A Larger Faith

Corporate Free Speech, Again

2010-02-09T10:27:00.002-05:00

Turns out it's not simple. I really don't think corporations are people, and yet they are treated that way when it comes to the First Amendment. Teir contributions of money to political causes and to politicians are protected because they enable and amplify speech. They can't be people, because they do not have consciences. Their proper motive is profit, so their speech reflect a search for their own profit, and not the common good. Because they are brought into being to pursue profit, their speech doesn't even properly reflect the views of their shareholders as persons.

I found today's Opinionator in the New York Times particularly helpful: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/how-the-first-amendment-works/ although the dreary truth is that we are stuck with the results of highly refined legal redefinition of terms and reinterpretation of events.

I say, not people. I also say, the giving of money is not really speech but action, and actions can be regulated. Having our government turned into an instrument for promoting the profitability of companies cannot be a good thing.

Corporations, People, Rights, and Values

2010-01-30T13:07:00.005-05:00

Apparently corporations are people, with first-amendment rights to participate in electoral campaigns, just like anyone else. True, they are treated in some ways as people, a way to limit the liability of Boards of Directors for their actions. This is important: it's probably one of the reasons for the popularity of corporations as a way of organizing business.

But look, corporations are collections of people. They are made up of workers and shareholders, in whom the true personhood and the rights associated with it are properly lodged. One of the arguments corporations used about income taxation, if I remember my economic history correctly, is that they are actually not people themselves, because look, they belong to these people who also pay taxes, so any tax on their corporate "personal" income would be a second tax on top of the tax the actual humans behind them pay. We ended up with a system that taxed corporate income at a lower rate, and not all of it, in effect asking them to pay for the privilege of being considered people under the law.

So for some purposes, corporations are people, but for taxation, they are not. I say, the right of using money to talk in political campaigns should be like the taxation thing. The people who make up the corporations have the right to express themselves. Having the corporation do it too is double expression, just as taxing corporate income is double taxation.

Should people who own corporate shares have double expression? That doesn't square with my values. In citizenship, it should be one person, one voice. That way, I get to say what I think, and I don't have to worry about whether the corporations in which I own stock say what I think or something else. It's more efficient, and it's the right thing to do.

Church and Community Change

2010-01-17T20:15:00.004-05:00

They are starting a program to explore making Belfast a "Transition Town" of the kind that develops resilience for the coming changes of climate and energy use. I haven't read the book that goes with it yet, and as usual, I have to be at work during about half the discussion group meetings that are about to happen -- one of the perils of a line of work that requires meeting with people who have normal jobs during the day. But that book is on order, and I'll go when I can.

I have been reading another book, though, $20 Per Gallon, by Christopher Steiner, subtitled "How the inevitable rise in the price of gasoline will change our lives for the better." Steiner works for Forbes magazine, coming to business journalism with a background in engineering, so his investigative choices are interesting and his analysis is mostly sharp. He outlines the changes that the market system will bring into being as the price of petroleum products rises, giving some attention to the global warming question, but focusing mainly on changes in lifestyle that will come. Mass transit, dense urban centers, food production near point of use, rebirth of manufacturing.

Coupled with a reading of Jim Wallis' Rediscovering Values On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street, a Moral Compass for the New Economy, $20 Per Gallon opens some interesting vistas on the future.

The most important vista I see, through the lens of these two books and my own experience, is that we have some really important choices to make about our values and how we use them to shape our lives and communities. Change is coming. The big question: Is it going to be governed by the Wall Street ethos that considers demand and costs of production and not much else, or is it going to be governed by something more human- and planet- oriented?

Either way, it won't be a catastrophe. Still, I have become weary of realizing time and again that my body and mind are being used as ATM's for some corporation. I'm going to get to as many of those "Transition Town" meetings as I can and try to get a glimpse of an alternative.

Report from the Hermitage

2010-01-02T13:41:00.003-05:00

It really is small, but it's not as small as Thoreau's cabin. It has inside plumbing, which is a good thing, because it's in town rather than out in the woods. But it's an experiment in living simply. Thoreau lived in a time of great cultural and economic change, the dawn of the industrial-commercial America we have lived in from that time to this. Now, that way seems to be in trouble, and something new begins to take shape. Thoreau stepped aside to look, and I find I am doing that too. But from a different kind of cabin.

Somebody asked, so I measured it: 300 square feet, with an additional unheated back room of perhaps 80 more, counting the closet space. That includes a bathroom, which Thoreau did not have, and room for lots more clothing than he would have found right ("Beware of all enterprises that require a new suit of clothes"). I have more chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society, he said. He also had a bed people could sit on if there were more. I have a couch, plus a nice comfy rocking chair, and four chairs.

He had his fireplace for cooking, and drew water from the pond. I have a little kitchen with a stove, fridge, sink, and cupboards. I figure I can have three guests for a simple meal -- so far two is the most I've had for supper -- and five for sitting and conversing.

I have more books than he did, most of them stashed at my office nearby. Although I have been reflecting a bit on The Iliad, I will not be reading it in the original Greek as he did. I have my computer, and radio, though I'm living without TV in its usual forms. Electricity, which he lacked, and central heat. I have a car, which seems like a necessity and might not be. I experiment with leaving it parked for days at a time. Maybe a day will come when I declare it surplus.

My regular job is half-time, so my days have space for the meditation, sauntering, and journaling that went with cabin living for Thoreau. He stood aside from the rapid social change of his day to reflect and find words to comment. May it be so for me.

A New Year's Prayer

2009-12-29T12:25:00.003-05:00

Somebody asked me about prayer, whether Unitarian Universalists pray. The person who asked is considering joining our UU congregation, and prayer is part of her way. Prayer is a part of my way, too, though I come to it by a winding path. There was a long time when I would meditate, but not pray. Then some things happened.

This is a post about what I recommend now, rather than how I got here. See what you think. It rang true for me when Mother Theresa was quoted as saying of her prayer life, “I listen.” Whether you are sure there is a God, either out there somewhere or deep within, or suspect there might be but aren't sure, or feel confident that there is not, deep listening for the promptings of the spirit (or Spirit), is a practice worth cultivating.

Actually, I recommend four basic spiritual practices, all of which can be thought of as kinds of prayer. The first is to pay attention to what is real in this world, really pay attention as well as you can, every day. The listening – and looking, smelling, tasting and touching – would be a big part of that. The second is to accept whatever is there, whether it's bad, like the cancer that reappeared; or good, like realizing that your relationship with your difficult child is becoming more joyful. Acceptance involves compassion and forgiveness as it grows deeper. Finally, practice gratitude. Not for the cancer, surely, but for life and the kindness of those around you. Find the gifts that have arrived for you each day, notice them, accept them, and feel the gratitude.

The one other practice I truly recommend is to take time for wonder. I sometimes name it “look at the sky.” Take time to admire and be awestruck by what is around you.

If you do these things, and I try to do them, your life will be a prayer. It won't matter if there is a God or not. You will sense yourself as a part of the flow of energies in the Cosmos, and you may find yourself asking to be guided into harmony with that flow. When someone asked President Lincoln if he prayed for God to be on the side of the Union in the Civil War, he said no, but that he prayed that the Union was on God's side.

I pray this January that we may find our ways to be on God's side, to live in harmony with the great flow of energies, to help the arc of the universe bend toward justice, love, and peace.

Minister as Community Organizer

2009-12-26T12:29:00.004-05:00

When people learn that I came to ministry with a background in community organizing, they think immediately of all the work I might be doing in the larger community, getting out there to make things better for poor people, the homeless, immigrants, others. And I do some of that. But what surprises me is that nobody tumbles to the idea -- until I suggest it to them -- that ministry is a kind of community organizing. True, it's a kind of spiritual guide gig, and a kind of religious education thing, but at heart, much about it is concerned with gathering the congregation into a functioning organization and breathing into it a sense of its own purpose.

When I read that the minister of a mid-sized church is "a kind of executive," it feels wrong. Yes, maybe a kind of executive, but really, a community organizer. Someone who can teach the skills of welcoming newcomers, getting the word out about special events, integrating those newcomers into the purpose of the organization, developing leaders, and using leaders well. I've been ministering to congregations that are smaller than mid-size, doing my work this way, and I'm pleased with the results.

It's easy for a minister to fall into picking up the pieces of a non-functioning organization when dealing with a smaller congregation. It's possible to do it, and it can be helpful if the people don't come to expect the minister to do it all. I say jokingly that the minister of a smaller congregation is a bit like the proprietor of a small business, the one who is always prepared to step in and run a machine when someone is absent or sweep the front walk or wash dishes. But not all the time. A congregation's disarray needs to be addressed by the minister-as-community-organizer. People need to be invited to step forward and take responsibility for things.

Working with disarray is something that appeals to me. It's one of the reasons I became an intentional interim minister.

Right now I am serving a congregation that is afraid of becoming "minister-centered," That is something to be afraid of, I think, and a hazard for congregations the size they are. They would benefit from more ministry, moving from a half-time to a full-time person. They would benefit from a minister who is a spiritual guide, a religious educator (there is a sense in which it's all religious education), and a community organizer. They seem to believe that more professional support would somehow diminish the leadership they are accustomed to providing, reduce them to helpers of the Big Professional.

Some congregations do get like that. They commit to more ministry than they really choose to pay for, they lose their sense of purpose, and they become a kind of perpetual fundraising organization with little further reason for being than the comfort of being together. A good community organizer can help remedy that situation or prevent it from developing.

I recommend looking to the approach, the tools, and the results of community organizing as a way to revitalize our congregations. There needs to be sense of mission, yes, but also a commitment to strengthening participation and leadership within each of our gathered communities.

Community, Houses, and Church

2009-12-06T15:14:00.003-05:00

There are a group of people in the Belfast area who are getting together a cohousing community. This is to be an eco-village, with everything done to reduce the carbon footprint. There will be a walkway to the town center, and the project will actually preserve some farmland in a key part of town where housing development is very likely in the near future. But I feel a little grumpy about it.

On reflection, I know why I'm grumpy. I grew up in a place that had a lot in common with what is now called co-housing. It was a suburban development of small houses on large, wooded lots. There was a community association that owned and managed the water system, the extra lots, and the community house, where there was a cooperative pre-school. There were lots of potluck suppers (Dutch suppers, they called them), at the community house, where people from the community got together to socialize. One of the extra lots was developed for tennis courts. At the winter holidays, there was a tradition of strolling through the neighborhood singing carols. There were paths, so you didn't have to go everywhere on roads. It was nice. As with many suburban developments, the first residents were mostly about the same age--people with kids. And in this case, they were all concerned to build a good community in which to raise the kids.

The first families got to work with the architect to design the homes and figure out the layout of the subdivision. Individual homes, common house, eating together, shared responsibility -- So far, it sounds a lot like co-housing, only in those days they were not so specifically concerned about eco-friendly living and I don't think they insisted on consensus, which is the co-housing standard.

It was nice. But then I think what happened was that it turned out some of the people were really interested in houses. Their incomes rose, and they went off to a nearby hillside to build larger, more elegant, homes, also on lots with trees, but without quite the complete apparatus of the common house, the community suppers, the extra lots, the paths -- the ideological underlay was softened. They did have a community association, and their way of sharing was to have a community swimming pool. (Everybody was older, so the preschool was not quite the draw it had been in the old location.)

A good thing about that new neighborhood: it was there that the Unitarian (no Unitarian Universalist yet) congregation got started. The old neighborhood, where my family had stayed, stressed community-building based on where we lived. Our grownups did reach out: they provided leadership for the Girl and Boy Scouts that inclued others beyond our enclave, they also provided leadership for the League of Women Voters, the Democratic party, and the Parent Teacher Associations first of the grade school, then of the high school. I think the parents of the new neighborhood did those things too, but for me, the main thing they accomplished was starting that Unitarian congregation. Old neighborhood people participated, but it was mainly a New Neighborhood thing. I went there. It was good for me. By not focusing so much on their own housing development as a definition of community, they drew a circle that included me, a kid from a place that tended to draw a circle that left them out.

Both ways are good and important. Whether it's a congregation or a housing development, a community provides a good base for feeling safe in the world. And a person who feels safe in the world can be much more effective in reaching out to help others in the wider world. My mother didn't approve of church. She said it tended to wall people off from the rest of the world. I found that the co-housing-like community I grew up in did that, too. Church worked better for me.

So I feel grumpy about the people who are going back to the housing development as a source of community. I should be saying, "go well, best wishes!" But I suspect they will be sitting on their porches reading the New York Times on Sunday mornings, missing out on the kind of community I have found most satisfying and telling themselves it doesn't matter. The thought makes me grumpy.

I think it does matter. But my mother was right for her, so maybe they are right for them. I'll just have to be in the business of drawing larger circles.

Interplanetary metaphor

2009-11-24T18:20:00.002-05:00

It took me awhile to realize why I was reading all those novels and stories by Ursula LeGuin. They so often feature these supremely lonely interplanetary travelers, folks who have gone to sleep to traverse the light years between their starting place and their destination. Their families live and die while they are in suspended animation, so that if they return, their loved ones are no longer there, and the culture has moved on.

