Taking the Bus

It was about a year ago that I started to take the bus to work in earnest. I experimented with a three month bus pass and then purchased a yearly pass. I don't take the bus every day, but I imagine I've averaged twice a week this year. Buying the pass was the easy part. Harder was figuring out things like what potluck dishes do bus travel well, how to get errands done on the way to and from work, where I can go for lunch without a car, and those kinds of adjunct issues. Being a bus rider adds a half an hour to my work day, but since I can listen to the news or pray, it's not a complete loss of time.

This is the desert, so we don't get much rain; the morning I took this picture was the first time in a year it was uncomfortably wet in the morning. I've had to ask someone to come and get me once because of bad afternoon weather. Last Summer there was a spate of trouble with missing or broken down buses, but my route has gotten new equipment, and we don't seem to have those troubles any more.

The new buses don't seat as many people, and lots of folks sit sideways, which I don't like to do. They arrived just as gas prices started to rise, so just as we got less capacity, we got more riders. I actually had to stand for a while one day, which is a first since my Boston Days. I do feel good about my riding the bus. Not only is it the ecological way of the future, but I have a sense of knowing the people of my city better. And I do arrive at my destination more relaxed. All in all, I like the bus.

For Such as This

Our new church administrator came to the service a few weeks back to be introduced, and something I read from Annie Dillard prompted her to give me a Jewish prayer she loves:

"Blessed are you, Holy One, sovereign of all worlds, who has created such as this."

Baruch atah Adonai
Eloheynu melech ha'olam
shekacha lo b'olamo

(This reminds me of wonderful lines from Fiddler on the Roof: a villager asks the rabbi, who has just proclaimed that there is a blessing for EVERYTHING, "So is there a blessing from the Czar?" "Certainly," says the Rabbi, and he intones, "May God Bless and keep the Czar, far, far away from here!")

"Blessed are you, Holy One, sovereign of all worlds, who has created such as this."

What a wonderful prayer for life's odd moments!

A prayer, I presume for those moments of awe, such as the one I had this evening when I went out to my garden and found the last sun's rays in an otherwise darkly clouded sky had bathed the world in yellow light. "Blessed are you, Holy One, sovereign of all worlds, who has created such as this."

And perhaps for those moments when you are perplexed, as in, I don't know what that meant, or where we're heading, but it is beautiful....

And also, most profoundly, for those moments when you have come to terms with some awful thing, so that you are ready to bless it, not too extravagantly, but as a part of all that is your life. I remember coming to that place after my cancer diagnosis. Sometime in the last few days before surgery, after I'd had a month to adjust to the whole shocking, terrible business, I found that I no longer wanted to hate these wayward and dangerous cells or try to will them dead. That would have been the right blessing for that moment, too.

"Blessed are you, Holy One, sovereign of all worlds, who has created such as this."

I passed my 10 year anniversary of that cancer diagnosis last Spring. Now that all has turned out well, and I see the many blessings that era brought me, I can be more extravagant. It changed so much (and almost all for the better) that I must be grateful.

Unitarian Universalism has a prayer like this, in the form of a hymn: "For all that is our life, we come with thanks and praise, for all life is a gift, which we are bound to use, to serve the common good, and make our own life glad."

Contemporary Worship

We have to start a third service next year. Gulp. Many UU churches have successfully made the transition to two services, but few have tried three services, so we're making this up as we go along. One option is a band-led service, and in pursuit of knowledge of this worship-beast, several of us crashed a Presbyterian Contemporary Worship service on Saturday evening. It's my third such venture, (one Reformed mega-church, one medium sized UU church, and one big mainline church.) Here's what I'm learning.

Contemporary Worship seems to be a matter of developing a higher level of energy than a traditional worship service has. Indeed, I think that the basic aim of a traditional worship service is to calm people, quiet them, help them be receptive to the message. The music is used to awe and impress...big organ, beautiful anthem...the Glory of God revealed in Music.

In Contemporary Worship, the aim is to get folks up, singing along, and clapping. There's a beat to the music, and the singing goes on for a good long (20 minutes?) time. Well done, and in a well-filled room (last night was well done but a very small crowd, perhaps 60 people in a room that must seat 4-500 people) all that energy is very, well...enlivening, and I can easily imagine that this, too, helps people to focus on the message of the day.

The did project their words, but to very high screens. I bet there's a science to screen height and I bet those were too high. It was a very good message, weaving in Pentecost, Mothers Day, and the end of a sermon series on the gifts of the Spirit. This was the first time I've seen the use of an embedded video in a sermon...this hilarious clip of all the things Mothers Day, sung to the William Tell Overture. Judging by the comments on YouTube, it was shown in a lot of churches this morning, and a lot of folks looked it up to see it again.

