Burning our Regrets, Safeguarding our Intentions

I have always liked the ceremony of the turning of the year, the one where you reflect on the year just completed, release your regrets, and welcome fresh intentions for the year to come. I often don't get to lead the service just after Christmas, and blessedly so, but this year, I found myself scheduled for December 30. Knowing I would be pretty tired after the extra services at Solstice and Christmas Eve (little suspecting at planning time that Solstice would be snowed out), I planned to take the time that Sunday morning for ceremony, not sermonizing.

It was good. We spent time in silent reflection about the year just past, then in spoken sharing about particularly important life events that people were willing to make public. Then everybody took little slips of paper and wrote, after a further silent reflection, the things they wanted to release to the universe, regrets, missteps, habits, they hoped would be taken from them somehow. I invited them to crumple up the little papers and drop them into a big bowl. As my helper passed the bowl through the congregation, it turned out that the big metal salad bowl from the church kitchen made a wonderful sound as it was struck by the crumpled papers. People threw them in with gusto -- bong!-- even launched them from a distance. They crumpled them tightly for maximum effect. What a great sound to signal release!

We gathered into silence again, accompanied by the strains of "Auld Lang Syne" played on Celtic harp. And as the silence deepened, we reflected on what we wished to invite into our lives, now that whatever that other stuff was had left. There was time to write or draw reminders of those intentions, and then an invitation to safeguard them, put them someplace where they would be seen from time to time, even tape them to the mirror so they would be seen every day. That felt good too.

We sang again, and closed our ceremony. Then some of us went outside to burn those little crumpled papers from the salad bowl. We went downstairs and reported that the "bad stuff" had been released to the universe, news received to general rejoicing.

I'm thinking that simple ceremonies have a place in our church calendar, ceremonies that invite inner work rather than sermons that stimulate thinking and reflection. Not every week, but from time to time.

A Step Toward Marriage Equality

I'm excited! The State of New Hamphshire is about to have legal Civil Unions. That means gay and lesbian couples can have at least some of the rights and responsibilites married heterosexual couples have. It has real practical importance for many -- health insurance as a family has got to be better than health insurance as two individuals -- even though the benefits are limited. To me, the real importance of this step toward "civilizing" same-gender commitments is that it signals a shift in social attitudes. The conferring of legal recognition, however limited, confers the dignity of being recognized before the law. Couples raising children together need not pretend to have some other kind of relationship than the one they have. They can come out of the shadows and be themselves. Families.

All kinds of families need all the help they can get. They get it in our Unitarian Universalist churches, and I'm thrilled that they now get it in some other faiths as well. And now they get a little nudge in the right direction from the State of New Hampshire. Stable, loving relationships are a gift from the Cosmos. They are also the product of deep commitment by the people involved plus acceptance and encouragement by family and frieds, church and community, yes, even State.

So in the early moments of 2008, I plan to be standing on the State House steps blessing and making legal the commitments of as many same-gender couples as come forward to participate. And for those of you who are elsewhere, I invite you to raise a glass to toast this sea-change in New Hampshire. From then on, things will be different for same-gender couples who make commitments to one another here in the Granite State, for those commitments will be made on a firm foundation undergirded with law.

It's not full marriage equality, but it's a start.

A Conference to Remember

I attended the every-other-year conference of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU) at the beginning of November, in Oberwesel, Germany, not far from Frankfurt. The organizers had assured us that it was a very lovely site, and indeed it is. We stayed in a youth hostel on top of one of the steep hills beside the Rhine River, right next door to a real medieval castle. We strolled through a village with medieval ramparts that once protected it from marauders. And we sampled wine made from grapes that grow on nearby hills.


But we didn't do much tourist stuff. We were there to confer, to meet other Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists, and to help our tiny worldwide movement grow. We are transforming from a primarily anglophone movement into one that operates in multiple languages. Still, the conference is held in English, and everyone who attends really needs to speak and understand English.


There was solid representation from our English-speaking communities in England, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Plus, there is an organization of fellowships started by Unitarian Universalist expatriates with congregations around Europe. The biggest groups that don't speak English as their first language are from Transylvania (in Romania) and from Northeastern India, in the Khasi Hills. There are smaller and emerging groups in many places -- Italy, Spain, Mexico, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, Burundi, Nigeria -- and individual people working to gather congregations in Bolivia, Argentina, and other places.

The practices of Unitarians (mostly they call themselves Unitarians) and Unitarian Universalists around the world vary considerably, as do their circumstances. It is good to be such a diverse group, energizing to be ourselves in conversation with one another.

Falling Leaves

For some reason, or maybe for no reason at all, this autumn has been a time when people within and close to our congregation has been departing this life. I have performed seven memorial services since the latter part of August. Although one was for someone who had not been going to church but had a family member who had been to a service at our church and liked it, and another was for someone who had once attended our congregation and meant to get involved but never did, the others were for people we knew much better. We had another death just before Thanksgiving, but the family is waiting for a memorial service until after the holidays. And with these fall memorials this year has come the resonance of those from the year just past and from fall deaths of last year and the year before and the year before that.

It's a lot of loss for a relatively small congregation, coming bunched up like this. Yet at the same time, we had the most productive holiday fair ever, and with the coming of cool weather in November, we have had healthy attendance on Sundays. I'm thinking the release of all that sadness, not just for these losses, but for the many losses perhaps not adequately mourned some time in the past -- I'm thinking the release of that sadness may have released some new energy we didn't know we had. Maybe it's true that the place of sadness within the heart lies very close to the place of joyous energy, so when you touch the place of sadness with love and care, you also nourish the energy of joy.

As the difficult season of holidays comes upon us, I wish everyone courage to touch the place of sadness with love and care, rather than simply to pretend to be happy.

Community Gathering

I was driving home early Saturday evening, having thoroughly enjoyed officiating at the wedding of a wonderful couple from church, when I noticed something odd at the corner of Union and Harrison, right near where I live. I slowed to pass a gathering of people from the neighborhood waiting for the arrival of emergency vehicles after a car crash. I threaded my way through, parked in my driveway, and walked back out to the corner. The people from the vehicles seemed not seriously hurt, though one of the cars was rather spectacularly smashed. It seemed that the other vehicle, a large pickup, had just driven out in front of her, and what could she do?


I stood with my neighbors, whom I mostly never get to see, conversing about the scene, then also catching up with each other. I met the grown daughter of my next-door neighbor, who is now living with Mom, only I didn't know. I feel like such a stranger sometimes! I've only lived here for six years, after all. It's too bad that it takes a crash like this (or a fire -- there was one of those a couple of years ago), to bring us all out of our houses to stand around. Crashes that happen at night or really early in the morning don't do it either, and not that many of us are around if one happens during a weekday. But there we were, and this was a community gathering, the only kind we have. Nice people, my neighbors. I wish there were moments to hang out without crunched cars and the distress that goes with them.

These little side streets, Harrison, Prospect, not so much Myrtle, though it does happen, Orange, Pearl, they seem to bring cars together when they meet with Pine, Union, and Maple. On Pine street, the most recent accident brought the news that people can't see around the cars parked along the side of the street to be able to cross safely. On Union Street, I think some people forget to look both ways, since the other nearby big streets are all one way. And of course, people get going too fast on those big streets, so even if somebody could see to pull out, they might not be able to see far enough. We had a fatal accident not long ago on Maple street when someone was going way too fast and another car pulled out of a little side street in all innocence. But the most popular seems to be just blowing through stop signs, as the girl in the pickup did on Saturday. There was one of those at the corner of Union and Prospect a while ago that happened just as I stepped out onto the porch to pick up the morning paper. I spoke with that driver. She was distracted, she said, because she was rushing to the hospital to see her mother, and she had just not looked to see the stop sign.

We never reach a conclusion about all this at our community gatherings. We wait for the ambulance and the fire truck to come; we notice who goes in the ambulance and who does not. We comment about how it happened and who should be more careful. Everyone should be more careful, and we have no idea how the way this whole thing works could be changed to make it less accident-prone. I confess, I am grateful to have an event that brings everyone out to the sidewalk to stand around. But there's got to be a better way to do it!

Two Weeks in September

The beginning of September is an intense time for those of us who work in churches. It's a time for finding out things that have happened in the families of the congregation since June, a time for getting things started in all kinds of church programs, and a time for special celebration. It's exciting and exhausting. This year we added to the madness by hiring a new Director of Religious Education at the very last minute, doing interviews on Labor Day weekend, getting an agreement by the end of that first week, and spending a whirlwind week getting the program started for real. I arrive at this moment like a person washed up on the shore after flailing downstream through white water rapids, grateful, a little surprised, and somewhat disoriented.



I missed out on an ordination I wanted to attend, partly because my car had a mystery with a dashboard light that might be telling me something is wrong. But actually, the car is just reflecting my body and spirit, flashing a warning light that something might be overheating. It was telling me that if I didn't drive far out of town, then if the overheating occurred, I'd be close enough to home to be towed. I felt that way personally, as well.

The mechanic found a simple solution to the flashing light on the car. In the meantime, I attended to my own personal flashing dashboard light, using the time I would have taken for my colleague's rite of passage to mark my own passage from the time of beginnings -- the first two weeks of September -- to the "regular" fall season.

On Labor Day weekend, a small group gathered on Sunday morning to mark the end of the summer season. Two full-sized services later, the shock of seeing "everybody" is wearing off. Two weeks ago the green of the trees was just thinning out toward yellow and red. Now we start seeing real color. The autumn equinox arrives this weekend. A touch of fall is in the air, mixed with the still-warm breath of summer. Time to be with the fading light, the rising colors, the falling temperatures, and the rhythm of daily living.