The lives of these travelers are lonely, but not friendless, for they find companions in the worlds they visit, even love. What they do not encounter is anyone who is truly their own kind. They are outsiders, bringing and outsider view to the places they visit. Often they are under instructions to interfere only with great care in what is going on where they have landed. They might promote women's rights, for instance. Or introduce some new technology. Or stop the progress of a rogue colonizer. But only after careful study of the culture, and with the intention of doing it in a culturally appropriate way. Or in the case of the rogue colonizer, to excise the unauthorized alien presence cleanly.

So yes, I was reading these novels and stories in September and October, feeling drawn to them. Because... it's so much like interim ministry! I'll be walking among the people of this planet, joining in their culture, working alongside them, carefully introducing possibilities by working with the list of interim tasks. Making friends. Finding my usual sources of entertainment in whatever form they are available, and discovering others from among what is preferred locally. (The yoga is not quite the same on this planet, but satisfying. The country dance is a little different. They have a lively program of plays they put on for one another's entertainment.) The Emissary is welcome, and invited to partake, yet always bound by the rules of the Ekumen about what the boundaries must be.

I have chosen this metaphorical interplanetary travel, or rather, it has chosen me, drawing me to this outpost now and another one soon, bearing news from the Ekumen and interpreting it to the people here. This outpost welcomes the Emissary warmly, but I know there are other planets where the Ekumen is seen as the problem rather than as part of the solution. Will I travel to those as well? How might the mission be different?

I am grateful to Ursula LeGuin for her heroes, the lonely observers who enter into relationships and make carefully planned moves that might change things. They, along with my actual colleagues in this work, light the way.

Notes from the Hermitage

2009-11-08T18:46:00.004-05:00

Living in this little space, cosy and comfortable in a basic sort of way. I thought when I started that I would learn a lot, and this is a report on what I am learning.

Living in a small, well-insulated space, I'm quite sure I am reducing my carbon footprint. Living so close to work that I don't have to drive, ditto. I can and do walk to yoga and food shopping and the doctor's office. But I drive long distances to see friends and have professional meetings. So far, one airplane trip, but it was all the way to the West Coast. Probably wiped out all the savings.

But the point is that living in a small space is having an impact on the way I live. There is no way to have a selection of places to leave piles of books or papers related to a variety of projects. Everything has to be put away every time, or it makes gridlock. I rely more on electronic files, and have gotten more paranoid about making sure they are backed up. No space for paper files.

I seem to have too many clothes, since the closets of my little place are full. And yes, there are still some things that are not being used, so they could be released into the possibility of other uses -- given to Goodwill. Everything must be put back in the closets, because there are no extra chairs on which to drape clothing that is between wearings. Clean enough to put away, or dirty enough to wash? There is no middle ground. I am not used to being so decisive about this matter.

And clearly, I have too many dishes, because they overflow the sink before I get around to washing them. Actually, it's the same as with the clothes -- everything must be used regularly to justify its place on the shelves, and it all needs to be put away soon after using. If they are in the sink, it's a very, very, short time until nothing can be done in the kitchen. And I can't (and don't really want to)eat out all the time!

I am tyrannized by the flow of material through my life. Everything must be disposed of right away -- trash in the trash bin, garbage in the mouse-and-skunk-proof frozen storage, recycling in the assortment of bins and bags in the back/front hall. The Sunday New York Times is more than enough newspaper -- I'm really surprised with myself not to have started a daily newspaper subscription. I don't even get the weekly Belfast paper, which would give me a lot of information not available elsewhere. But the packaging! Food and other things come wrapped in so much material that is otherwise useless, and I have no room to store it! Buying things with no wrapping is really appealing.

This is all very good for me, I think but let me warn you all: living in a smaller space will change you in ways you don't expect.

I think of someone I once knew who had been for a long time in the submarine service. Living alone, he found it hard to take up enough space to fill up a one-bedroom apartment. I think of people who really are monks. Of the young man who had been part of a household I joined when I went to seminary. When he finished his time helping in the world and was ready to go back to the monastery, he put his things into a backpack and left.

I suspect this sort of thing is not going to be great for the consumer economy. Maybe it will be great for those of us doing it. I wonder...

When it is all connected consciously

2009-11-02T16:31:00.003-05:00

I reflected on Michael Pollan's story in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the one about the farm in Virginia where everything is interconnected in complex and important ways to produce happy, healthy animals in a sustainable way. There are probably many ways to build farms that interlink the care of the land (and the planet) with the feeding of humans, and this is but one example.

What struck me was that while the farm's chickens were very much in demand, it was not possible to respond to the market signal of rising price by shifting production more toward chickens. Everything on the farm was interconnected in more or less fixed proportions, so more of one thing really meant expanding the whole operation, possibly producing more of some other products that were not in high demand.

Imagining a town surrounded by farms engaged in sustainable agriculture of this type, I began to think, well, the people in the town would have to sort of want what they have, except when there was a chance to start up a whole new complex of farm operations with a whole new mix of products.

It might not be bad at all, but it is really very different from a system where more demand calls forth more production, that is, the market system.

We could settle into wanting what we have, enjoying a lifestyle that would gradually evolve into being traditional, getting to know one another, talking things over, exploring possible changes together, and allowing things to shift ever so slowly with changes in taste or knowledge of nutrition or requirements of climate change.

Living here in the small town of Belfast, Maine, the sense that this could happen is very real. It would not be a market system. What would it be? And how would it respond to changing wants and shifting conditions of production? Probably it would be good to explore the answers to these questions by allowing that kind of agriculture to grow up around our small towns. Something post-industrial might emerge, carrying with it some of the pre-industrial, for good or ill.

I suspect that values have a lot to do with how it might evolve, so naturally, I want Unitarian Universalists to be right there helping it happen. Will we do it?

An Event in the Rain

2009-10-25T17:01:00.006-05:00

So there we were, maybe a hundred soggy people standing in the rain, and yes, quite a few of our number had driven their cars to get there, and we were doing this media event about trying to get the attention of those who might do something about the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.

There was a reporter there, getting soggy with us. He asked me why we were doing it. Not being one of the organizers, I wondered if I should say anything. But, well, I was the Unitarian Universalist minister on the scene, so maybe... I mumbled something about getting together with other groups all over the world and something about how if we let the Earth become a place where humans really couldn't live, it would be something even a Unitarian Universalist could call a sin.

I wasn't at all sure. This was a kind of feel-good event (even though we were getting miserably wet, the group was really having a good time together) with content that was easy to love, no opponents anywhere in sight, an event that was asking us to do nothing but show up and stand around looking numerous --we actually spelled out the numbers 350, and a photographer climbed the fire department's ladder truck to take our picture and send it to the worldwide event headquarters.

I actually was proud of the Belfast congregation of Unitarian Universalists. The main organizer of the event was one of them. The singing group, the "Raging Grannies" had members from the congregation, the group that walked over from the other side of town with a great big drum under a beach umbrella included congregation members, the crowd was thick with us. Without the UU congregation, the event would have been much smaller. Maybe it would not have happened.

And on reflection, I'm sure it really did matter. It's hard to get beyond the generally pretty anemic things we do as individuals in the midst of a culture of waste, and it's hard to get people to be serious about the bigger things. We feel stronger now. We're part of a larger movement that is maybe going to get the attention of people with power around the world, to help them believe that people really care to save the planet. We may not know how, but we need their help to get everyone to be serious about this. Because it really would be a sin. Even for a Unitarian Universalist. Maybe especially for a Unitarian Universalist.

If Consumer Spending Doesn't, What Will?

2009-10-04T20:25:00.004-05:00

There was more on the news about how they expect the recovery to be "jobless", how employment will lag behind other indicators, and we'll have slow, slow growth for the next several years. Consumer spending, they say, is not bounding back robustly -- and why should it, since we were spending way too much and borrowing to make it happen and pretending house prices would never go down and we really, really, don't want to go back to that again.

Indeed, it's time to save, not time to spend, because so many of us are facing the uncertainty of an overstressed Social Security system with underprepared portfolios. Consumer spending is going to have to take a back seat to consumer saving.

So, the economy is not going to be recovering the way it has after the last several recessions. But it could still recover faster than they think. It could be about investment. And it could be about ending the violence of extreme poverty around the world. It could be about building some sort of post-capitalist system that made it possible for family incomes and consumption to rise around the world and didn't require the families of the United States to overextend themselves to keep everything working. Where is the creative thinking that once made American capitalism famous?

If the folks who make loans keep looking in the same places for their business, we'll just end up in the same old mess we were in the last time, only later. Let's do something different!

Legacies of Violence

2009-09-29T15:26:00.004-05:00

I just finished reading Tracy Kidder's book, Strength in What Remains. I devoured it as if it were a novel, transfixed and often horrified, anxious about its charming protagonist with the improbable name of Deogracias. It brought into sharp relief the problem of what happens to people who have been through large-scale violence, because it is in part the story of Deogracias' survival of genocide in the African country of Burundi.

We know what happens on a small scale from research and stories about the lives of returned veterans, rape victims, and survivors of other violent experiences. The people are forever changed. They often suffer from disordered ways of perceiving and responding to what's going on in the world. They need to talk and talk about what they survived, and to do that talking with people who can hear and care and not be made crazy themselves. They need to find a new way of being in the world. Not a few of them find that some kind of return to the event is part of the story of their new life -- advocacy for other victims, promotion of legislation or social change to prevent what happened to them from happening to others, running support groups, and much else. And some never find a way to be part of "normal" society again.

But what happens when whole communities have been subjected to large scale and ongoing violence?

We look at the way Israel and Palestine deal with each other in the world. Both sides look just plain crazy to the outside observer. I am deeply certain that large scale and ongoing violence against the people of both sides has created this.

In Tracy Kidder's book, the protagonist returns to Burundi after being away in the United States for years. During that time he has not been subjected to the ongoing violence. He has had a chance to do a number of things that have helped him begin to heal. When he goes back, the people seem very strange to him compared to the way they were before. Kidder quotes Deogracias as saying "you know what it is? They are all crazy." (p. 214).

What can a country do when everyone is crazy?

And, shouldn't we as a country be thinking about this as we proceed with military options in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Shouldn't we be thinking about this as we get ready to leave Iraq? The aftermath of large scale ongoing violence has to be that everyone is crazy, and someone needs to help them pick up the pieces, begin to heal, and find a wholesome way to live -- maybe to find it again, maybe to find it for the first time.

If I Were Serious...

2009-09-18T07:00:00.003-05:00

If I were serious about a smaller carbon footprint, there is so much more I could do -- and yet, some of it really feels beside the point.

I could stop using paper towels, change from plastic to glass for food storage and abandon plastic bags; I could combine projects that use the oven, and I could maintain the thermostat at a lower level in winter. I could dry more clothes in air. I could be more careful to buy things that come from nearer rather than farther. But how good is that?

Already I live in a small, well-insulated space that's really close to where I work. I use the lightbulbs. I do run a computer, but not a television set. I don't have to drive to work, to the laundromat, or to the grocery store. I even don't have to drive to the movies, the hardware store, the doctor's, etc., etc. I do have to drive to see my friends, but I'm starting to have friends here, too, my home since August of this year. I do have to drive to professional meetings, because we are not thick on the ground in this part of the world -- that could change, but it won't be soon!

Mainly, I could stop riding on airplanes. When I took a couple of on-line carbon footprint inventories, it was sobering to realize how much that adds to the weight of CO2 I contribute. That's because I live really far away from my family, and if I want to see them, I pretty much have to fly. Maybe there's another way to handle this, but that will take time.

So it comes down to this: it's time for me to pay attention to the systems that spout carbon on my behalf. Electricity. Transportation systems. Urban design. The economy itself, based as it is on "consumer spending," which basically means moving materials from one place to another, using energy to convert materials from one form to another, packaging stuff and packaging the packages

Not just my own personal choices, but the bigger choices we all make together or someone makes for us. I'm sure of it: we can have a really nice life and use a whole lot less stuff, move a whole lot less of it from place to place, the whole nine yards. It's time to start imagining it, and I feel really old to be starting. But let's. Now is the time we have.

Saving for Change

2009-09-15T17:46:00.002-05:00

Maybe what we need is a bank. Or, a bunch of banks. We activists are often so focused on policy and legislation that we forget the creation of new institutions that could start to make the changes we want. We in our private lives (I'm thinking I don't like to call us "consumers") are saving more, spending less of the money we are still receiving. This is not surprising, since so many are boomers who just saw the market blow away their prospects of retirement. It makes sense.

So we are saving our money into a system that should be putting it back into circulation as investment, which would be spending that both creates jobs and income and creates additional productivity for the economy. Developing capacity to produce solar panels, insulation, products from recycled materials, maybe. Improving agriculture in places closer to markets, maybe. But it doesn't seem to be quite getting there.

