April's Transitional Thoughts

Here we are in April, the month that T.S. Eliot called “The cruelest month of the year” in his poem, The Wasteland. He made this judgment because, as he goes on to say, it breeds

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

It has always struck me as somewhat odd that a poet of his stature could have such a complaining attitude toward the month in which spring seriously asserts itself. But then he was, after all, born a Unitarian and turned Anglican.

Actually, I suppose I have a similar complicated personal reaction to April myself, because of the way it encourages life to grow out of dead things. However, what has struck me (professionally) as a UU minister is that annual meetings of congregations often fall in that month.

And, at annual meetings, the remains of the past year are either celebrated or critiqued; reports are submitted; budgets are passed; and forward looking exhortations are made. They are made, that is, unless the main effort has been to con- demn failures instead of identifying possibilities.

It is a time when the effort is to bring new life out of old. In people terms all this moves forward in a healthy way as long as people turn the past into food for the future and work together

respectfully and cooperatively – which to me means cooperating democratically.

Now, April, with its paradoxes, may not be the most democratic of months but it is probably the

most generative. But so, also, is the democratic process paradoxical and generative.

Even as April makes use of life that has degenerated into humus so democracy makes use of human efforts and desires that have devolved into differences. In fact differences between people are what provide the grist for democratic resolution.

Harmony, after all, is what occurs when cacophonies have been resolved into mutually compatible sounds. For me, what April does best is to bring new life out of the death of old life. So, why should not an annual meeting do the same and create new possibilities out of the spent momentum of the past?

Perhaps if T.S. Eliot had seen Unitarians do a lot of this, he might have remained one. At any rate, this congregation has a great opportunity to generate a strong and healthy new life for itself when it does its annual thing and meets on April 17th.

Don Vaughn-Foerster