Left Coast Unitarian

My letter to Diane Feinstein on the 5th fleet in Bahrain

2011-06-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

I write this letter to you as a 4th generation Californian deepconcerned about human rights in the Middle East. You are my Senator, as well as a member of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.

The organization Human Rights First Recently published an announcement entitled "Sham Trials in Bahrain Prove Need for Greater U.S. Pressure."

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2011/06/28/sham-trials-in-bahrain-prove-need-for-greater-u-s-pressure/

THe point of this article is that continued human rights abuses, particularly the jailing of human rights activists and opposition leaders makes Bahrain an improper partner for the United States in the Middle East.

I strongly encourage you to support legislation that prohibits appropriations for the continued basing of the US 5th fleet in Bahrain if these abuses continue. The credibility of the United States on human rights issues is jeopardized by continued military cooperation with the current regime in Bahrain.

Anniversary Joy

2008-05-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

C and I celebrate our 14th anniversary today. We will go out tomorrow but we managed to sneak a little picnic lunch this afternoon. Ironically, we both mentioned how much it seems like just yesterday we got together and yet we both feel like we have always been together. It's been a real joy and seems unbelievable that we have been together for 14 years.

In the past year we have started running together and have only managed to grow closer. We're both close to the same size we were two kids ago when we met now too. Its been great to grow into a whole new level of physical activity together. Its been a hard week of training for us this week. I am very proud that C is still up and at it after her big half marathon two weeks ago.

C has accomplished so much in 14 years. Two kids born at home and a Masters Degree. She also delivered dozens of babies during this time. I finished an MSEd and am very close to finishing my MDiv now too right after she finishes her Family Nurse Practitioner.

Great summer and thinking about exercise

2007-09-03T20:52:00.001-07:00

It has been a very long time since I have written here. I have spent most of this summer training for a triathlon and coordinating a summer project and RE for a local congregation.

It was very nice to get some media coverage for our work this summer. UUCSM was a great place to work and a great place to go to church this summer.

Just about every day (except for some Sundays) I have been working out. Saturdays have been coached with a team and the rest of the week has been on our own.

As someone who grew up during the 70s California fitness craze, I have always had mixed feelings about this level of exercise and sport. I grew up around several families "widowed" by active participants or passive consumers of sports. So I have tended to think of working out or higher level recreational athletics as somewhat self indulgent. There are a lot of things I could be doing with those 10 or so hours per week I have spent even if I've lost 30 pounds (my weight gain from two kids and seminary :)) and weigh the same I did when I graduated from high school twenty years ago but with a smaller waist.

The question I have been considering is how to decide when exercise can be good or even sacred versus when exercise becomes idolatry or self-absorption. When people hear that I am training for my first triathlon, they often ask if I am raising money for a cause. Perhaps they have heard recent ads for Team In Training from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society which is doing a great job of getting people trained for their first triathlon, marathon or half marathon while raising money for a good cause. Our local triathlon is a benefit for the work of the local Rotary but not particularly charity oriented. I think most people would feel it was a good thing if I was out raising money this way or that this is one way that exercise would be judged a priori a good thing. Perhaps the health benefits for myself and the role model it gives my kids also functions this way.

The other thing I did this summer was complete a course on early church history, with a heavy dose of critiques of Gnosticism and the influence of Augustine. The old stereotype of the shallow, self-absorbed yuppie at the gym, combined with a heavy dose of "Christian" body suspicion instigated this line of questioning for me. In Christian terms (via Irenaeus)if the body is good enough for the incarnation there must be something good about it.

But how do we devise a theological language that valorizes exercise or physical activity that does not denigrate some people with bodies or conditions that might make this difficult or impossible? Being influenced by Fat Is A Feminist Issue and writings about ability and access I have tended to avoid talking about exercise and fitness. I generally don't talk about the training I am doing though it has been a lot of work and something of an accomplishment.

We Arrive at GA with a great food accident

2007-06-21T23:49:00.000-07:00

So after 12 hours of driving we arrive at GA just in time for the Service of the Living Tradition.

By luck, a wrong turn put us on to a detour and we found the fantastic Blue Nile Cafe Ethiopian Restaurant at 2221 NE Broadway. The food was spicy and excellent, with fluffy soft injera and flavors as good as any Ethiopian restaurant we have tried.

The poor kids ended up going to the SLT after a 12 hour car ride. They did great, but it was clearly too late for them. I told them I will have to get them vegan doughnuts at Voodoo Doughnut tommorrow.

The 5 year old was excited when he recognized Bill Sinkford from the UU World magazines at our house. It was very nice to run into some Starr King and PCD friends as well.

I enjoyed the SLT tonight and was very happy to be there with my family. I am starting to enjoy the tradition of it and allowing myself to look forward to getting preliminary fellowship as well. I liked the content of Bill and Barbara's sermon and their general preaching style. I'm not sure they would have gotten away with being so self-referential in my homiletics class though.

Even though the service still seemed long, it was disappointing to not have the traditional practice of people walking across the stage to receive the hand of fellowship.

I think I will start tommorrow with Dr. Amina Wadud giving the Starr King President's Lecture. I have heard lots of good things about her work on gender and Islam. The rest of the day I will attempt to focus on family ministry.

Smells Like School Spirit or Be True To Your School Part II?

2007-05-30T22:46:00.000-07:00

Reverend Peacebang, seems to have kicked off something of a snarkfest towards the Thomas Starr King School for the Ministry and does not approve of some of the responses from students of said school.

Now I have been a student at Starr King for what seems like forever. My work in Transylvania has delayed my graduation an extra year. You won't generally see me talk like a true believer, but I am fully in support of the work that the school is doing in terms of social justice. I will intentionally avoid using the shorthand terms that are used to describe this work here, because I know for some readers it would feel like you need a secret decoder ring to interpret.

For me the actual matter of dispute is fairly simple. If a person of color, especially an elder, suggests that a particular term is not the most inviting way to title or describe a gathering, I will take them at their word absent a good deal of evidence.

This is a reiteration of a point I have made here before. If someone tells you that a particular term is offensive because it was used as a slur against them or as part of a system of oppression, you generally don't have much of a case for trying to dispute it. This may not make for a perfect system, but to me, it is common (or sadly perhaps less common that I might want to think) courtesy.

This is much less fun than railing about political correctness or a rousing game of "poke fun at the hippies" but it generally has served me well.

Comment moderation

2007-05-23T09:51:00.001-07:00

Sheesh. I've done two posts now for the first time in months and I have had to turn on comment moderation to deal with the diatribes of someone's vendetta against their former church. Either that, or I am dedicated to the censorship of North America's last great free thinker heretic.

I have only ever deleted comment spam and clearly irrelevant comments designed to drive traffic away and gain attention. I think you will still find some of these comments in the archives.

On a more substantive note, I think it is important to reiterate that someone can be your ally without necessarily being just as enthusiastic about whatever it is you bring up at any given time.

I'm reminded of my time as a young leftist when I would be at meetings and members of the Socialist Workers Party (or was it the Socialist Labor Party or the Workers Vanguard or the Revolutionary Communist Party?) would soak up meeting time talking about whatever issue they thought was most important, repeating each other's comments about the same thing. Usually they were valid issues but not relevant to why people were getting together at that particular time.

Here where I live there is an older activist, who I generally agree with, who insists on going to any progressive meeting (usually environmental organizations) and reading long diatribes. His analysis of contemporary problems is pretty good, but his poor social skills (As Douglas Copeland describes a character in Jpod, he has now inside voice) make him impossible to work with. Most of the people I do work with locally feel like they agree with him but do not want to be anywhere near him or associated with him in any way because of the way he carries on. And this is totally in spite of the fact that we all basically agree with him.

I mention this because it seems a lot like the stereotype of the crusty humanist decades long social justice committee chair that I have heard people spin stories about.

Church Technology Planning

2007-05-23T09:07:00.001-07:00

I was recently contacted by some old colleagues to assist schools with creating their technology plans. For some schools, the technology plan is just another paperwork requirement to get different kinds of grants. For others, the technology plan can actually serve a useful role in guiding how technology can be used to help students learn, teachers teach and administrators administrate.

I'm wondering if a similar planning process would be helpful for churches. A good technology plan might include a built in replacement policy for equipment (ideally a plan for regular upgrades and a three to five year replacement cycle). Also useful is a policy for dealing with donated equipment. I've seen so many junk computers dumped on schools by well meaning people, and have seen similar equipment in church offices. (As an aside, please don't send old computers to Transylvania. By the time you pay to ship them, you might as well wire money to buy equipment there or in Hungary.)

My son just got back from a district youth con. The youth I drove mentioned the wireless internet available at the host church. How might we plan strategically to use online resources in religious education effectively? What sort of training is needed and what are the minimum resources necessary to be successful? And what are the potential downsides?

As an educational technologist, I suppose I am at first glance somewhat skeptical of technology at church. But it seems to me that the level of technology in each congregation is increasing, and the minimum requirements for acceptable production values in our society are getting more complex. We must not let the cart get ahead of the horse however. As Einstein put it, "The perfection of means and confusion of ends characterizes our age."

Sermon inspired by Genesis 15

2007-05-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

Genesis 15:1-30
15After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ 2But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?’* 3And Abram said, ‘You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.’ 4But the word of the Lord came to him, ‘This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.’ 5He brought him outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ 6And he believed the Lord; and the Lord * reckoned it to him as righteousness.
7 Then he said to him, ‘I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.’ 8But he said, ‘O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?’ 9He said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon.’ 10He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. 11And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. 13Then the Lord * said to Abram, ‘Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; 14but I will bring judgement on the nation that they serve, and afterwards they shall come out with great possessions. 15As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.’
17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire-pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, 19the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’

I’m not here to say what you are worried about. I might know and I might not. But I can know that there are worries to keep you up at night and worries to make you sick in the gut. I can see it in your eyes and I know we’ve all been there. And for the most part, we have all been there alone, despite any friends, family or mates we may have.

Now our hippie friends may say that we just need to “trust the universe,” but for a lot of people, especially people who have less power and privilege, life in our global economy is not really trustworthy. Hard work and a positive attitude are not enough. And it is awful had and lonely when your whole life or even an entire socioeconomic system seems arrayed against you.

Now Abram (you know Abram, he becomes Abraham, the father of the Jews, Christians and Muslims later) isn’t even alone. He believes in G-d and G-d even talks to him directly. Even in the personal company of G-d Abram still has to ask what do you mean? How is this going to work? I’m still worried. And even after G-d shows Abram, “Look I’m G-d its no problem for me and I can make it work and it will be fine” Abram still has to ask “How do I know your promise is true?” Abram has doubts twice even with G-d there to talk to him and show him and make a deal with him.

So how are we supposed to feel in our times of need and doubt? You are not alone and your sense of despair is perfectly natural. But you need hope to survive..

When we lose hope we begin to shut down. We become increasingly isolated and withdraw from the social bonds that sustain us. Wealthier people may retreat to their high profile SUVs and gate garded communities while the most despondent of all social classes may ultimately retreat to the numb comfort of drugs and alcohol or even suicide.

Socially when we lose hope we become less and less involved in our world. We develop so-called compassion fatigue and a “let the devil take the hindmost” mentality. In our own suffering we succumb to the most reactionary kinds of thinking about the sufferings of our neighbors and others near and far. We lose trust in the ability of people to work together and solve problems collectively and retreat to rugged individualism.

Religiously, we lose the ability to make sense of our world and wonder how we will make it. We lose connection to our sense of the divine and the holy connections between us. When we suffer we no longer feel the blossoming promise of life, and forget that while we all must suffer sometimes, some are made to suffer more than their natural share through a variety of bigotry and injustices.

Sometimes as modern religious liberals we try to look down on people with traditional beliefs. We say they just want easy answers. But look at Abram, even from the mouth of G-d direct to his ear the answer is not easy. It may take 4 generations and it may not work out exactly the way you expect. And like Job later even if you do everything right it may not be easy. And you will doubt and despair. And the writers of the ancient Hebrew holy scrolls knew this. Doubt was not invented by Nietzche or 20th century liberals. And hopelessness is not some new postmodern condition.

Too often as religious liberals we strut around with a great deal of pride in our doubts. And we intentionally ignore that we live in a system designed to break us down into the smallest possible units until we are reduced to passive individual consumers, defined by hierarchy and what we buy.

The most explicit instance of how this works in our society is in prison. A friend who spent several years in state prison used to explain that the worst thing you could do in prison is look like you were bonding with someone. Immediately you would find yourself separated, whether it was a songbird in the trees or an incarcerated sister that looked to you as an elder. Even when prisoners are not literally in solitary confinement, their lives were structured to create an emotional solitary confinement. And it is this solitary confinement in our prisons and in our torture chambers in Guantanamo and the Middle East that is the best metaphor for examining how our society can function to make our suffering worse.

In many societies, past and present, a much stronger sense of kinship and extended families exists. In the village I served in Transylvania, every elder is an auntie or uncle. When people are sick, a neighbor brings food, chops wood or tends animals. And most houses had at least two or three generations living together. Now in our society, those of us with a little more live in big empty houses, while poor people can not be seen in groups larger than two without being called a gang. Everyone must have their own house and own possessions. And everyone struggles to keep up with appearances, until they fall through the frayed strands of our safety net and end up on the street, that same street that so many of us are only one paychecks and a dead or pissed off relative away from.

A recent study in American Sociological Review based on interviews with nearly 1500 people by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago states that 25% of Americans feel that there is no one close with whom they confide in about things that are important to them. Eighty percent of respondents confided solely in family. This study has been continuing since 1985, when the average person reported 3 people to confide in (compared to 2 in 2004) and only 57% of people relied solely on family members to confide in.

In a society that is designed to tear us apart in good times and bad, our most radical act is to strengthen the bonds between us across all our social divisions. We must actively resist any attempts to force us or our neighbors to suffer alone or to fear invisibility. Abram with all his men and war bounty still could not be reassured about his legacy. His men below him and all his wealth were no solace to him.

One of the most striking visible features of my home, is the giant redwood trees that tower hundreds of feet into the foggy North Coast sky. The redwood is the tallest living thing on earth, but what few people understand is that they compared to other trees they have shallow roots. Now how can it be that trees that are almost 400 feet tall can stay standing with shallow roots? The secret is that they spread their roots widely and intertwine with those of other trees. The entire redwood ecosystem lives and dies together. The simplest ground cover, ferns, oxalis and trillium all depend on the shade and moisture of the trees. And the trees need the ground cover to prevent erosion and compression on their roots.

How might we become more like the mighty redwoods?

As individuals we must strive to stay connected, to our family, to our friends and to our community. We must acknowledge the social forces that keep us from bonding with people who might seem different from us and take concerted action to break down artificial barriers created between us all. We must let no one suffer in silent isolation, and rescue all from their literal and metaphorical solitary confinement. We must be like the roots of the redwoods, or the tubes that bring us food, and air and circulate our blood when we are on life support. Like the sponsor one has in 12 step, or the neighborhood elder who reassures anxious new parents. We all have a friend that we haven’t heard from in a while or someone down the street that we have not met yet. And all of us have had a time when an unexpected call or visit would have made a world of difference. Each of us must be for each of our friends, neighbors and others a support. This will take great courage but it is courage that we can muster.

As a community we must work together to include all our neighbors as their full authentic selves in our society. We must call on our creativity to build opportunities throughout society for meaningful participation and for everyone to find support in each of lives challenges. We must support the institutions and events that break down social divides in our communities. Where I live, the only institutions that unite people across race and class are public schools and youth soccer. This can be as simple as sharing a meal with others each week, or volunteering in our community. Or even keeping events accessible by transit or offering childcare. One young friend leads a much appreciated book discussion group at a local senior center. We must have a very deliberate compassion and a thirst for justice to ensure that the less privileged among us can participate fully and equally in the blessings of life and our moral commonwealth.

As religious people gathered in beloved community, we must spiritually and materially build a generosity of spirit and a surplus of caring and compassion that washes over our community and out into the world that so badly needs our love and our benevolent rage. We must reclaim our Universalist heritage and leave no souls behind. UU Minister Peter Morales from Golden, CO makes the case that we have a moral obligation to find and welcome the spiritually homeless people with no one to confide in, and that it is morally equivalent to not feeding the hungry or housing the homeless to turn away, by insularity or the inertia of our comfort zone, these desperate seekers of solace.

When Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe is vast but it curves towards justice, he was inspired by the white abolitionist Unitarian Theodore Parker. And even if it indeed curves towards justice, and all things shall pass, and things will work out in the end, sometimes it needs a little hand from us, individually and collectively. Just like sometimes we all need a little hand.

Whatever God you do or don’t believe in, we are the divine hands to bind up the broken and set the captives free. It is only our ears that can be the thousand ears of Kuan Yin Bodhisattva who hears the world’s cries and our hands the thousand hands that rescue and heal.

There will never be a utopia where all our problems are solved. But let us covenant together to be that life support, those life giving roots and trunks that keep all of us and all our hopes alive. Let us solemnly swear to be constant reminders and steadfast support to all our friends and neighbors to feel, as Jesse Jackson put it so eloquently many years ago:

“Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high; stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don't you surrender! Keep Hope Alive!”

Let a bond bind us to all creation, and truly leave no soul behind. And though we will split no animals in half and walk between them, and won’t receive any great vision of the stars , let us pray for the strength to reassure one another, and each soul that struggles, that as numerous as the stars, we are here, loving and caring to see one another through the long cold night.

And just maybe, then, we will be able to sleep through the night, or know right away whose shoulder we can cry on. Or how to talk to our AA sponsor when the battery in our phone is dead. Or who can help when the landlord needs the rent and the baby needs medicine. Or even what to do when things are going all right but you can’t figure out why you feel so alone.