"They" in the financial institutions seem to be waiting for the market for debt-financed consumption to firm up so they can make loans back to us. If we don't want to go there so much any more, maybe there need to be some new lending institutions that are focused on investment in the traditional sense. I'm thinking of investment in capacity-building that's close to the ground. I'm thinking of the a bunch of new New Hampshire Community Loan Funds, or a whole lot of credit unions for community economic development. The money we save could be recycled into the community in ways that would get us going on the lower-carbon way of life we are needing to achieve.

If we turned our attention, not completely, but partly, away from trying to persuade other people to do things to shrink our carbon footprint, and toward building communities that actually have smaller footprints, wouldn't that be a good use of both our passion and our newfound thrift?

The Consumer Spending Revolution

2009-09-11T07:55:00.002-05:00

Almost every day there is yet another report of sluggish consumer spending. On the one hand, it's something that seems good. We're saving for the future, saving up in order to buy things, holding back on using those credit cards. We're feeling insecure because of the rocky employment picture, we're feeling poor because of the reduction in value of all our assets, so we're holding back.

According to the commentators, our greater thrift is holding back the economy. They sound as if they wish we would just plunge into that high-spending way of life that went before the financial meltdown that led to this Great Recession.

I say it's not consumer thrift that's the problem. I say the shift is an opportunity. Greater thrift creates an opportunity for the people and institutions who make loans to think anew about what they are doing. This is a time for investment in a new way of life, and the savings creates a funding source. Invest in green technologies, in farms closer to places where people live, in neighborhoods where people can get what they want by walking or riding a bike, in railroads that move things more cheaply, in all those things that will make real a different way of life. Invest in ways to recycle materials and reclaim waste for profitable use.

Let's not go back. Let's make art and put on plays, read poetry and do sports, go walking just for fun, hang out in coffee shops and go to church. Let's fix the equipment we already have so we won't be throwing so much away. Let's build a society where consumer goods are not the be-all and the end-all, but rather tools to enrich our relationships with one another or tools to our enjoyment of our own minds and bodies. Let's go on saving and letting the saving turn into investments that can undo some of the damage we have done to the planetary ecology on which our lives depend. We can have a nice life without so much stuff. A nicer life, even, if we open our eyes and look around at the possibilities.

From Another Planet?

2009-07-16T17:14:00.002-05:00

I've been holding this post for a long time, a bad thing since it is about interplanetary exploration!

Actually, Rev. Mark is not from another planet, he's from Uganda. I met him at the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists gathering a couple of years ago, and here he was again this summer, attending the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Salt Lake City. He has many great connections, but somehow in the course of planning his itinerary, the International Office has routed him through Manchester, New Hampshire, where nothing was happening. I volunteered to help, so I met him at the plane, took him to his hotel, and spent some time sharing sights and food with him. The next day, I took him to South Station in Boston to meet the bus to Cape Cod and his next assignment.

He came to Unitarian Universalism the same way a lot of Americans do, by finding that another church tradition did not work for him. He believed in himself, he said, and in the inner guidance that came to him, rather than in submission to the authority of someone in a higher position in the church. He had found us online, then met us at the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists meeting, which led on to his making this trip to the U.S. to make connections here. Many things he found strange -- he marveled at how heavy so many Americans are, he was uncomfortable in air conditioned buildings -- and it was all very interesting. He liked the highways.

We spent a space of time on the highway from New Hampshire to Boston, and in his company I found myself thinking that if a country were to begin a plan of development right now, they would do well to do it without highways. It is not at all clear how we will transform our highway-based way of life, the one where so many people get up in the morning, get into cars, and drive to work, as the price of fuel rises and its availability shrinks. For how long will this continue to make sense?

I spoke of my feeling that a country could have a nice life without so many of them, without so many cars. Having thought of a country that still had a choice, I began to see my own country in a different way. What will we do with them as we move into the fuel-scarce future? How will we have a nice life without so much driving?

Courage to Love a Troubled Country

2009-07-04T14:06:00.006-05:00

I remember the Fourth of July of my childhood, a time when our whole neighborhood packed up their picnics and their softball equipment and headed out to a park by the Potomac River, a place of green grass with a nice grove of trees, where there could be running and playing in the sunshine and sitting later in the shade. I remember there were home-grown fireworks after it finally got dark, but before that, there were ceremonial talk and song and food.

The flag was displayed. One of the men, an actual radio newscaster, would read the Declaration of Independence in a strong, confident voice. The adults would murmur their assent in key places, but I had no idea what was so important about all that. We did sing the Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful and My Country 'tis of Thee, and it was from that singing that I came to learn all the verses of all those songs. Then of course there were things to eat, of which I only remember the Flag Cake, something my mother made, a normal rectangular cake frosted with stars and stripes. I got to help with the frosting when I was old enough.

We were patriotic, and determinedly so, for it was the time of McCarthyism, which was testing the strength of our little community. The radio newsman moved away to get out of the political heat of the DC area. One of the fathers of kids I knew went to jail. My own father lost his job. And still we read the Declaration and sang the songs and made the flag cake. But in the end, we were not the same. I certainly was scarred by the experience of those times, and I think others were too.

By working diligently in that small community and in the larger one surrounding us, my parents and their friends were able to build an island of good values in a sea of intolerance and selfishness. That island still exists, lo these many years since they did their work. Leaders of my generation are passing the work along to younger ones.

So it was worthwhile. And this most recent spell of McCarthy-like political climate was mostly not so bad as that one, though it had its moments. I'm hoping that little by little our country becomes civilized. Maybe it's really true that reaching out, having conversations on many levels, sharing words and song and food, maybe that's how the world is really changed. We remember the moments of courage, the moments of challenge, victory and defeat, but in a sense what's really important is the work in between, the daily building of the way of peace and freedom within ourselves and among our neighbors.

I don't have a flag cake to share this year. Maybe next year it would be good to do that. Whether I do or not, I will continue to love my troubled country with all its flaws, love it enough to speak truthfully and work diligently to make it better.

Meeting Thoreau in the 21st Century

2009-07-01T20:14:00.003-05:00

After he helped his father build an "arrived" house in town, Henry David Thoreau borrowed some land from his friend Emerson and built that cabin where he lived for two and a half years. There he wrote the only two books he ever completed: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. He had the privacy there to observe, remember, reflect, and write. He was living at the cabin when he made that protest against the war on Mexico that landed him in jail and became the germ of his lecture and essay on Civil Disobedience. The cabin was a good place for him just then, furnished with just the barest necessities, and not too far from town.

My own new place, in keeping with the exigencies of having accepted part-time work as an interim minister with a wonderful congregation in Belfast, Maine, is reminding me of Thoreau's cabin. It's better: I don't have to build it myself. The rent is right. It has all the necessities. And even I, who pride myself on a fairly simple lifestyle, will have to pack a storage unit full of all the things I won't be taking to my Walden on the shores of Penobscot Bay. There will be enough chairs to entertain a very few people, and the place is but a few steps from the local food coop, where a larger group could sit for hours and talk. And it's very close to church, indeed. There will be privacy in the evenings to play my flute. I will be able to park my car except for trips to the hospital or people's homes or other suchlike excursions.

Will I write? I will surely keep my diaries, which will not have a record of anything like surveying the contours of the bottom of Walden pond, nor curmudgeonly commentary on other people's habits and beliefs. But what will present itself to be written besides that? I'll wait and find out. I do know there will be good spaces of time that can be devoted to the work of writing or to the mindless moodling that is such a necessary part of the creative process. Still, the temptation to look for other paid work is very real... for the right opportunity, I could surrender to the temptation to get paid for something more than the half-time ministry. Will I have the courage to drive life into this corner and experience the very marrow of it? This remains to be seen!

Scary Prospect

2009-06-13T14:37:00.003-05:00

Last August, a gunman opened fire in a Unitarian Universalist church, upset because we are "too liberal". Last week, a doctor who provided abortion services was murdered as he ushered at the Sunday morning service. And then, a white supremacist opened fire at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC. Gun sales are up. Ammunition sales are so brisk that there are shortages in some places. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports a major increase in hate group websites. It's a scary prospect.

While I was checking the SPLC's website, I looked at the hate-group map of New Hampshire. We're not doing as bad as some other states, or maybe, our haters are more independent... there's a white supremacy group listed in Concord that has its Post Office address in Haverhill and an anti-semitic "traditional" Catholic group in Richmond. But we all know independent-minded folks with guns in the closet and emergency rations in the cellar, people who will talk about "the rising" that will result if the liberals push too far.

So what's a peace-loving liberal-minded religious person to do?

I guess I'm remembering that peacemaking does not wait for war to begin.

We need to talk with the folks we know, the ones with the apocalyptic mindset, and listen to them, too. What is it they fear? Is there common ground? Something to work on together? These conversations are not easy. Not easy to set up and not easy to pursue once they start. But each of us knows someone who needs to calm down about what's happening in our country just now. The TV news they see, the radio talk shows they prefer, and the websites they visit will not help them calm down. Only their real live neighbors, co-workers, and relatives can reach out with the calming effect of listening and caring.

What the shooters in Knoxville, Wichita, and Washington have in common is something that draws them out of the network of grumbling, fact-distorting, right-wing opinion they inhabit day to day into a supremely solitary action, a sense that the mantle of responsibility has fallen on their shoulders, that they must act rather than continue to complain.

There is no way to tell how many degrees of separation there are between us in our liberal cocoons and them in their right-wing ones, but to have any hope at all of reaching the next potential shooter before he (or she) shoots, we have to move toward them with courage, love, patience, and hope. How can we do that?

A Pilgrimage of Sorts

2009-05-31T16:21:00.002-05:00

I sold myself at the service auction to give a tour of Walden pond, with stories and quotations from Henry David Thoreau. People bought it! So yesterday we went, never mind that the forecast was for showers. The forecast was wrong, and we had a great time. It had been a little challenging to choose what to say about Thoreau's Walden journey to a group that had not, like the Adult Enrichment class I gave a few years ago, actually read the book first. And I wasn't sure I wanted to focus on "Walden" itself. There was a passage in "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" that talked about places near Manchester NH -- the village of Amoskeag, the little mountains called Uncanoonuc, the lake above the dam, and the village of Hooksett. So I read that on the way from here to there. But also, we wanted to get to know each other. Several of us had taken different names -- I pointed out that Thoreau had done that, too, having started out as David Henry.

There was the background of his going -- the tragedy of losing his brother to lockjaw, the disappointing stay in New York City, the threat of a particularly stupid war with Mexico, the growing concern that there would be Civil war, and his own father's desire for a nice, big, house, which Henry helped him build. And the idea that this was not all that far from town and dinner invitations and visits from friends, a place more of open fields than it is now, with a stand of pine woods that Emerson had bought and offered him as a place to build a retreat. And the pond, the lovely pond, still there looking placid and inviting.

And some quotations that showed his interest in enlightenment, a spiritual experience about which he and his friends were newly excited, now that translations from the Sanskrit were becoming available. The important thing is to wake up and stay awake (Richardson says Thoreau himself suffered from narcolepsy, so this would have been of interest on more than one level). And to live in constant anticipation of the dawn. The fact that this period was one of great productivity, the period when Thoreau wrote his only two book-length pieces, and grew so much as a writer and speaker, that was important to mention. And that he had gone to spend that famous night in jail from his lodging in the woods.

The personal things drew their attention -- who he loved, how he dressed, playing the flute by moonlight while floating in his boat in the pond, his sister bringing pies from home, his struggle with TB. His last words, prompted by someone asking if he could see the other side of that dark river separating this life from the next -- "One life at a time."

The weather was perfect, the company was engaging, our lunch at the Walden Grill was delicious, and the experience of Concord today was fun. I guess it was a pilgrimage, at least for me, to revisit our holy curmudgeon's places and refresh my sense of him. I was glad of the occasion.

Trusting the Process

2009-05-28T15:55:00.004-05:00

I'm in the middle of a strange journey. I resigned as minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester, quite sure that my ministry with that congregation had reached its conclusion. June is my last month with them. At the same time, I face a really challenging market as I look to move into intentional interim ministry. I've been trusting the process, and it has become a long, strange trip. A ministry awaits, of what kind, in what location, I am not quite sure. Will it be the interim ministry I set out to find? or something else?

It began gradually about twelve months ago, and went into second gear around January. But no real information was available until April, and no real action was possible until the last week of that month. I had rounded up resources to help me get through it: an interim minister who was not going to be searching this year to serve as a coach, a friend from seminary to serve as confidante, a shrink, just to be on the safe side. And I went to an expensive intensive session of career counseling to get clear about my inner and outer strengths and challenges.

The final list of congregations arrived for Round One, and I did my best to pick congregations that would not be wildly popular with everyone else while at the same time being more or less up my alley. Since this was my first time doing it, I went mostly on guesswork. I have some ideas about advance preparation for next time.

My coach came back from the conference of professional interim ministers with the word: "If you want to work this year, you need a website." I had thought it was an option to do it the old way with a portfolio of documents that could be express-mailed to interested congregations, so I set about to get online. I called a member of the congregation who has been helpful with IT stuff. He showed me the way to a site where a domain name and a website could be set up. "Website tonight!" it called itself, but it took me all weekend and a lot of intense concentration to get a reasonable facsimile of a job search website up and running.

