Month of Sundays Service

The Best of the Oldest Dead White Males

Opening Words
No. 426, "The wilderness and dry land shall be glad"
From Singing the Living Tradition

Children's Story
Damon And Pythias by Sophia L. Fahs

Many years ago there lived in Greece two young men whose names were Damon and Pythias. They were good friends, and loved and trusted each other like brothers.

At that time, the city of Syracuse in Sicily was ruled by a tyrant, King Dionysius. Today we would call him a dictator for he had forced the people to make him King and he ruled with a cruel hand. Dictators fear and punish people who tell them unpleasant truths. Therefore, when Pythias dared to oppose Dionysius he was condemned to death.

Brave Pythias was willing to die for the sake of what he believed to be right, but he was eager first to say good-bye to his parents who lived in another part of the country. He looked King Dionysius in the eye and said:

"Your Highness, you have the power to take my life. But I beg you to grant me one request. Before I die, give me one week to go home to say good-bye to my parents, and to arrange for their comfort and safety. I promise I will return by the end of the week."

"Pythias, do you take me for a fool? If I let you go, you will never come back." Proudly Pythias tossed back his head:

"You have my promise. I do not break a promise."

"Fine words! Fine words! But life is sweet. Once out of Syracuse, you will never return!" At this Damon interrupted. He had listened quietly but now could no longer keep silent:

"King Dionysius, Pythias has never broken his word. He will come back. To prove my faith, I will go to prison in his place, and die for him if he does not return." An ugly smile lit the face of the tyrant.

"So be it!" You may take his place. But expect no mercy. If he is not back by sundown on the seventh day from now, you die." Damon cast a loving look at Pythias and said:

"I am not afraid. He will return."

Damon was led away to prison and Pythias hastened to his parents to plan for their well-being and to say a sad good-bye.

The trip home went smoothly. The skies were sunny and the streams easy to ford. Pythias was a good runner. In two days he reached home.

With breaking hearts his parents heard the reason for his visit. They did not try to hold him. He had learned his high sense of honor from them. After a few hours of planning and weeping, his mother said:

"Now you must go. Damon lingers in prison until you get back." The parents both gave him their blessing and he was speedily on his way.

Suddenly the weather changed. Storm clouds gathered. An inky darkness covered the sky. Soon lightening zigzagged and thunder clapped and roared. Then a torrent of rain descended and drenched Pythias to the skin. His garments clung about his legs. It was difficult to run. The streams turned into rivers and these rivers soon overflowed their banks and washed away the bridges. Where Pythias had walked through fords, he now had to swim against a rushing current. Precious time slipped by and Syracuse was still far away. A horrible fear gripped him. Would he get back in time?

The morning of the last day came. King Dionysius went early to the prison and entered the cell where Damon lay upon a bed of straw. A smile of evil triumph distorted his lips:

"It is still but morning. Sundown is the appointed time."

"You do not mean that you still expect Pythias?"

"Indeed I do! He will be here by sundown!"

"Amuse yourself with your fairy tale a few hours more. It may help you to forget that when the sun sinks behind the clouds today… you die!"

The hours passed. A crowd began to gather to watch the execution. "Too bad," they said, "an innocent man is to die. Of course he was a fool to expect that his friend would return -- yet he was a noble fool. Too bad! Too bad! Will his courage hold out to the end?"

Now the guards were leading Damon from the prison. They paused before the special seat prepared so that King Dionysius could watch the execution in comfort.

"Pythias has not returned, Damon." In a clear voice that rang through the court Damon answered:

"He will still come or else you will soon learn that he has died on the way. Tell him that I went to my death in the sure knowledge that he had not betrayed me." The light of faith that glorified Damon's face caused Dionysius to lower his eyes. Suddenly a guard shouted:

"A man comes running -- he seems exhausted! He stumbles! He falls! He rises again!" All waited in hushed silence. Then, with a last great burst of effort, Pythias entered the gate, and dropped before the throne of Dionysius. As he panted the words, "Your Highness, I am back!" a mighty shout of joy rose from the throng.