Homeless Teens at School

I visited a drop-in center for street kids in Mexico City when I was there last spring, a place with couches, a computer, showers, and food. I was grateful that there was someplace the many homeless kids in that neighborhood could go, and after getting acquainted with the man who directed it, I left some money and vowed to myself to find some more once I got back home.


Now I read that there are street kids right here in Manchester, teens who can't live at home and don't have anyplace else. Too young to go to the shelter, it's not at all clear where they sleep or how they eat. And some of them are making the heroic effort to attend school in the middle of all that. What's up with this?

Little by little, we bring the so-called less developed world home. Kids on their own, rightly or wrongly believing the foster care system would not be better, undetected by an overburdened system until registering for school brings matters to official attention, they really live here in this little Yankee city. And surely there are more kids, the ones who have decided not to try to keep on with school.

I feel ashamed to know this about my city, and I don't know what to do.

The Market for Ideas

I am old. I remember the early '70's when we had that earlier energy crisis. I remember how sensible it seemed to conserve, to wear sweaters in winter and open windows in summer, to walk or ride our bikes, to grow our own food, to insulate things better, to drive cars that burned less fuel, and all the rest. Something happened, and I remember that by the early '80's, it was all buy-buy-buy again, and never stopped. Some of that stuff has stayed with me, but there are many younger people for whom it is just strange. My nephews have fun by driving cars around on logging roads, trying to burn as much gas as they can on each stage of every rally race. They think I'm a little looney. My son seems to have received some of that earlier sensibility, though -- maybe from all those home-made oatmeal cookies of his childhood -- consuming less, growing a garden, and all that. Of course, we all use ski lifts intemperately, and I have a particularly bad habit of getting onto airplanes to zoom over oceans and continents at great expense of greenhouse gases and fossil fuels.


Now, here is the predictably recurring energy crisis again, and here again is a certain wackiness I remember: All the conversation seems focused on corporations and how they can make money in a new and differerent environment. Of course that matters, but it's as true now as it was in the '70's that decentralized solutions have a big contribution to make. The solar panels that just warm up your hot water are still simple and effective, never mind whether they make electricity. Where are they? Smaller houses with better insulation still make sense, and some people are working on making them popular, but do they make the news? No, it's all about cars and power plants.


It's the same as with the so-called War on Drugs. If we just reduce the demand, the problem becomes manageable. Consider these things, I say:

*live in a smaller house or apartment, closer to the place where you work.

*work to make your city a better place to be a pedestrian and user of public transit.

*turn things off, all the way off, and only turn them on when you are really using them.

*find things to do that don't involve driving someplace.

*when you need things, buy them used.

*find things to do that don't involve buying something.


Solar this and that? Get those light bulbs that use so much less energy first. Then see what makes sense for your life about buying more stuff. Something solar might be a good idea.

One thing I'm pretty sure about: They still don't know how to deal with the waste from nuclear power plants. Quite a lot of time has passed since that other time when we all just said "no" to nukes. You would think they might have found a solution, since that's the #1 technical obstacle, right? Did they look? As long as we don't know what we're going to do with the waste, I say, it makes no sense to build new nuclear plants, even if some environmentalists have been persuaded to advocate them in this scary new world of global warming.


Another thing I'm pretty sure about: Coal is bad.


So, beware of "plug-in" electric vehicles. Where will all that power come from? Nukes or coal.
(I'll give my jeremiad on trading energy shortage for food shortages with ethanol another time.)


Feet. Bikes. Buses. Trains. Living closer to where we want to go. Using less. Planting trees and gardens. We could have a good life doing those things. Why not?

Our Fair City

It seems the Honduras football team from Manchester narrowly lost the league championship to Brazil, a team centered in Nashua. They proudly carry the name of Manchester thoughout the region, proud of themselves, full of energy and commitment. The only thing is, they don't have a place to practice, and the community in general doesn't know who they are.


Ours is a city who has known who she is for a long time. She has baseball and American football, she has hockey, amateur theatre, art schools, and now things are changing. She was able to find a place in her self-understanding for slam poetry, which is a good thing, because her children are making a name for her in the slam world. But now, she's been totally blindsided by this Honduras thing.


Football? She thought she knew what football was about. She thought she had it covered. But here are these lean young fast-running men with their round ball running up and down the field, and she says, "me?" She says, "Are these mine?" They laugh and say "yes," but until now they never even knew how to talk to the Parks and Rec about how to reserve a field. So now they are asking, and now she is wondering. But not for long. Of course they are hers.


All those soccer moms and dads in the suburbs, that's not the kind of game they are playing here. It's football, and serious. The Hondurans play, and I've seen the Africans playing, too, and I don't know who all else. Some people say there isn't a well developed audience for soccer here in the United States. They say David Beckham had to come and help bring his kind of football into the mainstream. But nobody noticed: There's a big group of fans in the United States, but most of them are cheering for Mexico, most of them are speaking Spanish, and others of them are speaking French, Swahili, Portuguese, German, Italian, you-name-it.


Who needs to learn that world football is already a big sport in the United States? The people who already thought they knew who we were; the people in all the cities who thought they knew what was happening with their people.


Hello, Manchester (New Hampshire!) -- welcome to the world.

Wild Speculation

Intrigued by what I learned about the Visigoths in Toledo, Spain, I came home and started poking around to see what more I could learn. Ulfilas, the apostle to the Goths, created a Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible into Gothic. A partial copy of his work remains, the Codex Argenticus, now housed in Sweden. He taught an Arian form of Christianity, that is, he was a Unitarian. He was deeply involved in conversation with leaders of the emerging Roman Catholic faith, trying to persuade them to a different theology. Both Saint Ambrose in particular had Arians the neighborhood of his church in Milan, Italy. They had their own church building and enough followers to make life difficult for the emerging Roman Catholic hegemony. Ultimately, Ambrose won the day, on the theological scene. And ultimately, the Visigoths moved westward to what is now the South of France, but I have no idea of cause or effect.

The Visigoths had come from Dacia, which is more or less where Romania is now. They began their commitment to Christianity when they were there, serving as allies of the Romans, defending the borders of the empire. They were displaced by the Huns, at least as rulers. Who knows how many stayed behind? Much later in Translylvania, part of the ancient Dacia, a Unitarian theology found new roots when it was imported from Poland in the sixteenth century. Even though it came most directly from Poland, the Transylvanian version of Unitarianism originated in northern Italy, one of the places where Ulfila's gospel was taught.

Ultimately, the Unitarian Visigoths traveled to Spain, where they settled in the Duero Valley as well as in Toledo and some other strategically located cities. They continued to have influence in the South of France, the very part of the world where the Cathar heresy later had to be stamped out. I read that the Cathars "denied the incarnation". Unitarians? I wish I knew more.

And of course, many centuries later, Michael Servetus raised the banner of Unitarian theology one more time. He came from Northern Spain, from Aragon, not all that far from the part of the world where the ancient Visigoths had settled.


My wild speculation is that varieties of Unitarianism were actually not uncommon among the Christians of the old Western Roman Empire, that vestiges of much earlier teaching continued to live among the people, even if they had been pretty well suppressed among the official leaders of communities.

My sense of Ulfila's theology was that he had much in common with the Gnostics who are so popular among academics just now. His was a pretty "high" christology, not something most U.S. Unitarian Universalists would find congenial, but I have the sense he was the founder of an important, though hidden, tradition in Western Christian theology. So here's my wild speculation: that the Visigoths were carriers of seeds that blossomed much, much later as Unitarian and humanistic flowers in Romania, in Northern Italy, in Southwestern France, and in Aragon. I'm wondering: if this is so, how were those seeds preserved? Of what did they consist? Who carried them?

Overnight on the Train

The train, the "Empire Builder", was 45 minutes late pulling in at the depot in Whitefish, Montana, where about 50 passengers waited to join its westward run. This is one of the classic American trains, connecting Chicago and Seattle along an efficient and scenic path. The Amtrak station in Whitefish features a statue of the Great Northern Railroad's symbol, a fierce looking muscular Rocky Mountain sheep, recalling the glory days of rail. The cars are large and tall, permitting views of the often spectacular scenery, though the first part of our trip was to be in the gathering dark. The ride was smooth, and the cars were clean. We had sat outside the station, enjoying the soft warmth of the sumer evening, watching the sky turn from red to gold to gray when the headlights of the train came into view up the track.

Quite a few passengers got off in Whitefish, ready to go experience Glacier National Park or wherever in this beautiful northwest corner of Montana. When all of us were seated, it was clear that there were just enough seats left for passengers expected to board in Spokane -- the train was full. I was sitting with a lay minister from Missoula, Montana, on her way to a family wedding, so we had pleasant conversation. Across the aisle, two young men from Russia were settling in for the night. In the next seats ahead of us, an older German couple and their adult son conversed about their day. There were others from places where train travel is more normal than it is in the U.S., and they seemed to be taking the funkiness of American rail travel in stride. And the train seems to have some regular riders who live along its route and want to be connected to other places on it. One family from North Dakota always goes to the coast of Oregon for the month of August, and they always take the train.

I had a good time riding this train, despite the fact that no matter how well I think I sleep on an overnight anything, I always need a nap the day after in a real, flat, bed. In the morning there were fabulous views of the Cascade mountains east and north of Seattle and then of a sun-drenched Puget Sound, with its islands, framed by the Olympic mountains across the way. I don't know when I will have the excuse to do it again, but the arrangement of my family members through the Northwest makes it likely this will not be the only time.

