Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Our UU Identity

Nancy Howard
Acting Director of Religious Education
First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Antonio, TX
San Antonio, TX

The framework for this program and sample sessions are included here. For the entire program components and resources contact Nancy Howard at First UU Church of San Antonio, TX 78213, 210-344-4695 or nbhoward@mailhaven.com.

This religious education program focuses on our UU identity and is organized around seven pillars of wisdom (see below) and includes participants at four age levels (Kindergarten – Grade 3; Grades 4-5; Middle School; High School). Each session within the curriculum has the following elements:

• Picture poster of the person identified with pillar that was placed in the children’s gathering room, and/or classroom;
• Quotes of each hero/ine printed large and placed on the RE bulletin board and parent meeting room, ingathering, room and classrooms;
• Sign on the main bulletin board and in the ingathering room – I Am Somebody. I’m a Unitarian Universalist – above two large mirrors so all participants can envision themselves as part of their UU heritage;
• Two-page biographical story developed by the religious educator that was given to each teacher to read and then to tell in their own words;
• Ingathering Children’s Service that includes songs, joys and concerns, silent meditation, picture poster and artifacts of the person and historical period, and quotes from hero/ine;
• Speaker or video or project to bring the heritage theme into today’s life and community.

Sample sessions follow – Faith Development: James Reeb and Human Welfare: Dorothea Dix – to give you a flavor of the program.

• Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Our UU Identity
• Ethical Development – Mary Shelley, Julia Ward Howe
• Spiritual Development – Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Beatrix Potter
• Religious Identity (and Community) – Sophia Lyon Fahs, Sir Tim Berners-Lee
• Faith Development – Rev. James Reeb, Wade Richmond
• Human Rights – Paul Revere, Clara Barton
• Human Welfare – Dorothea Dix
• Fairness – Susan B. Anthony, P.T. Barnum

Human Welfare Pillar: Dorothea Dix

It wasn’t a good idea to be insane in New Jersey 150 years ago. The state had no mental hospitals. People who went mad were just locked up in cellars and attics, sent to poorhouses and jails, or farmed out to the cheapest caregiver.

But in 1844 the Yankee reformer Dorothea Dix came to New Jersey to plead for the construction of a modern state asylum. To prove her point, she traveled around the state to document the horrible conditions facing the mentally ill.

She found people living in filth, chained up, and beaten. At the Morris County Poor House she found that the violently insane were kept in the cellar, where, said Dix, one would not want to keep a dog. In Essex County, men, women, children, sane and insane, were thrown together in the jail.

Where did this compassion come from? Dorothea Lynde Dix was born on the Maine frontier when it was still part of Massachusetts. As a distributor of religious tracts promoting a hellfire and brimstone theology, her father, a self-trained minister, continually moved his family from place to place. As a child Dorothea was required to stitch and paste religious tracts, a task she deeply resented. The unhappy child was neglected and abused. At age 12 she ran away. She lived briefly with her Grandmother Dix in Boston and, by 1816, with an aunt in Worcester, Massachusetts. Because female children weren’t permitted in schools in 1816 when she was 14, she opened her first school for young girls. For the next 20 years, she combined teaching with writing textbooks, poetry, and religious tracts for young readers. Believing the work of a teacher must include community service, she ran a free evening school for poor children, one of the first in the nation. Dorothea also took care of her sick grandmother and continued teaching at her school. However, she became more and more drained and eventually had a complete breakdown and severe hemorrhages. Her condition was, what is now called tuberculosis, but back then they had no name for it or any known treatment. Often in poor health, she eventually closed her schools and traveled to England where she met reformers who were changing the way the mentally ill were treated.

By the early 1820s Dix had found her religious home among Unitarians. She appreciated the Unitarian emphasis on the goodness of God, purity of heart, openness to new knowledge, and responsibility for the good of all society. Although Dix established an extensive network of friends in the Boston Unitarian community; she would never marry.

In 1841, when she was nearly 40, she reached a turning point in her life. Teaching a Sunday school class for women in the East Cambridge jail, she realized that a number of the inmates had committed only one “crime”: they were mentally ill. The jail was unheated, because it was thought the mentally ill could not feel cold. Those incarcerated were not segregated; hardened criminals, feeble-minded children, and the mentally ill all occupied the same quarters. Dix secured a court order to provide heat and to make other improvements.

There were a few institutions that provided humane treatment for the insane, but they were the exceptions. Dix devoted the rest of her life to changing this; with single-minded fervor, she became the “voice for the mad.”

She began by surveying every jail, poorhouse, and house of correction in Massachusetts. In January 1843, she delivered a lengthy and dramatic report to the state legislature. With the support of several influential Unitarians, including Samuel Howe and Horace Mann, one of whom was her cousin and former suitor, she succeeded in persuading the legislature to appropriate money to expand the state hospital for the insane at Worcester.

Encouraged by her victory in Massachusetts, Dix took her crusade to other states, covering over 30,000 miles in three years of non-stop travel. She prepared “memorials” designed to inform lawmakers and shame them into acting. In 1843, there were 13 mental hospitals in the country; by 1880 there were 123, and Dorothea Dix played a direct role in founding 32 of them. She lent her support to other causes, especially prison reform and education for the blind, but the mentally ill remained her primary concern.

Her skill as a lobbyist made her the most politically active woman of her generation, but her most ambitious campaign – for federal land grants to endow state mental hospitals – failed.