That Monday, we found out which congregations had gotten our records. I took a chance and emailed their contact people to let them know my web address. And waited.

Soon, one congregation called to say I didn't look like the minister they were looking for. But soon after that, others called, and we set up telephone appointments for interviews. I had three nice interviews with three congregations that all looked as if we could make beautiful music together, but ultimately, as Round One was ending, they all called to say they had picked someone else. Deep breath and wait for round two. And start thinking about Round Three, the alternatives to Transitions Office facilitated interim ministries. A nicely-situated half-time ministry. Overseas temporary ministries. And pretty soon, three more listings from Transitions. One quick response and another good interview, but no, I was not their final choice. And now the pace has slowed. One of the new ones is really looking for a consulting minister who might stay. So is the half-time prospect. And the last one hasn't been in touch yet.

Maybe this is my chance to do something really different -- volunteer with some organization that saves the world's forests? -- and so I have begun my inquiries into that. The overseas possibilities are still alive. A friend is interested in one of them for her sabbatical, so maybe I should just chill on that one. A few more pictures on my website, but will anyone be looking at it? It will be perfect just in time for the market to close. My confidante's telephone ear is getting tired, but she's happy to encourage me. My references are eager to speak yet again about my sterling qualities. My coach continues to be helpful.

My little team and I are trusting the process. One of my reference people from inside the congregation said it today, "it will come, and maybe from a completely unexpected place." Tonight, I'm taking a deep breath, looking at the new crescent moon, and remembering to trust. Trust and do my footwork. Along with so many others in this little market and so many others in this big world of recession. The right thing is out there, coming closer. May it be so.

Violence, Nonviolence, winning, losing

2009-05-18T16:27:00.004-05:00

Today's news bring the somewhat surprising revelation of the end of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Long a militant movement dedicated to the establishment of a homeland for Tamil people in their majority Sinhalese country, they have been decisively defeated after a thirty year struggle. Today's news also brings the story that nonviolent pro-democracy activist Daw Aun Sang Suu Kyi is being tried for a crime in connection with the invasion of her home by a supporter who swam across the lake to the place where she was being held under house arrest. The Sinhalese have won against the Tamils: it remains to be seen whether the result will be repression or coexistence with mutual respect. The pro-democracy activists continue to struggle in Myanmar with no visible results.

Violence has ultimately failed in Sri Lanka. Nonviolence has not yet overcome the institutional repression in Myanmar. The caring observer is perplexed. I want to believe that nonviolence holds the key. But the balance of violence-based power in both countries is in the hands of their governments.

If nonviolence is the answer, then shouldn't the state-sponsored violence be curtailed? In Myanmar, the government doesn't believe in democracy, so of course they don't believe in the peace in which democracy can flourish. In Sri Lanka, there is a democracy of sorts, dominated by the Sinhalese majority. Do they want to sponsor the peace in which democracy can flourish for the Tamils as well as for them?

I don't know what I am learning from the news today. I believe in peace, and I believe in nonviolence, and I wonder if justice can be achieved at all.

Communicating Passionately

2009-05-11T16:18:00.005-05:00

I chatted with representatives of several Unitarian Universalist congregations recently because I'm looking for a new job. All three groups spoke in guarded terms of the "disagreements" they had going in their congregations. I was bemused that somehow I had made connections with three seemingly very different groups, scratched the surface, and found the same kind of trouble: ongoing disagreements that were sapping the strength of their church communities. Then I spoke with a colleague who had led a number of congregations. She said it was really, really common.

Because look, she said, we are the people who assert our freedom and our individuality while at the same time proclaiming our welcome of all different kinds of people with all different kinds of views. Right, I thought, as I remembered a conversation with a psychologist who told me she thought UU's, in contrast to "normal" Protestant denominations, were mostly intuitive types on the Meyers-Briggs scale. An intuitive type myself, I am painfully aware of our tendency to come up with a brilliant idea about the general outline of whatever-it-is, letting the details sort of take care of themselves (or not). I'm always looking around for someone more on the "sensible" side of that scale to help me complete any plan. So there we are, big on proclamations and short on specifics. And in congregational life, it seems we are paying a price.

That made me think of another time when I started following the advice of a book on how to get along with my children. It was awhile ago, and I believe the book was "How to talk so your kids will listen; how to listen so your kids will talk." There were definite formulas about what to say.

"I have confidence you can figure out what to do" ... or, more to the point,

"What you are suggesting is contrary to my deeply held values."

It seemed very artificial, but I was determined. Gradually it became more natural. I did learn how to talk so they would listen and listen so they would talk. We did better with some things than others.

Now I'm thinking of those days again as I think of congregations and their needs for internal communication about important things. Our deeply held values get dragged into what's happening at church with not-surprising frequency.

It turns out there is a whole mini-industry built around the need for people to get along at work, another place where people's deeply held values can rub up against each other in a big way. And sort of entwined with the industry of helping people in workplaces get along is another set of institutes and programs aimed at making peace among people who are actually at war or close to it. Of course, we can make use of some of this.

I'm most taken with the work of Marshall Rosenberg and his followers, called Nonviolent Communication or Compassionate Communication, and alongside that with some work of the Harvard Negotiation Project summed up in the book Difficult Conversations.

What I'm wondering is what it would take to get a whole congregation to go around for a substantial period of time speaking in ways that feel artificial about things they haven't dared speak about for fear of what might happen. The use of "I-statements" is just the beginning. Does anyone have a clue about how to make this work? (The intuitive with the big idea is reaching out to the sensibles to complete the plan...)

Kind of a Surprise

2009-05-02T07:25:00.004-05:00

The gallery was packed on Wednesday morning as the state Senate took up the question of same-gender marriage. I didn't get in, because I had been standing outside with two others from church holding a sign supporting both same-gender marriage and transgender rights. The bill to include transgender in the list of categories for nondiscrimination went down to defeat -- the silly argument that there was enough text in the law to do the job already apparently carried the day. But somehow, same-gender marriage passed!

People I saw afterward (and I wasn't in the gallery, where it was surely different) were subdued. What would the governor do? I think we found it kind of a surprise after all discouraging hype and all the bluster from the opponents. The explicit separation of civil and religious marriage, explicitly allowing religious communities to make their own decisions apparently made the difference. There had been creative thinking in the heat of the thing. A last-minute change crafted in the moment made it work.

It even took a few days for New Hampshire Freedom to Marry to organize a petition drive to address the governor. I think they must have been surprised, too. But yes, Governor Lynch does need to hear from us. In these times of economic difficulty compounded by a health scare, it is great to be able to move forward with legislation that will actually make life better for some people without spending a lot of money!

Testimony on Same-Gender Marriage

2009-04-15T05:59:00.003-05:00

This is testimony prepared for delivery to the New Hampshire Senate on April 15, 2009.

Honored Senators, Fellow Citizens

I am Rev. Mary Wellemeyer, Parish Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester. Unitarians and Universalists have had congregations in New Hampshire since the early nineteenth century. We are not large, but we have deep roots. Among our nation's founding fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were Unitarians; Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a Universalist. There are twenty-two congregations representing today's unified movement of Unitarian Universalism in New Hampshire today. Several members of the legislature are members of Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Our religious tradition has long recognized that some among us by nature turn toward romantic love and partnership with others of the same gender. Because we affirm the value of settled, long-term, relationships in our communities, and because we value the people who choose settled, long-term relationships with partners of the same gender, Unitarian Universalist ministers have been performing ceremonies of union for same-gender couples since the 1970's.

The present legal climate where states distinguish between civil unions and marriages is no less confusing to me as a religious professional than the previous arrangement where same-gender couples had no legal status. What we have now is better for the couples, but still difficult for me as clergy. For years, we Unitarian Universalist ministers understood that the ceremonies of holy union we performed were religious only, not backed by the force of law. And yet, we were inclined to call them “weddings,” with the resulting status of the couple a “religious marriage.” I still perform religious weddings for same-gender couples and say of the couples who are so joined that they are “religiously married”, although in terms of the law they are joined in this odd category called civil union.

I find myself thinking, “why can't they just be married?” There's a gap between those who are qualified for a religious marriage in our tradition and those who are qualified for a civil marriage in the state of New Hampshire. I declare this morning that my confusion and frustration stems from an abridgement of free exercise of religion for the well-established, mainstream religious community I serve. There may be other ways to solve this problem legally, but one of the most straightforward is the one before you today: make marriage legal for committed couples of the same gender.

Please: I ask you to take action to align the religious practice of those traditions that accept same-gender couples as qualified for marriage with the civil practice of marriage. Let those whom God has joined together not be relegated to a kind of not-quite marriage by the State of New Hampshire.

Easter, again

2009-04-09T08:50:00.003-05:00

I haven't been paying much attention to this blog lately, but maybe Easter is a good time to begin again. My life is moving in a different direction, and at this season, the pace is accelerating -- there are things to do and deadlines to meet to make myself ready to leave Manchester and become an intentional interim minister. I'm excited and energized by the prospect!

The blog started as a way to keep in touch when I was on sabbatical in spring of 2007, and has shifted emphasis along the way, but now I'm back in pilgrimage mode, this time entering on a project to be a kind of 21st century circuit rider. I see this as a return to my original intention, to keep in touch as I travel and to record what I learn. Two years ago at Easter I was in San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico, experiencing the traditional ceremonies that mark this Christian high holy day in a rather traditional place. There were a crowd of people who followed the procession of Christ carrying the cross, many dressed in black, on Good Friday. Then all was festivity on Easter Sunday. This year I am again celebrating with my ambivalent congregation, lifting Christianity out of "Lo the Earth Awakes Again" with the help of Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock, wondering why it's so hard to include Christian holidays as among the many traditions we honor. Where will I be next Easter? In the land of Unitarian Universalist ambivalence, I'm sure, but someplace different, with its own traditions and its own Easter hangups.

I'm hoping to learn much about congregations in transition, and in the process to learn about who they are and how they do church. I have ambitions to help them be their best selves in the world, overcoming old habits that keep them stuck in the past. Can that happen? Maybe sometimes. And maybe sometimes it is sufficient to be with them, love them, and do church with them more or less the way they are used to having it. I feel the season's joyance, as the hymnodist suggests, partly from the spring and partly from the liturgical calendar. New possibilites waft through my life on the fresh breeze. It is good to be alive and good to be part of this faith tradition.

Death for Michael Addison?

2008-12-04T08:45:00.003-05:00

It was a dreadful deed done by a young man with a violent past. He shot the police officer, and he had been thinking of shooting cops for days, if not longer. Is death the answer for this crime?

I think of lynchings, of course, when I think of the death penalty. And I think of the many mistakes made in the many courts where death was meted out only to be overturned when more evidence was gained. This one is not one of those. But lynching is still on my mind, since this criminal is black, being tried in the white state of New Hampshire.

There is no clear answer in the Bible, though for Christians, the example of the life of Jesus certainly points toward punishments that do not result in death. His way was one of nonviolence.

In John 8:3-11, Jesus intervenes in the case of a woman about to be stoned to death for adultery, saying "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." Depending on what you believe about apostolic witness, this is pretty straightforward. But this story is not attested by any other gospel, nor does it appear in the earliest manuscripts of the Book of John. Is it truly the teaching of God? No matter how much I like it, I find it a slim support for not casting stones.

In Romans 13: 1-5, the Apostle Paul writes of the importance of submitting to the authority of government. But this is the teaching of someone who leads a community that does not govern. Paul's people are not able to choose whether government will impose death on some criminals or not. So his advice is to accept what cannot be changed. We, however, live in a world where there is some choice about what government requires, and in this case, the jury has a choice about what sentence to impose.

In Matthew 5:21-22, Jesus clearly teaches that Christians should not kill, or even be angry with others. But at the same time, in the very same chapter of Matthew, Jesus affirms the rightness of the Law of Moses, saying "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets...Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." And the Law of Moses affirms the death penalty.

Then there's the much quoted "all who take the sword will perish by the sword" in Matthew 26: 51-52. Michael Addison is one who has taken the sword, so to speak, and some would argue that Jesus calls for such a one to perish by the sword. But this is circular unless the sword is in the hand of God, for someone else must "take the sword" to kill him -- and presumably also suffer the same condemnation. I'm inclined to see this teaching as offering the lesson that violence only leads to more violence.

So that's where I end in a reflection on Christian scriptures and the death penalty. Violence only leads to more violence. If we deplore the violence that cost Officer Briggs his life, then it is only appropriate to find a way to punish without violence. We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

The jury will decide, regardless of what Scripture or other authority may say. I think it's time we gave some thought to adjusting the laws of our state to take this decision out of the hands of future juries. Let us punish without violence, I say, for those who take the sword will perish by the sword.