I guess I'm writing to recommend seeking out times to ride the train. This one was a sociable sort of travel, with a chance to exchange friendly chat with random people. There is much more room on a train than on a bus or an airplane. You can walk around. There's the experience of the passing landscape. Although car travel provides advantages of luggage space and passenger comfort, in the cocoon of the car, you meet no one. And I'm thinking that the matter of meeting no one as we travel is a really important loss to us culturally. So when you travel, maybe even if it's not about taking the train, do take a chance on finding ways to meet people along the way.

Fires Over the Mountain

Here in Northwestern Montana, it's fire season, and at the moment there are more forest fires burning here than in any other state. We are to the west of the tallest mountains, in a beautiful flat valley where rains do fall from time to time through the summer. This is a place where agriculture is being displaced by a kind of sprawling urban development, though farming far from gone. I walk borrowed dogs, waving at people driving their pickup trucks to work. It's possible to forget about the fires, mostly, though not for the families of smoke jumpers and other fire workers who are all away, doing what they have to do in the summer.

In our valley, it's really hot in the afternoon, then cool at night and very pleasant through the morning. And the weather is really all we need to know about, because this is a family with a new baby, just seven weeks old. I'm with them to get to know my new granddaughter, Melody Rose, who is a healthy, hungry, baby, determined to teach her new parents how to care for her. They are all doing fine, but no one has slept more than a few hours at a time for the last seven weeks.

The fires are far over the mountain, out of sight, out of mind. Then comes the news that one of them has closed the main east-west highway, U.S. Route 2. And with that news, the thought that my departure on the train might be at risk, since the tracks run very close to the highway. The Amtrak computer advisory line assures me everything is fine; the local Amtrak's official voice recording assures me the same. But the fires suddenly have a presence for me that they had lacked in the days before, and today for the first time, I notice the light haze in the air and the slight smell of smoke.

Fires, actual and metaphorical, are with us all the time. It's worth taking some time to be aware of them. But we had important living to do, being Melody's family, so it would have been silly to spend much time attending to them. What's the moral of the story? Something about balance, I'm guessing, and developing the judgment to be sure what the right balance is between paying attention to the larger realities and the more intimate ones. Not the one right balance that is true for everyone, but the individual right balance that is true from within.

Hey, It's Olympia

There we were, my nephew Ben and I, enjoying very creatively prepared food and excellent wine in a well-appointed restaurant. Like the other customers, we were dressed casually in jeans and whatnot. Today, it was more striking than usual. The waiter had on a colorful fringed hat to help with the celebration of Lakefest going on outside. Dishes from the special Lakefest menu arrived as if for ambulatory eating -- my blackened wild salmon with mango slaw arrived on a plastic plate, and I noticed a couple nearby receiving sandwiches on paper holders -- connecting us to the spirit of the fair. In reminding me not to dress up, Ben had said, "hey, it's Olympia." And indeed it is, a place where dressing up is just really not on anyone's list of things to do, but also a place where good food is an important part of what's going on.

Continuing my survey of public transportation options, I had declined to rent a car at the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Since I arrived really late, the only option was the airport shuttle, which drove the hour-plus to Olympia and efficiently dropped its six passengers on our respective doorsteps. I'm staying downtown in the middle of everything, so we can walk to many things we want to do, but when we wanted to see a current movie, a car was necessary. We can see old movies by walking. Actually, there is a good bus system, and I'll bet we could have gone to the suburban movie by bus. And since Ben has a car, we chose his favorite sushi place a little out of walking range, over the one (perfectly good, he said) right near the Lakefest and my hotel.

When I leave, I'll take the regular bus to the Seattle train station (walking to the bus station), then go by train to Northwestern Montana. Trains are supposed to be very good in terms of greenhouse gases per rider per mile. But I can't forget that I did arrive on this coast in an airplane.

I did make a contribution to the Nature Conservancy to offset the carbon emissions involved in my airplane ride from the East Coast to here, and I'm planning to do that now with all my flights. More trees can't help but be good, and maybe I'll support alternative energy, too, when I take these heavy CO2 airplane rides. When I looked into what's called "carbon offsets," it wasn't at all clear that every enterprise in the offset business was actually going to do something helpful. One commentator wrote, "let the buyer beware!" So I went with trees from a known source. The plane remains the best way for me to get to see my children, alas!

But truly, using less is what we have to do. We can only go so far with alternative fuels without alternative environmental damage. Already it's clear that wind energy is not so great to look at. And that ethanol creates a moral problem about using farmland that could be devoted to food for hungry people. Nuclear power is just as bad as it was when we thought about it a generation ago. All these are alternatives to walking more, using our bicycles, taking the bus or the train, living closer to work, that sort of thing. So let's walk. And plant trees.

A Bit of Culture Shock

So I've been home now a little over two weeks, and I'm getting used to driving everywhere and sitting in the office and being part of ongoing relationships again, but it's a bit of a shock. This includes the matter of taking my meals at home, something I didn't expect. On my travels, I could have a satisfactory breakfast for 2.50 Euros, with delicious coffee, better than what I make at home, and a chance to hear the hum of other people's lives, even to chat with some of them. Then, at 2:00 or so in the afternoon, I'd have a nice dinner for something like 10 Euros (more in Madrid and Barcelona, of course!), again with the "people" benefits of being in a restaurant, and no dishes to wash after. A bit of cheese and fruit later in the evening, and my food day was complete. Clearly, I can eat for less at home, but it feels lonely and troublesome. And that 2:00 PM meal does not exist here.

Driving everywhere: I live in town, where I can walk to work, walk to many shops -- the drug store, the bank, the library, a lovely pastry shop, a greengrocer, a small supermarket, several restaurants -- but the "real" supermarket, the health store, places to buy clothing, the airport, they are all only available by car. Or by this quirky local transit system, if you have lots and lots of time and a really good sense of humor. And there are places I want to go for fun where the car is really the only choice. In Europe, I even took the train to the trailhead for my backpacking trip.

Of course, the Europeans are inventing suburbs where cars are really convenient and stores are designed for people to drive up to them, but I think it's time for all of us to be thinking about going the other way. It's ironic, I think, that the closest location of my bank is a drive-through, whose automatic teller can be used by foot after hours, but you're not supposed to approach on foot, just by car. So when the humans are there, they can't wait on you if you're not in a vehicle. I've resolved to bring the walking and transit riding to my life here in the land of "live free or die," not to be a prisoner in my wheeled metal shell.

There are physical and spiritual benefits to being in the world without that shell of a car, I'm thinking. I wonder how it will be?

Feeling At Home

I spent five whole days in one place, in Montserrat, up in the hills outside Barcelona. And lo and behold, I started to feel really comfortable there, the way I sometimes do when I go to a retreat center in the "normal" world and spend a few days. I started to know where to find the better cup of coffee, understand which doors to push and which to pull, know which trails led where, and stuff like that. More, some of the staff started to know who I was and exchange pleasantries.

But there was one thing: being in Catalunya is like being in Quebec, only more so. As with French speakers in Quebec, there are people who mainly speak the local language, Catalá, and have a kind of basic grasp of the "other" language, in this case, not English, but Castellano (that´s Spanish, to those of us who are not into emphasizing that Spain has more than one language). So I was walking around, feeling happy and comfortable among all these people whose speech was simply a kind of unknown music flowing by.

It was strange-- the feeling of comfort made me want to speak English with them, and sometimes that was the better choice, because English is also taught in school and has less political baggage than Castellano. The church services were conducted in this alien tongue, so I just let it all wash over me (a good thing, in this case, not to understand what they were saying). Beautiful Gregorian and other chants by the monks who live there. If I had understood better, I might have felt less at home.

Anyway, on St. John´s eve, I went up for the bonfire and the fireworks and learned the steps for the sardana, so I´ve begun my initiation as a Catalan. Now, the language, that´s another story! And the wanting to speak English? Maybe that mainly means it´s time to go home for real.

On The Rocks

I took a walk up the hill from the monastery in Montserrat, a gentle and upward path to the little chapel above the St. Michael´s lookout over the cliffs. People on pilgrimage to this place to see the special image of the Virgin and Child used to climb up from the little village far below, and then, I read, they would gather themselves into a procession to walk the rest of the way. I imagine singing and carrying of special objects aloft, and a generally festive atmosphere, since the direction of travel is a gentle downward slope rather than the steep climb up from Colbató. And I remember walking with the pilgrims on the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago, and imagined how they would be feeling when they finally arrived in Santiago de Compostela. Festive, and tired! (There´s a giant censer in the Santiago church designed to overcome the smell of thousands of pilgrims all at once. Bathing facilities have improved since the middle ages...)


Today the pilgrimage to Montserrat is made pretty much exlusively by bus, train, and car. I suppose you could climb the trail from Colbató, which would be like reaching the summit of Mount Washington on foot, only worse!The nicely dressed pilgrims would look at you as if you were a bit of a freak in your climbing clothes, then get back on their buses and wonder who whose inappropriate ruffians were? I wonder about the spiritual benefits of pilgrimages by bus, but then, I have a kind of Henry David Thoreau approach to matters of the spirit. The folks on the Santiago chat were always chiding each other about looking down the nose at non-walkers. It´s easy to do. They stroll into the great spiritual monument, then out again, go buy an ice cream, have a look around. Has any inner anything changed for them?

As they say on the Camino, "Everyone has their own pilgrimage". So I´ll hold my judgment and concentrate on my own Way. Today, some people celebrating the 75th anniversary of their town´s "giants" brought them on pilgrimage to Montserrat, danced them around in the plaza outside the basilica, with festive drum and bagpipe-chanter accompaniment. Who says pilgrimage has to be solemn and serious?

Go, Stop, Then?

