I’ll begin with a poem that Sarah Chang shared during her service a couple Sundays ago. It is a Coleman Barks poem inspired by Rumi. I say it that way because Coleman Barks is the poet singlehandedly responsible for the boom in interest in the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Jalaludin Rumi. Coleman Barks is a fine American poet. He does not speak or read Farsi Persian. He read English translations of Rumi and thought, “I think I can say better what I think that’s saying.” I have read some of those earlier English translations of Rumi, and in my opinion Barks is right about that: he does say it better. But whether what we’re getting is really Rumi or more Coleman Barks is an open question. For one thing, Rumi was deeply, devotedly Muslim, and references to the Koran are sprinkled extensively through his poems, but all of that has been erased from Coleman Barks’ versions, so I feel like I ought to acknowledge that. Still, this Coleman Barks poem inspired by Rumi is lovely, and is beloved by many throughout the English-speaking world – and is very wise.
This being human is a guest house.You are a guest house. Hospitality is your job – it is the labor (see what I did there?) the joyful labor of being human.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Hospitality involves the skill of making other people feel welcome, assured that they belong. And what Rumi by way of Coleman Barks tells us is that every experience is like a person – every emotion, every passing fear or sadness or moment of joy, every momentary awareness, every problem or challenge – is like a person to be welcomed and entertained and assured that they belong. You could try to keep out those guests you find unpleasant – and I guess you probably have tried to suppress feelings you didn’t want. But if you don’t welcome them at the front door, emotions do have a way of sneaking in through the back door. Hospitality is about welcoming all of your life into your life – and that includes other people.
Now: On this Labor Day weekend, I want to share with you a story about the origin of Labor Day – how we came to have this holiday. It is fundamentally a story that has its roots in the impulse toward hospitality – wanting to be hospitable, but not hospitable to everything. When our hospitality isn’t radical – isn’t extended, as Barks and Rumi say, to whatever comes – when we want to welcome what is fun and joyous and slam the door on what is dark or hurts a bit – then things won’t work out so well.
Labor itself is the mixing of what is hard with what, we hope, is rewarding – intrinsically rewarding ideally, and at least extrinsically rewarding, but even when intrinsically rewarding, still sometimes un-fun. We happen to inherit a tradition in which labor is punishment. In the Genesis story, the original humans ate “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” and Yahweh kicked them out of paradise, and gave them labor. Yahweh was gender-specific about the labor – in keeping with the culture of the time from which these stories emerge. The woman’s labor is childbearing. The man’s labor is working the fields. So labor is what we have to endure because we ate of a tree and got called out. We go out of Eden and go into: labor. Tough break.
The interpretation of that Genesis story that makes more sense to me is one offered by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner in Eyes Remade for Wonder. Kushner suggests that the whole thing was a setup. Like any good parent, God knew that to grow up we would have to leave home and so put that tree there to create a pretext for kicking us out.
“We have read it all wrong. God was not angry. God rejoiced at our disobedience and then wept with joy that we could feel our estrangement and want to return home.”The return home, however, is not easy. It is, in fact, labor. And the labor of making our own way home and the labor of making others feel at home turns out to be the same labor.
Whether or not labor seems to us to be a pain or a drudgery to endure just to pay the pills, there is before us also the prospect of labor as the path home. Let me then relate the cautionary tale of industrialist George Pullman, born 1831.
George Pullman founded the Pullman Palace Car Company that manufactured railroad cars, particularly the Pullman sleeping car. In 1880, he bought 4,000 acres 14 miles south of Chicago, and got an architect to design not only his new plant for making railroad cars, but a whole town: houses for 10,000 workers, shopping areas, a church, theaters, parks, a hotel, and a library – all owned by one man. He built and owned the power plant that powered his factory and his town. The town was named after him: “Pullman, Illinois.”