And if our commitment to justice and to one another is to be more than hollow words, than we have some work to do. Hard work, scary work even, but rich generative work, like getting are hands dirty tilling soil to make the spiritual vacant lots of American life into gardens of flowers for beauty and food for sustenance.

Kedves testvéreim, my dear sweet siblings, Amen.

Comfort the afflicted? Afflict the comfortable?

2007-03-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

When I think pastorally, I feel some sympathy for the concerns people have about UU church life being too much about politics.

But other times, I ask myself, what is the proper response of a faith community or a denomination at a time when our country is practicing torture, extraordinary rendition and what would be considered war crimes if performed by any other government on earth?

I'll admit that I am a pretty serious activist and don't need to hear about these issues from my church. And I'll admit that I've had enough going on in my life that I need pastoral care as much as anyone. And my sermon didn't mention any of these political issues this last Sunday.

But what is the purpose of our religious life together? To feel better? To keep us entertained? To feel smarter than people who go to "regular" churches?

How can our worship together serve its prophetic function without everyone complaining about politics? I've come to believe that anything that involves people and power is politics and there is no way around it. I'd rather plead guilty to being political in church than forget that silence is the voice of complicity and that the prophetic voice is just as important as the pastoral.

Happy Birthday to You,,,

2007-01-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from the Letter from A Birmingham Jail:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "An Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this 'hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to 6e solid rock of human dignity.

Mikulas Bacsi comes to town

2006-12-18T05:57:00.000-08:00

After years of being strictly agnostic on the Santa question (we would
feign ignorance but the grandparents could do whatever they want), our
family is in Transylvania this holiday season.

Here, on December 6th children clean their boots and leave them
outside and Mikulas Bacsi (Uncle Nicholas) comes and leaves goodies
and gifts. As the visiting Americans, every effort was made to make
sure an adequate Mikulas Bacsi would come to our house. It is Saint
Nicholas day and the tradition lives on in the Unitarian villages
(which were Catholic a few centuries ago) even if the Catholic saint
becomes Uncle Mikulas.

Our little ones were quite excited. I got the phone call from the
minister to get ready and made the bag exchange to get the gifts to
them before the kids came out to see Mikulas Bacsi.

It was quite adorable and charming. Chocolate is quite the major gift
here and we have had to take a real "don't ask, don't tell, don't
pursue" approach to our kids getting sugar and milk products.

Christmas will be 4 days here. We will have regular church and
communion on Sunday monring, Christmas Eve service on Sunday evening,
and then worship on the 25th, 26th and 27th. Children will perform at
the school on the Friday before and at the Church on Christmas eve
(Religious Education is taught by the minister at the local public
school here). We are quite looking forward to it.

After that, we return to the states after 6 months and celebrate the
holidays with family and friends.

Transylvanian Unitarian Liturgy

2006-12-18T03:35:00.000-08:00

Transylvanian Unitarian Liturgy

One of my initial goals for my work in Transylvania was to learn about Transylvanian Unitarian liturgy. Practically, of course, it is very important to know what to do when. The Transylvanian church now has a standard order of service. In the recent past, each congregation had its own standard order of service. Of course before the service even starts there are certain rituals to be observed.
First there are the bells. In our village, the bells ring three times before the service, first at 10am, then 10:30 and finally at 11:00. I try to head to church at the first bell, though most ministers actually live in a parish house and don’t leave their house until the third bell. When I am not in the pulpit on any given Sunday I really enjoy leaving closer to the third bell, when I can see the people of the village walking to church.
Because our village is almost entirely Unitarian it is very pleasant to walk the length of the village with all of the people who will attend church. On Sunday (and on most other days) the typical greeting is “Isten áldj,” or “God bless you.” This is a standard parting and greeting among Unitarians no matter how devout. Once when I was walking down the street I saw an older woman looking out her window. I could have said “Csokolom” or “Jo napot kivanok” (“I kiss your hand” or “Good Day”) but instead I said ““Isten áldj.” Her immediate reaction was “Nem, katolikus.” I apparently had found the only Catholic in the village, so I apologized and went on my way.
At the minister’s house we have coffee and discuss the bible text and sermon theme for the day. If I am in the pulpit we also discuss any words that might be difficult to translate. Once at a special service in another village I was there for a loaf of bread to be cut into pieces for communion. The chalice and special linens also needed to be prepared for this. I watched the minister’s wife work with the silver and linen and the minister’s son help keep track of how many pieces of bread had been cut. On a normal occasion things are a little more relaxed. Often the minister will socialize with the lay leadership or the elders of the church, as well.
When the third bell strikes, the parish house is locked and we head to the office for the donning of a preaching robe. Transylvanian robes have no sleeves. The robe rests on your shoulders and you take a string under each arm and tie them in a bow behind your back. Some robes also have a clasp in the front near the neck. After the preacher is wearing a robe, we leave the office and lock the door. Whoever is in the pulpit that day leads the way. Often we stop and wait for people to arrive or make their way into the church. Usually while the third bell is still ringing we wait for people to enter ahead of us as we walk down the path to the church door. Even in the city I have seen the minister wait on the sidewalk outside while latecomers enter the church.
When the minister enters, the members of the congregation stand up. Whoever is in the pulpit that Sunday enters first and opens the door to the minister’s pew. Whichever one of us is not in the pulpit then enters the minister’s pew. Both of us stand along with the congregation for the opening hymn. At the conclusion of the first hymn, the minister leads the congregation in sitting down, usually by laying hands on the closed hymnal or bible before taking a seat in the minister’s pew.
The minister and the congregation all sit and sing the second hymn. At the conclusion of the second hymn, the minister goes upstairs to the pulpit. The congregation stands when the minister gets to the pulpit.
The minister starts with a prayer for the congregation. It usually lasts 3-5 minutes and is intended to reflect the concerns of the congregation that week. It is important to note that prayers and sermons are not typically read in Transylvania. The prayer is intended to be extemporaneous and unique to that time and congregation. The minister’s prayer is followed by the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13 or “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy will be done, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this our daily bread. Forgive us in our debts as we forgive our debtors. Deliver us not into times of trial but rescue us from the evil one. Amen) In some congregations the members recite the Lord’s Prayer with the minister, though I have mostly seen just the minister speaking both prayers. Both prayers are closed with an Amen.
The Lord’s Prayer is followed by the middle hymn. The congregation remains standing through both prayers, the middle hymn and the reading of the bible text. The text from the bible is identified and read allowed. The minister closes the reading with an Amen, closes the bible, lays hands on the bible, and with a nod the congregation sits down for the sermon.
Sermons are normally about 20 minutes long, just as in the United States. Liturgically, they are quite different, as the ministers use no printed text and preach from a pulpit above the heads of the congregation. The pulpits are typically ornate woodwork and are decorated with fine Transylvanian lace. (A family member’s initial reaction to a picture of me in the pulpit was, “I thought Unitarian church services were usually very simple?”) Ministers preach in a loud resounding voice. It would be easy to mistake their preaching for some sort of fire and brimstone moralizing because of their energy. The acoustics are amazing. It is a powerful feeling even when I do not understand the language being spoken. I have only seen one church (one of the largest in the old Transylvanian capital of Kolozsvar) that felt the need for amplification.
The sermon is followed by a silent prayer. The short silent prayer is relatively new to Transylvanian liturgy and it has received varying enthusiasm in different churches. The silent prayer is followed by a benediction.
The benediction is much like that in North America. I always try to ask God to help us live out that week’s teaching to better love god and serve our neighbors. In most congregations, ministers hold out the palms of their hands as they ask God to bless the life of the congregation. There is some controversy around this in places, because it should be clear that any blessings come from God and not from the minister. At the end of the benediction, the minister leaves the pulpit and returns to the minister’s pew. While standing at the Lord’s Table (where communion is given and baptisms performed) the minister makes announcements to the congregation. Typically as a visitor, I am introduced to the congregation during this time and the congregation is invited to ask any questions. After this period of announcements, and occasional discussions of church business (particularly during the summer when meetings are less frequent) the closing hymn is played.
At this, the minister goes out the door of the church. Whoever was in the pulpit is first to leave the building and stands immediately outside the door. The minister’s family then follows, leaving first from the front pew. After this, the members of the congregation file past the minister (and family) shaking hands and sharing a thank you or blessing as they look into each other’s eyes. Along the path of the church, the members of the church form a receiving line and greet each other. In the city, people crowd onto the sidewalk just outside the church and along the front of the church building (the better part of a block in Kolozsvar). Typically the minister offers a few words to this outside gathering and then a farewell. At this, we go through the church gate and to the office at the parish house. This is when the preaching robe is removed, and the treasurer counts the offering. A receipt is made and a record made in the church register of attendance, money received, the bible text and sermon theme of each week. At this point there is often socializing with the lay leadership of the church or some of the members. In our village a choir practice sometimes happens at this time.

Transylvanian Opening Prayer

2006-12-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

One of the first questions I had after attending church regularly in Transylvania and starting to preach in Transylvanian churches was about the structure of the prayer. The opening prayer is at least five minutes long and a significant part of the overall service.
I found out that there is a model structure for each Sunday’s prayer that is followed by ministers here:

Megszolitas- invocation
Dicsoites- glorification
Halaadas- thanksgiving
Bunbanat- penetance
Kérés- request
Befejezés- End

In the weeks leading up to the American Thanksgiving holiday, I preached a sermon on Francis David to commemorate his death anniversary (November 15th). Often when I am in the pulpit here, I have the local minister give the prayer and benediction because they are intended to reflect local issues specific to the congregation. For this particular service I chose to offer a prayer of my own attempting to follow the structure used by ministers here:

We give thanks for life and all its blessings. And today especially we give thanks for great teachers we have received including your greatest teacher Jesus and our great Unitarian teacher Francis David. We are full of gratitude for the teachings we have received and our ability to learn and make the most of our reason. We are grateful for Francis David who started this church, and for all those known and unknown who have struggled with your help guided by your great teachers to keep this faith alive and free.

Sadly we must acknowledge that sometimes we do not live up to our teaching. We allow ourselves to be divided against our beloved brothers and sisters because of old slights or petty differences. We must repent of the selfish ways of the world and set ourselves back on the right course to love our neighbors as ourselves and better serve that force that gives life to all. We must love all life with the love of that which created all. We must avert our eyes from all the distractions that life has to offer us and stay focused on our true divine purpose.

Jó istenunk look over all our brothers and sisters. Keep us on the right path and keep us from harm. May all who are cold have heat, may all who hunger have food. Let peace prevail on earth, especially as we enter this holiday season. Fill our hearts with your peace, today and everyday. Help us love one another and learn better from the great teachers you have offered us.

Isten lélek, fill our hearts during this time of worship as in all times. Help us appreciate all that is holy and right. Let our eyes be your eyes and our hands your hands to serve you as we become servants of your loving spirit. Amen.

Review: Transylvanian Order of Service

2006-12-17T03:28:00.000-08:00

Transylvanian Order of Service: A Review

1. First Hymn
2. Hymn
3. Prayer
4. Lords prayer (Our Father)
5. Middle Hymn
6. Bible Text
7. Sermon
8. Silent mediation (Introduced by John 4:24)
9. Closing Prayer
10. Announcements
11. Benediction

Reflections on the sense of place and its power

2006-10-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

There is power in the knowledge of a place. The French have created a new word for this “terroir” which combines the word for land with the word for knowledge and ability. While I may have guessed at the reality of this, I don’t think I truly understood it until I came here to the Homorod Valley of Transylvania.
One could walk the length of both the big and little Homorod Valleys in a couple long days. The distance between villages is very small. But in each village, you will find slightly different ways of life and slightly different ways of working the land and raising animals.
This is not from some sense of novelty or innovation. Nor is it the result of radically different geography. One village may have access to more wood and trees while another may have easier access to stones. But in general, the villages of both valleys are basically similar in geology and climate.
The residents of each village have built up over generations an intimate knowledge of their microclimate and locale. Each tiny difference is probably unnoticeable to the outsider. Whether it be small variations in how hay is stacked, when or where difference crops are planted, or how animals are kept and pastured. It is even reflected in the contemporary use of cement, tractors and combines. One can see slight but systematic variations in the selection of construction materials and tractor attachments.
On my very first day in Transylvania I was asked about why I had come here and what I would do when I returned to America. One older man suggested that I could tell everyone how bad it was here. I must say that I have not seen anything so bad in my time here.
In planning to travel to Transylvania, I prepared my self for the worst possible conditions. I did not know what my house would be like. I did not how I would eat. I did not know if people would be hungry or dirty or begging in the streets.
In the villages I have seen nothing like this. People are poorer here than in America. But rural poverty here is similar to rural poverty at home. Houses are heated, food is cooked and water is warmed by burning wood. Most houses have electricity and most houses I have visited have a washing machine for laundry. While many things are stored in cellars for winter, every house I have visited has a refrigerator.
People here are very concerned about my well-being. They always want to know how I am doing here and if I am able to eat. My strict vegetarian diet is a mystery to most people, but everyone wants to be sure that I am eating well. The strange thing is that vegetarian soup broth and some soy products are cheaper and more readily available in even small markets here than at the Safeway in my hometown.
In my hometown there was recently a small conference on economic localization which had participants from 7 states and several countries. The point of this conference was to look at how local economies could survive based on sustainable agricultural and supplies available within a 100 mile radius. The thinking behind this is that there will eventual be a collapse of the economy based on cheap oil as oil becomes less and less available in the world. I try to tell the farmers of the Homorod Valley that what they have practiced for hundreds of years, people I know are paying to learn. And it all comes down to an intimate knowledge of a place and its particularities.
Now I can talk at length about the problems of provincialism and the fatalism that it can create. I have seen it myself teaching both the economically isolated urban poor and the geographically isolated rural poor. But I also know with a religious faith that the treasure of human diversity and the keys to human survival were born in the intimate knowledge of and deep rooted connection to place.
My home in California is in the great redwood trees. They are the tallest living things on earth. They grow almost 100 meters tall. But the paradox is that they have shallow roots. Rather than sinking roots deeper and deeper into the earth to support their massive weight, their roots spread laterally, where they intertwine with the roots of other trees. Their very survival depends on the survival of the other trees, and on that of the other plants, like fern, sorrel, and wild iris, that have adapted to their particular ecosystem. Their survival depends on the health of their community and place. And it is thus with humans as well. Our survival depends on our community and environment. And for this knowledge I owe a great debt of gratitude to the people of the Homorod Valley, where I live days shaped by the daily trip of the cows to the pasture and back. Where even the smallest details of life are shaped by mysteries of working the land and preparing for winter in ways I am only beginning to understand.
I think some Unitarian Universalists probably suppose that we in North America have a lot to teach other religions, even our brothers and sisters in Transylvania about earth based spirituality. But the truth is, that people like me (and most modern UUs) who are generations removed from living off the land, may have a millennium of learning to catch up on. For we are small and the earth is big. And we can only live in one place at a time. And similarly, we can only observe the rhythm of life and its cycles in one place at one time. And the lives of our brothers and sisters in the Homorod Valley are holy volumes of this knowledge, that even if we were to cross divides of language and distance, we would still face a great difficulty in truly comprehending. It is my fervent hope that in my time here I can develop even the smallest understanding of what it means to live according to and in the creation of this knowledge.

Where have all the partners gone?

2006-10-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I have posted anything. My connectivity is problematic here in the village.

I recently got to visit with some North Americans visiting and doing some volunteer work at the partner church here in Transylvania.

One thing that I am hearing too often is about congregations who may have not heard from their American partner churches in a long while. Maybe the partner church work was the turf of some eccentric who has since left or maybe it was a pet project of a previous minister.

I would ask any UU readers who are not sure if their church has a partner church to check the list of partners and see if your church may have a dormant partnership. Also there are churches in India and the Philippines looking for partners.

During the summer I saw lots of people visiting their partner churches and have seen some of the projects made possible by partner churches. But really I hear that people want to know that you know they exist and are still here living their lives and living out their faith and traditions. Transylvania is not the Unitarian version of the Amish country or Colonial Williamsburg. There are real people here living real lives. Most people living in villages never travel outside of the local area and it means a lot to hear from people around the world.

So please, check and see if your congregation has a current partnership. And if it does, see if you can make sure there is communication more than once or twice a year. Send pictures of your people and your church. See if you can find out how many kids are in confirmation this year or how many baptisms there have been. Try to share information about the highlights of your church year and get information about the major Transylvanian events (especially Easter, Pentecost, Thanksgiving and Christmas). It will matter to someone here more than you might think.

Confirmation Sunday

2006-07-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

Been very busy or offline most of the last couple weeks. Two weeks ago I attended confirmation Sunday services at the First Unitarian Church of Kolozsvar.

I got to share a very different liturgical experience yesterday. It was confirmation Sunday at the Unitarian Church of Koloszvar. At first this was the source of some confusion for me because the church was packed with a few hundred people. I heard the bell (which is only a couple hundred feet out my window, and thought it might be too late.

I walked down several flights of stairs. (We are staying in the dorms which are in the attic of the Unitarian high school. The headquarters for the Unitarian Church of Transylvania is in the same building and the church is right next door). I made it to the street just in time to see the minister and the bishop in their robes walking in with the kids who were going to be confirmed. In the foyer there was a large stone that commemorated David Ferenc (Francis David) proclaiming the Diet of Torda.

I walked in the big outer door (which I will admit I was a little afraid to open when I passed it each day on my way to Hungarian class).

A woman tried to explain to me that it was a “templom unitariaus.” I told her “Es unitarius amerikai vajyok” which is bad grammar but I think she got my point. Another woman who seemed to be in a position of authority came out to the foyer where we were standing and said “Tessek” which could mean either “What do you want?” or “That’s it.” She meant the latter as she closed a curtain in front of the door behind us and went through the inner door and back to her pew. She invited the older woman to a seat and helped a couple other latecomers find room around the side of the sanctuary.