After all these weeks of traveling from one place to another, I´m in one place now for five whole days, with nothing in particular to do. I´m in Montserrat, Spain, and I´ve been here before, so it´s not like I have to explore all the great sights. I do have to go walking on these wonderful mountains, and I do have to do something "spiritual", since this is such a spiritual place, but this moment is about stopping, gathering myself for a return to normal life, whatever that might be.

I just got an email message from the yogi I met in Mexico City, reminding me that I want to be home so I can tell people about his work with the street kids of his town. Yesterday, while I was visiting with two of the leaders of the Madrid UU congregation (very small, but strong), I received a copy of their service for this Sunday and I thought, "how can I use this?" I confess, I talked with Mike Palmer on the phone to get an update on church politics so I can be prepared for re-entry, and I´ve been in touch with Cyn to keep abreast of the pastoral care landscape. Talking with Cyn also makes me want to be home so I can check in with folks in person

Television here includes CNN in English. In Madrid, TV was totally Spanish and all about Rafa Nadal, the new and Spanish world champion tennis player, and of course Real Madrid, who just won the Spanish national football championship. With a little Basque separatism on the side. So with the help of TV, re-entry is starting to happen. June 30, I should be back in New Hampshire, and I´m hoping to bring body, mind, and spirit all at once!

Theological Irregularities

I´ve been looking at religious paintings and sculpture more than is my ususal custom during this trip to Catholic places. Having unearthed that theological irregularity about the Unitarian Visigoths, it´s occurring to me that I have seen evidence of plenty more. Some are subtle, like paintings that show the Virgin Mary with a red garment covered with a blue one, that is, divine on the inside and human on the outside, like the way they color the robes of Jesus. Some reflect a controversy, like the "old" Joseph versus the "young" Joseph. God must be the father of Jesus if Joseph is really old, yes? Then what we to make of the wonderful, happy young Joseph showing off his baby in the Burgos cathedral? There´s the Big Mother thing, and the madonnas from the caves, miraculously discovered at early stages of christianization all over the places I have visited. There is one from Guadalupe(really) in Extramadura, Spain, and like the others, she tends to be dark skinned, with a long, thin face. Who is she?

I am bemused by the view that Mary was so Virginal she didn´t really have her baby the way a normal mother would. There are paintings of her standing, surprised, looking at a baby that seems to have suddenly appeared on the floor in front of her. "Oh, there you are!" (And I remember the drawing from Leonardo´s notebooks showing the angel bringing the annunciation of Mary´s pregnancy in what could euphemistically be called the usual way...)

There´s a really intriguing painting by El Greco of the burial of a nobleman everyone loved, showing two saints having come down from heaven to help him into the grave. Above the scene of the burial, an angel assists a little, pale something into what looks like a birth canal that will allow it (the soul of the deceased, one supposes) to pass into the heavenly realm, pictured with billowing clouds and populated with the usual dignitaries. And among the paintings of heavenly realms, there is indeed variation about who is there and who is highest.

People had different ideas about those old stories during the Middle Ages, even as they do now, and the Powers That Be had their hands full keeping their doctrines straight. So what else old is new?

The First Unitarian Kingdom

Here I am in Toledo, Spain, and I have news: The first Unitarian kingdom was here in Spain, the rule of the Visigoths in the fifth and sixth centuries. First thing: these folks were Christians, but not the Roman or Byzantine kind. They had been evangelized in their earlier home of Dacia by their kinsman Wulfila, a student of Arius, the famous first Unitarian heretic. They had rites and books, architecture, music and customs. All of these had gradually changed, no doubt, during their passage through Northern Italy on their way to take over the administration of the Iberian provinces of the collapsing western Roman Empire. Second thing: They managed to pacify and hold most of the Iberian peninsula for awhile, until things got complicated and the Muslims invaded from the South. (Prior to that, their king had converted to Roman Catholicism, so the Unitarian version of the kingdom must be said to have ended then).


After the Muslims took over, the Visigothic church evolved into an institution that was able to co-exist with the Muslims and the Jews. Their rites continued to be observed in Latin, but gradually everyone´s daily language shifted to Arabic. There is no reason to believe that the post-conquest church was any less Unitarian than its predecessor, though I don´t know very much about that part. I do know that the Visigothic kings had appointed the bishops. I think unitarian christianity is particularly well adapted to coexistence with Muslims and Jews, so I´m hoping this information will be encouraging to christians to move away from trinitarian absolutism.

Visigoths. Who would have thought? Originally from what is now Sweden, they say. Hardly barbarians by the time they were pushed out of Dacia by the Huns. Interesting folks.

Piles of History

Yesterday I was in Burgos, today I am in Toledo, and even with that relatively brief interval in the realm of modern transportation, it´s all an experience of piles of history. The piles are deep and high. They go back to Roman times and before, though the Romans were the ones who really got serious about piling up stones and making sure things stayed put.

When they dig under the streets, they find remnants of Roman and pre-Roman settlements, sometimes graves, sometimes just stuff, sometimes walls and floors. When they take the paint or plaster off the walls, they uncover frescoes that were put there a thousand years ago. The guest house where I stayed in Toledo has a plexiglas window through the floor into a lower level where they found a medieval cistern preserved with its cover, ready to use the next time the city water system fails.

Digging through all this material, what you find depends a lot on what you think beforehand. There´s a long-running argument in one town about whether a certain building was originally a church or originally a synagogue, with lines drawn between people who want to assert a long-running Christian hegemony and those who believe the earlier settlements were more diverse.

Diversity seems to be gaining in popularity. Here in Toledo, there is a former church that has been restored as a museum of the synagogue it once was. And a church building no longer in use but still owned by a local parish that is being restored as a sort of hybrid of mosque and early church. The local Catholic icon, San Ildefonso, is these days being identified with his Visigothic roots. Since the Visigoths were Unitarians, this is quite an exciting development for some of us!

It would be nice if some of the anti-diversity of the intervening past could be erased, but still, this looks like progress to me, this reconstruction of the ancient past to reinterpret who was here and what they believed.

Enough for Now

I have been walking with the pilgrims on the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago. Today I am in Santo Domingo de la Calzada after walking here from Nájera. It was a really great day of walking, and it was my last. Tomorrow I´ll take the bus to Burgos, beginning the last segment of my travels. This has been a great experience, even if I spoke less Spanish than I wanted, due to the international nature of the pilgrimage.


It was also an inexpensive segment of my travels. The system of albergues makes it very affordable to stay overnight if you have a sleeping bag or sheet sack. Of course, it´s pretty interesting for a whole lot of people to share just a few toilets, wash basins, and showers, but after awhile, you get into a kind of group rhythm that makes it work. Is this kind of walking possible anywhere in the United States? We have places that would be just as good... and they wouldn´t have all those annoying gold retablos in the churches, and the walk wouldn´t come with any sense that visiting churches was a big part of it, maybe.


It´s different from the Appalachian Trail, which is all about getting in touch with the lingering wildness still visible in the East. It´s about culture and civilization and history, with walking thrown to slow you down as you pass through it.


Of course, some people manage to pass through all this culture and civilization and history on foot without really seeing much of it. They focus on their kilometers per day -- forty is a favoite number for this group. Then there are those who become preoccupied with the care of their feet and knees, so the only place they visit in any town where they stop is the farmacia. I got to do some of that, and it is culturally interesting, learning what another group of people think is the right way to treat this and that, but it´s pretty narrow.



But I´m wondering, do we already have anything like this? and if we wanted to have one, where would it be?

A Grandmother

I have been expecting to become a grandmother now for months, and yesterday I got the news that baby Melody Rose McNally has arrived safely. Mother and baby are well, father (my son) is completely tongue-tied with delight. It´s really strange to be so far away. I did give some thought to the value of walking for expectant mothers as I walked along the Camino de Santiago. I remembered the special statue of the Mother and Child in the cathedral at Valencia where pregnant women bring flowers and then walk around the ambulatory nine times to bring them a healthy delivery. But at the very end, Megan was told to rest -- no more lawn mowing!--mostly because the weather was so hot.


Anyway, I´m a grandmother. I´m excited, but I won´t get to see this baby until some time in July. The women I am more or less walking with congratulated me, of course, and started calling me "granny". Now what? Maybe it´s unusual or maybe it´s normal for this part of Spain, but it´s really hot during the day. Since we are not grapes, who grow everywhere here and enjoy the hot weather, we have to get up really, really, early to walk before it gets just too awful. Grandmother or not, the road is waiting, and I am walking.

Inside the Cathedral

There are big churches everywhere along the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago. Some of them are falling into disuse, others are being tended by smallish congregations, and some have the support of large communities of faith. Many reflect the Spanish "golden age" of the seventeenth century, which was indeed an age of gold. It generally just makes me angry to see the huge golden retablos, because I think about the people who were native to the Americas who died by hundreds and thousands to make that gilding possible. Yet some of the art work is truly gorgeous. In Viana, a city that is much less important now than it was in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, I entered a gilded church with wonderful, vibrant figures of saints and angels reaching out from their sculpted places with lifelike grace and enthusiasm. And I had to think. Some of my thoughts were about now.


Here in Viana, artists worked with the materials that came to them, creating inspiring images. Those materials made it possible to have the four different shades of gilding, among other things. When you´re an artist, what shame is there in working with the best to create the best? And don´t we do the same? We work with the materials at hand to create our art and our lives, not really thinking about where things come from and what the human or environmental cost might be of what we are using. Because it´s there, right? And somehow it is okay, because the materials are there.


I don´t know what to do about this, other than to find ways to make sure the materials come to us from sources that don´t do violence to humans, other beings, or the Earth herself.