With amazement and awe King Dionysius gazed on the fallen man. A new belief crept into his heart. He had seen a love and a loyalty that were stronger than the fear of death. He rose from his chair. Above the shouts of the tumult his voice rang out:

"Pythias, you have come back to live, not to die. Two such true friends must not be parted."

Meditation
No. 493, "Fire of the Spirit"
from Singing the Living Tradition

Sermon
The Best of the Oldest Dead White Males
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka

When I was little, I believed that Socrates was a big deal. In Sunday School we had a whole curriculum about him - how he asked questions, how he pursued wisdom, how he shook things up, how he stood by his principles even to his death. The Socrates curriculum came alongside other curricula that exposed us to our heritage: Jesus the Carpenter's Son was one year, and there was Achnaten the (Egyptian) Sun God, and the one about Moses, that linked us to our Jewish heritage. I believed that these people were my heritage as a Unitarian: men who came from humble beginnings and grew to be great leaders, or men who dared to think for themselves and establish wholly new and courageous patterns of religious thought, men who were willing to die for the good and the right and the true. I internalized these men, I claimed them, I knew these guys - they were my people, and they made me proud.

Current thought in educational circles tells me that my Sunday School relationship with these fellows of antiquity is either impossible or bad. Today we believe that in order for me to identify with a role model, that role model must be more or less like me to begin with. But Socrates, for one, was a seventy-year-old man, and I was a ten-year-old girl. Socrates lived several hundred years before the Christian era, and I was Twentieth Century. Socrates, like all ancient Greeks, had black hair and olive skin; I was blond and pale. Socrates lived across the ocean in a thriving metropolis and intellectual center; I lived in rural Ohio in a vast intellectual wasteland. Nobody ever told me that because Socrates was different from me, that because he was a "dead white male," he could not be my inspiration.

I am a champion of multi-culturalism. Nearly a year ago, now, when the Times columnist Anna Quindlen wrote a column (1/27/93) about Clinton's choice for his inauguration poet, Maya Angelou, I clipped it. Anna Quindlen makes the case that because Maya Angelou, an African American woman, was chosen for this prestigious occasion, little Black girls everywhere would be empowered to imagine themselves as great poets. She includes a quote that says, "If there's nobody who looks like you, you have the sense that you can't do it. If there's somebody who's something like you, it seems possible."

Personally, I was raised to believe that people are people, and if I wanted to, I could dream about being like Louis Armstrong, or Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Harriet Tubman, or... Socrates. For me the point of multi-culturalism is that we all do have humanity in common, the point is that the range of human accomplishment is wide, the menu is incredible, the opportunity for inspiration is so vast, the gifts so great from all quarters of the globe and from all points along the time line, that we need to open ourselves to all that we can, no matter who looks like what. Yes, I believe in multiculturalism because I want to hear Maya Angelou and I want to hear Socrates.

But the thing is, we are told these days that dead white males are… dead! And not only are they dead, we are told that their death is a blessing, that the dead white males are the bad guys, that, Socrates, a part of the prevailing culture of ancient Greece, was a bad guy.

Well he was a bad guy. And he was a part of a bad culture. Bad at least if we get to superimpose our 1990's notions of good and bad onto a completely foreign culture in a completely different time. Socrates was part of a culture that, for example, favored sacrifice - not metaphorical sacrifice - not like a "sacrifice play" in team sports, or a symbolic sacrifice as we see in Christian communions, but actual animal sacrifices. Animal sacrifices, done according to elaborate ritual that to our sensibilities are among the most gory and barbaric imaginable. The hot Agean sun, the odors of sweat, blood, burning fat, rotting flesh, the swarming flies, this is not what we want to teach our children. The Greeks had their reasons, as do all cultures that practice animal sacrifice, but for most of us the custom seems simply a bad custom, and I would not defend it.

Ancient Greek culture has gone out of favor for three more reasons, and the first of those is the issue of slavery. The Greeks held slaves. We believe slavery is wrong, we believe fundamentally that people should be equal and free. That equality would have been an utterly foreign concept to the ancient Greeks. We don't want to honor a slave-holding society, and again, of course I would not defend them.