I have to say that it feels just impossibly intimidating to be having to find video clips as a part of sermon-writing. I'm feeling glad that our sanctuary is just too bright for projection.

Speaking of intimidating, I think that finding a music repetoire for Contemporary Worship, especially without violating copywrite law, is going to be the biggest trick of all. These Christian Churches can download their stuff off of websites and easily pay royalties. We UU's can't even easily use things from our own hymnals, not to mention finding a way to get permission to use, say, Cris Williamson's "Song of the Soul" as a worship tune.

Short takes

1. Even in informal worship, I think the preacher and band should be dressed up just a tad.
2. Looks like intergenerational bands work.
3. The band needs to have practiced enough that they can put energy into connecting with the congregation...eye contact, etc.
4. electronic drums: This was a great discovery. They can be played at a volume that would work in our sanctuary, they don't take up too much space, and they are not prohibitively expensive.

A Bird in Church for Pentecost

The moment we opened our church doors this morning, a curved bill thrasher flew in. Her(?) mate stayed outside and fussed, but she was confused by our big windows and couldn't find her way out, in spite of the attempts of at least a dozen people. With all our doors open, a second bird flew in...a young dove who was not confused by our windows because she didn't see them. She crashed and I carried her out, her little heart hammering in my hands, wondering at this coincidence; in 20 years, I only remember one other time we've had a bird in the sanctuary, why in the world would we have two in a week!

But, of course! This is not just Mothers Day, it is Pentecost...that day in the Christian Calendar when the Spirit (often depicted as a bird) came upon all the people who could suddenly understand each other's many languages.

The Thrasher and her holiday were noted by the lay leader before the chalice was lit, and she provide a good deal of amusement through the first service and the first half of the second service, strutting along the top of our mural and making short flights through the crowd. She seemed to like the music. She spent the prayer of the second service eyeing the side door which had been left open for her and departed on the stroke of the Amen. We all did feel blessed...and relieved...

Kinda Sad about Hillary

I voted for Obama in our state primary, and I can't say that I like her much, but as the handwriting is on the wall, I have to say...I'm kinda sad about Hillary. It would have been cool to have a woman president.

Hope for the Shade Problem

So what I've been doing in my spare time is obviously not blogging. It's the season to put in the garden, and I'm experimenting with hanging tomato plants to make up for the loss (to shade) of a chunk of my garden. So...meet Chaco, a chocolate cherry tomato, and Ceila, a Celebrity tomato. We'll see how they work...

In the background are the apple and peach trees up top, and invisible in the mulch, three more tomato plants, and cukes and squash under the mesh tunnel (that's for squash borer control.)
I've planted carrots for the first time since I was about 6 and planted a row in my mother's garden which I could not bring myself to thin. My mother believed in learning by experience...so I learned. It's taken 50 years to try again. Now that's a scary thought!

IMG00033.jpg

Now, this picture is not as much fun...it shows the totally pathetic shipment of pepper plants for which I paid $16.95 plus shipping. This picture makes them look good...you don't see the blackened leaves. Only about three of these plants are wroth taking a chance on planting. They were definitely damaged during shipping; the tips of their leaves are black. But mostly they are just puny, leggy little things. What a disappointment!

Trying Hard to Love a Tree

The trees that the absentee owner planted (the 6, 25' trees ) on the short eastern wall of his yard are not to blame for my loss of vegetable garden, and I shouldn't hate them. Nor should I hate my neighbor. Nor should I pray for the death of the trees.

But that vegetable garden was important to me, and so were the raspberries which are likely now in too much shade, and I'm taking the loss hard.

This owner is a privacy nut. He bought a house whose back yard is overlooked by two story houses in the next block and spent a fortune on an illegal wall and on these six trees. The neighbors whose back patios are now totally shaded by the wall have apparently not complained, and I don't think I can complain. If you have invested in solar panels your neighbor can't plant trees that will shade them, but if it's just that you want sun in your garden (no money invested) that's tough luck.

Now that the trees are leafing out, it's become clear that they will cast even more shade than I had imagined when they were planted in November. And it appears that they are Aspens, which means that they will double in height.

They shade my sitting patio, and the tiny leaves make a lovely, soothing sound when they quake, as I discovered this afternoon. But there will be fewer tomatoes from my tiny yard this year, and I'm sad.