I stayed at the refuge for pilgrims provided by the church in Viana, and after the evening service, the parish priest presided over an informal and pleasant spaghetti supper for those of us who were spending the night there. Then he invited us to come back into the church by a passage that led from our quarters to the choir loft. Soft music played in the gathering dark. The silence was very serene within the great stone space of the building. The gold was far below. Just the quiet spirit remained. Inside the cathedral, many things are possible -- in the silence, there is no need to pray to any deity, and it´s easy to absorb the peace that seems to emanate from the walls. I left confused. It was not all right, that business with the gold. And I don´t even know what awfulness attended the raising of the great stone structure in the first place. Yet here, something breathes from the walls that really is all right.


I guess it´s true. Things are usually mixtures of good and bad.

Your Own Camino

It´s a kind of odd, rolling party in some ways, walking the Way of St. James, the Camino de Santiago. People drift along the trail, passing one another or meeting at stopping places to share a snack. People drift into the albergues, washing socks shoulder to shoulder, and drift around town on tired feet, looking for food in the tiny grocery stores and in restaurants. So we´re always meeting each other, especially in the small towns. Some keep to themselves, others reach out to ask about food, health information (feet!), news from the trail, and such.

Some people are taking the bus between places, some are riding bikes, and a great many are walking. Today, it was getting really hot by noontime in Logroño, and a lot of people decided not to go on in the afternoon. So there was a big crowd of pilgrims outside the refugio as its opening time neared. No way that crowd would all fit into the 80 beds available. I went with two other women to look for a different kind of accommodation. There, in a fourth floor walkup, was a pleasant room with a bed for each of us. Wonderful!

Different ones of us do different things. Some move right along, walking or riding fast, burning up the trail to get there quickly. It is, after all, the point of this exercise to cover the kilometers and arrive at Santiago de Compostela. But there are those of us for whom the journey is more important than the destination. There´s nature, history, argiculture and industry, and especially people to meet along the Way. That would include me. And that goes better by foot.

Different ones of us have different orientations to the spiritual journey. Some are inclined to travel in silence, even to go fasting, carrying symbols of the religious faith they live by, attending services at every opportunity. Others treat it more as a hiking vacation, enjoying the passing scene very much in a spirit of relaxation and fun. Then there are those with some kind of in-between attitude.

We meet one another, and learn something of everyone´s journey. Everyone has their own Camino. And all Caminos are of value-- there is no one right way.

20 km till breakfast

I am walking with the pilgrims of the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago, through Northern Spain. We sleep in albergues, dormitory-style housing for pilgrims, some private, some sponsored by the local town government. Everyone gets up early, packs up their pack, puts on their boots, and heads out the door -- usually the people in charge want everyone out of there by 8:00 AM. And usually, there is breakfast somewhere in the picture. Either at the albergue or at the coffee shop down the block. In Zubiri, high in the Pyrenees Basque country, there would be breakfast at the local bar at 9:00, which seemed a long time to wait. So most of us headed down the trail, thinking there would be a cafe con leche and a pastry in the next town. We were soooo wrong! In this old-fashioned farming part of the world, coffee shops are just not done. Despite the fact that we were passing through four respectable sized towns, there was no coffee and no pastry.



The Spanish couple I had shared the table with the night before while we had a little supper told me that they usually had dinner at 11:00 PM, which made it possible for them to simply get up and go to work the next morning without breakfast. And so they did on this day, setting off aat 7:30 or so for their day on the trail. For those of us with the breakfast habit, it was a hard day. I had some leftover hard sausage and cheese, so there was at least something to eat at 10:30, when it became clear there would be nothing from the villages.



When several of us gathered at 2:00 in the next place we would stay overnight, it was time for comida, Spanish dinner. So we ate, and afterwards we had coffee, not the usual after-dinner cortado, but the breakfast cafe con leche. It had been 20 kilometers from getting out the door of the alberge to the first sip of coffee, way to long for my taste! But when a shorter version of this pre-breakfast walking began to happen a couple of days later, I was ready. The folks at the little store only six kilometers away were able to rustle up a bocadillo--a sandwich on a tiny french-bread style loaf -- that worked really well, and I had convinced myself that breakfast coffee is truly optional.



This walking is quite an experience. There is solitude, and there is camaraderie. There are chances to speak Spanish, even chances to interpret for people, and there are conversations with no Spanish at all-- English, spoken in various degrees by people of many nationalities, French (which I still have not recovered but now understand somewhat), German (totally unknown to me). We sit at table or meet on the road and find out what we can say to one another. It is often very good.

Big Mother

I am traveling in Northern Spain, walking with the pilgrims of the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago.

It´s true that the very early images of Mary the Mother from this part of Spain show someone who is very large, holding a grown man on her lap. I like to think this has something to do with an idea about a mother goddess, a holdover from what people knew about the unseen world before the coming of Christianity. But Big Mary went away, replaced by a young mother who delights in her infant son.


Then occasionally you see an image that evokes that Big Mother feeling, but the image is of Saint Anne, who is sometimes sculpted as holding a grownup Mary on her lap, with the grownup Mary cheerfully cuddling her baby. I like Saint Anne, the Big Mother. I understand that in the South of France, where grapes are farmed without irrigation, it is Saint Anne to whom the farmers address their concerns, and Saint Anne whom they thank with generous offerings after the harvest.

Who says the old ways have passed into the mists of forgetfulness?

A Day of Silence

It happens when you travel to a place where you really don´t speak the language. It happened to me in France. I realized when I went to buy my ticket from Montpellier to Avignon after spending some time on the train from Barcelona -- I went to say something in French, which I thought I knew a little, and only Spanish would come forth. There I was, completely in the realm of síl vous plait, pointing at something, and merci. Fortunately, my relatives met me at the station when I arrived, and this awfulness was eased. I listened to French for a week and spoke English with my hosts. At the end of the week, it was time for me to go back to Spain, but by a very long and indirect route. I was going to St. Jean Pied de Port, in the far Western foothills of the Pyrenees.

Clutching my ticket, I got on the train. I was to ride four trains in all, from 10:30 AM to 10:30 PM, all among speakers of French, left to my own devices for lunch and supper and finding my connections. It was for me a day of silence, not unlike a silent retreat. I watched the scenery as it shifted from vegetables to vines to grains, noticing with pleasure as we passed the wonderful pile of walled city at Carcassonne. It rained, another good silent retreat thing, sweeping the landscape with waves of water. Lunch happened, thanks to a team of ladies accustomed to dealing with silent strangers, and eventually dinner. Simple following of directions and pointing at my ticket when confused got me from one train to the next.


Then there I was at 10:30 at night, loose in a strange town with medieval walls around the part of it I was supposed to find my way in, and behold! a man from Quebec appeared to help me find a place to sleep. It wasn´t the one my relative had called, but it worked fine. The man was planning to spend a pleasant day seeing the town and speaking French. I, on the other hand, was in a hurry to leave there and get someplace where they speak Spanish.

I am here to report that an occasional day of silence is a good thing. I learned some things about the work I am doing and wrote them down. And now, I´m having a great time speaking Spanish. So -- it´s a bad thing not to speak the language. But, it´s a situation that may bring blessings.

Can I Do This?

I unpacked my backpack this morning and took out a lot of things I use regularly, trying to get ready to go walking. The lighter pack is still pretty heavy, not by Appalachian Trail thru hiker standards, maybe, but pretty heavy. I have to have my little portable office with me since I´m actually writing a book, but maybe not all the printed material. And I can surely do without the church-lady clothes and shoes. I mailed a box to myself to pick up later in Spain and another box home. Not light enough. Can I do this walk with this pack?

Each day for three days, I got up in the morning, put everything in the pack, and started walking. The house where I am staying is at the top of a hill at the end of a long ridge, so I had a choice of lots of elevation change or not much. The two questions: can I walk up the 900 meter hill at the entrance to this walk? and can I walk tens of kilometers every day for two weeks? My conclusion after taking the test walk down the hill and back up: no, I can´t really do the 900 meters straight up. I vowed to look for a bus or a taxi to the pass and walk from there. It was one of those moments of maturity I dislike so much.

Yes, I´m a short person with a pack that is a little (just a little) too heavy, in a body that´s a little heavier than I would like and older than I would like to admit. And maybe, just maybe, once I get up that big hill, I´ll be able to walk every day and carry the pack. I´ll try.

Michael Servetus Country

It is pretty far out in the country, in farmland along one of the tributaries of the Ebro River, about three hours' drive west of Barcelona, the birthplace of our early hero, Miguel Servet, Michael Servetus. It's prosperous farm country; there are big warehouses and lush looking fields and modern equipment alongside the signs of long habitation. An ancient church here, a hilltop tower there, a cluster of ancient looking houses over there. And outside one of the clusters of ancient looking houses, an official sign pointing toward "Miguel Servet Casa Natal¨ the birth house of Michael Servetus. It seems that the Unitarian hero and martyr we know as Michael Servetus is actually a bit of a celebrity in eastern Aragon.

At the annual meeting of the Servetus Society, new publications were announced, new partners from the scholarly community were welcomed, and a good financial situation was recorded. They get support from the government of Aragon, as well as from their private donors and foundations. The mayor was there to announce plans for more money and more attention to the ancient monastery where Servetus´ father was an important business manager. Apparetly, he´s enough of an attraction to be worth public attention. There´s a high school named after him in Zaragosa, for instance, a suitable memorial for a man who valued education and thinking for yourself more than anything.

In farm country, it´s common to think that people don´t have anything to do but work n the fields and vote for the most conservative candidates available. That seems not to be the case where the memory of Servetus is cultivated along with the grain and the grapes.