Thanks

2008-11-23T17:46:00.003-05:00

The news is that there is a radio station that is already into Christmas music, the idea being that people need a lift from all the woeful tidings of the season. Excuse me, but what happened to Thanksgiving?

I get a lift from giving thanks, especially when times are hard. Gratitude is, in fact, one of the big spiritual practices of the world's religions. Give thanks, they say. Giving thanks is important, they say. It's important because it is uplifting. People need a lift from all the woeful tidings of the season, so let us undertake the spiritual practice of giving thanks.

Imagine all the years when harvests were thin, and survival through the winter was a dicey prospect. What did our foreparents do? They worried, of course, but also they gave thanks. And why not? The world is full of many wonders. Life is amazing. Every day I wake up, it's time to give thanks. And throughout the day there are many moments to be grateful. Grateful for the smile of the waitress at the coffee shop. Grateful for the greeting of my co-worker. Grateful for the opportunity to make what I can of another day. Letting gratitude run through my day, pretty soon I realize I am in love with life, indeed, that I am happy, that I am in awe of nature and human invention, and so much more. And yes, my 401(k) is toast.

There are so many bad things that happen, things for which gratitude is really not the appropriate response. But then, through the rage and disappointment, beyond the tears, it turns out there is something, not the central event, but something around the edges, there is something for which to be thankful. Those little crumbs of gratitude from around big awful events are important. They make a trail that can lead us from bitterness to forgiveness, from despair to renewed hope, a trail of crumbs through the dark places that can take us back out again.

So let us not go quite yet to the forgettable and commercial uplift of Christmas songs on the radio. Let's take time for Thanksgiving first, and tune up our spiritual practice of gratitude. It's something within ourselves that will deliver the goods as we face these hard times. And it's good to start with giving thanks.

Turning?

2008-11-09T02:28:00.004-05:00

Turning is what people say we need to do as a nation. We have somehow gotten onto the wrong path, and we must turn now to a better way. We have chosen a President who promises change, and surely turning to a better way would be another way of putting that. But what is our relationship now to that choice? Have we done our part of the work by making up or minds and voting? I hope that is not all we little people plan to do.

I'm thinking of our country as a large piece of equipment, a big truck, or a ship, something that takes a lot of energy to turn. And this turning is not even so simple as a change of direction for an earth mover, a truck, or a ship. Besides, the pieces of the turning all seem to be interrelated, and not all the levers that control the parts are in the hands of our new president. He controls some of them, and influences some of them, but not all of them, and as he has carefully reminded us, not yet. We chose, and fell back in amazement at our work, which truly is amazing, but it is not done yet -- he starts work on January 20. The other elected officials we chose at the same time will be working with him, whether as partners in his vision or as loyal opposition. That will certainly help us get pointed toward a different direction, but the change of direction involves other institutions than government.

There is still work for us to do. We need to hold to the vision with its interconnected parts, a vision partly in the hands of government, partly influenced by government, and to some degree outside government control. A new way of doing international relations, lowered reliance on fossil fuels, a better system for access to health care, better public education, and a renewed commitment to protecting the habitability of the planet, these are the major headings of what's involved. First, government will have to deal with the immediate crises in the financial markets and the "real" economy. It's important for us to hold the vision of the changes we need, and to start working on them directly as opportunity presents itself.

Maybe there are new "green" enterprises to be started. Maybe the are ways to promote good health practices, from healthy eating to exercise without getting involved with government programs. Maybe there are ways to lead change with local initiative before they make up their minds at the national level. Maybe there are tiny international efforts at outreach that we can make our own.

People are going to be doing things on a small scale that help direct the change that is starting to happen. Some people will be doing things on a larger scale outside the realm of government. Will they be people who value human dignity and diversity? will they be people who value the use of democratic processes everywhere in society? One way to make sure they will be people who have the values we teach in Unitarian Universalism is for them be members of our faith community -- perhaps you? or someone you know? or someone who hasn't yet found us? We are a larger faith in the sense that we direct our attention to the deep needs of our world here and now, rather than to some imagined other world. And I say we need to be a larger faith in numbers, too, in order to help make this turning happen in the right way, in a way that is good for people in all walks of life and good for all living things, in a way that is good for the Earth.

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Decisions

2008-10-28T08:25:00.004-05:00

So here we are at the end of October, making decisions about how to cast our ballots for president on November 4th. We hope these decisions have everything to do with considering what we value, comparing it to what we think might be delivered, using good judgment about aligning our interests with our candidates.

In some ways, it's an exercise in faith. We have no idea what the candidates will really do when they get elected. Sometimes we hope they will do something a little different than what they have promised. For me, I'm hoping that "clean coal" turns out to be something we can live without, and that promises in that department need not be kept. Sometimes, once they are elected, they just change their minds about what they can or want to do, and there we all are.

So we look deeper. There's that surface level where we can calculate whose health care plan or tax plan looks like a better deal for us, and even which one looks like a better deal in terms of the kind of country we'd like to live in. Who is this person? And who are the people around him? What are the indicators of the qualities of character we look for? Yes, it's about character, but not in the sloganeered way we have known in past campaigns.

Unitarians used to believe that good character itself brought a kind of salvation, and indeed, we spend a lot of energy in our congregations considering how to be good people, people of good character. Our seven principles are guides to character as well as being guides to action in the world. So I suggest as a handy guide to the character of our next president a quick check of our own seven principles:

Does he respect the worth and dignity of every person?
Does he model justice, equity, and compassion in human relations?
Does he accept others and encourage them -- if not to spiritual growth, then to finding their own way to a good life?
Does he pursue a free and responsible search for truth and meaning?
Is his way of working with others a model of democratic process?
Does he reach out in meaningful ways toward a world of peace, liberty, and justice for all?
And by his actions does he show respect for the interdependence of all life on our Planet?

If he passes the UU Principles Character Test in addition to promising policies and actions you approve, I say, the choice will be clear. If your deep intuition still tells you something else, I say, examine the sources of your deep intuition. This year's election is not just about getting on with our same way of being a country. It's about finding another way. Character can help us find the leader for that vitally important task.

Intensive Beach

2008-08-29T11:49:00.003-05:00

I had signed up to take an intensive class in Unitarian Spiritual Practice as a student at large at Meadville Lombard Theological School, a week of intensive immersion in learning the spiritual practices of our Unitarian ancestors, mainly the Transcendentalists. Rev. Rob Hardies was going to be teaching it, And it was going to be at Ferry Beach, on the coast of Maine. This was a double attraction, important learning and agreeable location, so I was sure it would be worth the rather astonishing cost.

Now I can report that it was a good choice. Seventeen of us gathered six hours a day for five days in a large room normally used for things involving yoga mats and exercise balls. We had read a large number of books and articles and signed up to do presentations on others that not all of us were reading. (I was part of the Theodore Parker team). I confess, I had not been as well prepared as I intended to be, but I was able to hang onto the thread of the conversation throughout.

The practice of self-culture was at the center of Transcendentalist spirituality, a practice that owed a lot to the way the Puritans had done things before, but also reached across the Atlantic to the German and English Romantics. It had everything to do with starting your day intending to become a better person, examining yourself on a daily basis through keeping a journal and reflecting prayerfully, and consecrating your life to the good of all. In their hands, at that time in the development of American culture, it became a powerful tool for social change. It can be argued that echoes of self-culture still echo down the years in our culture today. As a particularly poignant example, we listened together to Barak Obama's acceptance speech and heard them.

And all week we had a succession of the kind of sweet summer days that make people come back to the Maine coast year after year. Sunshine, a little breeze, cool at night and warm in the day. Not too hot. The water, of course, was too cold for real swimming, which was just as well, since we were not really free during the prime beach hours. There was plenty of walking on the beach, enjoying the porch facing the sea, listening to the waves, smelling the air, and imbibing the sense of peace that comes with all this beachiness. How could we keep on being up tight in a place designed to let go, surrounded by others doing much less stressful things than taking a graduate level Seminary class.

I am heading home refreshed and inspired, ready to start the church year with the spirit of those New England ancestors who loved Nature, loved one another, and loved the Spirit.

Spiritual but not religious

2008-08-12T13:18:00.003-05:00

When I read that there are more people out there in the world who claim to be Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist than there are members of our congregations, I am really confident that we have quite a congregation out there of folks who say they are "spiritual but not religious". True, some of those self-described Unitarian Universalists who don't attend our congregations are more skeptical than spiritual, but there are those who really do think they can be spiritual on their own.

To some extent, it's possible. Many of us prefer the church of nature, taking time out on weekends to go hiking or cross-country skiing or birding or whatever. This is good. Nature can be spiritually nourishing. Our spiritual ancestor, Henry David Thoreau, turned to nature for spirituality more than to other humans. But his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, chided him for being too often alone, and urged him to take someone else along on his rambles. Emerson thought there could be no spirituality without human companionship, it seems. Others of us just live our lives, reading books that remind us of the spirit, Conversations With God, Tuesdays with Morrie, books by Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama, and contemplating life in what we hope is a spiritual way. But what is spirituality if it does not require anything of you beyond reading books? The spirituality based on books --even the spirituality based on attending occasional weekend workshops -- this is also incomplete without people with whom to talk it over, without the challenge to actually put the spirituality into practice.

Being "religious" can get to be a problem, though. You go someplace where people all believe some things in common, and what if you don't agree? I'm thinking there really are only a couple of things we believe in Unitarian Universalism, when it comes right down to it:
We believe in welcoming. We believe in trying to find our own spiritual paths. We believe in testing our experiences of the source of meaning and guidance through sharing with others as well as thinking it over for ourselves. And we believe in reaching out to help others, no matter where we or they are on our spiritual journeys. And that's about it.

Is it a religion? We think so. But you don't have to be "religious" to be part of it.

Sadness and Fear

2008-07-28T19:03:00.003-05:00

We still don't really know why he did it. But he did, and apparently he was a person who hated everything we stand for. That was enough to trigger a moment not only of sadness and prayer for the people directly involved, but also of fear for ourselves. I'm sure Manchester, New Hampshire, is not the only conservative place with a Unitarian Universalist Church, so my thoughts and prayers go out to my sisters and brothers in those other places, places where it's not inconceivable that some gun toting, disgruntled desperado could choose killing us as a form of self expression.

Our congregation's history includes an episode of terrible vandalism, a crime never solved, when the whole interior of the church was systematically trashed. Was it a hate crime? No one knows, but for the people who were there, it sure felt like it. Personal histories of our members include hateful encounters-- people who were fired from jobs because of their sexual orientation, people who were threatened, even actually attacked, for traveling in the company of someone of the same gender. My own history stretches back in time and across the miles to my childhood in Northern Virginia where my parents were threatened for being "n-er lovers" and all kinds of liberals were referred to as "communists", a time when I learned to be very cautious about expressing my views.

The tree of fear has real roots, and this event has watered them with blood. Let us use it as an opportunity to remember the bad old days and to notice the badness of today, sure, but let us also use this as a time to resolve again that our views have importance in the world, importance that is worth a calculated risk. These risks need to be acknowledged. But let us reflect on them and use those reflections develop the courage we need to stand for what is right in ways that can reach out effectively to our surrounding communities.

Visions from Chautauqua

2008-07-14T13:22:00.003-05:00

It's not like anything else, this gated village on a lake in the not-so wilds of far western New York State. Families come and stay there for a day, a weekend, a week, or all summer, where a feast of cultural opportunities is spread before them. I got up early for Zen meditation with a senior teacher from a well-known Zen center. Others got up early to go sailing or play tennis. Still others slept late in the blissful quiet of this mostly car-free environment. Worship services, lectures, conversations, book signings, concerts, recitals, every hour had another cultural temptation to absorb. Some of the cottages are quite grand, while others are modest. There are hotels and condos catering to most budgets (no campground, though -- there is a definitely higher-than-average-income feel about the place), and really, they are quite interested in making sure there is not a lot of driving of cars. That's what got my attention.

We had paid over $4.00 per gallon the last time we filled the tank on our way over there from New England, so it's not surprising that fuel was on my mind. So here's the deal. There's a little "downtown" area with the library, some shops, a post office, and a grocery store at the center of the place. The other places to go are within walking distance, though there is a trolley service of sorts, and a bus, both making the rounds on a regular basis. Out by the main gate there's an early morning farmers' market for fresh local produce. You can almost just go there and stay all summer without going "off campus" as they say. It's true, there's not a lot of privacy, because the lots are all small and everyone is always out on the front porch.

I spoke with a woman who said she had been coming for over twenty years, arriving from New York City with her carry-on bag, gathering up the things she would have stored from the last season, settling into the same room in the same residence year after year. And in all this time, she has not brought a car with her. I actually didn't ask if she owned one, which maybe she doesn't, since she lives in The City. It seems she wrote a book a long time ago that is still used in schools, that still brings her a dependable stream of cash that makes this vacation possible. But adjustments have to be made. This year, she will have to have someone drive her out to the pharmacy in town, because the delivery service has been changed from the drug store she always had used to a different one, and she hadn't gotten around to changing her prescription. About once a week, someone drives her to town so she can do a few errands, visit the "big" grocery store, and so forth. Otherwise, she walks or takes the trolley or the bus. There's plenty to do, and people she knows who either stay all summer themselves or drift through by the week.

