The third weekend in April has been designated as primary in our commemoration of Baltimore Ethical Society having existed for 60 years. That Sunday’s platform will be one of several special moments. And while all the anniversary details are not yet in place, I hope you will hold aside Saturday the 21st for our celebratory dinner.
When the Ethical Movement’s 50th anniversary took place in 1926, Felix Adler recalled that at its start he had been “a very young professor of religious history and literature” at Cornell University asked to present to an assembly of some hundred people in New York city a “sketch of a religious society imbued with the spirit of religion but without its dogmas.”
From his vantage point at that golden celebration, Adler daringly addressed the “spiritual evolution” as a process he envisioned had to be undertaken as core by future Ethical Societies. Key to this process must be that “the human race shall take its evolution into its own hands, and that as yet unrealized manhoods and womanhoods shall appear.” Such achievement Adler grounded in the concept that social reformation can be achieved only when changes in human living conditions are accompanied by changes within humans themselves.
For change to occur within each solitary human being, Adler offered that there must be constraint as well as affirmation of the self, that the individual must submit to discipline as “no great thing has ever been accomplished without it.” We must realize or understand ourselves and perfect what we realize into habit.
Adler noted too that those who participated in the formation of Ethical Societies were concerned even more for their children than for themselves. That was certainly true by those who brought the Baltimore Ethical Society into being.
In the words of Pell Kangas when BES celebrated 37 years of existence, “Consider the challenges that are faced when undertaking to build a new unique religious fellowship to meet the needs of a new generation of people who come from various cultural and religious backgrounds” – and yet accomplishing this fellowship in a “Baltimore where racial discrimination in housing, eating places, schools, in employment was still a fact of life under the laws of the land and an accepted convention in the minds of most people.”
Those words remind us that the Ethical Society of Baltimore grew from – and will continue to grow from – the concept that “morality is going out of one’s self and living in, living for, something larger.” Keep that in mind along with the dates of April 21 and 22, details to follow.