Over the Top

Well, there it was, in all its unfinished splendor, the church of the Holy Family designed by Antonio Gaudi at the end of his career, the project that consumed him completely, to the point that he lived on the premises, neglected his clothing and personal care, to the point that when he was hit by a streetcar one day, people had no idea this ragged old man was the world-renowned architect whose fame lit up the city of Barcelona. The project was ravaged during the Civil War, and it could have been recovered more quickly if more of the drawings and models had survived, but the truth was that its completion had to wait until the advent of computer-guided stone cutting, so complex were the curves he specified. But now it is being built. It is clearly farther along than it was two years ago when I saw it for the first time. The columns really do make the interior look like a magical forest. Over the top. Way over the top. Wonderful and beyond wonderful.

Gaudi is almost a definition of over the top. The center of the city is studded with his more playful works and the works of his imitators, as well as of earlier and later seriously brilliant architects. And the dream garden, the Parc Guell, where originally the idea was that some great public art would enhance a kind of playground for the wealthy, a subdivision to be populated by gracious gentry living in gorgeous homes, a place to party in grand style. But... life intervened, and the gorgeous houses were not to be built, with the ultimate result that the great public art became a great public park for everyone in the city. The day we saw it, with its fanciful designs in tile and stone, it was full of tourists from everywhere in the world. Over the top. Another story of pushing the limits, getting burned in a way, and coming out the other side with something amazing.

I think that´s why Barcelona continues to love Gaudi. It´a city with a taste for the extravagant and the wonderful. And probably one of the reasons I am so taken with Barcelona. There´s a liveliness in the place, a spirit of adventure that calls to me even when I´m on the other side of the ocean.

Three Cultues Twice

Three cultures. In Mexico, it´s the European, the Indigena, and the Mestizo. In Spain, it´s the memory of the long centuries when the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jewish cultures coexisted in the Iberian peninsula. Ferdinand and Isabella declared Spain a Catholic country and expelled all the Jews and Muslims who had not already left in 1492, but before then, there had been this long period of three cultures living side by side, with varying degrees of comfort and discomfort with each other.

I went to a gathering of the many cultures of religion that now populate the Iberian Peninsula, a Parliament of World Religions, framed for the local area along the lines of the much larger Parliaments being sponsored by UNESCO. I believe they got the idea from the 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, a Parliament that was the brainchld of some Universalists and Univarians in the United States. In Spain, the Catholic majority seems to be learning that there are not just three cultures, but many, and some of them are learning that there are useful things to know about spirituality from learning more about these other cultures.

In Mexico, Catholicism has absorbed many practices of the religions that were there before, making it a more diverse faith tradition than you might think on the surface. They go through various times of insisting on more purity and other times of allowing more latitude. Mexico could learn from Spain about the deadly consequences of insisting on purity. The third culture, the one that exists now, is a mixture. I saw a group performing a ceremony that clearly had roots in both European and indigena cultures, and one of the striking features was the use of some very old-seeming European style musical instruments, like from the sixteenth century.

There was a concert Saturday night during that interfaith conference that featured an early music group who played "Three Cultures" music. This would be a little older than those musical instruments in the pueblo in Mexico. It was clearly music that was of a certain period and clearly music that shared certain instrumentation -- despite having differences in content and purpose, the music of three cultures sounded like music of one culture-- the three shared a great deal. What a shame that some of those who shared in the richness of that time were declared "other" and required to leave.

There was a laugh and a lesson at the end of the concert. We were on a university campus, a place that wanted some security while at the same time wanting to economize on its security force. Our residence was just outside the main campus. Between the concert and a night´s sleep there was a checkpoint. But the checkpoint was only staffed --we suspected, but had no official word--until midnight. This being Spain, where things go on into the evening, and it being a concert with three different groups, the concert was not over until well past the witching hour. There was no one at the checkpoint. Instead, the big gate was closed. What to do? I confess, after strolling around a little and failing to find a quick alternative, I was among those who climbed over the gate, went back to the residence, and went to bed. A more cautious, rule-following soul we saw the next day had wandered the streets until 3:00 AM, looking for a legitimate way to leave campus. There are still walls. And we still have different ways of dealing with them.

On Foot in Suburbia

I had a car when I was in Washington State, staying in the suburbs of Olympia and Seattle, traveling to the slopes to go skiing. Last week, I was on foot in the suburbs of Washington, DC, staying in Rockville, Maryland, with nothing but the kinds of normal errands to do: mail some things, get some groceries, use the internet connection at the library, buy some baby things for my prospective grandchild. I was also wanting to walk, since I´m about to embark on this two week ramble through northern Spain. Anyway, the weather was lovely, the azaleas and dogwoods in bloom, and I felt blessed to be there, slowed down to a walk.

And yet, there I was. There is a bus that goes by very close to my friend´s house, a bus whose main mission is to take people to the Metro (subway). I found I could ride it easily to my usual destinations in the morning, but when I waited for it in the afternoon, it really didn´t come at the times the schedule said it said it would. Hmm, I said to myself, at least in Mexico City the little buses come all the time and whenever they show up, it hasn´t been too long a wait. But walking was good. I wasn´t in a hurry and I needed the exercise.

Getting to the shop of baby clothes was more of a challenge. That required another bus. But where to wait for it? The website did not really say. I got there, I thought, and waited. The bus stop sign had the number of the bus on it, but it didn´t come. I asked! Around the corner! There it goes now! So I waited for the next one, and pretty soon, I got to the baby clothes place. They had exactly what I needed. Nearby, a pleasant restaurant had a nice lunch for me. And across Rockville Pike, I found the right bus stop and waited with confidence, somewhat longer than I thought I would, for the bus to take me back. The baby clothes and I walked back through spring breezes and vistas of May apples, happy to be on foot once again.

I like these places of peace and green, with azaleas and dogwoods and May apples and such. I like to walk through them for whatever reason. And I appreciate the little buses, now fueled with natural gas, and hope more people will take them. They´re not as practical for anytime travel as the little buses in Mexico City, but they´re really worthwhile. I wish them well, the little buses everywhere. May we all walk more and drive less and find a bus when we want one.

"They're All Catholic"

Since I attended Bible Study and worship with a small group of Unitarians in Mexico City, I can tell you with certainty that "they are all Catholic" is not true. Like us, Mexicans who start thinking about faith find themselves asking questions, and then, whether they are Catholic or Evangelical (the other large faith group in Mexico), they find out that questions are not in order. So they drop out, or, if they are lucky they find us. Or the Quakers. The group I met is affiliated with the ICUU, the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, and they call themselves "Unitarian," a designation that has meaning for them. After all, Miguel Servet, martyr to the cause of Unitarian theology, was from Spain.

Conversation in the Bible study group was sophisticated. They had been reading Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. They were talking about whether the prophets had predicted the coming of the Messiah in the person of Jesus. And, since Fancisco, their leader, is an activist for gay rights, among other things, they were reexamining some of the passages that are used to condemn gay and lesbian ways of love. During worship the small group who gathered were invited to contemplate loss and mourning in a biblical framework, but not to be restricted to what had already been written. We got a little instruction about the parts of a psalm, and proceeded to write our own.

I thought about the conversations I had had in San Cristobal de las Casas, where there is no Unitarian group. The university students I met there were very intrigued with what I described when I talked about my faith. How could some form of Unitarianism come to them? Building some sort of liberal religion directly from Catholicism and pre-Columbian religions, finding songs they already know and changing the words... what would it look like? sound like? Could it be the kind of religion an increasingly educated population needs?

Something is changing in Mexico. In Mexico City they followed up very quickly on legalizing partnerships of same-gender couples with decriminalizing abortion. Separation of Church and State has become a battle cry. Is there an opening here for liberal religion? I think so. And it needs to emerge. The Unitarians are there, and I hope they step forward. It could really be good. I´m holding them in my heart, sending energy, and saying prayers for their good work at an important moment in history.

Go Figure, an Immigration Story

Mexico is a good place to be while contemplating migration issues between here and the U.S. One of the EEUU guys at the place where I´m staying admitted to having run out of money once while he was here, so he worked under the table as a teacher of English until he got enough money for bus fare. "I was an illegal alien worker" he said, noticing the irony of being an illegal estadounidense in Mexico rather than an illegal Mexican in the EEUU.

I spoke with an anthropologist who has been studying the same group of indigenas for fifty years. His group live in high, dry, mountain country, and for years now, their main source of civic wellbeing has been their children in the United States. There are two big communities in the U.S. where the language of this group is spoken, and many nice houses in the high, dry, mountain country financed by those who live in those communities of migrants far away.

But it was another story told by this anthropoligist and his wife that made me say "go figure," this time. This couple, the anthropologist from New England and his Mexican wife, had lived for a long time in the U.S., so long, that the wife had her green card for permanent residency. But her mother got old and sick, so for the last eight years or so, they have been living in Mexico next door to Mom, visiting their indigenas in the mountains, visiting occasionally in the U.S. place where they maintain their official residence, and generally living a pleasant life of retirement.

But a time came recently when Tio Martin, who has lived for a very long time in Southern California, stopped answering letters. At Easter, my friends traveled to California to look for him and see what was up. The first thing that happened was that the U.S. immigration folks decided the Mexican grandmother going to look up her brother in California had not been living enough in the United States to justify her having a green card. They took it and gave her a tourst visa, just for this trip, with bureaucratic followup required to be able to come again.