I couldn't help thinking our regular neighborhoods could be more like this. There's Boys' and Girls' Club for the younger set every week day. There are electric carts for people with mobility issues. One payment includes all the culture you can absorb. And while you actually are able to leave at any time, there's not much need. Why not get out of our cars and start walking and biking and taking public transportation? Get to know our neighbors as we walk past one another's porches? I'm sure we wouldn't be living the way we are if there hadn't been some big drawbacks to this old-timey way of doing things, but this glimpse of it made me think that what is old might just become new again. I say, let's take our vision from Chautauqua, and invent a new kind of neighborhood that works without having to drive so much.

Florida in June

2008-07-05T04:10:00.002-05:00

The General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association gathered in Fort Lauderdale towards the end of June, giving me yet another chance to celebrate my birthday in an exotic location without my family anywhere around. It's generally worth it, as it was this time in ways that I am still sorting out in my head, producing an untidy flood of documents that I am still sorting out on my desk. But going to South Florida in June left me with one very clear impression: people should not be living in such numbers on this hot, fragile, wet, beautiful, sandy shore.

So there we were, gathered into a neat, security-checked corner of this place, one that could be made to appear much like any other convention center, air conditioned into not having to go outside, offered food much like any other convention food, so we could pretend that humans were in fact supposed to be here. For the Haitian cab drivers, it seemed like home. And for us, too, it seemed like home, the home we re-create every year so we can celebrate our milestones, have our conversations about theology and practice, argue about how to do the social justice we want to do, and just generally get into our way of being together -- worship of words and songs and music and artistic ambiance, shopping and schmoozing in the exhibit hall, listening in the plenary sessions, participating in workshops. We might as well be on another planet, and our Planet Convention is in South Florida this year.

I find it difficult to do General Assembly, so this sense that people ought not to live here, ought not to visit here, this sense of wrongness fit right in with my mood. But by limiting the amount I did, by focusing on reconnecting with colleagues, I was actually able to enjoy the time I spent on Planet Convention. I met new friends at the International Council of Unitarian Universalists' booth and related activities. I met old friends at the Andover Newton Theological School event. I hung out with the women of E-Meetinghouse, people with whom I share an electronic fellowship but do not see, especially in groups, unless I come here. My workshop on "Eight Spiritual Practices to Save The World" went well, and I made new friends around that.

I found one friend who also has a General Assembly birthday and had dinner with him. I discovered another friend has a General Assembly birthday, so I had dinner with her the next night. I came away with tasks to do to follow up on new and old connections, and with a sense that I actually look forward to General Assembly next year.

Maybe now that I have conquered the thought that people ought not go to places like that, I can persuade members of the congregation I serve that they, too, should visit Planet Convention, wherever it happens, to make new friends, learn new ways, and celebrate with thousands of others like us.

Thinking of Norbert

2008-06-16T08:21:00.003-05:00

Norbert Capek was not just the inventor of the Flower Ceremony, he was a devoted father. So when Flower Sunday happened to fall on Fathers' Day, it was clearly time to talk about Capek's life. I realized by the response to what I said that this was a story unfamiliar to many members of our congregation. (Yes, I get it -- if I don't tell it, no one else will!) They didn't know he had re-planted Unitarianism in Czechoslovakia, that the teachings of his church about freedom of thought and growing your faith from within were considered treason once the Germans came, that he had died in a gas chamber after being worked nearly to death in Dachau.

It feels as if the channels for spreading UU stories to adult members of this congregation, for teaching the UU's of Manchester, New Hampshire, about our very own movement, are very thin. There's Sunday morning. There's the often unread newsletter. There's the library -- unfunded, and a new part of our enterprise, so not a really well-developed resource and not yet widely used. And there's the Adult Enrichment program, most effectively used for teaching spirituality these days. There's this blog, and its companion meant for the local community. I'm intrigued by the flow of comments on my Eagle Scout reflection -- maybe this channel is not as thin as I think.

Our own website is mostly used for sharing information about events, and the UUA's website is so big and complex, it's hard to know and access what's on it. I'm thinking that as the internet gets to be more like TV, it could be possible to share more stories that way. But could we do it well? accurately? attractively? And I'm wishing someone else would do it, of course. Days seem very long already. So much to share, so little time! And so few channels to attract and hold their attention!

I'll hold the good thought, do my best, and hope to say what needs to be said in ways that convey it to those ready to absorb. So much to do, so little time!

Flight of Eagles

2008-06-08T18:02:00.004-05:00

There were three of them this year, young men from our congregation who completed all the work to become Eagle Scouts in the Boy Scouts of America, the highest level of scouting. They are now scouts for life, according to the way of the BSA. They worked hard in different ways, one with a project to create a little park in a downtown neighborhood, another with a soccer camp and used-equipment collection to benefit young Iraqi soccer players, and the third with a huge project to brighten up the meditation garden at our church. All of them showed leadership and creativity. All of them learned lessons of character and citizenship that will be with them all their lives. So of course, we honored them with little ceremonies in church. The first was in January, and the second was just today, June 8. We felt proud.

We also felt a little ambivalent. Not about the young men who earned this honor. But about the relationship of the values of our religious movement with those of the larger Boy Scouts of America. We feel a little sneaky and underhanded as we celebrate our flight of Eagles, because we are painfully aware that the BSA does not accept boys and men who have minority sexual orientations. Two of our adult members earned the rank of Eagle Scout. One of them proudly volunteers in the local scouting organization, at times feeling conflicted about the values of his church and the values of scouting. He assisted in the presentation of our congratulations to our new Eagles. The other, a gay man, has returned his insignia and certificate. He did this because he knew the scouts would not have accepted him if they had known of his sexual orientation.

When I spoke with this second man, the one who resigned, he said that yes, it was okay for us to celebrate the new Eagles in our flock. Much of who he is as an adult, he said, had to do with what he learned through scouting. So he was glad for the experience. And yet, he is not welcome. I'm sorry it has to be like this. I'm glad that scouting is there for those of our boys who fit in with their program. I salute their achievement. I hope the presence of Unitarian Universalist adults among the ranks of scout leadership will help bring change from within.

Old People

2008-06-01T20:29:00.005-05:00

I spent much of the month of May's "extra" time attending to the pastoral needs of a dear old lady and her family as she drifted gently toward death. I was glad to do it. We had her memorial service on May 31, an excellent time, because there are flowers in everyone's garden that could be gathered to brighten the church. She herself had often brought garden flowers for services, so it reminded us of her. She and her husband had lived long lives in a network of communities. They had been vital participants in the activities of our congregation, of Star Island, their family, and several other organizations dedicated to worthy causes. We all loved them. Her husband had died last October, leaving her, after sixty-some years, adrift in a world without him. It was a conscious decision on her part -- she wasn't feeling well, she didn't want to go on without him -- there was a moment we all knew that she had decided no to go on living.

It was sad to realize that this was happening, yet there was nothing to do but accept. And gradually, the life force ebbed from her body, although she remained alert in the moments when she was not too tired. Her family gathered. Her friends dropped in for short visits. She loved people, so these visits revived her while they lasted. But it became clear she was allowing herself to get overtired -- so the visits had to end. We hated that part.

Sometimes, when someone in her nineties dies, hardly anyone remembers. We had another elder lady die last fall, someone who had been out of touch with the congregation for years, living in a retirement home, someone whose interests had all faded as she aged, who had slipped more deeply into dementia in recent years. Her husband had died in the spring, and by fall, she was ready to "go and be with him." Much about her story was the same -- a long marriage, a long life into her nineties, the death of her beloved husband a few months earlier, a decision not to go on living. And when it was over, there were a very few people who remembered and still cared. They had had no children, and most of their friends has passed from this life before them. The nephew and niece who were their guardians did care, but there was no other extended family who chose to be at the memorial service. A dozen old people gathered, plus the nephew -- the niece had gone back to the midwest where she now lives-- to remember her life and say goodbye.

Not so with our lady of May. When we celebrated her life, over two hundred relatives and friends crowded into our modest sanctuary. There were so many stories -- touching, funny, poignant, colorful -- together we summoned up a hologram of her presence, resolved to be like her as much as we could, laughed and wept, and bid her farewell. It was a death that had come in its time, since it is imprudent to make any claims on the future at ninety-one, and yet we all wished she had gone on living -- just a little while, for us. And there was so much food. Her son had sent word not to make a fuss, only to be told that not fussing was not going to be possible. Everyone wanted to bring something to the reception. This was a good thing, because everyone wanted to stand around and talk and eat and drink punch and coffee for a long time, even after a long formal service.

It's not really true that we choose our endings, although I suspect there is more choice than we think, those of us on the outside. Having watched these dear elders live their last days, weeks, and months, though, I suspect there are some things we should remember as we lurch forward into old age. Mainly, it seems to be about having friends and having interests. Life continues to flow through us as we remain engaged with the living of it. Belonging to a church, with its constant resupply of people of younger ages, seems just right. As the lives of the younger ones help maintain the interests of the older ones, the wisdom and simple presence of the older ones blesses the younger ones. Families can sometimes be like this, but families can get small. A person needs multiple communities and multiple interests long into old age, no doubt about it. There truly is something wrong with shutting people away into colonies of the elderly and letting them find community only among people in older age. Let the doors be open between the generations!

Tale of Two Seders

2008-04-27T18:37:00.003-05:00

Our UU Congregation has its own version of a Passover seder most years, and this year it fell on the first day of "real" Passover. We gathered, families bringing young children, families bringing elderly parents, adults with Judaism in their past, adults with no clue about what Passover might be, for an ordered celebration, a dinner with traditional foods, and our own approximation of a Haggaddah. Everything was in English, the songs were mostly selected from songs of freedom we know from other contexts ("Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell old Pharoah, let my people go!") And some things were about Unitarian Universalists, those who have tried to help when people -- especially Jewish people -- were being killed, and those who stood by. We allied ourselves in spirit with the people who were slaves in Egypt. They had been in "a narrow place", the English translation of the Hebrew word for "Egypt", and somewhere in our histories as families, as individuals, as cultural groups, we have all been there. In our usual style, it was informal, with readings shared all around, requiring minimal leadership. And in our usual style, the food was copious and excellent. Our cooks followed Jewish recipes and used no leavening anywhere. Someone had found some bottles of nice dry kosher wine, and of course, there was grape juice. A good time was had by all.

I had the pleasure of attending the seder at the home of the Conservative rabbi and his wife the following night. It was a wonderful, convivial gathering of a dozen people, including some teenagers, but otherwise all older adults. The table was decorated to illustrate the ten plagues that Moses allowed God to send to the Egyptians. Little plastic frogs were everywhere (we need these for the little kids at the UU Seder next year!). And finger puppets, one for each plague. And Elijah's cup was joined by Miriam's well in a place of honor. There was a song about Miriam and the women dancing on the shores of the Red Sea after the people had crossed over. Of course the fine china and crystal and silver and linen marked this as a very different kind of occasion than the one in our church basement, but I know of seders in synagogue basements, too. In contrast with our group of mostly newbies, with a few execptions, everyone there had been doing multiple seders all their lives as part of the rhythm of the Jewish liturgical calendar. There was rich chanting in Hebrew, and of course songs that everyone else knew in Hebrew. Still, the main story was told in English, shared around the table the same way we had done ours the night before. If you wanted, you could read your part of the story in Hebrew, but the requirement was to include the English as well. As in our UU seder, things got informal and even a little silly at times, as people enjoyed each other's company.

I came away feeling all right about the way our congregation does Passover. It's a UU Passover, of course, but it's true enough, to my ear, eye, and tongue, to the "real thing". It's a combination of serious purpose and informal tone, reaching out in gratitude to the Holy, promising to remember, feeling our unity around the table. Children and their parents leave with many things to talk over. Another time, though, I'm going to try to get my congregation together with a group from a Jewish congregation for seder, to bring a live experience of interfaith celebration into what for us borders of make-believe.

A Great Celebration

2008-04-23T17:09:00.000-05:00

I was among the 250 or so happy Unitarian Universalists who got to celebrate the joining of the New Hampshire/ Vermont District of the Unitarian Universalist Association with the Northeast District (Maine) on April 11 and 12. What a party! There were a banner parade, choral singing with percussion, and a rapid-fire “testimony” time on Friday night that got us all thinking about what a lot of Good News there is to share about our congregations in these three states. And a well-run meeting in which delegates from the two districts met simultaneously for their last separate annual meetings, culminating in a vote to merge, consolidate, or whatever it was we called it. Then our surprise keynote speaker, Ginny Courter, UUA Moderator proceeded to knock our socks off with an alternately hilarious and touching presentation encouraging us to go ahead and let people know about our faith. I missed the grand ceremonial worship service because I had long ago agreed to do a wedding that afternoon for a couple near and dear to the congregation’s hearts, but all reports were that it was energetic and inspiring. Members of the congregation who attended came back energized, though tired.