I stood for most of the regular service. I managed to get a seat after the regular service had ended and the confirmation ceremony was well under way

I have been thinking a lot lately about what Unitarian Universalism could learn from the confirmation practices of the Unitarian Church of Transylvania. On the one hand, it is easy to see it as just like the confirmation services we might see at Catholic or mainline Protestant churches in the US. In a packed church in Kolozsvar, I got to see a multigenerational service, where grandparents and little sisters and big brothers clearly were remembering their own confirmation or looking forward to their own chance to march in with the minister and take communion in front of the whole community. It is this idea of a multigenerational, family faith that I think would be a true revolution in Unitarian Universalism, at least as I see it on the west coast of the United States.

Almost there

2006-06-24T03:46:00.000-07:00

We are most of the way to Transylvania now. I had to leave so many things behind I sort of panic at the thought of what we are going to need. What might I need to function as an intern and live for six months? I shaved off about half the books I wanted though I am sure I will be begging people to ship other theology books to me. I've now lugged my massive Oxford Study Bible from plane to plane through security checkpoints. I had to take it out on one flight so my bag would fit in the overhead bin.

I'm at a T-Mobile hotspot in a crazy duty free shopping mall at London Heathrow. I feel incapable of even basic grammatical language. Its 11am and my body still thinks it might be 4am like it is in California.

Had a near panic yesterday as our Budapest lodging fell through but we found a nice apartment to stay at through expatriates.com. UU's traveling through Budapest on Partner Church activities or to the ICUU symposium contact me and I can give you the contact for it.

Tonight we sleep in Budapest. In the morning we will take the optimustrans.ro minibus to Kolozsvar. We wanted to take the train but the schedule did not work out and the bus service came highly recommended.

Fathers' Day Sermon

2006-05-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

I was asked to give a Fathers' Day Sermon this year. In reality it would easy to tell a couple funny stories about my dad and a couple sad ones about his death and be done with it.

I work pretty hard with my congregation to talk about the Jewish and Christian traditions and how they can inform Unitarian Universalism. I usually try to bring in at least some of the Revised Common Lectionary readings when I am in the pulpit to help folks be at least familiar with what the other protestant churches in town might be talking about.

But I have to admit, with Fathers' Day I am stumped. I think of Jephthah's daughter, Abraham with the binding of Isaac and of course the father who loved the world so much he gave his only son. I mean I love you all, but nobody is taking my boys.

I feel like I can talk reasonably intelligently about Christology, but when push comes to shove, I can't quite get past that.

I don't really want to be cheesy enough to refer to the Da Vinci code, but how is it more troubling that Jesus could be a father (all the holes in that theory aside) than the notion that a loving or just God would sacrifice his son?

Iron Chef Daddy: Let the battle begin

2006-05-21T18:49:00.000-07:00

I've been greatly enjoying the Iron Chef Daddy action over at Returning. All I can say is Allez cuisine!

Transylvania

2006-05-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

I've been very bad about writing anything here. I've been hit by a very busy school year end and a very busy couple months at work.

On top of this, I have been given the once in a lifetime opportunity to go to Transylvania and spend six months working with a rural minister and participating in the life of his congregation. This parish immersion experience will be my first ministerial internship, though I will be applying for another internship in the US later.

During the week of General Assembly, I will be in an intensive Hungarian language seminar in Kolozsvar. I will then attend the ICUU symposium before I travel to the village of Homorodszentpal.

I believe that there is a lot we can learn from the lives of our brothers and sisters in Transylvania. I am particularly interested in how different liturgies develop in different cultural contexts and in how differently the same Unitarian ideals develop in different contexts. It is my hope that a broader awareness of Transylvanian Unitarianism can help many Unitarian Universalists come to terms with their relationship to their Christian roots such that they might be able to derive some meaning from the Christian tradition without necessarily identifying as Christian or forgetting whatever troubling experiences they may have had with the tradition.

Anyone interested in furthering the work of bringing Transylvanian ministers to study in the US or in how more American UU seminarians could have learning experiences in Transylvania should contact the Balazs Scholars Program at Starr King School For the Ministry.

Thoreau

2006-05-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

LIberal Religion vs. LIberal Politics?

2006-05-03T19:25:00.000-07:00

I appreciate the tone of this post on immigration issues, though I think it raises a key question for me.

There is a line between liberal religion and liberal politics. The post from the UU Congregation of Central Nassau makes a lot of references to the meaning of citizenship and the rights of states. To what extent are states and citizenship the domain of religion or theology? I'll admit that for me the rights of individuals and even their groups may seem grounded in theology but I am not really ready to make the leap to states. I think there is a real reason that the Christian tradition teaches us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's.

I understand how in theory a state may just be an extension of a community of individuals, but in practice I never see states truly functioning this way. When is the religious legitimation of the state or the rights of state actors not idolatry?

I mean this more as a question than as heated rhetoric. My initial answer would be that states are only legitimate from the point of view of theology when they (and to the extent that they are) furthering the blossoming of life in its fullness and helping beings develop (in Channing's terms) their faculties of the soul.

My view is perhaps overly influenced by Foucault's notion that power only really exists in its exercise and therefore the practice of the state is more important than the theory of the state.

Is the belief that liberal states represent agencies of human progress a conflation of liberal politics and liberal religion? I'd very much like to hear someone's argument on grounds that for liberal religion to be embodied it must function in the realm of the possible, with a full understanding of the eschatological reservation, though this is a compromise I am not sure I am ready to make.

May 1st: Our generation's civil rights movement?

2006-05-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

Could I be the only white UU blogger who made it to a protest yesterday? Could this be? I'll admit I went on my lunch hour and found the time and place by reading a Spanish language newspaper.

I spent the last weekend at the Pacific Central District Assembly. For the Sunday worship service, Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker was in the pulpit talking about UU Theology. She made the case that there are some theological options that are off the table for Unitarian Universalists, including views of predestination or other denials of at least partial human agency. She argued that the notion that some people would be eternally rewarded while others would be separated and eternally punished is also not compatible with Unitarian Universalism.

She also made the point (and very nicely quoted me) that there is no way for a Unitarian Universalist theology to consider any human beings illegal.

I know I am something of a panentheist, though I tend to use a humanist vocabulary. There is a spark in all people that I would call divine. And it makes us part of a larger whole. If anything is to be saved, it will be in these bodies, by these people in this world. If there is a balm in Gilead, it will be applied by our hands, and if a promised land that can be is to be built it will be built by these very same hands.

May no borders separate us or denigrate the sanctity of working hands. These hands are all we have to do the work of God and the work of humanity.

Solidarity and conversion

2006-04-19T19:14:00.000-07:00

The desire to diagnose injustice as an intellectual problem as well as the power of action to achieve a new form of justice requires “raised affections,” a vitality taht can break through old forms of behavior and create new patterns of community. But the raising of the affections is a much harder thing to accomplish than even the education of the mind; it is especially difficult among those who think they have found security.
This element of commitment, of change of heart, of decision, so much emphasized in the Gospels, has been neglected by religious liberalism, and that is the prime source of its enfeeblement. We liberals are largely an uncommitted and therefore a self-frustrating people. Our first task, then is to restore to liberalism its own dynamic and its own prophetic genius. We need conversion within ourselves. Only by some such revolution can we be seized by a prophetic power that will enable us to proclaim both the judgment and the love of God. Only by some such conversion can we be possessed by a love that will not let us go.

James Luther Adams’ notion that liberalism and liberals need a conversion experience strikes me as an amazing truth. I struggled with this concept for many years but lacked the language to talk about it. During my radical youth, I have sometimes chided well meaning liberals who had very abstract ideas of justice and very lukewarm commitment to their justice work.
Sometimes I will tell dogmatic atheist activists (UU and other) that if they are really just doing work for others they really are just performing that kind of “Christian charity” that they despise. I have found that no one stays committed for an extended period of time if they understand their work as doing good deeds for others. Usually, their notion of the other is so abstract and so distant that the work loses meaning and dissipates into the problem of “compassion fatigue.”
Other times, when I have really looked at issues of commitment and what it can take to create change and build justice and community, I have talked to people about two kinds of consciousness. The difference between the liberal and the radical can often be delineated by these two kinds of consciousness.
One I call the No consciousness. Liberals with this state of mind will take the radical step of dissent, but will seldom reach beyond their individual comfort zone in terms of risk or in terms of dialogue with others outside their immediate social circle. The quiet check and letter writers (God bless them) are usually in this mode. Often times, those who participate in silent vigils or other entirely symbolic actions also operate from the point of view of the No consciousness. They have taken the very brave (necessary yet not sufficient) step of registering their dissent, but have yet to learn Frederick Douglass’ wise words, “Without struggle there is no progress.”
The other consciousness I refer to as the Hell No consciousness. Where the point of view of the No consciousness might say “I disapprove of this,” from the Hell No consciousness one might say “I disapprove of this and I am obliged to do what I can to prevent this from being done in my name or to reinforce my own unearned privilege.” In this light, silence is indeed the voice of complicity. While a kind of mindless rebelliousness can sometimes look like this Hell No consciousness, when it is sincere it reflects positive progressive towards a broader notion of self that is involved and engaged in the larger community and world. It moves beyond the brave dissent of the mind and into action and the dissent of the body and community.

The Fire Next Time

2006-04-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

This is the crime of which I accuse my countrymen, and for which I and history will never forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives, and do not know it, and do not want to know it.

James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time as quoted by Rebecca Parker in Soul Work.

Clarification

2006-03-31T08:41:00.000-08:00

Paul W. expressed some confusion about my last post. It's not that I don't understand the usage "illegal alien," it's just that where I am from it is a slur that no one should really use, any more than the English equivalent of "mojado." I fully understand the technical and colloquial use of the term. I would suggest that in Channing's terms that calling anyone an "illegal alien" is contrary to understanding the likeness of God in them. Furthermore, I would suggest that the theological calling of our tradition compells us to help all develop their faculties of the soul regardless of which side of which line they were born on.

I grew up in San Marcos, California. Thats 49 miles from the border. People would often visit (usually for underage drinking or cheap pharmaceuticals) Baja California without any thought to Alta California.

My first teaching work was 12 miles from the border. Some were born on one side, some were born on the other. The whole thing seems so much more arbitrary when you live there.

And the machinery of injustice is so much more real, when you have to drive by security checkpoints to get to Riverside or to visit family further north along Interstate 5. From the age of 6 on, visiting my grandparents or anyone else in my extended family meant having men in uniform with guns looking into our car to see our skin color. When we played youth soccer, one of the highlights of the year was the American Youth Soccer Organization day at Disneyland. La Migra would always look at us differently if a teammate named Sanchez or Lopez was going with us to Orange County.

Wake now compassion, give heed to the cry, voices of suffering fill the wide sky; take as your neighbor both stranger and friend, praying and striving their hardship to end.

Todos Somos Illegales

2006-03-30T17:46:00.000-08:00

It is not clear to me how one could espouse the values of Unitarian Universalism and still consider any person illegal or alien. I want to thank the Latino/a, Chicano/a and Mexicano/a youth in my community that came out to take a stand earlier this week.

Tommorrow is the birthday of Cesar Chavez. His "The Organizer's Tale" is a favorite text of mine on organizing. I have been inspired by Father Victor Salandini (The tortilla priest) who worked with Chavez and the UFW. In my left wing student journalist days I got to meet Cesar Chavez, Fr. Salandini and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers. My mouth still remembers the day that I ate grapes for the first time after the boycott ended.

I've had the pleasure over the year of teaching immigrant children from Asia, Africa and Latin America. I can still vividly remember the difference between Spanish speaking kids who went to school in California and were illiterate in two languages compared to my kids who went to elementary school in Mexico. For every time I had a upper middle class white parent try to make excuses or cut corners for their kid, I can tell you about the dedication of the parents (with questionable immigration status) who came here to give their kids an education.

Colbert Report

2006-02-27T23:42:00.000-08:00

Did anyone Tivo Monday's Colbert Report on Comedy Central? There was an extended UU joke.

Colbert gets exasperated at a stage hand's explanation of UUism and asks "So do you celebrate Christmas or Hanukah?" and the stage hand answers, "Sure."

James Luther Adams

2006-02-21T19:19:00.000-08:00

From Our Enemy: Angelism (1944)

I would suppose that most of us would say that all of these propositions about human beings are perfectly obvious. We all know that we live in a community and that we have bodies as well as minds. We know that what we learn is learned from experience in the body and in the world of things. We know that though our children are at times assigned by the poets the role of little angels coming from heave, which is their home, trailing clouds of glory, still their bodies need care, their minds need to be developed. We try to show them how to use their eyes, their tongues, their ears, their hands. We do not treat them as though they were pure spirits. We sometimes are even tempted to agree with the Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards, who called them "little vipers."

Indeed, through most of our lives we act on the principle that we are a little lower than the angels. We remember that we are dust, that our physical hunger must be satisfied, and that we must maintain a social order or perish. To some people, however, these concerns seem to be worldly matters. Hence they speak of a spiritual life that is only beyond the material order. Nevertheless, even our so called spiritual life depends on our bodies and requires the resources of the material order. One of the most spiritual things we know is music, but music is heard through the ears, and it requires wood and steel and horsehair and catgut and finger technique. Bach is not simply a synonym for heavenly and angelic sound.

Nevertheless, when we turn to consider our life in society, we find many people who seemingly forget that we are a little lower than the angels. Religion is thought of as being something wholly spiritual and individual, as lifting us to higher levels of apprehension and enjoyment than are possible in the world of things and rites and ceremonies. Sometimes this yearning for spirituality resorts to such extravagance as to claim that religion is something purely inward, that it needs no outward forms or social institutions. Indeed, we are frequently told that outward form only kills religion, that outward forms are mere trappings, that religion is only what we do with our solitariness.

Here again, as well as with music or poetry or architecture, religion must be seen, touched, heard, in order to be expressed or identified. A religion that has nothing to do with the community, that has nothing to do with the body, with the life of the senses, with outward forms of expression, does not exist except in the imagination. Religion must express itself through communal forms, through books, music, the spoken word, spoken prayers, as well as through buildings and sacrificial action. To claim to be religious and also not to be interested in these things is like saying that one is interested in poetry but in no specific poems; it is like saying that one is interested in government but not in legislatures and ballot boxes. There is no such thing as poetry apart from poems; and there is no such thing as government apart from constitutions or courts or police.

The relgioin that is purely spiritual is purely non-existent. We often hear it said that the greatest enemy of religion is materialism. This is by no means true. The greatest enemy of religion is sham spirituality, pure spirituality. It is angelism, an indifference to the needs of the body and especially of the body politic. Indeed, it was precisely the false spirituality of the Russian church which bred the needed materialism of the revolutionists. The German churches tried to be purely spiritual; they got fascism as their reward. One is indeed reminds of Gibbon's dictum that the virtues of the clergy are much more dangerous than their vices. Religion must be realized in particular acts in order to insure its continuing life. With reason, T.S. Eliot has said, "The spirit killeth, the letter giveth life." In short, angelism can kill religion.

I am not especially concerned her to derive a defense of institutional religion from the medieval angelology. The general principles implicit in the human condition have a far reaching application to the whole of our life. The good life must be realized in particular acts in order to exist at all. The angel is already perfect, being only commanded to maintain appropriate status to avoid falling into the pit; in short, to avoid becoming, like Lucifer, a fallen angel.

The point is that human beings must express themselves through the institutions of the community. There is no such thing as a good person as such. He or she will be good only as a good husband or wife, a good health professional, a good lawyer, or legislator, a good citizen. Anyone whose goodness does not take form in the institutions of family, school, church and state is a person is good for nothing. Human virtue and happiness require a local, a communal habitation. We are considerably lower than the angels.

Love and Understanding (What's so funny 'bout peace...)

2006-02-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

Love and Understanding (from Ken Patton)

What more have we to give to one another than love and understanding?

We will gather a store of love for our children, and marry love to wisdom, that the needs and thoughts of the child may be known to us.

We will make a world for the gladness of children, bringing to them the conviction of their worth and beauty which their beings crave.

We will gather a store of love for youth, troubled in the rising turbulence of life, to guide them into maturity with less of loneliness and torture.

We will fin useful tasks for their hands, that they may learn to create with clean joy.

We will gather a store of love for parents, for if the homes of the land are stark and brutal, than we are indeed poor.

Our chief labor is the building of homes, an dour knowledge will be increased to set the seasons of childhood and parenthood in the ways of goodness.

We will gather a store for the aged, whose days have been stung with our follies and hurts. Our land will be a large home for the elders.

Their strength shall be restored in the vigor of their grandchildren.

Their loneliness shall be forestalled in the companionship of their children, who in their own parenthood have met their fathers and mothers coming toward them across the years.

We will turn our whole persons to the use of love and understanding, for the one without the other is a fumbling hand, and ignorant mercy is a plague of death.

Wisdom must be made the ready implement of love, and love the guide and repairer of knowledge.

Post Chrisitanity? Post Progress Narrative?

2006-02-13T19:21:00.000-08:00

In general, I believe that Unitarian Universalism (though in particular I am thinking of pre-consolidation Unitarianism) constructed a post-christian identity based on Humanist Manifesto style supersessionism and the progress narrative. For a variety of reasons, the progress narrative does not really work any more. I don't think anyone has really come up with anything else to fill the vacuum left in its wake.

Friends that can make you feel like a slacker

2006-02-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

I was in Berkeley today for class at Starr King School for the Ministry. Walking from the BART station I was reminded of one of my first trips to Berkeley.

It's hard to believe that it was 15 years ago. Several carloads of us had driven up from San Diego to go to a massive peace rally in San Francisco. We had decided to meet up in Berkeley and take the BART train under the bay to San Francisco. This was quite a scene. I remember being on a train with the East Bay Tow Truck Drivers for Peace, Prostitutes for Peace, Balkan Musicians for Peace, and the Bike-Sexuals for Peace.