Pullman’s workers worked for him, lived in houses owned by him, paid their rent and their utilities to him, and shopped in stores owned by him, strolled in his parks. He was, in his way, and in his mind, being more hospitable to his workers. His aim was to solve the issue of labor unrest and poverty: labor unrest for his own industrialist motives, but at least he had the insight to see that to do that required tackling poverty.
For years George Pullman had been a philanthropic supporter of fine schools – with the aim of providing business with a better quality of laborer. He wanted a happy, loyal workforce, so his town provided for all his workers’ needs. They got a state-of-the art home: indoor plumbing, gas lights, sewers – well above the average dwelling of the time. They got fine country air and beautiful neighborhoods. The mortality statistics, indeed, established that Pullman, Illinois was one of the most healthful places in the world to live.
The town created a national sensation. The press praised Pullman’s benevolence and vision. To ensure there would be no unhappiness, Pullman prohibited outside agitators, allowed no saloons, or vice district. The hotel on the edge of town had the town’s only bar, and it was open only to visitors, not the residents. He prohibited independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings or open discussion. He wanted his workers to have clean homes, so his inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for cleanliness and could terminate leases on ten days notice. Private charitable organizations were prohibited. Pullman was showing hospitality – but on his own rather restrictive terms – which isn’t real hospitality at all.
He built only one church building in his town: the Greenstone Church. Pullman’s plan was that all religious denominations would band together and share the one building. But the various denominations would not unite, and no single denomination could afford the rent, so the church stood empty for the town’s first seven years until Pullman finally slashed the rent by two-thirds, and Presbyterians rented it. But it all came crashing down.
In 1893 the stock market crashed. The railroad "bubble" (overbuilding railroads, and relying on shaky financing to do it) burst. The "Panic of 1893" was, at the time, the worst economic depression the United States had ever experienced. 150 railroads closed. There was massive unemployment. Pullman cut his workers' wages by 25 percent or more. He did not, however, reduce the rents he charged his workers for living in Pullman, Illinois. Hospitality sometimes entails sacrifice, and Pullman wasn’t willing to share in the sacrifices of hard times.
The next year, 1894, 4,000 Pullman employees went on a wildcat strike: "wildcat" because it wasn’t authorized by the workers’ trade union officials -- which was because they didn’t have any trade union officials -- which was because Pullman didn’t allow labor unions. Then organizers for Eugene Debs' American Railway Union came in and signed up many of the striking workers, and the Pullman strike spread. Soon 100,000 railroad workers across the country were refusing to handle trains with Pullman cars. The strike shut down much of the nation's freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit.
Various sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks or threatening and attacking the replacement workers the railroads sought to hire. At its peak, the strike involved 250,000 workers in 27 states.
Pullman called up his friend and fellow railroad director, United States Attorney General Richard Olney. With President Grover Cleveland's backing, troops were sent to Chicago. The federal government secured a federal court injunction against the union, Debs, and the top leaders ordering them to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars. They refused. The Army moved in to stop the strikers from obstructing the trains. Violence broke out in a number of cities inflicting millions of dollars in damages and killing 30 people.
The Army broke the strike. Debs went to prison for violating a court order. The railroads fired and black-listed all the employees who had supported the strike.
As soon as the strike was over and the trains were running, President Cleveland and Congress moved to make conciliation to organized labor. Six days after the 1894 Pullman strike ended, legislation was pushed through Congress declaring that the first Monday of September was a Federal holiday, Labor Day.
So that, dear ones, is why we have Labor Day. It is the consolation prize we got after the Feds sent in troops to protect corporate interests and break up a strike. It was a bone to try to head off further conflict. And they put it in September, instead of giving official recognition to the more widely known International Workers Day on May 1, because they wanted to pull attention away from the more radical labor movements.
The story of conflict between "management" (the wealthy, the controllers of capital) and people whose labor they want to make use of (whether slaves, indentured servants, or laborers) is the central and on-going story of our country. This is who we are as a people.