So now two are one, with a bigger voice and fewer votes in the UUA, though our fewer votes will emerge as the longer-serving of our Trustees reaches the end of his tenure next year. And we’re too big for any of the congregations to be able to house our annual meetings and conferences. I trust we will make up for all that by having a critical mass that will bring new energy to our associations here in northern New England. It will certainly be easier to staff one District instead of two, and to staff it well instead of sketchily. I’m excited about the presence of a small church specialist among us, since this is a part of the world with many little congregations tucked away here and there, bringing civilization to the boonies.

May Northern New England speak and sing with a new voice that energizes the whole region with the good news of Unitarian Universalism, the faith we make for ourselves in conversation with one another.

Service and Peace

2008-03-19T08:34:00.003-05:00

I went to a peace march and rally in Concord on Saturday, along with six or seven others from our congregation. Two of our delegation participated in the reading of names, the nearly 4,000 U.S. service people who have died in the war, plus many more civilians, both U.S. and Iraqi. They read in shifts for 13 hours to say the names. And those names are just the beginning. The group Code Pink had collected shoes and lined them up along the sidewalks of the square in front of the State House -- combat boots, yes, and flip-flops, high heels, little sneakers, and other kinds of civilian shoes, to remind us not only of the soldiers, but of the everyday people whose lives have been taken by this war. As we walked to the State House from the other side of the river, passing cars honked and gave us the peace sign (one or two offered the "other" salute). We even walked with a police escort along the street for a couple of blocks, heady stuff! A very funky marching band accompanied our parade. We chanted, "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!"
For me, there was a certain bitter nostalgia. I was glad to see that many of those marching were too young to remember those other marches. Not even born in Vietnam times. Some who would not remember the first Iraq incursion. There was music -- their kind of music, and mine, too, for the day.
There were speeches. Nabil Migalli, head of the New Hampshire Arab American league, spoke passionately about the false pretenses under which the war was started and the tremendous damage it has done to our national security and our stature in world opinion. He reminded us that terrible things are being done in our names for no good reason. Then a young veteran took the stage, Will Hopkins, to speak of his experience in this war, and of the price paid by so many returning veterans in the form of dreadful injuries, and in the form of hidden injuries of the spirit -- the flashbacks, the fear that doesn't stop, the reluctance to seek treatment. We will be paying for this war in the very fabric of our own culture for a long, long time.
It's a cultural question-- we value military service to our country to defend the peace we have within our borders. And then we squander the lives of those loyal Americans who enlist for this valuable service as if they were so many electronically generated images on a computer screen. We need to reincarnate our thinking about this service so as to respect it more. Real people with real families, real hopes and dreams of life within the borders the service supposedly defends, real blood, real muscles, real arms and legs and heads.
If our faith, Unitarian Universalism, is about God, then it must be about God incarnated in everyone, the spirit of life that animates us all, the precious and sacred made flesh . The flesh too sacred to be thrown so lightly into harm's way. And from the response to the march from the passersby, I'm thinking there are a lot of Americans who share this faith without actually saying that's what it is. Wholly human -- holy human. Something divine within us all, too precious to be thrown away.

Different Uses for a Church

2008-03-05T19:15:00.004-05:00

It was Sunday, and on a Sunday our church is full of life. Meditation starts at 8:00, then the Our Whole Lives class at 9:00, warming up the place for the main events, Adult Worship and Children's Church, at 10:00. This particular day, there were both a class for potential new members and a Religious Education Committee meeting right after social hour. It's not always totally busy for me, but this week, it was.

I sat with the Religious Education folks, then went over to the Newcomers class, where I was scheduled for a cameo appearance. I had work to do coming out of the RE Committee meeting, so I sat down to do it after the class was done (3 new people "signed the book" to become members!). The Finance Committee had asked for a detailed justification of the budget for our prospective new Director of Religious Education. I created it and shipped it off to the other concerned parties for comment. Then I prepared my evening discussion class, "Co-creating the Church We Want" and went home to get a bite to eat.

Sunday evening is full: The youth group meets, the Social Responsibility Committee meets, there's and AA meeting, and the discussion I was leading happened to be meeting. I locked my purse in my office and headed off to the other side of the building to meet my fellow co-creators. The conversation was rich -- we actually opened up some things that seriously need wider discussion and resolution -- and I was feeling pretty wired by the time I got back to the office. A good kind of wired, the way I feel when a lot has happened and I need to process. There was some more stuff to do at the computer, wired or not, and it was about an hour before I was ready to go home.

But as I looked around, it became clear that my purse was missing. Money, ID, cards, keys, missing. I called the police. I called my landlady to let me in. Then I went home and called all the credit card offices. Someone had apparently already used one of my cards at several stores. Then the next day, it became clear that someone had broken into the other office and into the closet where we keep the safe, and maybe they had used keys they found to open the safe. But the money had left the building before they got there. I lay awake most of the night, trying to process, but mostly just freaking out.

I thought that yes, a church has many functions. We provide a place of calm and quiet for meditation, age-appropriate worship for young people and adults, instruction in dealing with life's persistent questions, conversation about how to be our own best selves both individually and collectively, opportunities for healing, and now, apparently, someone was thinking we were a sort of informal ATM.

Of course. A church collects money on a Sunday, so Sunday evening must be the right time to redistribute it to someone who needs it. I don't accept this idea. Especially when the person doesn't even have an account with us! Building security. Not my favorite concern. But there we have it -- if we don't want to be an ATM, we'll have to tighten things up. I like it that church is many different things to different people on Sunday and throughout the week. But there are limits.

Spiritual Knee

2008-01-27T19:59:00.000-05:00

I love to ski. It's one of the ways I connect with the highest truth and the deepest love -- I feel the oneness of everything when I'm floating downhill with those long flat things stuck to my feet. Songs of the universe pass through my head and the sky opens up to let the energies of the heavens connect with those of the earth. In the days when I had a partner who shared skiing with me, a day on the slopes generally served as the best appetizer for an evening of high-powered love. Both the skiing and the lovemaking are/were spiritual practices for me.

So now this year, I come to a time when my right knee has enough arthritis in it to provoke a flareup. At first, I didn't know what it was. I spent weeks contemplating life with a sore knee. I limped up and down stairs. I couldn't do yoga. I couldn't take long walks. I couldn't ski. It was awful. "So this is how it feels to be in your 80's," I thought. I was so unhappy. I'm quite a few years away from being in my 80's, not at all ready to go there. Though many people my age have real physical limitations. I thought of them and felt grateful. Acceptance, I thought. That's the spiritual practice for this knee. And it was.

But non-acceptance was also a worthwhile practice. I went to the doctor and accepted a shot of cortisone and a prescription for anti-inflammatory pills. I took my friends' advice and started taking glocosamine. Finally, after weeks and weeks of one thing and another, I can dance and I can ski.

First, it was dancing. I go contradancing, which although it is quite energetic, is always done in places where you can stop and go home with very little trouble. Somebody told me to get new shoes with less resistance to turning. I did, and it was great! Then, I went for an afternoon to a smoothly groomed, pretty boring ski place. I got cold from not exercising enough while heading down hill, but my knee came through beautifully.

I paid attention to my knee. I let it tell me what to do. And it did. One step after another became clear as I paid attention to what it said.

So my spiritual practice of accepting the truth and paying attention to my knee has led me from despair to readjustment. Maybe I'll never ski aggressively again, or maybe I will. I'll pay attention and not just make up some story about what's going to happen. I will be guided in the way that works. After all, It's my spiritual knee that will take me to where I need to go.

Experimenting with Worship Time

2008-01-04T20:47:00.000-05:00

We're experimenting with worship time. Some members and friends of the congregation work nights or Sunday mornings and find it really difficult to get to church on Sunday at 10:00 AM the only time church "happens" for us. One mother confessed that she has a tight turnaround with taking her son to a sports practice and almost never makes it to church -- plus, she really, really isn't a morning person! To those of us who have been Unitarian Universalist forever, it seems very unnatural to think of church happening at a different time. I still wish they wouldn't have youth sports practice on Sunday mornings, because we still really can't have Sunday School any other time. But with our experiment, now Mom can come, but only once a month, at 5:00 PM on the second Saturday of the month, January 12, this month. (check our website for other months: www.uumanchester.org)

I can tell you it's very sweet. There's something about the silence outside in the evening -- no doubt this will change when spring comes, but for now, silence -- and the smaller congregation makes it more intimate. We sing together, keep silence together, take our time in sharing joys and concerns, and reflect together on the theme of the week. Sometimes the sermon is cut short to allow for discussion, so it's less formal. The light is different, the stained glass windows look different, and there's just something about the calm energy of that time of day that makes everything flow together nicely. Then, sometimes, we go somewhere to get a bite to eat and socialize afterward.

I'm hoping many more people discover this experiment with worship time. Maybe you if you're nearby? We'd love to have you!

Burning our Regrets, Safeguarding our Intentions

2007-12-30T20:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-14T16:20:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-05T11:25:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-27T16:47:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-23T18:08:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-16T17:57:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-26T12:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-21T19:15:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-11T18:50:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-09T08:18:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-30T20:27:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-27T15:25:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-21T10:22:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-18T14:18:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-26T06:41:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-22T05:41:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-06-20T12:23:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-16T09:18:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-14T10:56:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-12T12:59:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-10T11:43:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-08T11:09:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-05T23:41:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-04T14:11:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-03T11:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-30T09:06:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-05-24T10:26:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-23T09:48:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-18T08:52:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-16T06:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-11T13:22:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-05-02T15:11:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-27T16:59:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-23T17:06:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-19T10:24:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-18T09:31:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-18T09:08:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-03T15:15:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-01T00:42:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-28T10:39:00.001-05:00

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

2007-03-27T09:41:00.000-05:00

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.

Geography of Motion

2007-03-21T10:13:00.000-05:00

Once I read that highways have a special aesthetic, required because they are places transforming themselves into other places. They need to be insulated from the normal, non-transforming places, the ones that just stay still and be themselves, because if viewed in terms of a non-moving aesthetic, highways are ugly, and if viewed in terms of the moving aesthetic, "normal" places are a confusing jumble that makes no sense. That seemed true.

For several days, I found myself living in a different kind of place transforming itself into different place, the complex hotels, restaurants, car rental facilities, and parking services that surrounds the Sea-Tac airport outside Seattle. I was there because I had things to do to the north and to the south, plus I was coming from the east, wanted a place I could find easily, and wanted easy access to the airport when it came time to leave. But there I was for several days, long enough to experience the place as itself.

There's this blob of activity in buildings and parking lots just outside the airport, which makes sense only in terms of coming and going. The hotels are clearly mostly places where people come in after a flight on their way to wherever they are "really" going, or where people come to pause for the night before getting on the plane. All of them are surrounded by extra parking lots for people who are leaving their cars during their absence. The hotels are interspersed with "park and fly" places and car rental agencies. The "better" hotels have their own restaurants, so the traveler need not leave the premises; hotels like the one where I stayed are content to offer an efficient shuttle service. Food facilities outside hotels seemed oriented more to the employees of the many travel-related operations than to travelers.

But here's what I found: I was on the edge of airport-related service activity, so by going out on foot, I could be strolling in a residential neighborhood, complete with a little lake and a lovely park, participating in a place that makes sense as place. By car, I visited the library and the Post Office, even the supermarket, and there they were, solid and fixed, belonging only to the place they inhabit, even though minutes away, there was this other place that made sense only in terms of the logic of air travel. To heighten the contrast, it was spring in the places that were not in motion, with green grass, daffodils, cherry trees, and other Northwestern things I don't recognize in bloom, while the traveling place was dominated by concrete and electric light, knowing no season.

Since I was there for a few days, I was grateful to be able to access the place that stays put. Since I was leaving on the plane, I was grateful to be able to access the place tranforming into other places. The transforming place is ugly in terms of the ways of the place that does not move. The stationary place makes no sense to the people who are engaged with the processes of the transforming place. They know no season, only movement. They need no library or post office or park. They might as well be two different worlds.

"My Name is Rachel Corrie"

2007-03-18T10:38:00.000-05:00

It happened that I was in the Seattle area at the same time that the one-woman show, "My Name is Rachel Corrie" was opening. This is a play based on material drawn from the journals and emails of the young Olympia woman who died when she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, just a few days before the start of the Iraq invasion. I saw it with my nephew Ben, who is a little older than Rachel would have been, but shares with her the experience of being a student at Evergreen College. He continues to live in Olympia, so her reminiscences were close to home for him. He said it was right on.

Apparently the show we saw was significantly different from the one that played in London and New York, tailored for the hometown audience, the ones who would understand the significance of salmon swimming through a creek in a culvert to return to their spawning places. Marya Sea Kaminski, the actress who played Rachel, took us from the breezy hipness of a student going to college in her hometown to the anguish of a partisan totally absorbed in the cause of justice for Palestinians. Although Rachel had always wanted to help change the world, she realized when she went to Palestine just how silly her concerns in the middle-class college student world had been. She loved the Palestinian families she got to know with the wonderful passion of youth. She was part of a peaceful protest against the destruction of homes along the border between Israeli and Palestinian areas. That is where she was killed, standing in front of the bulldozer to discourage it from razing the home of a family she knew.