When they found Tio Martin, he was in terrible condition. His life companion had slid into dementia and wouldn´t let anyone in the house. In the meantime, he had started falling. She couldn´t get him up when he fell, and neither could he. He quit eating. They really found him in the nick of time. They got him to the hospital -- he has private insurance as well as medicare-- where rehydration and feeding quickly returned him to a lucid state. They straightened out his finances, which had fallen into neglect. The local caseworker was going to be able to straighten things out for his lady, and he was going to be able to go to a retirement home after he got well enough to leave the hospital.

My friends will have to go again to help him, once the tourist visa thing gets straightened out. But how could this be? You go across the border to help your family member, you lose your residency status, further visits become more difficult, and what? If she doesn´t go back, it will surely be more trouble for Tio Martin´s social workers to help him make the transition from living in his own house to living somewhere else. But heaven forbid a Mexican relative should come and smooth things out! Go figure.

Sinking Monuments

Mexico is a wonderful, vital place, and Mexico City has all the vitality plus a great deal of evidence of a kind of messed-up past. The conquerors built their church with rocks from the Aztec Templo Mayor, their main temple. They set it right in front of where the temple had been, and over the years created an amazing monument in stone. Right nearby, other big stone buildings were added as commerce thrived and Spaniards got rich. They recreated the kind of central city they had known in Spain -- forgetting, until it became painfully obvious, that Mexico City was originally a lake. All the oldest buildings are sinking into the mud on which they were built. The biggest problems with the subsidence have to do with unevenness in settling. Despite all efforts, one of the cathedral´s towers is leaning. And of course, on top of that, this is an area of seismic activity.

Buildings that once had magnificent stairways leading up the them now have either very short stairways or a series of steps down to their entrances. In some cases, it really spoils the effect. Naturally, all kinds of engineered fixes are happening all over the city, but they are expensive, and not all buildings will be saved. At least the cathedral no longer has scaffolding all over it to hold it in place. In the meantime, people have figured out how to build tall skyscrapers in this area that not only don´t settle but also don´t fall over in earthquakes. We´ll see. Or at least, they´ll see.

It makes me think of the procession on Good Friday in San Cristobal de las Casas. There were some people, mostly older, who dressed in black and followed the cross to the reenactment of the crucifixion in a mournful spirit. There were some people, not so old, who followed the cross in their regular clothes, looking solemn, mostly. There were a bunch of people who stood on the sidewalk and watched the procession. Things are changing. Ancient monuments are sinking. Ancient practices are becoming something to watch, rather than something to do.

The Zocalo, the big square in the middle of Mexico City, the front yard of both the Cathedral and the Presidential Palace, is filled with a wonderful chaotic blend of vendors, Aztec dancers, jugglers, people offering herbal cleansings, balloon sellers, political protesters, you name it, throughout any day. Then, just to remind everyone, there´s this full military ceremony to take down the giant flag that flies over all this. For 15 minutes or so of an afternoon, the people clear a space, the sanitation guys pick up the trash, and the military come with singing, drums, and trumpets, to honor the flag. They leave with it neatly rolled up (like a sail), and within moments the chaos is back as if nothing had happened.

Walking back to where I´m staying after all that, I saw people dancing in the park, to a band that looked as if it had just set itself up on its own accord, in a little opening with a statue of Poseidon in the middle, left over from Empress Carlota´s fantasy of European Capital in Far Distant Province. They were dancing the dances of now, never mind the sinking monuments.

Something is changing in Mexico, and I´m thinking it´s probably fine.

Maya Wisdom

I returned from my journey to Palenque and its Maya ruins with much on my mind. Once I had expressed my admiration for the Mayas, the grandfatherly gentleman who sometimes joins the table at casa Carmelita looked me in the eye and gradually began to unfold a story of Maya cosmology. The cross of the Maya represents their sacred tree, he said. It was confusing to the Spanish when they arrived -- they thought this symbol meant that some other Christian had visited and converted the Maya before them. It served to provide some protection for the Maya, but in fact, it had nothing to do with Christianity. The sacred tree has parts, he said, with the part around the base of the tree representing water and all the life within the waters, the trunk representing the land and its creatures, including humans, and its branches the air and the life of the air. Although there were some special trees in certain places, there was no need to have any one particular tree as a focus for worship, because all trees have these parts. The gods have their places within the parts of the tree, as well.

If ever there is need for a tree to be cut down, as to build a house, it is done with appropriate ceremony, establishing the place of the house with rites lasting three days. Offerings are made at each corner of the house, where the cut- down tree will be set into the earth. The gods come to ¨eat¨ the offerings and bless the house. The house becomes of itself a sacred space. My informant said that his great grandfather had taught him the Maya tradition that there are as many stars in the sky as there are trees on earth. The great grandfather had been sure that there were fewer stars in the sky in his old age than when he was young, so many trees had been destroyed. Everything is interdependent. Everything is sacred. I like the idea of beginning with trees, myself. More trees, more stars. May it be so.

Enchanted Forest

I´ve stayed in El Panchan now for three days, a place from the first moment I arrived was clearly an enchanted forest, un bosque encantado. It´s a place of camps and cabañas, where the clientele is not entirely European, American, and the like, but there are certainly a lot of us. I´m guessing that we come here partly because of Don Mucho´s, the restaurant where they disinfect all their greens and make ice with purified water, and partly because it´s so close to the ruins of the ancient Maya city we all want to see. There are a goodly number of young people with backpacks, because the accommodations are very reasonable. I stayed at Margarita and Ed´s, in a thatch-roofed cabaña, screens at the windows and screens for a ceiling, and ate gratefully of Don´s foreigner-friendly food.

The ruins were great, and I´ll write about them, too, but at the moment, I want to tell you about the enchanted forest. Deforestation is a big issue in this part of the world, where poor people cut down trees at the edge of the forest because they need fields to grow crops for food. Here, at the edge of the reserve that contains the ruins, with ranches on two sides, growing not food but cows and horses, there is forest. When I chatted with Juan -- John, actually, who says he speaks neither English nor Spanish, only Texan -- he filled me in on the story. Moises was the one. He planted trees all over this area over a period of years, encouraged by Ed, an estadounidese expert on reforestation. That´s Ed of Margarita and Ed´s Cabañans, who unfortunately died about a year ago. Of all the millions spent on reforestation by the government in recent years, this project, which cost the government nothing, is the only one that worked, said Juan.

The little creek that flows through here is clear. I also the effect of a healthy forest on the streams by taking a (guided) hike through the selva within the park boundaries. wonderful clear, cool water falls over rocks in the shade of great trees. Likewise, in the little island of forest full of foreign tourists, there´s a lovely feeling of cool, foresty peace. In the middle of the night, when all is quiet, there´s the occasional outburst from howler monkeys. The people make noise, too. Earlier in the evening there´s music, then drumming around the fire. Everyone smiles and says "hola" or "buenos dias", even though they really speak German or Danish or English or some such thing and may only speak a few words in Spanish. No doubt there´s something else about the way a special culture emerged in this place, but maybe it´s all due to the enchantment of the forest that Moises planted.

A Surreal Experience

My plan was simple: take a 5-hour bus ride from San Cristobal de las Casas in highland Chiapas to Palenque, a town with some important Maya ruins. It was only after I got on the bus that I realized this was to be a very long descent. In fact, after awhile, I kept sort of looking for signs that the downward journey by twist and turn after twist and turn might be going to end. I saw none, only a succession of steep valleys on one side or the other.

San Cristobal is a former colonial capital, rich in history, with a pretty sophisticated population. It looks kind of European once you get used to it. It has ethnic restaurants, from Japanese to Middle Eastern and Greek. The young people of the family I was staying with are smart and worldly. Palenque, by contrast, when I got there, is two places in one. It´s a little country town where you can´t get a plumber who knows what he´s doing, and even he won´t come just because something he did has turned out to be wrong. And it´s a mecca for international tourists who come to see the ruinas. But that is not what the surreal experience was about.

There we were on a Sunday afternoon, a busload of miscellaneous folks, including many indigenas on their ways home from selling things at the feria in San Cristobal the week before. It was a lovely air conditioned intercity bus with a digital video system that played a series of movies to keep us all content in our seats. I watched these movies with one eye while looking at the passing scenery with the other. I watched as the upland vegetation gradually yielded to more tropical looking trees and plants. We stopped briefly after two movies and a truly awful video about visiting Hawaii. Then when we started up again, it seemed we were to watch "The March of the Penguins".

And this was truly surreal. The air conditioned bus was actually a little chilly. The view out the window suggested increasing heat and humidity as the foliage and the dress of the people at the side of the road changed toward the tropical. Palm trees of many kinds, vines everywhere, cocoanuts for sale by the side of the road, huge broad leafed things by the side of the road that look like what I know as house plants -- tropical, yes? But at the same time, there were the penguins at the end of the world, with their songs about how wonderful it is to live in the cold and white of the Southern snow desert. Marching, surviving the snow storms, marching again, fishing under the ice, wonderful penguins with wonderful music on the chilly bus. The so-called reality of the tropical outdoors was only to be seen, and with only one eye, and not to be experienced.

We came to the bus stop in Palenque -- fortunately a little after the movie ended. There it was, the reality of a warm, tropical afternoon in lowland Chiapas. I caught a taxi to my lodgings, reorienting myself as I went: tropical, Chiapas, tropical. Not just a change from upland Chiapas, which was different enough, but so very different from the snowy wastes of Antarctica! What is real, anyway?

Another World

I am having trouble finding my way around in San Crostobal de las Casas. I am having trouble finding my way around the keyboard used by folks who speak and write Spanish all the time, but mainly, I am having trouble with information overload. The streets and houses and stores and restaurants all look very different from the ones I´m used to "reading" as I pass by. I am here to learn Spanish, and I am learning a great deal more.