Post Traumatic Thanksgiving

I took my son to the airport the other day; he started the Spring Break College Hunting Trip a few days before I could get away. He's an experienced traveler, and took off from the curbside, bag in tow. I was awash in memories of his first solo trip, 10 years ago, this very Spring Break. He was going to stay with his grandparents while I had surgery which we hoped would...and did...cure my cancer. He was a half a year too young to fly alone; his frequent flying grandfather had charmed some airline executive into giving permission for this cross-country, emergency trip.

This was before the days of personal movies, and my son was not yet reading for pleasure. I worried about what he would do for four hours, all by himself, strapped into his seat. A teenaged friend had loaned him a gameboy and I had supplied him with changes of batteries that I wasn't sure he could manage. I walked him all the way to the gate and handed him over to the flight attendant, who, seeing my tears, hustled him down the jetway and out of sight before I could remind him about the batteries.

My parents called later that evening to say that they had collected him on their end with ease, and handed the phone over. "Did you have enough batteries for the gameboy?" I asked. "Oh, I didn't play that." "Really? What did you do?" "I talked to the man sitting next to me. We talked about Star Wars".

I breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving to a traveler who, probably wanting to take a nap or get some work done, had instead taken pity on a little boy who needed somebody to talk to on his first, long journey. I'm grateful to this day. He returned home 10 days later, an experienced traveler, with his grandmother in tow; she took care of us all for a while before things lapsed back, slowly, into the new normal that falls around us all after the difficulties of our lives have made us ever more aware of our gratitude for families and friends, for healing and joy, and even for strangers.

Tomorrow I join my college-hunter in Baltimore and we take off on one of those "If it's Thursday, it must be New York" sorts of trips, and I'll begin it in gratitude.

Resurrections

This is the Louisville Unitarian Church. It's right downtown, next to the public library. They had a fire in the early 1990's, and have come back from the ashes in a creative, vital way. The Steeple that was replaced only by a steel structure gives a hint. The building manager postponed his Sunday dinner long enough to show a couple of tourists around. Throughout the building they took what was left to them (the stone structure) and re-built for their needs...a lovely back garden, a more intimate sanctuary, a gathering space. It was a very inspiring sight on Palm Sunday, a reminder that resurrections come in many forms.

Thomas Merton Anniversary, II

I've been in Louisville at the Large Church Conference, and snapped this picture of the Thomas Merton Memorial. Thomas Merton was one of the figures of my young adulthood, and I was thrilled to realize that the moment of his Enlightenment Experience was only a few blocks from our Hotel, and, furthermore, was commemorated by a plaque! It is not often that religious experience is so honored in our society. To complete my amazement, I was told that today is the 50th anniversary of his experience. Someone had read the story in the Louisville newspaper.

I got the picture posted via the miracle of mobile blogging and before I could add text, Rev. Cynthia Cane posted this comment, which I've moved up to the body of the text because her enthusiasm is so contageous!

I believe this (picture) is in downtown Louisville , which we Kentuckians call the 'ville. Thomas Merton wrote an astounding account of a personal about standing on the corner of 4th & Walnut:

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people,” he later wrote, “that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race. ... There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Wow! To-morrow is the 50th anniversary of this moment! And I can go to Louisville. Thanks!!!

Thanks, Cynthia!

Staying Hip

I turned in my paper calendar for a connected organizer in about 1992. The device was an electronic rolodex. Great little 6 oz machine, but I turned it in a year later for a Palm Pilot. A couple of years ago, I added an MP3 player...wonderful for travel and exercise, and last Summer, I started carrying a cell phone. And I started getting camera envy and realizing how many cool pictures I'd take for this blog if only I carried a camera. I'm not an early adopter, but I am an adopter.

I was also getting tired of lugging a Radio Shack Store around in my purse.

Last week, I bought a Blackberry and lightened my load. (I also lightened my bank account.)

This is an addictive little device which is elegantly designed and has the poorest documentation of any piece of technology I've ever purchased. The English is all impeccable, but there's hardly any of it...the equivalent of a "Getting Started" users guide. Even the downloaded, 300 page users manual doesn't tell us such vital things as which of the 4 ways you can "turn off" your phone is what the airlines mean when they tell you to turn off your phone. If you want to play your music or your games or work on stored documents, you have to have the phone off. Does anybody out there know how to do that?

So, my readers, you can look forward to more pictures and mobile blogging!

Mobile blogging

This post comes from my phone. I'm in Omaha, soon to preach the instalation sermon for my old friend Kate.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

What IS Contemporary Worship?