Two advertisements appeared in the program, one sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and one by a coalition of Jewish groups led by the Anti-Defamation League. They wanted to remind us that people are dying because of Palestinian attacks and the borders need to be secured. They wanted us to know that Rachel worked with the International Solidarity Movement, and that ISM supports "armed resistance" against Israel. The ADL ad's text told us that "the ISM exploited Rachel's idealism by intentionally placing her in harm's way, encouraging her to stand in front of bullets and bulldozers."

Maybe so, but I don't think it excuses mowing her down with a giant Caterpillar earth mover.

What's going on over there? What's going on over here that people want to make it okay to murder people who are engaged in nonviolent protest? The Jewish Federation ad wanted us to believe that Rachel Corrie died "by accident". I don't think so.

Palestinian extremists are certainly not to be excused for their suicide bombings, their artillery attacks, and all the rest. The Israeli government is certainly not to be excused for squeezing the livelihoods of Palestinians with border closings, destruction of water supplies, and bulldozing of homes, fields, and orchards. How can the constant escalation of nastiness be brought to a close?

I have no answer. I know that there is a role for people who affirm peaceful means in the face of violence, people like Rachel Corrie, who will go there and show what it looks like, standing with the Israelis, and standing with the Palestinians. I am grateful she lived and sorry that she died. I hope the spirit of nonviolent action will continue to stir and grow in that hostile land.

Two Land Deals

2007-03-17T00:20:00.000-05:00

I found myself in two very different places recently, places that shared stories about land deals, where wise reflection led to two very different solutions to the problems a blessing of abundance can create in families. One was in the Hudson River valley in New York, at Claremont, where the Livingston family is remembered, starting with their first settlement there in the 1600s. The other was in the little logging town of Montesano, Washington, where the founding families are remembered from just a few generations ago. There was an official docent to show us through the elegant home, now a museum, at Claremont. There was a descendant of the one of whom the story was told to show us around the little lake, the dam, the sites of the old houses, and the edges of the forest at the park in Montesano.

Robert Livingston, one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, had a huge estate in that part of New York, part by inheritance, and part by marriage. He was married to a remarkably resourceful woman who not only bore him ten children but also managed the estate while he was away doing public business. When their house was burned early on in the Revolutionary war, she managed to save herself and the children, hide the silver, and protect the library from the ravages of the British. Livingston was a believer in a natural aristocracy, not an inherited one, as befits a founder of a democratic nation. In those days, the expected thing for a landed family was that the oldest son would inherit the whole. That was not Robert Livingston's choice. Instead, on his death, he bequeathed each of his children an equal portion of the vast estate. They would all be rich, but much less rich than the eldest would have been under the old system. It was much more democratic. Indeed, in several generations, the wealth was completely dissipated. The last two members of his immediate lineage, two women, had different approaches to the disappearance of the old wealth: one married a rich man and the other went to work on Wall Street.

In Montesano, it was Gene's grandmother who came into ownership of the large tract of land with the lake and the dam when her husband died in an accident at work. She had borne fourteen children, and had to raise them, so she built an electric generating station at the dam site and operated it until quite late in her long life. In her will, she gave the large tract of land with its lake and dam over to the town as a park. She stipulated that there should be no making of money from it -- no logging, no more electricity generated, no selling of pieces of it--but that it should be used as a park. If the town failed in this, the land would revert to the family. The town did not have resources to develop the land as a park, but the State was willing to create a park there, leasing the land from the town. The land remains intact, and in an area where most of the timberland is clearcut on a regular basis, the forest grows in its own way. Gene's grandmother could not have divided her estate equally among her children without dividing that piece of land, so she gave it away. She clearly believed in fairness and in the value of keeping that parcel in one piece. Did she believe in a natural aristocracy, rather than an inherited one, as Livingston did? Her grandson Gene works in the woods, and her other grandchildren and great-grandchildren work at many occupations that keep things moving in that town and elsewhere.

Different families find different solutions to questions of fairness in inheritance. Seeing the same issues come up in such different contexts made me think that sometimes people can do the right thing, and that not all right things look the same.

Homeless in Olympia

2007-03-09T16:11:00.000-05:00

Olympia Washington has homeless people. Or at least people who spend much of the day on the street. Since I had just come from the East Coast, I was up much earlier than normal people, so I found myself strolling in downtown before things really got started. As I waited for the light to change to cross the street to the marina, a man came up the sidewalk and stood next to me. He seemed a little bedraggled, and he seemed to be talking on a hands-free cell phone. As I waited on the curb next to him, it became clear that he was talking on a cell phone of the mind. I changed direction, thinking the marina would be more fun a little later. So I went to a coffee shop that's part of a fair-trade crafts shop called "Traditions". I was their first customer of the day. The next ones to come in were a couple, the woman pushing a walker loaded with things they needed to have with them. It was a nice walker, the kind with hand brakes and big wheels, with a seat for resting when you need to stop walking. They sat over coffee and talked quietly, counting over some change from their pockets. She wanted ice cream to settle her stomach and he got it for her. I left and continued my tour of downtown, spotting several more people in nooks and corners, looking inconspicuous.

Then later, I met with Art Vaeni, the minister of the Olympia UU Congregation, a New Hampshire native, who used to serve the Starr King UU Church in Plymouth. Something happened this winter, when the City Council decided that people needed to be off the sidewalks at night. A group organized in solidarity with people who were without the usual kinds of homes organized a protest. They set up a tent city on a tract of city-owned land. Just as they were about to be arrested and taken to jail, the Board of the UU Congregation had passed a policy that said they would offer sanctuary to homeless people who asked for it. They didn't exactly invite the encampment to move to their grounds, but communications were very good. The congregation affirmed the Board's vote very soon after. They are providing a place for the tent city for three months, and interfaith conversations are under way to make it possible for them to be supported by other congregations later.

Art claims not to have had much to do with the courage of the UU congregation's board, but I'm still impressed. Impressed with his ministry and impressed with the ministry of his congregation. How does this happen that a congregation steps up when the occasion presents itself?

Real Inclusion

2007-02-18T16:53:00.000-05:00

I have just returned from "The Time is Now" conference sponsored by the UUA in Arlington, Virginia. It was wonderful to be in a room with over a hundred Unitarian Universalists from many places all dreaming of the day when our movement would have demographics resembling those of the lands it inhabits. Of course, we were speaking mostly of our United States congregations, which could be much more diverse, and I'm the one dreaming of the world beyond those national borders. Even the word "welcome" came under scrutiny: if there's a "we" welcoming "you" and "your kind", are you really inside? or just visiting? Are you able to gain citizenship in a UU congregation with your dark skin, Asian features, Hispanic accent? It needs to be the kind of welcome table where when everybody sits down, anyone at the table can spread the welcome for anyone else.

I came home a day early to lead worship at my own church. Afterward, I found myself talking with a couple of parishioners over lunch about matters of welcome. We spoke of the improved process the church is working on for integrating newcomers into the life of the congregation. We've been repelling visitors, as Peter Morales would say, by not following up in a friendly and consistent way to draw them in. That's everybody, not just the kind of special identified groups we talked about at the conference. Yes, there needs to be intentional outreach to all kinds of newcomers, special and not. We need to spread a welcome that draws them into the processes of the church, gets them through the nurture of Adult Enrichment programs and Small Group Ministries and onto the Hospitality Committee, the Worship and Music Committees, the Social Activities Committee, into places where all kinds of newcomers become all kinds of active church participants, citizens of the place who in turn offer welcome to others.

Once all kinds of people sit down together, the table changes. People bring individual gifts, the flavor of their own ways of being in the world, their own ways of expressing faith. Recovering Catholics have added their flavor and their culture of our congregation in recent years. And in appreciating those gifts and that flavor, the culture of the congregation has changed a bit. Who's next? We all reach out to one another, energized by that special something between us that arises because we are congregation together. Getting the "who's next?" started may take a little attention, but I'm confident in the processes of this congregation, confident that there will be no permanent guests, unless the people involved choose that status.

Some things stay the same, for we do have a faith tradition here. But some things change, because the faith tradition has everything to do with people appreciating one another, learning from one another, becoming their own best selves together.

Reverence: Language or Spirit?

2007-02-07T11:53:00.000-05:00

The memorial service gathered many stories of the life of my elder friend, and they were told, as is our custom, both in an organized way from the pulpit and in a spontaneous way from the gathered people. It was also a demonstration of the "language of reverence" conversation we Unitarian Universalists are having, and for me, a rather uncomfortable one. Jane was an old-style humanist and social activist, despite being a maker of quilts and a source of wisdom about parenting. Spirituality of the churchy kind was not her own thing, though in her own way, her life was a prayer and a celebration of the gift of spirit. Church was for gathering, sharing, for getting about the business of raising families, making quilts, and seeing to the advancement of justice in the world.

I was struck by the disconnect between her way of church and the tone of the service. I was seated near one of the older women I had known when as a high school student I sang in the choir. When we were invited to join hands at the end, she leaned over to her companion and whispered, "this is why I don't come to church any more." Jane was of the same school. So I felt a little sad with the naming of "God" the saying of "amen", the offering of prayer, the suggestion that she and her husband might be "up there somewhere looking down" and sending us their love. Surely, when we gather a theologically diverse group for a memorial service, we know how to honor those who have different ways. Surely we know how to offer words of that speak of diversity and inclusion, ways that don't simply assume all of it is all right with everyone.

Somehow the reverence didn't extend to offering a service that would have pleased the one it honored. I would have preferred an open acknowledgment that we were remembering one of the ones who didn't do "the language of reverence" as it is practiced in these times, one who, by attending more to her life than to fancy words, became one of the most remarkable people anyone could remember. In my heart, it will be so.

Really Old Kids Get Together

2007-02-07T11:32:00.000-05:00

I just came from a memorial service for an old friend of my family's, a Unitarian Universalist service at the congregation where I grew up. The family, the congregation she had been part of from its very beginning, and people from our old neighborhood sat with one another, the art she had made, and the photographic record of the long love she had shared with her beloved husband. We shared stories of the ways we had known her. For me, from the old neighborhood, she was part of the fabric of my early life, so much that while I remember mostly the sparkle of her eyes and the attentiveness of her face, no special stories come to mind. It has been a long time.

I wrote a poem about oak trees when her husband died, and the story of her passing is for me very similar. We grew under oak trees in that old neighborhood, oaks that now fall, one by one, both real oaks and metaphorical ones. As one of them passes, it leaves an opening in the canopy of the forest, a space of light, and the realization that we of the next generation are spreading our branches into being parts of that canopy ourselves. It is an awesome process. And it's worthwhile for us mature ones of the next generation to gather and notice it happening, to honor our being oaks ourselves. We return each time from wherever we have gone. Jane is, I think, the very last one of those old pioneers. I will hear of and return for memorial services for others -- but for me, the generation of parents from the neighborhood has passed.

So at this last service for that generation of parents, a bunch of really old kids gathered. We're in our early sixties now, with graying hair and expanded waistlines, scattered beyond the forested canopy of that old neighborhood, some of us now retired from long-term jobs, and all of us kids again in our gathering to remember our network of parents. Over punch and cookies after the memorial service, I search the faces of people who look vaguely familiar to recognize the children I knew. (Searching this way, I fail to recognize someone I only know as a grownup.)

Stories arise about the way things were in those days when the network of parents called us to supper, offered us games to play and art projects to enjoy, shared grownup wisdom with us as they hung out the laundry. It had taken them some trouble to form themselves into that network. They had been strangers at first. But as they maintained a community association, held monthly covered-dish suppers, organized a community water system, and the rest, they had gotten to know each other and each other's children really well. We kids never found out until much later what a rare thing this was.

Now they are gone, and we really old kids have lived our adult lives mostly in places where that gift of community is not present. We have built or not built networks of parents for our children in other ways. Church is one way to do that. My own mother never approved of church. She said it cut you off from the diversity of beliefs and ways of getting through life that are out there in the world. But for me, stuck out here in the "real" world, church has been a way to do it without giving up the richness of diversity entirely. As good as that old neighborhood was, diversity of class, race, and age were not a strong feature of it then. Still, the children in my church community mostly can't run over to someone's house to play or to visit over a cookie and a glass of milk, something that building community in a neighborhood allows.

The really old kids got together again, and remembered being kids with a network of parents, running freely through the unfenced yards to play wherever and with whomever. Maybe there is some strength for the future in our remembering.

Welcome

2007-01-28T19:39:00.000-05:00

Hi and welcome to my blog. I am a Unitarian Universalist minister writing from a wandering sabbatical, posting impressions and reflections that might have something to do with theology. Sometimes reflections come to me in form of poetry. I intend to write sometimes in Spanish. The actual wandering and sabbatical start in March. Postings before then are from my everyday life as a parish minister.