Furthermore, Greek society was very rough on women. Women had no rights, no vote, no identities, and their roles were clear: Her duty was to order the house, to look after the property inside, and obey her husband. She had to train and supervise the slaves, if she had them; to store and manage the distribution of grain, wine, and oil; make and meet the annual budget; and see to the manufacture of household clothes from the raw fleece. She was not to sit by the fire but rather she should be constantly on the move, checking, inspecting, helping. She would rarely emerge from the house. (The Oldest Dead White European Males, Bernard Knox, pp. 49-52) These expectations would not go over well in most of our households, and once again, clearly, I would not defend them.

Finally, the ancient Greeks were racists. At least I think that's what we'd call them. At all levels of society, from slaves to aristocrats, Greeks believed in a qualitative gulf between themselves and all other people, all of whom they labeled "barbarians." Up until the time of Plato, Greeks believed that only they, the Greeks, among all people had the capacity for rational thought (The Legacy of Greece, M.I. Finley, pp. 8,9). You wouldn't want to defend a culture like that.

The question is, were my Sunday School teachers wrong to have taught me about Socrates? Should we drop the ancient Greeks as a part of our heritage? Is a Sunday sermon about our classical heritage a waste of your time?

In 1671, John Milton wrote his long poem "Paradise Regained," where we are reminded of the substantial list of splendors of ancient Greece by virtue of a little tour of Athens:

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
See there the olive-grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long,...
The schools of ancient sages;...
There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power
Of harmony in tones and numbers hit
By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,..
Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
High actions and high passions best describing.
Thence to the famous orators repair,
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce democracy,...
To sage philosophy next lend thine ear,
From heaven descended to the low-roofed house
Of Socrates - see there is tenement -
Whom well inspired the oracle pronounced
Wisest of men....

(Paradise Regained, lines 240-279)

That's the kind of list of credentials my grandmother would have given me as an argument for studying the ancient Greeks. My grandmother was, I think, the last living example of those people who for the last four hundred years believed that all that is good in civilization originated with the Greeks. She assumed that not only would you know how to pronounce all the names found in antiquity, you would study Greek and read the fellows in the original. She assumed that if you traveled at all, you'd travel there, to Greece. And be on a first name basis with the vases and the columns and the poets and the philosophers. She said the word "Acropolis" quite a bit in her everyday speech.

Well, I'm sorry, I never did any of that. In fact as a rebellious teenager I was real happy to find the poem by e.e. cummings that begins, "(ponder, darling,

these busted statues! of yon motheaten forum be aware! notice what hath remained/ - the stone cringes! clinging to the stone, how obsolete...."

But as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I must admit that time and again I do stumble upon the precepts of the Greeks - four that I'll mention this morning. And by now they are close to my heart, and maybe yours too.

The Greeks cared about intellectual knowledge. In our culture just now, and even within Unitarian Universalism, you don't hear much about the value of cold, hard knowledge. Because we have short-changed other categories in the recent past, categories like ritual, emotional connection, spirituality, mythology - and because we want to give those areas the attention they deserve, we have sometimes left the life of the mind behind. I would hate to see us lose sight of the value of "thinking."

Socrates believed that if you couldn't define something with absolute clarity, then you didn't really know what it was and you didn't know what you were talking about. He used to say that you can't make a shoe without knowing what a shoe is. (The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone, pp. 68-72) He cared about definition; he cared about truth, and he asked questions and struggled intellectually until he got as close as he could to an answer. Because I don't want to forget the intellect, I don't want to forget the Greeks.

A second aspect of ancient Greek culture that has made all the difference for Unitarian Universalists and a few other Protestant branches is the concept of democracy. The citizens of Athens themselves were the sovereign authority, just as in this church you, the members, are the final authority. In Athens, citizens gathered in an Assembly every eight or nine days, and they maintained an almost day-to-day control over their local government. As a congregation, members here gather twice a year as a pure democracy for our annual meeting, and as Unitarian Universalists continentally, we gather annually in June, as a denominational exercise in democracy. We have the Greeks to thank for the lack of authoritarianism in our religion.