The march and rally seemed so large coming from the small progressive community in San Diego. It took all day for all the contingents meeting on side streets to work their way down Market Street from the Ferry Building to Civic Center Plaza.

At the end of the day, we piled back on the train to go back across the bay. We had stayed up all night driving up from San Diego and we're all exhausted. A couple friends and I fell asleep and I remember worrying about not waking up in time for our stop.

I had to laugh getting off the train today and thinking about the two women that were with me on that train. One is an attorney and field director for Equality California. The other is the Director of WTO Programs for Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

I'm so impressed and I always love to hear about what they are up to next.

Ceremonial garments

2006-02-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

My three and a half year old boy figured out that he really only sees me in a tie when I give a sermon at church.

The other morning in his pajamas (the all in one with feet kind) he found the little clip on tie that goes with his "big boy clothes" that he thinks of as a school uniform to match the one worn by his sister.

He clipped the blue plaid tie onto his yellow pajamas and announced that he was the minister. He didn't do any readings or lead any hymns but he was very proud of himself.

Is it possible when we blog to the public as avowed Unitarian Universalists we take on a role beyond our normal identities and self interests?

Vocabulary of reverence and solidarity?

2006-02-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

I do and I must reverence human nature. Neither the sneers of a worldly skepticism, nor the gorans of a gloomy theology, disturb my faith in its godlike powers and tendencies. I know how it is despised, how it has been oppressed, how civil and religious establishments have for ages conspired to crush it. I know its history. I shut my eyes on one of its weaknesses and crimes. I understand the proffs, by which despotism demonstrates, that man is a wild beast, in want of a master, and only safe in chains. But, injured, trampled on, and scorned as our nature is, I still turn to it with intesnse sympathy and strong hope. The signatures of its origin and its end are impressed too deeply to be ever wholly effaced. I bless it for itskind affections, for its strong and tender love. I honor it for its struggles against oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight of so many chains and prejudices, for its achievements in science and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are marks of a divine origin and the pledges of a celestial inheritance; and I thank God that my own lot is bound up with that of the human race.

William Ellery Channing, "Likeness to God: Discourse at the ordination of the Rev. F.A. Farley," Providence, Rhode Island, 1828.

Beneath the surface glitter of American culture there is a deep inner core, which, I have argued, is ultimately religious: the sacredness of the conscience of every single individual. Nothing I have said tonight takes away from the enormous power for good of that idea. It is responsible for the best in our culture. But, by the very weakness of any idea of human solidarity associated with it in a culture dominated by the dissenting Protestant tradition, it opens the door to the worst in our culture. It easily leads to the idea that humans are nothing but self-interest maximizers, and devil take the hindmost. It is that version that we see all around us. I don't think we can challenge that version until we come to see that the sacredness of the individual depends ultimately on our solidarity with all being, not on the vicissitudes of our private selves. You face in your very denomination the most basic conundrum of American life. If you can solve it you may help lead the larger society out of the wilderness into wich it has wandered.

Robert Bellah, UUA General Assembly, Rochester, New York, 1998. (as quoted in Rev. Dr. Gordon B. McKeeman's 2004 Starr King President's Lecture at UUA GA 2004 in Long Beach, California.)

Eschatological Reservations

2006-02-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

Sharon Welch

The memories of the middle class often hinder the move from critique to action. Shaped by memories of conquest in the name of the common good (settling the West, the growth of technology, economic affluence, the military power of the U. S. during and after World War II), many middle-class people are paralyzed when we see that our work against the dangerous costs of this legacy of conquest does not have the same amount of immediate success. Given this disparity, the lack of control and precision in work for justice seems almost irresponsible. If control is the norm, then responsible action for justice is a contradiction in terms. American culture relegates such concerns to the young and the terminally idealistic. Responsibility is equated with action that is more likely to succeed, thus identifying responsibility with action that is by definition supportive of the status quo.
...
Memories of military and economic victories serve as a barrier to work for liberation. Any strategy may be criticized as woefully inadequate when it cannot ensure long-lasting, thorough change. The members of a study group at Harvard, for example, argued against disarmament because of its failure to provide guaranteed results:

Disarmament would not necessarily ensure a state's position in the international contest between states. It would not necessarily ensure a state's security. Nor would disarmament guarantee that the funds saved from weapons would necessarily be devoted to raising the living standards of poor peoples.

According to these strategists, it is not enough for an act, such as disarmament to be an ingredient in a larger process - i.e., releasing money that could be spent in other ways.
...
The search for guarantees, and for single solutions, is often paralyzing. Taking as the norm of power the ability of the political and economic establishment to meet its goals, middle-class activists often become trapped in cultured despair. They are well aware of the costs of systems of injustice, but find it impossible to act against them because no definitive solutions are in sight. The memories of the middle class are all too often enervating and deceptive: deceptive in their accounts of cultural victory without victims, enervating in their emphasis on the failure of "utopian ideals."
...

While a denial of the fragility of our political strategies and structures is undoubtedly dangerous, the evasion of the resiliency of our work for justice is equally devastating. Sole attention to the failures in history can blind us to the partial successes; the realization that more is yet to be done masks the fact that some good has been obtained.

Theologians have examined the relationship between continued human fault and the power of divine presence in terms of the concept of eschatology and the eschatological reservation. (13) The eschatological reservation is the reminder that all of our good works are partial. Though inspired and guided by God, they cannot be directly identified as the work of God, nor identified as the kingdom of God.
...
A search for only absolute victory leads to "faith and hope in something metahistorical and a disgusted turning away from real-life history."

I don't have time to really give this the time it deserves today. But I think Welch nails in when she talks about what hinders the move from critique to action. Too often, we like to critique but keep our hands clean. It reminds me a lot of a Rosemary Bray McNatt article in the UU World:

I have come to the painful realization that we sometimes conflate our dreams of the Beloved Community with the difficult and grueling work that might lead to its achievement. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that “one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified as a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.” It isn’t hard to notice that power without love surrounds us in this country today. But think too of the extent to which we live our lives amid expressions of love without political power. Think of the countless acts of mercy with which each of us may have aligned ourselves: We work with Habitat for Humanity, we volunteer at shelters and mentor children, we testify before hostile legislators unwilling to extend human rights to the whole human family; we lobby for an end to punitive drug laws that target people of color; we do a thousand things in an effort to make our love visible. And yet, if we had power, real political power, would not the hungry already be fed, those children already joyful? Would not Habitat be out of business and our legislators obsessed with supporting human dignity rather than denying it? Would not captives of every variety already be freed? If we had real power, is it not possible that our work would already be done?

King continues to challenge us: “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Life imitates art?

2006-02-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

My 3 year old has started at a new preschool and is having some trouble with adjusting to a bigger school. He really likes the school and the teacher but is a little shy about all the kids he does not know. He's been acting clingy when I drop him off.

Today he was a little bit less hesitant but he ran back to me as I was heading out the door. I walked him back to his teacher and sang "Go Now In Peace" and he really liked it. Both of our little ones love to scream out "You may go" when we get to the end of the song.

It's nice to think that church ritual and routine is a big enough part of his life that it is comforting to him. It has been said that no one would ever ask to have the principles and purposes read to them on their death bed. But I know I have soothed my kids with the hymns that they know. (Spirit of Life; Come, Come Whoever You Are; Go Now In Peace; and We'll Build A Land (which they think of as the sisters and brothers song)).

Repel Less Newcomers

2006-01-31T18:40:00.000-08:00

Are visitors to Unitarian Universalist blogs visitors to Unitarian Universalism? I know that some folks who know me but don't know Unitarian Universalism are now seeing what they can find out about it from our blogs.

When I asked people what they like about Unitarian Universalism or more precisely what their congregations do right I'm mostly interested in best practices and in hearing people's enthusiasm for their churches and Unitarian Universalism. I really was not commenting on the whole Fix Unitarian Universlism discussion going on in the UU Blogosphere. In general, I think that discussion has been better in tone than many of us often get. If I were to take the time to refer to Robert Bellah and how that conversation reflected the tendency of liberals to be more focused on questions of process than substantive justice. I'm personally much more concerned about people of color feeling that there is no future for them in the UU ministry or the stories I hear from people who feel like their congregation has no place for them since they have been laid off and can't make their pledge than I am about the UUA Washington Office or anything else that goes on at 25 Beacon.

Mostly I have been thinking of a different online Unitarian Universalist that I am a part of and my feeling that our interactions there are roughly equivalent to the foyer or social hall of a congregation. I took the line from Ghostbusters II "Egon... you're scaring the straights..." because I could see newcomers starting to flee from the way people were acting.

I recognize the inherent dilemna. On the one hand, the web is a very handy way for us to have intra-UU conversations with all of our buzzwords and bickering over minute details of process. But for many, our blogs will be the first impression people get of Unitarian Universalism.

For these people I say again, Unitarian Universalists are the sons and daughters of those that struggled for abolition, public education, suffrage, human treatment for the mentally ill, civil rights and peace. We are also the heirs of a faith based on reason, freedom and love. There is room for you and you are welcome. Please contact any one of us or your local congregation if you have any questions. We tend to be a little sheepish about sounding evangelical, but really we love to talk about Unitarian Universalism even if we might wait for you to ask us first.

New Sojourners in my mailbox

2006-01-30T19:38:00.000-08:00

"The church is only the church when it exists for others."

The February 2006 issue of Sojourners arrived in the mail today (along with a "Professional Clergy Dept." solicitation from The Christian Century).

I found at least two must read articles for me in this issue. First is a piece commemorating the 100th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who led the Confessing Church against the Nazis in Germany.

"The church is only the church when it exists for others." When the Confessing Church did not intervene for Jews beyond its own membership, for gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis, for the euthanized, Roma ("gypsies") and imprisoned socialists and communists, in that moment it forfeited being a church.
In a word, the "most understanding people" did not take a stand because of their deep-seated Protestant acceptance of state authority in the traditional church-state alliance. As Bonhoeffer wrote Sutz in another letter, "An end must also finally be put to the theologically founded reservation regarding the action of the state- all of it is only fear. 'Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves' (Proverbs 31:8)-who in the church still knows that this is the minimum commandment of the Bible in such times?"

While our sources and reasoning may differ somewhat, isn't this still a key demand of Unitarian Universalism? People can wail all they want about politics from the pulpit, but I challenge anyone to find a Unitarian Universalism absent this committment that is still meaningful or worthy of our inheritance of two proud traditions. We are the sons and daughters of people who fought for public education, abolition, suffrage, civil rights, human rights and peace. This is no time for us to hide our light in a bushel or bury our talents in the ground.

"Egon... You''re scaring the straights."

2006-01-29T19:21:00.000-08:00

There are weeks that I miss church (let's say one of the kids is sick or I am out of town) and I stil end up able to read blogs. I live a pretty healthy distance from my nearest congregation and consider myself a member of both my nearest congregation and the Church of the Larger Fellowship. Even when I can't make it to church in person I still really like to participate in the Sunday sharing of joys and concerns with CLF.

Anyhow, when I miss church and read UU blogs all too often I get the impression that there is so little love for Unitarian Universalism among my co-religionists. Fortunately there seem to always be a few cheery first year seminarians, a couple energized lay leaders, and a few religious professionals who manage to keep it positive and remind me that what I keep reading about online is the same faith that I see in my church.

My congregation is tiny, but energetic and growing. It's vibrant and theologically diverse, if mostly "humanist' in orientation. A big Sunday might be 35 adults and 15 kids. But last year it might have been 20 adults and 4 kids.

After the service today I was asked about UU history and how we got from the Divinity School Address to where we are today and how Transylvanian Unitarians might see things differently. This is fairly typical.

Last year I gave up snark for lent. It's a litle early this year, but in the spirit of Peter Morales' Lay Leader Drivetime Essay "Repel Fewer Newcomers" I'd really like to see your suggestions for what is right about Unitarian Universalism. Please let me know what your congregation does really well or what you like about Unitarian Universalism.

Reflections on another industrial disaster

2006-01-19T05:59:00.000-08:00

One day my travels brought me through the town of Mt. Olive, Illinois. Mt. Olive, Illinois is the home of the the Union Miners Cemetry and the Mother Jones Memorial. I did not know this at the time. Along the side of the highway, a spray painted piece of plywood said “Mother Jones Memorial Exit Mt. Olive.” I managed to convince my companions that yes we absolutely did need to stop.

The Union Miners Cemtery is a staggering experience, a library of the dead from mining explosions and the massacres of strikers. And yet people want to act surprised whenever more miners are killed.

There are those who look down their nose at those ancients who believed that some form of human sacrifice was required to make the universe run, but who are oblivious to the fact that we live off the fat of an industrial system that requires the death of a number of workers every year. In the US alone their are 70,000 deaths from work related illnesses and injuries every year.

Most Unitarian Universalists are safely removed from this unpleasant aspect of our sytem of producing goods and services. They can safely lecture those who choose to boycott sweatshop goods at WalMart about their shortsightedness and try to mock the excesses of those who call for a different system of global trade.

We have fed you all for a thousand years by Utah Phillips

We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed,
Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers' dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool.
Then if blood be the price of all your wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in full!

There is never a mine blown skyward now
But we're buried alive for you.
There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew.
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in!

We have fed you all a thousand years-
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike a week ago.
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives,
And we're told it's your legal share,
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,
Good God! We bought it fair!

2006-01-18T13:26:00.000-08:00

I heard a song on the radio from Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar and it reminded me a lot of Dan Harper's exploration of the idea that all theology is local. I'm always torn between the centrality of home and place and the idea that many of us lead increasingly post-geographic lives. Some folks have expressed confusion over Dan's use of the term "post modern." Sometimes I find it more useful to use the term "context specific" rather than the vague and perilous post modern. It's a technical way of saying the same thing. The idea of the post modern is that "high" modern theories claimed to explain everything, everywhere in totality.

The song I heard to day does a reasonable job of showing both the positive and negative aspects of a strictly local view that is well grounded in a particular place.

Ordinary Town

© 2001 Dave Carter / Dave Carter Music (BMI)

common cool, he was a proud young fool in a kick-ass wal-mart tie
rippin down the main drag, trippin on the headlights rollin by
in the early dawn when the cars were gone, did he hear the master's call?
in the five-and-dime did he wake and find he was only dreamin after all, 'cause

this is an ordinary town and the prophet stands apart
this is an ordinary town and we brook no wayward heart
and every highway leads you prodigal back home
to the ordinary sidewalks you were born to roam

rock of ages, love contagious, shine the serpent fire
so sang the sage of sixteen summers in the upstairs choir
so sang the old dog down the street beside his wailing wall
"go home, go home" the mayor cried when jesus came to city hall, 'cause

this is an ordinary town, and the prophet stands alone
this is an ordinary town and we crucify our own
and every highway leads you prodigal again
to the ordinary houses you were brought up in

raised on hunches and junk food lunches and punch-drunk ballroom steps
you get to believing you're even-steven with the kids at fast track prep
so you dump your bucks on a velvet tux and you run to join the dance
but your holy shows and the romans know you're just a child of
circumstance, 'cause

this is an ordinary town and the prophet has no face
this is an ordinary town and the seasons run in place
and every highway leads you prodigal and true
to the ordinary angels watchin over you

Another Dave and Tracy song that I have mentioned before has a similar sense of place but less ambivalence:

Gentle Arms Of Eden

© 2000 Dave Carter / Dave Carter Music (BMI)

on a sleepy endless ocean when the world lay in a dream
there was rhythm in the splash and roll, but not a voice to sing
so the moon shone on the breakers and the morning warmed the waves
till a single cell did jump and hum for joy as though to say

this is my home, this is my only home
this is the only sacred ground that i have ever known
and should i stray in th dark night alone
rock me goddess in the gentle arms of eden

then the day shone bright and rounder til the one turned into two
and the two into ten thousand things, and old things into new
and on some virgin beach head one lonesome critter crawled
and he looked about and shouted out in his most astonished drawl

this is my home ...

then all the sky was buzzin and the ground was carpet green
and the wary children of the wood went dancin in between
and the people sang rejoicing when the field was glad with grain
this song of celebration from their cities on the plain

this is my home ...

now there's smoke across the harbor, and there's factories on the shore
and the world is ill with greed and will and enterprise of war
but i will lay my burden in the cradle of your grace
and the shining beaches of your love and the sea of your embrace

this is my home ...

Out of the mouths of Daves

2006-01-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

Letterman the other night with Bill O'Reilly:

Letterman: Yeah, so why are we there in the first place? I agree to you, with you that we have to support the troops. They are there, they are the best and the brightest of this country. [audience applause] There's no doubt about that. And I also agree that now we're in it it's going to take a long, long time. People who expect it's going to be solved and wrapped up in a couple of years, unrealistic, it's not going to happen. However, however, that does not eliminate the legitimate speculation and concern and questioning of Why the Hell are we there to begin with?

O'Reilly: If you want to question that, and then revamp an intelligence agency that's obviously flawed, the CIA, okay. But remember, MI-6 in Britain said the same thing. Putin's people in Russia said the same thing, and so did Mubarak's intelligence agency in Egypt.

Letterman: Well then that makes it all right?

O'Reilly: No it doesn't make it right.

Letterman: That intelligence agencies across the board makes it alright that we're there?

O'Reilly: It doesn't make it right.

Letterman: See, I'm very concerned about people like yourself who don't have nothing but endless sympathy for a woman like Cindy Sheehan. Honest to Christ.

[audience applause]

O'Reilly: No, I'm sorry.

Letterman: Honest to Christ.

When I saw this at first I could'nt believe what I was seeing. And then I tried to think of what it reminded me of:

Delivered 9 June 1954 during the Army-McCarthy Hearings in Washington, D.C.:

Welch: And if I did, I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.