Señora Carmelita, my hostess while I am here, made a wonderful mole for dinner this midday, rich and subtle. On the streets, vendors sell all sorts of good smelling things I am forbidden by my friendly experts on foreign travel to eat. Everything is very colorful and clean. Since this is Holy Week, there are lots of tourists here, also lots of vendors with things both handmade and not. People seem relaxed and busy; some look worn and weary, presumably from a life of too much work. Even with such reminders of the less than ideal truth about the place, it is a pleasant place to be.

At the same time, everyone is very poor -- well, not everyone-- but the overall effect is of people with not anywhere near as much stuff as we are used to in Northeastern United States in the middle class. There are cars, but a minority seem to have them. There is pretty good water, though it is not really safe to drink it. Most everyone buys bottled water because they have to, not because of choice or preference. Schools, a mother and child clinic, a cultural center with weekend activities for kids, a little public library -- there is clearly a public sector providing services, though I am not quite sure how it all works. Several colleges and a university are here, too. There is this disquieting matter of people with automatic weapons in unmarked uniforms, a reminder that there really are justice issues still pending. This part of Mexico has the lowest income and the lowest literacy rate, so for sure there is work to be done.

I also have no idea how this city impacts the earth with its existence, but there are fewer engines, fewer electric motors, fewer light bulbs, fewer heating elements, and such than there would be in a city with "our" standard of living. At night, if I get up and cross the dark courtyard to the bathroom, there are stars visible in the sky. Not so in Manchester, NH.

I guess it is reminding me that there is more to a good life than stuff. Meaningful work, families, a sense that there is enough... the young man of the house where I am staying is studying to become a veterinarian so he can care for small wild animals and travel to Africa where they are endangered.

This is another world, and maybe a glimpse of a world to come. It is not the world I know, but for most, it is not a place of privation. So let us not be afraid as we think about reducing our carbon footprints. The report from here is that there can be plenty of joy and satisfaction in a life with a lot less of material things.

Passing in the Fullness of Years

I am away from the congregation among whom I serve, but my being away has not stopped the cycle of life from moving on among my people. Two of our oldest, beloved members died within the last two weeks, in the fullness of years, of causes related mostly to just being old. Eventually, the body just wears out, it seems, though different ones of us do it in different ways and at different ages. I sit here, remembering these dear people, wishing them peace, knowing that for each, it was time.

Frieda was one of the members of the committee that chose to invite me to meet the congregation when they were selecting a new minister. I had "clicked" with the committee, and very much so with Frieda. More than that, her being on the committee said something important to me about the congregation as I contemplated my options. This was a congregation that honored its elders and did not exclude them from important convesations. That seemed really good to me. That was six years ago. In the time since then, she got sick, went into the hospital, needed more care in an ongoing way, and gradually went into decline. She continued to read poetry, converse with friends and family on a variety of topics, keep track of what her loved ones were doing, in short, to live every day to the fullest, even as her strength waned. And her many friends continued to shower her with cards, phone calls, and visits. The staff of the nursing home loved her. Then finally, at age ninety-four, it was time to go.

Harold had been a part of the church community for longer than Frieda. In fact, he had been baptized there as an infant, the first child to be baptized in the "new" building we currently occupy. That was 1914. He had been a postal carrier for many years, an active, healthy, outdoor job that kept him in good shape throughout his long life. He and Dottie, his wife, were very close through the years. Family really came first for them. Although they did not have children of their own, their nephews and nieces have been like children to them, especially in later years, when the rest of the older generation had passed away.

Still, Harold seemed distrustful of life in some way. One of the other men at the Masonic Home told me that Harold hadn't really gotten involved with the Masons, hadn't pursued the path that leads to those really deep connections the Masons have with each other. He had kind of given up on church, too. After George Niles left the pulpit and especially after the sanctuary was remodeled, Harold lost interest in church. He went to visit his sister on Sunday mornings after he dropped Dottie off to care for the babies in our nursery. Even in old age, living at the Masonic Home, Harold was reluctant to get involved with what was going on, toward the end even declining to attend the memorial services at the home that were held for people he and Dottie had known. She liked to play bingo, but he never did, and eventually discouraged her from participating. Life closed in on him as he grew older. Nothing anyone could say or do would draw him back to the enjoyment of life. The remaining nephew moved to Florida; the niece did not come to call as often. Life grew small and sad as it dwindled away.

So what to take from this comparison of Frieda and Harold's last years in their long lives? I think it's about the importance of remaining involved and active in an ongoing circle of relationships, of maintaining interests, of finding newness and fulfillment in each day. It's true: old age is not for sissies. It takes courage to face the days when life is ebbing away. But then, that's true of the rest of life as well. It takes courage and determination to love your way through whatever age. But in the end, it's worth it.

We loved both of them dearly. For Harold, it will be important to remember how he was maybe ten or fifteen years ago, to recall something of his vitality and enjoyment of life. For Frieda, it will be important to reach beyond our immediate, sweet memories of her as a very old person to recall her as a lover, a mother, a writer, a grandmother, a friend, in the days when the spirit of life surged through her and into the world around. Let us take heart and live well, nourished by their examples.

Eucalyptus and Parrots and stuff

They're cutting down eucalyptus trees in California, the fragrant giants with the shreddy bark that yield those deodorizing shoots that populate people's bathrooms everywhere. Natives of Australia, they love it here. Native species are being crowded out.

Speaking of attractive invaders, I learned that there's some controversy about the two flocks of parrots living in the San Francisco area. Like the eucalyptus, the parrots are not native. The ones I found out about are the green ones with the red heads that were flying around on Fort Mason, near where I stayed. They originally came from Chile, caught wild and sold in the U.S. as pets. These feisty birds did not want to be pets. They either (a) escaped their cages, or (b) made life so miserable for their owners that the humans set them free. Now they live on Telegraph Hill and at Fort Mason, and in other scattered locations. Food and nesting sites are plentiful.

Are they displacing native species? The people who like them say no, but others say yes. Are they a more attractive version of the English sparrow -- sturdy and indefensible? We humans ourselves have certainly displaced a lot of native species. I saw the results of total logging of the redwood forests that once covered the hills of the Western edge of this part of North America. Great expanses of green pasture for dairy and beef cattle stretch out across the parts of Marin and Sonoma Counties I traveled through. The redwood has been totally defeated there, it would seem.

But here where I am staying now, in the Russian River valley, the redwoods are returning. Some of the little frame vacation houses in this neighborhood are set among younger redwood trees that tower over them. There's a feeling of strength about these trees. When I see them standing strong over the flimsy human habitations below, I sense their roots growing under the buildings to throw the little dead things off balance, trunks growing outward to push them aside, branches conspiring with the fog that rolls in from the coast to create a destructive dampness and shade. Of course, they can't win a war with humans. If they get too pushy, they'll be cut down again, unless there are enough humans that like them well enough to say they should be allowed their space.

I think we could be sharing more of "our" space with redwoods. I don't know what we should do about the wily eucalyptus invaders. I like the parrots, and I don't like English sparrows, but should it be a matter of like? I like the looks of purple loostrife, but I don't like what it does to New England wetlands. Should we be guided by who was there first? Or guilt about our own earlier negligent or destructive ways? This matter of a globalized ecosystem is not simple. For sure, we humans need to take more notice of our relationships with the other beings around us. We need to take more care of our place in the interconnected web of all existence. Easy to say, but not so easy to arrange.

UU Sunday Gatherings

Over the last three Sundays, I have visited three Unitarian Universalist congregations for their Sunday morning gatherings. All three were friendly and welcoming. At two of them, the minister was among those greeting us as we came in, and at the other, there was a team of welcomers who made sure newcomers were greeted, inquired about, and informed as to what was going on. Two had memberships in the upper two hundreds; one was in the mid-hundreds. One had a traditional UU building, dating from the 1960's and sited on a wooded suburban tract of land. One had bought and remodeled an old movie theatre from the days when "multiplex" meant two or three screening rooms (the seats were wonderfully comfortable!). The smaller one was meeting in a Masonic hall near the loosely defined downtown of the area it serves. The services differed in structure, offering varying amounts of music, participation by children, and speaking from the congregation. The "feel" of each was different: one energetic, one friendly, one contemplative, and in each, there was no doubt that this was a Unitarian Universalist gathering.

How did I know? The emphasis on human connection and openness to one another was one clue that began outside the sanctuary and continued all the way through. Two congregations had traditional sharing time; the other had people write their milestones into a book for the service leader to read. The use of silence as part of the service, a time when everyone could pray, meditate, invoke white light, or think their own thoughts in their own way, that was another clue. And the message in each case had a connection with what we could do in our lives, another way of telling we're UU. There were readings from many sources, references to but not total reliance upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that's a way to know we're UU. References to, but not total reliance upon the Principles and Purposes was another common thread.

I liked worshiping with the congregation that sang at every opportunity-- before the service, in hymns, and in response to everything: the offering, the sharing time, the children leaving, even the benediction had its own congregational song. I liked worshiping with the congregation that mostly kept silence, singing two very familiar hymns during the service and singing along with the show tune that ended the gathering. I liked worshiping with the congregation that sang more or less as my own congregation sings, three hymns and a familiar refrain as the children leave.

These were three gatherings for our kind of worship. There are UU gatherings that don't rise to the level of worship, and I am blessed not to have been part of any of those lately. For me, the key is to induce a kind of blending of our individual quests for meaning and our need to belong to a group. The singing together and the silence together, those things work well for me to bring that feeling of deep belonging. It's not just about the message. It's about being together, searching for meaning each in our own ways, somehow united in the searching and the finding.