrong can be a start.  If we cannot see injustice, then we can do nothing to overcome it. Seeing the signals and recognizing them as signals, we can then begin learn more about it and the problems that are being signaled.

"Black Lives Matter"--tee shirt, button, statement--is a signal that something is wrong--not only in the black community but in the white community that surrounds it.  When someone cannot understand that signal, cannot see that it is communicating something important, that too is a signal of something wrong.  It becomes a problem ignored, a wrong unrighted.  Worse, it becomes a problem prolonged and increased.  

How do we see?

Well, we look.  We scan our environment for threats--this isn't safe, that could be hurtful.  We look for anomalies--something is out of place, not right. We look for balance--the fairness that may be the most fundamental of all human values. Maybe we should expand our search beyond ourselves and our families to others in our community/world, even including strangers in our protective vision?

We interpret what we see.  That's the part about "getting it."  We tend to interpret the signals around us in personal terms.  Personal would include ourselves, our family, our friends--and moving out beyond the circle of known persons to larger entities, still "circles" to which we "belong."  We use familiar words and concepts and experiences and knowledge to interpret the signals we get so that we can read them in terms that we understand.  Not everyone uses those words or shares those experiences.  Seeing injustice will sometimes include a new perspective on what we are looking at.  That new perspective may include active study of an issue to learn more or something as simple as listening so that we can see things better.

Here's a fairly mundane example.  It's about wallpaper, but "wallpaper" eventually became a code word with my late husband that stopped a budding conflict because one of us remembered what happened when we shopped for wallpaper for the bathroom.  Well, it was a matter of taste.  I wanted the foil with butterflies (this was in the 80's!) and he wanted the stripes.  Things got tense.  We were starting to get a little more heated and a little louder and realized that our "discussion" not going well in the wallpaper/paint store.  We decided to take it over to the McDonald's across the street and try to work it out with some ice cream. And so we did, finally reaching the dumbfounding realization that he was talking about the master bath and I was talking about the guest bathroom.   We were arguing over nothing, since I was fine with stripes in the master, and he was fine with butterflies for the guests. From then on, for more than thirty years, one of us could say "wallpaper," and the other would stop to make sure that we were actually talking about the same subject. 

The point of the wallpaper story is that interpretation of data, including signals about injustice, can depend upon point of view.  "Getting it" always includes knowing the point of view from which you are "seeing."  It usually includes recognizing that more than one point of view is looking at the problem.  It should include sharing points of view until everyone can really see the same thing.

Seeing injustice, I have said, is an ethical obligation.  I also think that it is an ethical action.

What are you seeing?

Meeting by conversation

One form of meeting for the Ethical Society of Austin is called a Colloquy.  This is an old Middle English word, more used in the 19th century than the current one.  It comes, of course, from a Latin word, colloquium.  In my mind, colloquium has a more academic feel; colloquy, apparently, has a more religious connotation.  Both words mean "conversation" (of the more formal sort), but each seems to have found its more favored niche of use.

In ESOA, the Colloquy is actually a formal conversation.  The format is deceptively relaxed, given the very defined structure under which the conversation occurs.  The moderator (these days that would be Adam Gravois) introduces the topic and lays down the ground rules.  This conversation involves, he always reminds us, our listening skills.  We are not to interrupt or respond to what is being said, although we may respond at the end of the session during the discussion period.  One person, any person who wants to volunteer, begins.  Then the person to his/her right speaks, following counterclockwise around the circle until everyone who wants to speak has had a turn.  At that point we take a moment to think about what has been said.  If there is time, we can all then discuss one point or another that has been raised in the circle, validating, expanding, countering.

In the loosest sense Colloquy might be considered, as it is in religious circles, to be a conversation regarding theological questions or to resolve religious doctrinal differences, but only in the sense that the concepts and ideals under consideration deal with some of our deepest values and are approached by each of us from a different perspective. Colloquy functions to direct our thinking on fundamental concepts--love, tolerance, success, family, etc.--so that we define, as we may not have before, the concept in our own lives at the same time we are allowed to hear how others define and experience the concept.  In the welcoming fellowship of ESOA, deep emotions and intimate secrets are sometimes shared, adding to the sense of community--even family--that the society provides for its members. While not the purpose of Colloquy, this latter function might be considered a benefit.

I do not know the history of Colloquy in ethical culture.  Felix Adler proposed that society meetings consist primarily of lecture.  This is in keeping, I think, with the times.  Pre-electronic, certainly.  But also toward the end of the lyceum movement, which, for a while, provided venues for adult education from various public speakers.  Rhetoric and oratory provided intellectual entertainment as well as education in nineteenth-century America, and "conversation" would likely have been less valued as a means to consider the High Ideas that Adler intended to be the focus of ethical culture.  The concept of colloquy was certainly available, but its then context--religious discussion, especially for resolution of doctrinal differences--may have made it seem inappropriate for someone who asserted the importance of "Deed before creed."

However formal conversation might have crept into the repertoire of meeting types for ESOA, it does seem an appropriate tool for getting to the core of our values and ideals.  In the days and sometimes weeks before a Colloquy, knowing the topic, the audience/participant is already thinking about the concept. Knowing that he/she will be called upon to speak--preferably briefly--in real terms as the topic relates to one's own experience--the audience/participant is already thinking of what to say.  That entails reexamination of the concept as an abstraction:  What does this word really mean?  Then one begins to recall, to think about, to experience once more the events and people who have been a part of one's life.  This can be painful.  My own comments in Colloquy are often prefaced by "I didn't want to come today," "I really hate this topic," "This is hard."  The abstraction of "family" may present itself as a Norman Rockwell painting in our minds, but the reality of our own lives may include death, divorce, anger, abdication of roles, neglect, abuse, money issues, distance (emotional and physical)--and on through the seemingly endless list of how birth families can become weapons of mental destruction.  Or, if we are lucky, we do find love, closeness, marriage (or remarriage), children (grands and greats as well), comfort, joy--and on through the happily endless list of how birth--and chosen--families can become treasures of great worth.  In this effort, we re-examine our lives through the lens of the Colloquy's topic to get at its meaning in  the reality that we live.

Once Colloquy begins, we listen carefully as our fellows talk.  We talk about tolerance (and intolerance) in terms of limits and focus, revealing to ourselves those points of friction in society that demand boundaries or deserve our forbearance or which are mere historical artifacts that need to pass away quickly. We talk about love in terms of its sources, its types, its quantity, its presence or absence and find for ourselves new understanding of the value of this emotion in our own lives.  We talk about success and find that common definitions may not suit us, may indeed harm us, and learn of more ethical ways to define success in our lives and our world.  In the Colloquy format, the audience/participant becomes the speaker, and it is the thinking of the audience/participant that is reflected in the conversation.  The group produces the outline (albeit unstructured) of talking points and draws its conclusions about the meanings presented.

The first ESOA meeting that I attended was a Colloquy on cycles.  I had never seen this type of meeting before, not as a means to enlightenment, but I do love to talk.  Listening was harder in that meeting, because I had to think of what I might say to all these strangers, right?  As the conversation moved around the circle, I learned a little bit about these very human humanists and saw that--just maybe--I might fit in.  I have great fondness for these Colloquies now.  Yes, they have made me feel closer to the others in the Society, something I cherish.  They also made me think about some really hard issues in a more thoughtful and systematic way.  And they still do.  Long after the initial conversation is over, I am more aware of these concepts, looking at them with new eyes, thanks in part to the perspectives gained from other participants in the conversation.