McCarthy: Let's, let's --

Welch: You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Sometimes I have to wonder when a goof like Letterman can be so honest and to the point and even some of my smart UU brothers and sisters have to be so obtuse.

Soteriology

2006-01-03T21:50:00.000-08:00

I was reading a James Luther Adams paper on "Sin and Salvation" in An Examined Faith(which I had the great pleasure of discussing with George Beach at GA last year) and I got to thinking that there must be some other useful reads in some of the more difficult areas of theology from a Unitarian or Universalist perspective. I would be particularly interested in anything on soteriology, eschatology, theodicy and pneumatology. I have found http://www.religion-online.org/ very useful for Tillich texts and also have found some informative texts at http://www.jesusradicals.org/ (particularly Ellul and Tolstoy). I tend towards a social gospel eschatology, influenced by Tolstoy and the Catholic Worker movement.

I feel like a lot of times people rehash christology and the trinity endlessly at the expense of other parts of theology.

So any suggestions for texts, especially online texts?

Theology

2005-12-30T10:51:00.000-08:00

I was all set to wade into topics theological and talk about JLA and Tillich, but right now the best I can say is that my 3 year old sees rain butterflies in the water splashing into the air off our street. A "moment of transcendence" for sure. It raises a point about the distinction between the theory of theology and the practice of theology.

I'm not sure I buy the post-modern notion that all theology is local. In general yes, I believe that context specific theories are better than over-reaching total theories. But I wonder if there might be a situation at hand akin to the relationship between quantum mechanics, Newtonian kinetics, and Einstein's relativity. Physics looks slightly different on the level of the very small, the very large, and the everyday world we live in.

I am a structuralist in orientation, and would like to see some structure to contain and explain all our different personal and local theologies. There is the tyranny of structure that tries to explain away the local and the personal to fit some grand theory of everything. And there is the atomism of the strictly personal and local that I feel UUism has spun into. And I believe that there must be something in between.

Tillich criticized both autonomy and heteronomy. He believed in a theonomy that called for justice, compassion and communion. He saw sin as all the idolatries and profanations that allowed us to divide ourselves and quit living as neighbors or sibling children of God.

And while his systematic theology is among the most dense reading I have ever done, I know that he remembered that theology must be based in that sense of reverrence and mystery expressed by my son.

There may not be a god per se, and there certainly is no such thing as a rain butterfly. But both ideas can give us a different way of living life and relating to the world even if neither is necessary nor sufficient.

Us and Them

2005-12-23T12:38:00.000-08:00

In one of my capital punishment posts, Dan Harper asks if executions are part of a system of desensitization that make things like torture possible. I know there is some research that shows an increase in violence after publicized executions but I suspect it is pretty far down the chain of causality.

Yesterday I explored how some people need to believe that there is an other that could be controlled, incarcerated or eradicated and all would be right in the world.

An article online gave me a couple new thoughts.

In 1917 Sigmund Freud put the issue in perspective when he wrote: "In the course of his development towards culture man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom."

In this light I have to reflect upon the ways we talk about reason in Unitarian Universalism. In general, my thinking is influenced by Peter Singer and his notion that sentience, or the ability to feel pleasure or pain, may be a better guideline for evaluating ethical concerns. If we can kill and eat animals because they can't reason, can I eat my racist neighbor? Of course you can still end up in situations where neither reason nor principle work well.

The exploitation and slaughter of animals provides the precedent for the mass murder of people and makes it more likely because it conditions us to withhold empathy, compassion, and respect from others who are different. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, "There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler." Indeed there is. About the same time the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno made a similar point: "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."

Maybe it is the Buddhist influence, but I tend to think of the inherent worth and dignity of all beings, though I find person and being to be fairly interchangeable. Also, I think there are ways to be reverential of this worth while still in a subsistence relationship with other animals. I believe that many of the indigenous cultures of North America managed to strike this balance, though I am not sure it is possible in the current food system.

I'm not convinced yet that human-animal cruelty is the source of human-human cruelty. I tend toward a joint cause of both, though I do not believe that innate human depravity is the cause. In general I subscribe to the Seville Declaration:

Believing that it is our responsibility to address from our particular disciplines the most dangerous and destructive activities of our species, violence and war; recognizing that science is a human cultural product which cannot be definitive or all-encompassing; and gratefully acknowledging the support of the authorities of Seville and representatives of the Spanish UNESCO; we, the undersigned scholars from around the world and from relevant sciences, have met and arrived at the following Statement on Violence. In it, we challenge a number of alleged biological findings that have been used, even by some in our disciplines, to justify violence and war. Because the alleged findings have contributed to an atmosphere of pessimism in our time, we submit that the open, considered rejection of these mis-statements can contribute significantly to the International Year of Peace. Misuse of scientific theories and data to justify violence and war is not new but has been made since the advent of modern science. For example, the theory of evolution has been used to justify not only war, but also genocide, colonialism, and suppression of the weak. We state our position in the form of five propositions. We are aware that there are many other issues about violence and war that could be fruitfully addressed from the standpoint of our disciplines, but we restrict ourselves here to what we consider a most important first step.

Crime and punishment

2005-12-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

In general, I like to say there are two ways of thinking about crime and punishment: make the punishment fit the crime vs. make the punishment fit the criminal. This has parallels in parenting and classroom discipline as well.

In principal, one might say anyone convicted of murder shall be put to death. (Of course generally we do not rape the rapist or remove the hands of thieves at this point in our society).

Current criminal sentencing policy attempts to follow this principal by requiring certain mandatory minimum sentences for offenses and repeat offenses (called the Three Strikes law in California). There was a perception in the 80's that too many criminals were getting parole, and a few very horrific, high profile cases of violent crimes by parolees. So now we have a massive criminal industrial complex in California where they budget prison construction based on how many kids are born in a particular year and prison construction far outpaces the construction of new college campuses.

Making punishment fit the criminal leads to its own problems, and hightlights some issues with capital punishment as it is currently implemented in California. In principal it is a great idea to look at the offendor and their circumstances and find the most fitting punishment, but in practice this can be problematic.

An example from a school I taught at is illustrative. Once their were two students who on separate days independent of each other left the middle school campus to use a soda machine on the adjacent high school campus. One, a middle class female white student, was given a warning. The other, a Native American male student, was suspended for leaving school. So too much discretion may be a bad thing too.

For me, the main way to make sense of this is to look at what I would call a theology of crime (or perhaps sin if you don't mind the term). I learned in high school as friends of mine started doing time for petty and not so petty crimes, that the line between who were and weren't criminals was pretty fuzzy. Criminals really are you cousins and uncles and kids you grew up with. There really is no line between us and them.

Growing up in Southern California in the Reagan era, it was heresy to say so, but there is no group of them that we can just round up and kill off to solve all the world's problems. I believe this is true of crime and true of terrorism.

Sometimes I find the construct of original sin more useful than any liberal alternative in this regard. It is useful to understand that we are all capable of doing wrong and of hurting one another in large ways and small. Sometimes I feel like some UUs replace this older notion of original sin (that we are all sinners of different degrees) with the idea that those of us with the right diet, the right hybrid car, or the right jaded hipster sense of irony are somehow exempt from the capacity for evil. Within my UU community, I know one who did jail time for DUI, one whose son just got out of jail for DUI and another whose father is in prison.

The LA Police Department is sometimes referred to as the thin blue line between us and them. The Border Patrol tried to adopt the thing green line as a motto too. But all of this is misguided to me. We are them and they are us.

Indeed, the line between good and evil does not run between groups of people but through every human heart.

Interviewed

2005-12-21T16:06:00.000-08:00

I don't really mean to turn this into a blog about the death penalty, but Stanley Williams' execution was only a week ago and I still haven't entirely wrapped my mind around the experience of being outside the prison gates when he was put to death.

It is always an intense experience. My kids were very photogenic and we got a large amount of media coverage. I was interviewed several times.

About the best answer I could muster was to say that as parents, we teach our kids that two wrongs don't make a right. And it being the Christmas season, I think we can all think of at least one time when someone might have been convicted and executed without being guilty.

Killing time in California or California Uber Alles

2005-12-19T15:37:00.000-08:00

Pealbear wrote on her blog:

Until yesterday, I'd been quite taken with my newly adopted state of California. The Bay Area seems to be a fun place to live. On my trip down to Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving, I had a real appreciation for the beauty and landscape of California.
...
Living in California is different. Tookie Willams was executed 15 miles from where I live now.

Like the man said, "California is a Garden of Eden. A paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot, if you ain't got the do-re-mi."

More than once I have driven a visitor across the Golden Gate Bridge or across the Richmond San Rafael bridge and had someone ask about that buidling over there across the bay and seen the confusion in their eyes when facing the death row of "liberal, anything goes" California.

In my childhood down below what is either called the Orange Curtain or the Manson-Nixon Line, the shock to my visitors was the checkpoints on the highway where La Migra look in on your cars to see if you are white enough to drive from San Diego to Orange County or Riverside. From the San Clemente checkpoint you can just about see our nuclear power plant as well.

I'm a fourth generation Californian. I remember when the death penalty came back and I have been at the protest vigils for all but two of the executions that have happened since I moved to Northern California.

While I can recognize the desire and maybe even the occasional appropriateness of the desire to kill certain people (my pacifism is not absolute), I do not find it appropriate to let governments get into the business of killing people. Even if I am not sure about God, I will not willingly render unto Caesar the powers of life and death.

It is always intrinsically dangerous when we put the fiction (what James Luther Adams might call idolatry) of nations and states ahead of the reality of life and community.

I do not believe in the inherent worth and dignity of governments. I am a government servant and I believe that governments can sometimes serve human needs and the common good but are only justified to the extent that they do so.

I have served on a jury and appeared in front of judges. I do not delegate to any 12 of my peers or to anyone in a robe the right to decide who should live or die. This is not out of any lack of love for those peers or any potential judges (my attorney brother and sister in law would make great judges for what its worth). As an undergraduate, I studied jury psychology and the problems with eyewitness testimony and questioning (I got my only A+ in Psychology and the Law taught by Ebbe Ebbeson).

We are only human and our institutions are more so.

Rest in peace, Tookie. As we scatter your ashes to the wind may the world build the peace you worked towards. May we all know redemption and reconciliation.

Unexpected Joy

2005-09-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

During church today, right in the middle of the sharing of Joys and Concerns, a great egret was standing on a piling not 20 yards away.The kids were still in this week because it was our ingathering/water communion service.

I tried as subtly as possible to point out this amazing bird to the kids. Before I could mention it to anyone else, it flew away. I thought my kids had missed it too, but a minute later my three year old starting telling me about seeing "the bird that catches the fish in its mouth and you can see the fish hanging there." He'd seen that picture in a book before.

Blessed be, and may our hearts fill with gladness for unexpected joy and beauty that may fly into our lives when we least expect it.

Starr King School for the Ministry and other UU Seminaries

2005-09-16T18:56:00.000-07:00

I try to avoid blogging about the school, just as a matter of boundaries. But since it has come up in the comments, I feel somewhat obliged. Also I seem to get a google hit for unitarian seminary very often.

Contrary to the notion of one commenter, the school is not facing demise. And I may gripe about it but lets face it I'm in my third year. I had a great time in undergrad at UC San Diego, but you wouldn't even want to see everything I had to say about the place by my third year there.

Another reason I do not blog about the Thomas Starr King School for the Ministry is because I love it and I think it would make for boring reading. I would wholeheartedly recommend the school to any prospective students, particular if they prefer self directed study and their path includes UU ministry (if your true passion is to get a PhD right after your MDiv, by all means try to get into Harvard. It would look good).

I'm in no position to say anythihng about any other seminary. I imagine most of us only go to one. I like mine because it is a good fit for me and I love the faculty. They have done a great job of both challenging me and supporting me in my formation.

As a long distance commuter, my classmates have been key in giving me a strong sense of community and belonging. I've wondered sometimes how the Meadville-Lombard modified residency program would compare to my experience. In general I would suggest that anyone contemplating an MDiv should not do what I am doing and should be a more local and involved student. At this point I see the light at the end of the tunnel and have no regrets, however. I will however be sad to see the students who came in with me go if I take extra time to finish.

Token protestant

2005-09-14T19:41:00.000-07:00

I am in a great pastoral counseling class right now taught at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. It is funny because I end up being the token protestant student, with a rabbinical student being the only other student who is not a Catholic. When people go out of their way to modify language from the texts to be ecumenical and more inclusive of protestants I don't quite have the heart to break it to them how much further they might have to go in a UU context. My Jewish classmate will occasionally preface a sentence with "As the only non-Christian..." and I don't quite feel like explaining.

I have expressed some reticence in the past here about appropriating Christian traditions that do not feel properly mine, even if I do believe that Unitarian Universalism is squarely in the protestant tradition.

We were discussing the concept of pastor in the term pastoral care and whether it was separable from notions of Christianity. Apparently they do use the term at some synagogues and I did share that I have still seen Pastoral Care Committees in UU fellowships where one would only say God or Jesus if a hymnal was dropped on one's foot.

quite contrary

2005-09-07T07:01:00.000-07:00

There is a tendency I want to discuss which for lack of a better name I would call "asshole contrarianism." I have written in this space about the issues that arrise when freedom is treated as if it were the only virtue in the world. I am torn between the notion that this kind of contrariness stems from reason being turned into an end rather than a means or more from the lack of reason.

In UU communties, the devils advocate, naysayer or "asshole contrarian" is stereotypically seen as a cranky humanist, but sadly it is a syndrome that affects UUs of all theological (and atheological) stripes.

Most of my UU blogger colleagues feel a certain derision towards people who might be described as "true believers." I am at a stage in my life where I have been idealistic and optimistic. But I am also at a stage in my life where I am done being jaded and cynical, with everything kept at a protective, ironic distance.

I remember when I was younger I sometimes had friends who quit listening to certain bands once they became popular (REM and U2 were both common in my generation) as attempt to demonstrate their uber-hipness.

Sometimes I feel like people, in an attempt to protect themselves from vulnerability, the pain of caring or the numberous risks of intimacy feel the urgent need to deflate anything that other people are starting to believe in.

Recently I have seen this on the UU Theology listserv as people attack conceptions of gnosticism, presumably just because it is popular among some segment of UUs. Politically I have seen it in attempts to knock Cindy Sheehan down a notch after she became popular.

On some level, I think the tendency towards group think often generates a tendency towards oppositional group think. I will admit that I am a fan and admirer of both UUA president Bill Sinkford and Starr King School for the Ministry president Rebecca Parker (who preached an amazing sermon for SKSM chapel yesterday). It is a necessary corrective to have some degree of skepticism towards leaders like this. But I think there is no need to knock them down a notch just because they influence people or to knock people who are influenced by them.

Too many people it seems, especially among a wide swath of UUs, want to feel wholly self-invented.(I especially see this as a marriage of Manifesto humanist supersessionism and Reaganite bourgeois rugged individualism) For me, I am happy to recognize my influences.

My political thinking is influenced by the anarchism of Peter Kropotikin, Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, as well as the marxism of Rosa Luxembourg, Bertell Ollman and Harry Braverman. The socialist ideas of Michael Harrington are also a key inluence.

Theologically I am influenced especially by Jacques Ellul (a Barthian conservative Christian anarchist) and Paul Tillich (a theological liberal who courted with socialism). If the whole Bible were the Gospels and Romans 8, I would be a great Christian too. Mahayana Buddhism also shapes my thought, especially sutra passages about Avalokitsvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion.

Intellectually, I am influenced especially by the Frankfurt School and some of the more reasonable and socially engaged postmodernists.

Lucky to see that

2005-09-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

Early in the morning the other day,on the drive into town we saw a mother quail and about 8 chicks running across the road. I yelled out, "Look at the baby birds," to show the kids.

My daughter said, "Daddy, are we lucky to be able to see that?"

Yes we are.

The sublime comes unexpectedly, and if you are not paying attention, you can miss it.

Origins

2005-08-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

The other night at bedtime my daughter asked how people started having babies. She is only six, but her mom is a midwife, so she did not mean the obvious mechanical question. No, she wanted to know how anyone had the first baby if no parents had been born. I'll admit, I ducked the question. It was bedtime and was trying to get her to sleep. But you would think that two years of seminary might give me a better answer.

Either something came from nothing or something has always existed. I'm sure I will give her an appropriately vague UU sounding answer. She really likes The Everything Seed. Apparently six year olds are comfortable with a vocabulary of reverence.

Urban myths?

2005-08-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

Chalicechick and Jeff at Transient and Permanent are both talking about how UUs make distinctions between "birthright" UUs and "come-outers" and the assumption that people not born into the church are sometimes thought of as bitter refugees from their original tradition.

To me this is a lot like our language around "crusty" humanists. I belong to a small fellowship movement heritage lay led congregation. (Readers playing the home game can try to guess from the picture I posted before)

In my congregation there is a spread of secular atheists, new age, Vedanta, Buddhist, Christian and pagan members. (think two or three of each really). People do nice lay led sermons about what was good about their family traditions or something they really liked about Catholicism. They also do sermons on Hinduism, Buddhism or other world religions. No one bats an eye if I read from the Revised Common Lectionary one week or someone talks about Yom Kippur and atonement. We also have our share of what I would consider lectures about different topics. But all told, it is pretty well balanced.

I don't think we do a good enough job of including our pagan members. And I think we are a little hesitant to try new liturgical elements or to constrain the time taken by Joys and Concerns on any given Sunday.

I know that our stereotypes exist for a reason, but I think we often let a small number of cranky individuals give us the wrong idea. And again, it is a reason why I think the notion of The Tyranny of Structurelessness is important. If we do not use structures to facilitate participation and access, the loudest and most privileged will always win out.

