Small Group Reflection: Walt Whitman

At the Tufts Humanist Chaplaincy, we hope to foster a comfortable environment for people to engage in honest discussions around the challenges in their lives, and to explore how people outside traditional religion approach questions that many faith traditions engage regularly. Our day to day lives, on campus and off, can be challenging just as they are exciting, but we don’t always have a structured hour in the week to sit down and reflect on the way we’ve grown, and the lessons we can learn from the experiences of others.

At small group reflections, the Humanist in Residence facilitates an open, respectful, and confidential conversation around a theme that concerns and informs many of our choices and experiences in our life journey. The conversation begins rooted in a text (or other piece of culture) written from a Humanist perspective that engages the theme, and from there will be open to the perspectives and experiences of everyone present in the group. Those present are encouraged to bring pieces of culture that inspire their own values on the theme, including and especially those from other faith traditions.

The upcoming small group reflection will begin with a poem from poet Walt Whitman. It will be on Friday, September 30th, at 5:30pm in the Interfaith Center downstairs meeting room. Small group reflections are open to all members of the Tufts community, irrespective of anyone’s belief background. Light refreshments will be served!

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Walt Whitman is one of the most recognizable and celebrated Humanist poets. Born on Long Island to a Quaker family, his “democratic” free verse on the border of poetry and prose has also been hailed as some of the earliest American work attributable to gay liberation, though Whitman never self-identified as queer. Whitman was an early proponent of abolition, though we should recognize he too subscribed to racist sentiments about African Americans’ right to vote and presence in legislature.

Keeping in mind our project fighting for better conditions for the homeless in our community this weekend, we’ll be opening our reflection with a famous selection of Whitman’s that offers a call to service. He writes,

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.