Labor Union membership peaked in the 1940s and 50s, and has been declining ever since. There are 6.4 million working poor, as of 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the weekend for celebrating labor, let spare a thought or two for those who labor and aren’t paid enough to not be poor.
The story of George Pullman is of particular salience to us Unitarian Universalists. This story -- the story of the industrialist who owned an entire town, ruled over it, sparked a national strike, and then brought in the Army to violently break that strike -- is our story, quite specifically. You see, George Pullman was one of us in a very direct sense. George Pullman was a Universalist: born, raised, lived and died. George’s father, raised a Baptist, and his mother, raised Presbyterian, converted to Universalism, drawn to the “God is Love” message of the Universalist minister Thomas Eaton. George's Dad often led the services when no preacher was available.
The Pullmans were a devotedly, devoutly, Universalist family. Both of George’s two older brothers became Universalist ministers and were prominent figures in our faith. Late in his life, George Pullman had a Universalist church built in his hometown, Albion, New York, as a memorial to his parents.
Industrialist George Pullman was a Universalist, born and bred and lifelong. Something of the Universalist outlook may be detected in his life and actions. He believed his workers deserved decent accommodations. He saw that education was a win-win: it made workers lives better, and made them more useful workers for businessmen like him. "I have faith," Pullman told the press, "in the educational and refining influences of beauty, and beautiful and harmonious surroundings."
Pullman had a kind of Universalist hope that different denominations could come together and worship together in one church. There is a certain idealist, utopian strain of thought in the planning of his town. Liberal religion is characterized by an optimism about human possibility. From our beginnings 450 years ago, Unitarians and Universalists have been peoples who rejected Calvinistic conceptions of humankind’s total depravity. That optimism about human capacity is displayed in Pullman’s vision of a company town where every one was happy and productive.
In his case, it didn’t work out. Shortly after Pullman's death in 1897, courts ordered the homes sold to individual homeowners. What went wrong was that Pride and Control took over. Yes, people can get better -- can learn, can grow -- but they have to do so in their own way. That is the key to genuine hospitality – not merely meeting what you think their needs are, but journeying with them in the discovery of those needs. Growth, learning, and development cannot be all planned out with precise outcomes determined in advance.
Pullman believed in human improvability, but didn't believe in people enough to let them work out their own growth, awakening, salvation, in their own way -- even if they used their freedom to go backwards for a few years -- or a few generations -- and even if, left to their own devices, they drank, or listened to speeches from agitators, read independent newspapers, gathered and discussed unsavory ideas. Pullman wouldn't listen to his workers' needs.
We can’t ever be so arrogant that we won’t meet and talk and consider where other people are coming from. For Labor Day, remember George Pullman, the industrialist whose meanness sparked the events that led to the creation of the holiday. Remember George Pullman, the Universalist who got the optimism but didn’t get the humility – because we Unitarian Universalists today follow in his footsteps in more ways than it's comfortable to admit.
When has your voice of “let’s make it better,” come out as "fix it my way or I will treat you as evil obstructionist"? When have your own ideals made you cruel? I think we do that every time we think someone else is wrong. Then let this be our Labor Day prayer: to find the courage of hospitality: to talk to the people we think are wrong, and stay at it until we get over ourselves.
“God rejoiced at our disobedience,” said Rabbi Kushner, “and then wept with joy that we could feel our estrangement and want to return home.” We feel the estrangement. My challenge to you – and to myself -- is to talk, face-to-face, with someone you think is wrong. It’s election season – it’s not hard to find them. The hard part is talking to them, and keeping a civil tongue even if they don’t.
And that is hard. We feel our estrangement. So many of our fellow citizens, have such anger and fear – it’s easy for us to get angry at, and a little afraid of, them. The labor of hospitality, of returning home, one small step toward one small mend in one small relationship at a time, is ours to do. May we take up that labor. Blessed be. Amen.
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