Life (and brushing teeth)

2005-08-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

I noticed today that there are few things in life funnier than picking up
a 3 year old so he can spit out toothpaste into the sink.

At that age he doesn't really know what he is supposed to be doing. But he sure puts a lot into it. My six year old will fill her mouth with water to rinse and then spit like a pro. The younges on he other hand knows he is supposed to get stuff out of his mouth but is not entirely clear on how he is supposed to do it. He'll just let a white torrent of toothpaste run down his chin (and neck) and then wipe it off.

In theory this has to be done, so the toothpaste does not give him a stomach ache. And it can be challenging if you are already dressed for work. My kids really like the idea of brushing their teeth. Which is a good thing.

Something so small can be a sublime joy if you allow it. Or it can be an incredible frustration if you make it.

Sojourners

2005-08-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

The August issue of Sojourners arrived at my house yesterday.Several good articles on peace in the Middle East, Israel/Palestine in particular, including cover of Isreali peace activists and a Palestinian Christian involved in liberation theology. There is also a review of Sister Helen Prejean's latest book and an interview with Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls and her dad Don Saliers who teaches theology and worship at Emory University. (They have a new book out called A Life To Live: Reflections On Music As Spiritual Practice)

All told it is a very good issue and it remind me how reliably good Sojourners is. I know for some who try to separate religion and politics it may seem too political, but their political coverage is really well based in their theology. There is also a good article on mysticism, contemplative practice and Teresa of Avila.

I think Sojurners is a great project for people who advocate for a religious left. It's also a useful thing to show to certain secularists who ask where has the religious left been all this time?

So read Sojourners, especially if you are a humanist social justice activist. Let it stretch at your theological issues with Christianity.

A Panoply of Virtues

2005-08-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

My six year old tends to think that all that matters is fairness. And by this she really means sameness. If her brother gets a snack, she should get a snack, even if she has already eaten. If her brother gets two of something that she only had one of, she figures that entitles her to have two the next day while he gets none. We try to explain to her that fairness is complicated sometimes and not always what she wants. If her little brother goes to bed early because he didn't nap, should we send her to bed early just to be fair? If her older brother only gets one present (because it is more expensive and electronic) does that mean she can only get one?

To me it feels like she can only focus on one virtue at a time. And it seems to me that she is not alone in this regard.

Most of the adolescents I have had the joy and concern to work wth over the years tend to fixate on freedom as the one and only virtue. It seems to me that many people I know and many UUs seem to be this way too.

It seems silly to say so, but committment and belonging are just as important as freedom. I'm reminded of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart and the idea that liberals in particular have been won over by a psychotherapeutic expressionist sense of identity that degrades all social bonds to reciprocal contractarianism ("for as long as we both shall love").

There is a line is Bowles and Gintis book Schooling in Capitalist America that suggests that the function of schooling in a capitalist society is to render the individual sufficiently fragmented in consciousness such that s/he is unable to consider collective solutions to problems. The book is problematic in lots of ways, but I do find this section useful:

"To reproduce the social relations of production, the educational system must try to teach people to be property subordinate and render them sufficiently fragmented in consciousness to preclude their getting together to shape their own material existence. The forms of consciousness and behavior fostered by the educational system must themselves be alienated, in the sense that they conform neither to the dictates of technology in the struggle with nature, nor to the inherent developmental capacities of individuals, but rather to the needs of the capitalist class. It is the prerogatives of capital and the imperatives of profit, not human capacities and technical realities, which render U.S. schooling what it is. This is our charge."

Earlier in my life, I was more explicitly involved on the political left. I found myself often trying to explain how the version of individualistic freedom that was inherited from the mainstream commercial culture was not really as big a virtue as we might like.

As an anarchist I often worked to point out things like The Tyranny of Structurelessness
and how a fear of explicit structure can be worse than having some structure to work with.

Recently I wrote a paper about how certain discourses around purity and sacrifice within radical anarchist, environmental and animal rights activism show a clear inheritance from Christian rhetoric around vicarious atonement and theological purity.

I don't think it is a bad thing to acknowledge this inheritance and it should not denigrate in any way either Christianity or radical social movements.

It's just yet again evidence that no one exists in a social vacuum. I'm not going to go all the way into "creative interchange" and the decentralization of the individual (although Rebecca Parker did a great presentation on this at the Process Theology Network's workshop at General Asssembly). Personally, I'm still an existentialist and believe in the possibility of individual agency. But like Vygotsky, I believe that there is a dialectic between the social and the organic.

Religious naturalism

2005-08-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

I don't have it in me to get to far into the great discussion about religious humanism that Clyde, Shawn and others are having. But on the way in this morning I was talking with my daughter and I had a great moment of naturalist awe.

My daughter asked me about how water was clear and how you could make it stop moving to see through it even if it was still moving inside. (quite a question for a six year old if I do say so my self.) We talked about filling a clear jar at home and letting it sit still until we could see through it like a lens (we both have glasses).

I didn't really explain much to her, but I found myself musing about the mystery that is how atomic particles work such that everything solid appears solid and how translucent materials are translucent. I thought about the Bohr model I learned in school and quantum mechanics, and even a little about the What The Bleep Do We Know movie that could have been better but touched on this question.

It brought back an awe and a mystery that I have carried with me since childhood. I would not want to be corrected by people that study these things more seriously, nor to run off gentle readers who do not want to think of orbitals and the wave-particle paradox.

There is room for awe and reverence in a material world view. I believe that this awe neither precludes nor presupposes other theological considerations.

Birthdays

2005-08-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Four days ago was my 36th birthday and today is my daugher's 6th. (My daughter is 30 years and 4 days younger than me and my youngest son is 30 years and 7 days younger than my brother)

It is hard to believe that it was six years ago when Luna was born. My neighbors are all in shocked disbelief. Luna was born at home, outside in the hot tub that we were forced to buy to close the deal on our house.

Luna's birthstory (in fairly graphic detail) is online here. Her mom is a midwife so her version of the story is rather vivid.

I'm forever indebted to the Rev. Forrest Gilmore for an experience I had during a worship service he lead during my orientation when I started at Starr King School for the Ministry.

Each of the new students had come to the pulpit one by one and had received a blessing as he dipped his hands into a bowl of water from the ocean and laid his hands on ours. When we returned to our seats, we reached out our hands as he talked about ministry and the power of our hands to work and heal. As I held my hands in front of me (roughly in the position you would use at the end of a bounce pass in basketball) my mind and body were transfixed and I mentally returned to the day my smallest ones were born. I could feel them gliding into the world through my outreached hands. I began to cry in joy and could only sit in awe of and communion with the miracle of birth and creation.

I can only hope to ever have an experience at worship like that again, let alone to give that gift to others someday.

Christianities, christologies and me

2005-08-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

Scott's comment about Romans 8 in response to my earlier post and some of what he has been saying (along with Peacebang and others) about UU dabbling in world religion raises an issue for me.

In as much as we worry about cultural expropriation of Native American and other faith traditions and practices, to what extent does my use of Christianity follow the same dynamic? I have gone out of my way to criticize UU supersessionary rhetoric when it coms to Christianity.

As a ministry student, I find myself being asked to talk about Christianity to people fairly regularly and to explain people's questions about their own faith traditions.

I came to seminary as one of those people who thought Jesus was good and Paul was bad. I had read the Gnostic Gospels and thought Paul was too dualistic, too misogynist and too hateful of our bodies. It was John Buehrens who started me thinking differently about Paul. Soon afterwards I had the joy and suffering of reading all three volumes of Tillich's systematic theology. I'm not going to make my point here very well. The language and line of thought is new enough to me that I am probably incapable of explaining it to others.

Through Tillich I came to think of an adoptionist Christology that showed that the Spirit functioned in Jesus in a way that it can function through the rest of us when we are so "grasped and shaped." I don't believe in the Holy Spirit (tm) per se, but I do believe in spirit and in a drive for life and towards connection and communion as a fundamental element of what it means to be alive. And I think that Pauline christianity (especially as mediated by Tillich) is as good a way to describe the relationship between our material creatureliness and our ability to be (or at least our aspirations to be) more than mere matter.

All of this however does not make me a Christian in my own eyes, and it makes me wonder about how I use and abuse the Christian tradition. Am I in any way entitled to participate in discussions about the meaning of Christianity?

Labor pains of creation (Romans 8:18-23)

2005-08-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

Feminist theologian Sheila McGinn concludes her article “All Creation Groans in Labor: Paul’s Theology of Creation” with an outline of a Pauline theology of creation and how it relates to feminist theology:

From this examination of Romans 8:18-23 we can glean an outline of a Pauline theology of creation: (1) The universe is a creature of God. (2) As a creature, it has a purpose and a goal. (3) Creation is not a static entity, but a dynamic reality still in the process of fulfillment. (4) Creation works with God and humanity to attain its purpose. (5) Creation and humanity are intimately bound with each other. Creation is eager for human salvation, i.e., adoption as God’s children and heirs to God’s freedom and glory. (6) Human fulfillment and the fulfillment of creation are mutually contingent. (7) The fulfillment of the creation will reveal a nature organically connected to what presently exists, but also qualitatively different (“new”). (8) The fundamental feature of this difference is freedom/liberation characterized by clarity of purpose ((liberation from futility) and endurance (freedom from decay).
Many features of a feminist creation-theology come to the fore in this outline of Paul’s theology of creation. As Paul did, we will start with the assumption that there is a loving Deity who generated this universe (1). The earth and its creatures have a right to exist and to endure, quite apart from the benefits human beings can gain from this (2). Indeed, the creation is a dynamic reality, growing and changing all the time (3). The role of the human animal in this matrix of life is to preserve, protect and foster not only humanity but also all the other forms of life on earth, and indeed the earth itself. (6).
Human liberation, including the liberation of women and other marginalized persons from structures of domination, is the under-girding principle and goal of feminist theology (8). This requires a model of power that is reciprocal rather than unilateral. Hence humans must live with each other – and with the earth and other creatures – rather than dominating them. Living out this reciprocity is the key way to become fully human. In this process of living with the creation, human beings may make claims on the earth and its creatures, but the earth and its creatures may make claims on humanity (7). Central among these is self-preservation.
Among the feminist critiques of traditional theologies of creation is the “species-centrism” imbedded in them. The preceding outline of a feminist theology of creation illustrates several of the ways in which this human elitism is undercut. These also are features that a feminist theology of creation shares with the Pauline view.
What is interesting about Paul’s brief encomium on creation is that it goes two steps further than the feminist model outlined above. Romans 8:18-23 depicts creation as alive, active, striving for a goal it shares with humanity. Both of these points—the active role and the goal orientation (4 and 6) – are significant features of Paul’s view. Markedly different from many feminist views, Paul’s theology of creation is intricately intertwined with eschatology: creation is an active being precisely because it has a goal to reach.

Within Unitarian Universalism there is a strong tradition of attempting to build the Kingdom of God in the present world. Unitarians and Universalists are especially known for their involvement in abolition, suffrage and the social gospel. The most recent change to the principles and purposes that the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to promote and affirm was to add “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” The official denominational study action issue for this year is the role of human activity in global climate change. Sadly, however, in its own liberal post-Christianity, I believe contemporary Unitarian Universalism sometimes loses the sense of serious purposefulness that McGinn argues is where Paul goes further than a typical feminist theology of creation. There is a tension in our tradition (which is not always dynamic) between freedom of conscience and unity of purpose. It is encouraging to see, however, that others are looking at this passage of Romans and using it to build a stronger sense of purpose of the human relationship to the created world.

McGinn, Sheila E. “All Creation Groans in Labor: Paul’s Theology of Creation in Romans 8:18-23.” Earth, Wind, & Fire: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Creation. Ed. Carol J. Dempsey and Mary Margaret Pazdan. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical P/Michael Glazier, 2004. 114-23.

Been a bad blogger

2005-08-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

I've been a bad blogger of late. No posting and really very little reading. It's been busy at home and busy at work. I've been thinking a lot lately about the old joke that every minister has only one sermon, and just uses variations of it in each sermon.

A couple weeks ago I definitely lived out this idea. Because I give a sermon occasionally at my home church, I know the people listening and tend to focus on themes that balance out other Sundays.

I almost always include a little challenging traditional language and often at least tangentially relate my theme to RCL readings for that week. I believe we can grow spiritually through the confrontation with language that we may initially find uncomfortable. I also like to remind people when it ends up that the Bible is more radical or better said than any alternative I might come up with. (I will try to elaborate on this later).

In my home congregation, I try to serve as a foil for another member who likes to emphasize the freedom of our faith and for a faction that is especially interested in personal spirituality. I try to focus on commitment.

Even when you know that your values may change with time, and even if you are free to find your own values, it is necessary to commit and live up to your values at the time. I want people who play Unitarian, Universalist or Unitarian Universalist to understand that they are standing on the shoulders of giants, and that we owe it to our ancestors to live up to the inheritance.

The Pit

2005-07-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

I was up too late last night and ate too little today and ended up in a hypoglycemic perfect storm of angst and depression. It's a little frightening how low I can get in a situation like that, even if things are going well.

I've been really down since getting back from GA. I'm increasingly impatient to get back to Starr King and my classmates there, and increasingly ready to divest from my current job that takes up so much of my time. I work full time, and only get to go to classes one day each week. At least it looks like this semester I will be at school on Tuesday's so I can participate in chapel and see more of the SK community.

Any jokes you may have heard aside, it is a great place to be. For some reason this summer I am having a harder time negotiating the strange schizoid life of being a full time seminarian, a full time information technology worker, a full time father, a full time lover and a full time friend. There has been some turmoil in each sphere of my life of late.

As petty as my struggles are in the cosmic scheme of things, I wonder what can I do to deepen my faith to the point that it could help me when I lose sight of it all. I ask this not just for myself but for all. It seems to me that in the congregations I know people tend to revert to their childhood faith or rely on psychotherapy when times are hard. What can we do to make our congregations a better resource and sanctuary for people in need? Is this particularly a weakness of liberal strands of religion? How much harder is this when there is no personal god to call on?

Petty complaint

2005-07-14T19:16:00.000-07:00

I know this is a petty complaint, but have you ever tried to explain the relationship between clinical pastoral education, internship, candidacy, graduating from seminary, ordination and fellowship to someone who doesn't work for the UUA or a congregation?

People who ask when I am going to be done and what I have left to do don't really want an explanation of congregational polity, differences between Unitarian and Universalist history, or the history of ministerial consociations. But it is like peeling an onion, and every layer has its own story.

Congregational dynamics

2005-07-12T19:52:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Rove has maintained he neither knew Plame's name nor leaked it to anyone. In an interview yesterday, Wilson said his wife goes by Mrs. Wilson so it would be clear who Rove was talking about and noted how Rove attends the same church as the Wilson family. Wilson said Rove was part of a "smear campaign" designed to discredit him and others who undercut Bush's justification for war.

That must be some coffee hour.

From Where I'm Calling

2005-07-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

I really haven't been able to blog much since I got back from General Assembly. Not for lack of anything to say, either. Warts and all, General Assembly was a UU community larger than the community I live in. The workshops I attended were all larger than my congregation. I'm not sure I can convey exactly what that feels like. As a seminarian, I'm not exactly unconnected from a sense of a larger UU community. So it is a little embarassing to be as corny about it as I am.

Attending the Service of the Living Tradition, and seeing people I knew onstage, it really hit me how close to graduation I have come. I need to see the WRSCC and start applying for CPE and internships. I'm struggling internally with the transition from scholar of religion to minister in training. I've been asked to officiate at a renewal of vows this fall, and friends ask me to offer prayers when I eat at their table. Sometimes people at church pull me aside to talk about their lives. I worry about accountability as people project the role onto me, and I worry about failing, or hurting people accidentally.

I remember the drive home after my week of orientation at Starr King School for the Ministry two years ago. It was late at night, and traffic was stopped by an accident. A car had crossed the median and rolled over down an embankment, blocking the road and trapping two people in the car. As best I could tell, they both had their seatbelts on and they made it. I remember wondering if I should go to them and try to comfort them while the paramedics were on the way or if that would be letting the whole seminarian thing go to my head. The timing was such that the rescue started before I got close enough to judge the situation, but I still like to tease myself about the thoughts that went through my head. In retrospect, I think I was trying to negoatiate between a natural desire to help (and a sense of calling at that) with a newfound concern for boundaries.

I find myself struggling to fight any tendencies towards arrogance while dealing with the need to be and appear confident. I also struggle with the balance between being open to new thinking while needing to be clear about my own theological beliefs. I find that my beliefs are not really changing, but that I keep learning new language to express aspects of them. I am really indebted to Tillich for helping me have a new understanding of and relationship to christianity. I'm also really grateful to Rebecca Parker for sharing insights about process theology and atonement.

I've been following some of the arguments about anonymous blogging. I have to wonder if my words here might come back to haunt me. Either being too strident in my politics or too vulnerable in talking about my doubts.

There are still houses that cost less than my seminary education. I'm sure I could have done a great job of developing spiritually if I had spent my money on a cabin in the woods. Instead, my cabin on Walden Pond is in my head, and no one can take it away from me. Deep down inside, I know that I have made the right decision.

I believe that we are all connected. And I believe it is my calling to restore the sense of connection, purpose and meaning in our lives, however we articulate it.

More soon...

States of being

2005-07-05T15:23:00.000-07:00

Busy designing a database at work, but thought I would play the state game too:

bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C. /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

Obligatory July 4th Frederick Douglass

2005-07-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

I suspect any regular reader would see this coming. It is a farily typical leftist thing to do, posting Frederick Douglass's 4th of July oratory. There is a lot in this text that is relevant to the current situation. Talk about honoring principles while still being critical, and an argument about telling the truth versus sounding too radical.

What to the slave is the Fourth of July

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us.