A noted social reformer, Dix was appointed by President Lincoln to be the Union’s Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War. A week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix, at age 59, volunteered her services to the Union and received the appointment placing her in charge of all women nurses working in army hospitals. Serving in that position without pay through the entire war, Dix quickly molded her vaguely defined duties.

She convinced skeptical military officials, unaccustomed to female nurses, that women could perform the work acceptably, and then recruited other women. Battling the prevailing stereotypes – and accepting many of the common prejudices herself – Dix sought to ensure that her ranks not be inundated with flighty and marriage-minded young women by only accepting applicants who were plain looking and older than 30. In addition, Dix authorized a dress code of modest black or brown skirts and forbade hoops or jewelry; army nursing care was markedly improved under her leadership.

After the war, she worked on behalf of the mentally ill until she herself became too infirm. She spent her last years in the guest quarters of a state hospital she had helped found 35 years before; she died in 1887 at the age of 85.

Middle School: Dorothea Dix

Introduce the youth to noted guest psychologist. Explain that a professional mental health expert like our guest is here this Sunday because this week’s lesson focuses on mental health advocate Dorothea Dix.

Activity 1: Please read the Dorothea Dix bio to the youth:
Dialogue of Dix Lesson on the Effects of Ignorance (Middle School):

Have both the youth and then guest answer these questions.

• Why did people in the 19th century believe that mentally ill children and adults couldn’t feel the difference between hot and cold temperature, so they didn’t need heat in the winter?
• What else might these same people have thought about mental illness?
• How did Dorothea Dix’s Unitarian beliefs support her in her work with the mentally ill?
• When you see people on the street who look disheveled, does their behavior scare you?
• Do you believe that the mentally ill have rights?
• Should the mentally ill have the right to an education?
• Should the mentally ill have the right to work?
• Should the mentally ill have civil rights (due process of law, such as in the right to vote)?

Activity 2:

• Sponsor a recreation drive for the Adolescent Unit of the San Antonio State Hospital. In 1892, the Southwest Lunatic Asylum opened on the southern edge of San Antonio. Nestled among pecan trees and situated on more than 500 acres, the pastoral setting, with its tree-lined main entrance on South Presa Street, offered “asylum” in the truest sense of the word. The asylum was a self-contained living environment; crops and livestock were raised on the grounds, which at the time included the land across South Presa. A large lake provided fishing and recreational activities for the patients. All staff members lived on the grounds and had to obtain permission to leave. The hospital grounds also included a cemetery where patients were buried when other arrangements were not possible. It was not until 1925 that the words “lunatic” and “asylum” were removed from the names of mental institutions and replaced by “state hospital.”

The Adolescent Unit serves adolescent males and females aged 12-17 years of age in need of mental health services. This population greatly benefits from recreational type activities such as board games, Uno card games, G rated movies, basketballs, and 100 piece puzzles. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. All donations are processed through the Community Relations Department. One way we encourage the public to help the mentally ill is to help eliminate the stigma that still exists about people with mental illness.

Activity 3: Time permitting: Movie on bipolar illness borrowed from the San Antonio State Hospital.

Activity 4: Questions from the youth to Sally concerning mental illness

Faith Development Pillar: Rev. James Reeb
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
The 1965 Enactment

The resulting legislation which President Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965, temporarily suspended literacy tests and provided for the appointment of federal examiners (with the power to register qualified citizens to vote) in those jurisdictions that were “covered” according to a formula provided in the statute. In addition, under Section 5 of the Act, covered jurisdictions were required to obtain “preclearance” for new voting practices and procedures from either the District Court for the District of Columbia or the U.S. Attorney General. Section 2 of the Act, which closely followed the language of the 15th Amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition of denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color.

The Voting Rights Act had not included a provision prohibiting poll taxes, but had directed the Attorney General to challenge its use. In Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), the Supreme Court held Virginia’s poll tax to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Between 1965 and 1969 the Supreme Court also issued several key decisions upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 and affirming the broad range of voting practices for which preclearance was required. As the Supreme Court put it in its 1966 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Act:

Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress decided to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.

The Reverend James Reeb
4th and 5th Grades Lesson Plan

This lesson plan on the Rev. James Reeb has been scheduled as a follow-up to RE Sunday’s play on “Memories of Martin Luther King, Junior,” and because the 4th and 5th grades are housed in the room dedicated to the Rev. James Reeb.

Activity A: In your own words, briefly tell the children about the Rev. James Reeb’s life.

Activity B: Tell them about the UU Eliot House Memorial dedicated to two UUs (the Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo) and to Jimmy Lee Jackson.

Activity C: Ask the following questions to the children:

• The Rev. James Reeb had children whom he loved, but he risked his life for them because of his Unitarian Universalist principles. He has been called a “Peace Solider.” Explain what you think this term means.
• Only a few Unitarian Universalists have had to die for their beliefs. What Unitarian Universalist beliefs would you risk your life for? What do UUs believe in anyway? Our religion is more than just going to Church or saying certain words. The way we live our lives and treat other people is what’s important to us.
• Why do UUs march on MLK Day? Because we believe in the same principles that the Rev. James Reeb believed in.

Activity D: Read the story, “The Other Side.”

Activity E: Divide the children into two groups. One group will depict the freedom marchers and the police on the bridge waiting for them to cross. The other picture will show three men coming up behind three other men hitting them with rocks and clubs. While the children are engaged in this activity, read the Rev. James Reeb story from the UU Biographies Book.