For the Greeks, the fact of this new democratic form of government meant that a third aspect of society developed, and that was essentially a liberal arts education. Citizens needed to be educated in order to participate in their democracy: they needed to know how to think, to persuade, and to speak well in public, when up until then what the average man needed was physical strength and technical skills. The notion of wholeness, of a well-balanced and well-rounded education was born: in Athens it was said that a well-educated man was one who could play the flute, but not too well (The Greek Realities, Finley Hooper, p.1 79).

Now I don't want to leave you with the impression that with their fancy liberal arts education the Greeks were necessarily stuffy - these three poems will put your mind at rest I'm sure. The first, entitled "Winter Scene":

Zeus rains upon us, and from the sky comes down enormous winter. Rivers have turned to ice...
Dash down the winter. Throw a log on the fire
and mix the flattering wine (do not water it
too much) and bind on round our foreheads
soft ceremonial wreaths of spun fleece.
We must not let our spirits give way to grief.
By being sorry we get no further on,
my Bukchis. Best of all defenses
is to mix plenty of wine, and drink it.

(Alcaeus of Mytilene, Greek Lyrics, R. Lattimore, p. 44) And another:

Keep traveling, you swine, the whole way toward Smyrna.
Go through the Lydian land, past the tomb of Alyattes,...
big chief and point your paunch against the sun's setting.

(Hipponax of Ephesos, in Lattimore, p. 13)

(That's it.) The next...

Hold my jacket, somebody, while I hit Boupalos in the eye.
I can hit with both hands, and I never miss punches.

Finally, what I like about the ancient Greeks, the oldest European Dead White Males, is that they were such radicals. I know that these days they are cast as the old-fashioned conservatives to be left behind, but the fact is, what they stand for is revolutionary, especially when applied to religion. They asked questions. And they questioned their religion. And as soon as that process began, the established order of Greek gods and religious ritual began to collapse. Protagorus, for example said, "About the gods I cannot know, whether they exist or not, nor what kind of beings they might be; there are many obstacles to knowledge, both the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of our lives" (Finley, p. 216). I like a little irreverence and skepticism in a culture.

At the local Unitarian Universalist ministers meeting on Wednesday I was talking with a colleague about the question of the ancient Greeks. I said, "When I was a kid, we always learned that we came from the Greeks and the Jews and the Christians - where did the Greeks go?" He said, "You know, when I was in theological school in the Sixties, we had to take a course on our Christian, Jewish, and Greek heritage. Where did the Greeks go?" Later, I checked the hymnbook for reading and hymn possibilities, and while there are entries for Buddhists, and Goddesses, and Hiroshima Day, and Kwanzaa, and Martin Luther King Day and Native American Spirituality and Pagans and Rosh Hashanah and the solstice, I had to wonder, "Where did the Greeks go?"

So here we are, in December, the month most designated for song and candles and story and glory and tears in the face of darkness and joy in the glimmers of light. We will celebrate it all: Hanukkah, the solstice, Christmas. But this year let us begin with the oldest of the dead white males, that all of us, whoever we are, whatever we look like, can celebrate their radical nature, their sheer brain power, and the best of their human spirit. May the holiday season begin.

Hymn
No. 102 "We The Heirs of Many Ages"
from Singing the Living Tradition

Closing Words
No. 709, "Be doers of the word"
from Singing the Living Tradition

Questions for Discussion
by Amy L. Fisher

1. What is Rzepka's position on "dead white males"? On Socrates? Do you think her position would be different if she were not white?
2. Who are some other "dead white males"? Do agree with Rzepka that we should reclaim them? Is the tradition of Socrates worth perpetuating? What other "dead white male" traditions are worth keeping?
3. Do you agree that the Greeks have gone? What are some of the traditions which keep them alive? If any?

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Last updated June 12, 2005