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

Airport chapel and who needs it

2005-07-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting sights on my way back from GA was the DFW Airport Chapel which is served by 16 clergy from the DFW Interfaith Chaplaincy. The pamphlet says that "a Rabbi or a Hindu are available on call." It was quite a nice spot just off of gate B24.

I was particularly struck by the prayer rugs hanging on the wall. The whole terminal was inundated with very young soldiers off on America's crusade.

I was rather distraught by the youth of the soldiers and the tags on their backpacks with Iraqi city names on them. I walked down the terminal to pass the time because my flight was delayed. I got to see the rather nice and crowded USO. I met a couple young Marine recruits on their way to basic training at the MCRD in San Diego and heard a couple old timers tell them it would be fine and how to stay out of trouble.

The operation of the war is mostly removed from the community where I live. Our office has had one reservist go and return, and I have helped one person's kid brother get out of the service (special thanks to the Military Law Task Force and to a couple UU chaplains who answered questions and assisted that young man). I've also taken a small number of draft/conscientious objector questions (remember: potential UU conscientious objectors should register with the UUA registry for COs. The earlier you register, the better it documents sincerity to your draft board.)

At seminary sometimes, a heavy label gets applied to the students, "future religious leaders." As the sea of young faces in desert camouflage paraded by, I found no prayer to speak to the unspeakable loss and futility.

I was reminded of Wilfred Owens:

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, --
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

As much as I want to post Dulce et decorum est " My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori." I will resist.

The Send-off

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
Thy were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

Spirit of life, source of all, spark that animates our matter, look after these young souls and those they will encounter. Return us all to the unity of love, whole in body and spirit. Protect us innocents and transgressors all. Full of gratitude for the miracle of living in our bodies and souls, let us pray. Amen and blessed be.

uutopia and the real world

2005-07-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get behind in blogging because I have very little to say. Most of the time, I end up not posting because I have too much to say.

I have a torrent of feelings about my trip to GA and back. I came to General Assembly expecting to be a jaded ironic hipster with lots of jokes about the love of process for its own sake, theological vagueness, and general liberal cluelessness.

But rather like Dan Harper I came back more hopeful about Unitarian Universalism than I ever expected to be. Sometimes the whole enterprise seems to be coming apart at the seams and I wonder what I am doing borrowing money to become a UU minister.

If nothing else, this year's UUA General Assembly showed me that there is a there there.

I felt much the same way as Dan Harper and Philocrites did in this exchange:

After the lecture, I ran across Chris Walton, who's on the staff of UU World magazine. Chris was sitting in the Raddisson lobby, typing away on his cute little 12" Mac Powerbook, and he had just come back from Pagels's lecture. "We are seeing a real change in Unitarian Universalists," he said.

I wasn't sure I agreed with him, but he went on.

"Ten years ago, I could not imagine over 2,000 Unitarian Universalists sitting and listening to a lecture about Jesus the way people did tonight," he said. "No one got up and walked out in a huff."

He's right. there does seem to be a new openness to all things religious amongst Unitarian Universalists -- a distinct movement away from the hardline ideologies that many Unitarian Universalists used to adhere to -- there's a new sense of intellectual openness, a new willingness to listen.

And Chris and I agreed that this openness does have a generational aspect. The generation of younger Unitarian Universalists now coming up is far more open to exploring the Christian tradition, and not immediately rejecting it out of hand.

I'm not convinced that this is a function of younger UUs. I'm 35 (the Church of the Younger Fellowship offered to do a bridging cermony for me :)) and did not see many folks any younger than me. If a change is happening, I think it is happening in a broader demographic. I would like to think that one engine for this change is youth and young adults who have had a broader and deeper worship style that are insisting on staying in the church and adapting it to their needs rather than the other way around. But perhaps, many boomers, aging themselves and burying their parents, are looking for something else, much as their own parent's generation came to Unitarian Universalism during the growth years of the fifties and sixties looking for a different way of being religious as they raised their children.

This is just speculation on my part. I think this is actually better news than just the idea that new young UUs are different. There just aren't that many new young UUs. As cool as the Church of the Younger Fellowship is, I wouldn't anticipate it getting too many members from outside of the UU fold. This is in no way intended as a criticism of CYF or UU youth either. At General Assembly and even at my local District Assembly it became abundantly clear to me that UU Youth are among the coolest folks ever. If I hadn't just been gone for four days and had my my own kids to look after, I would have loved to have been able to help out at WUUKY IV 2005 (Western Unitarian Universalist Karmic Youth) that is happening just down the road a ways from me.

GA Bloggy goodness

2005-06-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

I took a red eye flight and arrived at 4 in the morning and got to the Ft. Worth Convention Center before anything was happening. Even before I could register I found this:

Here is Reverend Phil in action. His workshop was the first one I went to at GA today. He shared lots of good information about sharing UU values within our families.

Here is a picture of the UU blogger meetup at General Assembly.

Divine office

2005-06-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

On Sunday after church I went to a baby blessing at the Abhyagiri Monastery, a monastery in the Theravada Thai Forest Tradition. The aesthetic was very different, more low church compared to the Pure Land Buddhists at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas where my daughter goes to school.

I wsa struck by how similar the hall reminded me of a Masjid al-Iman, a Sufi mosque I visited last year. Perhaps it was because we were all sitting on a rug in rows. We did not do prostrations, but Buddhist prostrations feel very much like Salat to me.

While superficially, Ajahn Pasanno could not be more different from Sheik Yassir, but their presence in their communities were very much the same. Both are very much regular people, yet also larger than life in their own divine offices. I know this idea of divine office may be difficult for some. I know in my lay led fellowship we have mixed feelings about it, both on the question of divine and the question of office.

It is a goal of mine to encourage people, particularly Unitarian Universalists to approach Christianity, Judaism and Islam with the same reverence and curiosity that we typically apply to Buddhism and Native American spiritual practices.

No timetable for withdrawal

2005-06-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

This post will probably be better suited to my DailyKos diary but I am going to post it here.

I was driving home from work today and heard the latest news about the refusal to create a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq. I did a quick search at the National Archives and Records Administration and it looks like US casualties are about equivalent to the Vietnam war in 1965 (including 9 deaths from 1956-1960). In reality, 1965 was about as bad as the entire Iraq war.

I'm increasingly losing patience with so-called liberals (especially of the religious variety) who call for a better run war or want to argue the relative merits of World War II and theoretical pacifism whenever anyone questions the war in Iraq.

If this is 1965, this war still has 8 years left. My stepson turns 14 next month. Recruiting figures are looking bad. One of the local recruiters got caught having sex with girls from the high school who wanted to enlist. If this goes on, I have a hard time thinking there will be any alternative to conscription. I was trained by the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objecters and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors to do draft counseling two wars ago. I really hope I never have to use that knowledge.

I will tell you right now, I am not a pacifist. And I will tell you that it is not any Iraqi that I would kill before they take my boy to fight their war. I don't really care if responsible centrists think I am not credible on national defense issues or if responsible liberals think people like me will hurt the Democrats' chances of getting reelected to vote for the next war before they vote against it.

I'm a parent and I take my responsibilities very seriously.

Thanks

2005-06-16T21:59:00.000-07:00

I read today that the good Reverend Peacebang is taking a much deserved little blogging break.

I just want to thank her here for some intense and wonderful posts lately that really remind me why I am in seminary and why I am spending so much time away from home. Sometimes with grades and papers and paperwork I lose sight of it all.

Thanks for keeping it real, sister. Do take care and may the spirit grasp and shape you.

Happy Flag Day from Unitarian poet ee cummings

2005-06-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelov'd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

Namo Guan Shi Yin Pu Sa

2005-06-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

Michelle at Michelle's Ministry Blog mentioned that she has a tatoo of Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. It reminded me of some funny moments at my daughter's school this year.

I've mentioned before that my daughet goes to a Buddhist elementary school. It is only recently that my daughter has figured out that her principal is actually named Heng Yin not Kuan Yin. Heng Yin Shr is wonderful and if I were to be rescued by a vision of Kuan Yin I suspect it would be someone like her. Might cause some problems with the Dalai Lama though. (The bodhisattva avalokitsvara is known as the goddess Kuan Yin in China, but is typically male in Buddhist tradition and is apparently reincarnated as the Dalai Lama in Tibet).

When my daughter started at the school, my favorite misunderstanding was that she knew the word Buddha but not Buddhist, so any monk or nun was simply a Buddha. My daughter would say "My principal is a Buddha," or "A Buddha visited my class today." She has a classmate name Madison, and when they talk about Medicine Buddha they would always say Madison Budha.

In Spring they celebrated Guan Shi Yin's birth and my daughter started to recite her name more formally "Namo Guan Shi Yin Pu Sa." Namo is to return, Guan Shi Yen is to contemplate the world's sound's (Guan Yin hears the world's sounds and can help you if you call her) and Pu Sa is the Chinese for bodhisattva or enlightened being. The girls a the school will sometimes call Guan Yin Pu Sa if someone gets hurt.

The Chinese Pure Land Buddhism that the girls are learning is rather different from the intellectual, distant and bookish Buddhism that seems especially popular in white California. It has a fully functioning immanence and transcendence and a practical simplicity. There are aspects of the system that I don't agree with, but I think in general they do a good job of being true to their core tradition while still being open to other beliefs.

Heng Sure, a monk from this tradition teaches at the Graduate Theological Union (I'm registered for his Buddhist Christian Dialogues class) and is also a blogger.

A message to new parents

2005-06-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes at night when you lay your kids down to sleep there is nothing better than being a parent.

Sometimes, the only thing harder than being a parent is tolerating the advice people give you.

With three kids in our family, in that regard we have some advantage (finally). The disadvantage of having three kids is about what you would expect, mainly logistics. The advantage is that while it is possible that you are an awful parent to one kid and a great parent to the others, most likely you can tell by the average that you are probably at least doing a reasonable job.

So many parents with an only child get so worried that they will make the wrong decision and ruin their child's life forever. With three, you soon realize that you have to make a lot of decisions and that all options come with their own consequences.

When you have a few kids (or when I was a teacher with 180) you quickly learn that a little discipline is not going to irreparably harm anyone's self esteem. Most of the things new parents obsess about will probably be fairly meaningless in the long haul.

Sure, breasfeed your kids as long as you can (if you can at all). The benefits are real. Don't hit your kids, even in a very stylized way on their buttocks. The consequences are real too. As much as your can, keep your kids from junk food and junk TV. The consequences are pretty well known now too.

But mostly, find out what works for you and yours. Don't just do what everyone else does, and ignore most of the advice you get from people. You don't have to accept it (and mostly shouldn't) but you will act just like your parents did when you are under stress. If you must, make automatic routines for yourself that are second nature to rely on. As silly as the time out may seem, it is a good start if your first instinct is to spank or slap a child who is really being horrible. (not my sweet child!) (just for the record, my parents didn't so I don't have that baggage to deal with)

You will not be a perfect parent, and for the most part that is just fine. Don't be afraid to get help, and find other parents to talk to.

Kids will eventually eat. Sometimes babies will just cry. Most teens will pout for extended periods of time no matter what you do. Your daily routines will matter more than the right summer camp or preschool. Two of the only memories I have of my father are the way he we went to bed when we were little and reading the paper on Sundays. I also remember him driving his work truck home at dinner time.

I'm not telling anyone this from some pinnacle of parental bliss. I've got one that got sent home from school in trouble this week. I've got one who behaves a lot better for teachers and sitters than she does for me. And I've got one that everyone thinks is just darling, but he's the baby. They are all pretty great kids. But they get in trouble and make me hopping mad and lose my tools and papers and all the other things you might expect. So I guess for all that we seem like vegan hippies and left wing lunatics, we're a pretty normal family too.

Quizzes

2005-06-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for goofy internet quizzes like the belief-o-matic, so I couldn't help but follow Chalice Chick and take the "What New York Times Op Ed Columnist Are You?" quiz. No surprises here:

You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist
with a knack for both making sense of the
current economic situation and exposing the
Bush administration's lies about it. You
somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on
the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your
guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell
with 'em.

Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
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Triangulation

2005-06-05T18:36:00.000-07:00

It was Phil Ochs who said that liberals are 10 degrees left of center in good times but 10 degrees right of center when it affects them personally.

When you mix liberalism and scientism in the way that Unitarian Universalists often do, this can easily lead to to an odd competition to appear more moderate or more reasonable, independent of the actual issue at hand.

In lifestyle issues, this is particularly troublesome. You meet vegetarians who want to prove to you that they are reasonable and not as extreme as vegans. You meet protestors who want to prove that they are the good ones unlike so-called anarchists. For UUs it is often, we are religious but not like that.

In coarse language, I would like to ask: who do you shit on to prove you are not a freak? So many of my UU friends struggle so hard between being so middle of the road, middle class and middle America and the knowledge that they are also on the fringe of maintream American culture.

A lot of the time, people pick on groups that overlap with my community such as vegetarians, hippies, militant breast feeders, union members, anarchists, Buddhists, or any other group that can serve as sufficiently beyond the pale. It is even more fun when it happens within a group (such as when pre-consolidation Unitarians and Universalists used to do this to each other or when Democrats try to do this to left leaning members of their own party)

Read myirony

2005-06-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

I don't think I will be writing a post today. I am too engrossed in a discussion with Chutney over at myirony.net. Eventually I will use some of my comments there to make a post here.

Obligatory GA post

2005-06-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

I'm finally booked for GA. I'll be staying offsite and renting a car. Vegans need to forage wide for food in Texas. Actually it appears that there is a wealth of south Indian restaurants in Dallas so I think I will survive. Between that and Wholepaycheck Foods I should be just fine.

James Luther Adams mention in Harpers

2005-06-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

On TerranceDC's Diary on Dailykos I found out about an article by Chris Hedges (whose War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning I sometimes argue against) in Harpers entitled "Soldiers of Christ II: Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters" Hedges closes with a recollection of JLA's teaching at Harvard Divity School:

I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next.

Liberal politics and liberal religion

2005-05-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

A recent James Carroll column illustrated for me a point of distinction between the principles of liberal religion and the strategic dictates of liberal politics.

In an interview about his book How The Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev describes the status of the Irish in America during slavery:

...In 1841, the Irish political leader (in Ireland) Daniel O'Connell--he was something of a combination of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, the most popular figure among Irishmen throughout the world--issued an appeal--he and 70,000 others in Ireland--to the Irish in the United States, calling upon them to join with the abolitionists in America, to join the struggle to overthrow slavery. Treat the Negro everywhere as your equal, your brother, he said, and in doing so you will bring honor to the name of Ireland. O'Connell was speaking from a situation where Catholics in Ireland were members of an oppressed race. He was the leader of their movement to overturn that kind of subjugation. So he naturally reached out for alliances with the struggle against racial injustice everywhere.

The Irish in America rejected him. He went so far as to say if you don't do this, then we won't recognize you as Irish. They thought about it and concluded, okay, if you force us to choose between our love for Ireland and our attachment to the institutions of our new country, then it's South Carolina forever. What they decided to do was integrate themselves into American life as citizens, invoking the privileges of whiteness.

Having fair skin made the Irish eligible to be white, but it didn't guarantee their admission. They had to earn it.

Q: And how were they supposed to earn it?

A: There were two things they had to do. First, they had to distance themselves as much as possible from the black population of North America. They had to do whatever they possibly could to create barriers, to insulate themselves, to separate themselves from the black population.

The second thing they had to do was overcome the resistance to their own civil rights coming from the people who were better off than them--that is, the native Protestant, bigoted, anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner establishment that was running the country.

There was a relationship, in fact, between these two tasks. To the extent to which they could prove themselves worthy of being white Americans--that is, by joining gleefully in the subjugation of black people--they showed that they belonged, that they deserved all the rights of citizenship. On the other side, to the extent to which they were able to force their way into the white polity of this country, they were able to distance themselves from black people.

What my book is about, then, is how the Irish used the different institutions of American society to accomplish these tasks: the Democratic Party, early labor unions, the church, forms of urban social disorder--race riots, for example. It's about how they managed to implement and carry out an agenda which finally gained them admission into what I like to call the white race in America.

Carroll's column "America's Mess, not Bush's" lays out a small explanation of how so many of the things that (stereo)typical UUs like to accuse the Bush administration of that are not significantly different from the policies of earlier Democrats or Republicans. Of course he leaves out the similarities between the Patriot Act and the Counterterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that I always like to remind people of.

MUCH AS Democrats and liberals hate to admit it, the Bush disaster did not begin with him. That he swatted aside the structures of international law as a mode of responding to Osama bin Laden was prepared for by Washington's habit, begun in the Reagan years, of dismissing international courts, ignoring treaties, and refusing to meet obligations to the United Nations and other transnational bodies.

Certainly, I suppose many UUs sided with the World Court when they ruled against the US for mining the harbors of Nicaragua.

The International Criminal Court, just coming into existence as America's war on terrorism was mobilized, fulfilled the impulse to replace revenge with adjudication. Completing the Nuremberg legacy, this new court would have been the perfect arena in which to make world historic cases against Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, but George W. Bush, in one of his first acts as president, had ''unsigned" the ICC treaty.

This momentous act of political destruction had been prepared for, though, by Bill Clinton, who, despite signing the treaty, had never argued for it. Both presidents were protective of the US military because the Pentagon regarded itself as a ready target of ICC prosecution, a fear that seemed paranoid until revelations both that American soldiers routinely abused prisoners in Iraq and high Pentagon officials unilaterally rejected norms set by the Geneva Convention. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were epiphanies of a new Pentagon lawlessness, but it was rooted in several decades' worth of dismissal of international law.

Ironically, US military initiatives, including the invasion of Iraq, were justified with the language of human rights, as if the promotion of elections and the liberation of females defined the heart of Washington's agenda. This fulfilled a trend that began when liberals and neo-conservatives found common ground in the Clinton-era ideal of ''humanitarian intervention," as if every war in history hadn't been justified by its perpetrator as humanitarian.

The measure of the humanitarian character of interventions, of course, is taken by what happens on the ground in the countries at issue. In Afghanistan and Iraq, new levels of sectarianism, ethnic conflict, warlordism, drug trafficking, and radical Islamism are all evident in the broader context of destroyed infrastructure, widespread malnourishment, and obliterated civil society.

I would suspect however that many UUs were in the "humanitarian interventionist" camp during the Clinton era and probably during the Afghanistan invasion.

The deeper origins of the current crisis are revealed in other ways. The compelling, but rarely admitted purpose of shoring up American control of supplies of oil and natural gas is expressly reflected in the job histories of Bush's policy team, but the explicit claim of economic hegemony over the Persian Gulf region, with the threat of military force to back it up, had begun with the ''doctrine" of Jimmy Carter. The stated focus of America's Mideast war is on the threat of terrorism, yet the overriding strategic issue remains oil supply. That reflects the old thirst, the old policy.

Democrats and liberals blame George W. Bush for the American mess, but it is worse than that. In sum, the immoral and futile war in Iraq, increasingly disapproved in polls but steadily unopposed by politicians, belongs not just to our feckless president, but to the nation.

Even the current hero, Carter, for all the houses he has built since then, built the groundwork for precisely these kinds of interventions. Sure, one can argue that countries must defend themselves (or more nebulously their interests), or strategically, that the Democrats/liberals must be serious about foreign policy and appear macho if they want to be elected. But is this in line with your values?

What would it take for American Unitarian Universalists to ever have to decide to side with Unitarian Universalist values against Americanism? For the most part, even our dissenters and protesters are a patriotic bunch. Sadly though, it is not as easy as the "Peace is Patriotic" bumpersticker that is so popular here. Sometimes peace, "inherent worth and dignity" or even "the use of the democratic process" are in direct contradiction with the actions of the patria or father land.

Our faith is not one that gives us Romans 13 as a cop out, to say that the established powers are all of G-d so we should not oppose them.

I'm remind of REM lyricsfor Exhuming McCarthy:

You’re beautiful more beautiful than me
You’re honorable more honorable than me
Loyal to the Bank of America

It’s a sign of the times
It’s a sign of the times

You’re sharpening stones, walking on coals
To improve your business acumen.
Sharpening stones, walking on coals,
To improve your business acumen.

Vested interest united ties, landed gentry rationalize
Look who bought the myth, by jingo, buy America

I feel guilty for posting yet another Jeremiad. Maybe I'll move on to something else now that I have finished my Law and Prophets class. It's ironic that our situation today is vaguely reminiscent of the time of the Pauline letters, where people are called to figure out how to balance their values with their participation in the larger society.

Jumped the shark?

2005-05-31T12:15:00.000-07:00

I think blogging may have jumped the shark. If me starting a blog was not enough evidence for blogging no longer being hip, I think I may have seen the writing on the wall (or t-shirt to be more accurate).

We took a much needed vacation (long weekend really) and among other things visited a theme park. Someone in line ahead of me had a t-shirt on that said "I'm blogging this." If I'm blogging and a random woman with two kids at Six Flags has a blogging t-shirt, te end must be near.

O Captain! My Captain!

2005-05-25T01:24:00.000-07:00

Because I just turned in my final paper for this term, I thought I would share with you Walt Whitman:

O Captain! My Captain!

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

And now I bid you all good night. With any luck, after errands, appointments and some creative childcare juggling, I will be at the Alliance for a Better California rally at the State Capitol tommorrow evening. I'll probably wear my UU pin and a union t-shirt.

Slow posting

2005-05-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

It was good to make it to church today.

But if anyone is looking for encouraging words about going to seminary or graduate school our house is not the best place to ask. I am working on my last paper (Old Testament Exegesis: Literary and Feminist Criticism and Judges 4 and 5) and my partner is working on her last exam.

According to sitemeter, I've gotten multiple readers today looking for Phil Och's "Love Me, I'm A Liberal." I'm also seeing a couple googlers per day looking up Dave Chappelle, Dave Chappelle's mom and Dave Chappelle's religion. So to review, Dave's mom was the first fellowshipped African American woman UU minister. Dave converted to Islam last year and is taken an "extended vacation" in South Africa.

Sage

2005-05-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

I generally try not to geek out in this space, but I really like the Sage RSS reader extension for Firefox. I can quickly check for updates on several dozen blogs and news feeds at once and see content in a handy summarized form.

Occupied

2005-05-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

I've been inundated with emails of late that bemoan any development that bestows upon Palestinians or Arabs any degree of humanity. I joined a coworker's yahoogroup on eschatology and I get messages every day from Christian zionists who see anything that gives Palestinians the slightest space to live or be free of abject poverty and terrorization as a demotic and apocalyptic sign. (Of course the reverse of this is me always having to explain to Palestinian friends that I know very few people in the United States who are actively interested/involved in peace and justice for Palestine who are not Jewish).

Another coworker actually used the word "sand nigger" in a conversation. Given the curent climate, maybe I should not be surprised. But it is a term I didn't learn until college from a friend who had been its target (A friend who is in fact from a Sephardic Jewish family who passes for "Arab" in many parts of the US).

Even in a Unitarian Universalist context, I have found a certain hostility whenever I challenge stereotypes of Islam (my favorite is when people think of Islam as being a particularly and uniquely political relgion. I would make the claim that the typical Friday juma sermon is no more likely to be political than the average Sunday UU service). In my local congregation, I felt well received when I gave a sermon on Eid Ul-Fitr that looked at common ground between Islam and Unitarianism and at the idea of exploring Islam the same way many other UU's currently look at Buddhism and paganism. At least one member came up to me six months or so after my sermon and mentioned that he had started reading the Quran to be a little more informed. I suggested that he might want to read Karen Armstong's Islam: A Short History, A History of God or Muhammed: A Biography of the Prophet.

I suppose I have to be doing something right if people come to me months later and talk about how they were influenced by one of my sermons. It sure is easy to lose sight of that sometimes between exegesis papers, regional subcommittee on candidacy paperwork and the other assorted joys of being a student.

Bill Moyers rocks

2005-05-16T15:33:00.000-07:00

A transcript as well as audio (Real Audio) of Bill Moyer's speech at the National Conference on Media Reform is online:

We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch -- to punish the journalist who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

First, let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead. I should point out to them that one of our boys pulled it off some two thousand years ago after the Pharisees, the Sadducees and Caesar surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. I won’t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice, they might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove’s slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

Perfect religion from the neck up?

2005-05-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to highlight a discussion on the livejournal UU community about passion and the lack thereof in a lot of UU services.

Calliope writes:

I don't want to return to Christianity because the box it comes in is too small to hold my beliefs. But, oh! I want that emotional experience in my worship! Is Unitarian Universalism inherently unable to move us so passionately, or is there a way to bring what's missing into our fellowships, congregations, societies, and churches? Is the lack of one common belief structure the cause of this emotional distance?Because truthfully, I find most UU services to be dry and lacking passion.

A good number of comments follow, with comparisons between youth worship and adult services. I know Scott Wells and others have discussed this before.

I have to take something of a middle ground. I am a very low church kind of person, but I do think that sermons should not be the same as academic lectures. I would like our services to have a greater sense of majesty that traditional rituals often have, but I very quickly start to react against the sense of artifice I feel from many contrived rituals.

UU Tax Exempt Status and Social Security: A Threat in Indiana?

2005-05-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

Perhaps Chalicechick was on to something when she was worried about UU churches' tax exempt status.

From Talking Points Memo:

And back on Monday, Rev. Lisa Doege of South Bend's First Unitarian Church was planning to hold a program on the topic of Social Security at the church, which included Notre Dame Professor Teresa Ghilarducci, a pension policy expert who President Clinton appointed to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's advisory board and Indiana Governor O'Bannon appointed to serve on the Board of Trustees of the State of Indiana Public Employees Pension Board.

But Monday afternoon Doege got a call from State Representative Luke Messer, the executive director of the Indiana Republican party, who warned her that her church's program on Social Security might cost the church its tax-exempt status.

Talking Points Memo is covering in depth the social security privatization issue. This particular post was really intended just to cover one particular congress member who has taken several different positions on the issue.

Jim Wallis from Sojourners had something to say about the morality of Social Security destruction:

The Judeo-Christian faith tradition has much to say about intergenerational commitments. The Old and New Testaments could not testify more clearly that we must "honor thy father and thy mother" -- and care for widows and orphans, the ill and the disabled. And there is no trust more sacred to biblical faith than the injunctions to care not only for our immediate families but also the larger family of all humanity, especially the least, the last, and the lost. In Jesus' words from Matthew 25, "As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.”

We are commanded to “Honor your father and your mother,” which is linked to our own well-being and security, “so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12) Deuteronomy 5:16 repeats the commandment and adds the motivation “that it may go well with you,” again connecting the generations in a mutual sense of responsibility for one another. Proverbs 23:22 tells us to respect the generation which has gone before: “Listen to your father who begot you, and do not despise your mother when she is old.” And Proverbs 28:24 goes further and warns against any economic ill treatment: “Anyone who robs father or mother and says, 'That is no crime,' is partner to a thug.” Ezekiel 22:7 extends the warning to “orphans and widows.” The Christian New Testament picks up the same themes and in Matthew reminds us again to “honor your father and your mother.” Ephesians 6:1-3 says: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother,’ this is the first commandment with a promise, ‘so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.’"

The constant theme is that the well-being of our parents and the next generation is spiritually connected to our own. Social Security is a major way in which our society honors the previous generation by representing a civilized nation’s answer to the age-old problem of old-age poverty. This covenant assures the old in our community that growing old should not be a tragedy, and this commitment is strongly interwoven into the fabric of American society. Without Social Security, nearly half of elderly Americans would be in poverty; with it, only 10 percent are. For nearly two-thirds of the elderly, Social Security provides the majority of their income. In addition, over one-third of benefits from Social Security go to non-retirees, increasing opportunity for families facing unpredictable challenges. Social Security helps more low-income children than welfare (TANF), providing support to children who have lost a parent to death or disability. And when a worker becomes disabled or dies, the entire family is protected from poverty by benefits. There are now well over 4.5 million widows and widowers who depend on Social Security.

Where is between?

2005-05-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

I asked a few questions about UU Christianity in an earlier post. I wonder what language there exists between "Its all mystical nonsense like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny" and "There is one God, whose nature is Love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness."

In the last year, I have read the entire Bible and all three volumes of Paul Tillich's systematic theology. I've always said that as a person from an unchurched background I was able to explore Christianity, Judaism and Islam in much the same way that other UUs might explore Buddhism or Native American spirituality.

After two years of seminary, I have a newfound appreciation for the questions of Christian theology and the tensions that are mediated in the Bible. I know some of my colleagues resent the time we have spent on the Bible, and would never take the time to study Tillich because of his Christianity or because of the difficulty.

I appreciate contemplating the dialectic between the eternal infinite transcendent and the present finite immanent.

Given this I'm never sure whose side I am on in the great UU theological catfight. I wouldn't say I am a Christian but I'm sure my atheist friends would feel like I am not one of them anymore.

If I was a Christian I would adopt a Tillichian doctrine of the spirit with an understanding of God as the infinite ground of being. I know that I could say the same thing in panentheist terms, process theology terms and Buddhist terms (among others).

GA

2005-05-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

Trying to get serious about GA plans. It seems like all the workshops I'd like to go to are scheduled against each other. I wonder if I can manage to get all my paperwork for aspirant status cleared in time for the discount too. So who is going and for which days?

songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work

2005-05-09T00:42:00.000-07:00

On Sunday morning I posted a favorite Woody Guthrie quote. "I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."

I've shared before that I am from an unchurched background. A child of agnostic parents with fundamentalist parents. So I didn't have much church as a child, but I did have folk music.

Most of my objections to Christianity when I was younger pretty much would be addressed by replacing the word song in Woody's quote with the word church or religion. I hate a church that makes you think that you are not any good. I think that is why I was so infatuated, like all good new UUs, with talk of "the inherent worth and dignity" of all individuals. (I'm vaguely reminded of The Life of Brian: "We're all individuals!... I'm not!")

I was in my Unitarian and Universalist History class a couple weeks ago and was struck with the fact that the Humanist Manifesto really did approximate my beliefs at a particular point in my life. It still is not that far removed from how I see the world. I started this blog with a post about how I feel about that kind of supersessionary rhetoric now. I have a degree in literature from a "good" enough school to lay out a rap about normative gaze and erasure, intersubjectivity and pluralism if I really thought it was necessary.

I've heard it said that the new more spiritual UUs are just waiting for the cranky humanists to die off, and I've weathered the deluge of UUs and other hipsters who think they are too smart to believe in anything. I've heard that most of the faculty at my school are Christian and they are taking over, and I've heard that it is very hard to "come out" as a Christian there.

Personally, I'm not sure I really know what UU Christians believe. I think I can't quite figure out Christianity without the belief in "Jesus as your personal savior" like my neighbors. I'd love to hear my articulate UU Christian blogger colleagues describe this more.

There are times when I am so proud of how Unitarian Universalists really do include people and help "you take pride in yourself and in your work." But there are times when I feel like it is just a smug club, of people who feel too good to be like other people. Yuppies who look down on working folks with big families and big cars. A kind of nontheist or posttheist prosperity theology. Some notion that if people only ate better or had more schooling they wouldn't have health problems or money problems. Churches that, "run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling."

How do we live up to the Universalist charge to give people hope and not hell? How do we "sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."

I know a good discussion about heaven is better than the real thing. But what end does it serve to rehash the same arguments endlessly?

I hate a song...

2005-05-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow. Woody Guthrie

More later, after the Mothers' Day festivities. Strangely, I'm going to use Guthrie to talk about religion and theology.

Love Me I'm A Liberal

2005-05-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

I think I have shared before my own ambivalence about political liberalism and its relationship to liberal religion. Here for your entertainment are the lyrics to Phil Och's classic Love Me I'm A Liberal and a modernization by UU folksinger Evan Greer.

Love Me, I'm A Liberal
by Phil Ochs
I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
As though I'd lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don't talk about revolution
That's going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad the commies were thrown out
of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
as long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

The people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I read New republic and Nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I'm almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like Korea
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I vote for the democratic party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Love Me, I’m a Liberal (2003)
new lyrics by Evan Greer
I trade Internet jokes about Dubya
They sure are funny to me.
But don’t even think about asking
Me to give up my new SUV
I don’t know what you mean about oil,
I just wish that gas could be free,
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal!

Well I’ve signed about a thousand petitions,
And my golf score is six under par.
I keep myself up on the issues
By listening to N.P.R.,
And you know that I’m changing the world
With these stickers all over my car!
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal!

Well you know that I’m not a racist
Been on the side of the blacks all along.
And I always give a few extra dollars
To the young man who mows my lawn!
And I’ve never read Emma Goldman
But I know that she must have been wrong!
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal!

I went to that pro-choice rally,
I think women should get equal pay.
But it’s sure nice that my wife cooks me dinner,
And puts my clean laundry away!
And maybe our country ain’t perfect,
But revolution is never the way.
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal!

You know I support Gay marriage,
And I want the environment clean.
But I’m too busy at work to take action,
So I’m just voting for Howard Dean.
I know we must work inside the system,
It’s the best one that I’ve ever seen!
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal!

I cheered when they caught Saddam
I knew that the news wouldn’t lie,
Thank god that the war is now over,
And my 401-K is on the rise!
Because you know that I love my country:
best democracy money can buy!
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal!

Seminary weeks

2005-05-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

I having one of those endless seminary weeks, where it seems I will never finish my program, let alone do CPE, internship and settlement.

I'm working on papers on creation in Romans 8:18-39 and on the Song of Deborah in Judges 5:1-35, particularly Jael's killing of Sisera.

"Minister shoes"

2005-04-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

I was talking about church with my daughter on Sunday morning. We go to a lay led fellowship and she think of whoever leads the service as a minister. (This comes from a great kid's book she loves called Welcoming Babies. The diversity references are very subtle in the book, aside from the basic premise of exploring all the ways that babies are welcomed around the world. A careful reading reveals an interracial Quaker couple in one of the pictures (the baby is being welcomed by being passed from person to person in the meeting and one of the children is very excited about her turn to hold the baby) and a same sex parenting couple in another (they are planting a tree to welcome their second baby). Another baby is baptized by Reverend Lawson (sn African American woman). Luna was convinced at first that Rverend Lawson must be the baby's grandmother, but we discussed it and she learned the word minister to understand who Reverend Lawson was and what I am studying at seminary.

My kids are used to a lay led fellowship and when we visit other congregations they are usually in RE or nursery. The last time Luna went to a housed church with a settled minister, she tried to put away the chairs after the service was done.

So to make a short story long, Luna was asking if I was leading the service. Later that day we were unpacking some clothes from a trip and Luna found a pair of wing tips that I only wear with my suit. She said "Daddy, I see your minister shoes."

I was reminded of the fairly heated exchange at Boy in the Bands about Unitarian Universalist ministerial vesture. I'll admit that I am very low church in my outlook and my family tradition is particularly against special garments for ministers, but there has to be some alternative to my Blues Brothers bible salesman black suit.

Im sure I will never go as far as Scott (despite all my best efforts to the contrary, I'm too much of a nerd and a hippie to really pull it off) but do I have to look like Johnny Cash every time a give a sermon in church? I try to balance between giving a greater sense of liturgy or even sacraemnt with a conscious effort to not "play minister" as a seminarian in a lay led fellowship. In our fellowship, the custom is a suit for men who lead a service. One member who is a retired minister wears a stole with his suit (as does a visiting minister who leads service regularly).

Maybe I just need a nicer suit.