Our growth in Albuquerque is requiring us to think about adding a third sanctuary service to our current line-up of two sanctuary services and three video services. Gulp! One option is to add a "Contemporary" service. A commenter below asks what that is. There are two answers.

1. In a traditional Protestant church, a "Contemporary" worship service is one which uses a band rather than an organ to accompany singing and provide music, which is of the soft rock, or Christian Contemporary/praise chorus style. Generally this service is paired with a traditional service where the organ and German hymn-tunes reign. This style is not very attractive to UU's, who like more variety in their music and already tend to a blended style of worship. (and who prefer to attract the unchurched with the message, not the music anyway.)

2. In UU Circles, a "Contemporary" worship service (insofar as this concept is developed) refers to a service which is presumably Young Adult friendly. The story goes that ex-YRUU'ers prefer circle worship to the square kind their elders do, which they refer to as the "sermon sandwich" and even on the UUA website refer to with very un-UU-like disparagement. In such a worship service, the "message" would be broken down into several parts, delivered by several voices and media; voice, drama, video, music, song, all in one thematic whole. This type of worship is not new. It was called "Creative Worship" 30 years ago and was the mainstay of Worship Committees for a long time. It's hard work, and requires a number of people, not just the preacher, to have developed the ability to share the depth of their thinking. But it is absolutely wonderful when it is pulled off.

3. To the old Creative Worship mix of possibilities, Contemporary Worship has added the element of ritual. The best-developed ritual that I know of is allowing everyone in the congregation to get up and light a candle (silently) based on a theme in the service. If the theme is Mothers and Mothering, the congregation is invited to light a candle for their mother or someone who has mothered them, for instance.

In our situation, a "contemporary" service has to use the sermon as developed for the more traditional services. There's only so much time in a preacher's day, and we are not considering deploying a second minister to write a different sermon. But, borrowing from the Christians, it appears to me that one interesting possibility for a third service which might better be called "Music-lead". In such a service a musician is the worship leader. Taking the themes from the sermon, this person would plan and lead a "music-heavy" liturgy. It would begin welcoming and building the energy of the congregation with several lively songs, hymns, and readings, rather than our usual formal opening, move into a meditation which incorporated an element of ritual or meditation instruction. The Worship leader would make announcements, offer a prayer, and, well...be the worship leader. The preacher would simply be a part of the congregation, enjoying the scene for the first 30 minutes. Then comes the sermon...delivered by a semi-rested preacher. I like this idea. We're experimenting with it this Spring, so stay tunned.

Readin', Writin', and Shootin'

After last night's news of 5 murders and a suicide in a classroom on a college campus, I searched the internet thinking, "hasn't this happened before?" I got lots of links to VA tech and to the Amish killings. It took a surprisingly long time to verify what I was looking for; This was the fifth school/gun incident IN A WEEK.

Six dead at NIU

A week ago, a much more ordinary sort of tragedy: a female teacher shot and stabbed by her husband. She survived. He killed himself.

On February 8, in Louisiana, a rare female gunner killed two classmates and committed suicide.

On the 11th, a 17 year old shot a classmate in Memphis Both survived.

On the 12, a kid in California was shot in the head by a classmate. The victim died a couple of days later.



Everywhere the traumatized witnesses, the blood-spattered floors, the sirens and helicopters and broken hearts.

But nowhere even a counting, much less an effective response. Nobody dare say the only thing worth saying...There are too many guns around, they are too easy to get a hold of, this epidemic of gun violence is a threat far beyond what any terrorist has accomplished and we need to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Just imagine the response if in five communities in our nation last week, "terrorists" had walked into schools and shot people in them. If past experience suggests anything, we'd be at war in three more places by the end of the week. Imagine what would have happened if five different people put poison dust in letters and sent them through the mail? Did you know that more people have died of gun violence than Aids in the last decade in this nation? Did you know that the world just shakes its head at America-the-gun-happy and enjoys a free society without feeling terrorized by guns? (Yes, gun violence happens almost everywhere...but it happens here way, way more often.)

When will they ever learn?

YRUU

Kelsy in the comments, asks for my thoughts about the end of funding for the continental YRUU (Youth programs).

The thing that interests me about the ending of funding for YRUU is how it parallels the reduction of funding for Starr King and Meadville Seminaries, a move taken because we were spending all of our available "seminary money" on two seminaries which were preparing only 1/3 of candidates for our ministry. Even if you believe that these tow schools are preparing students well for ministry, it only seems fair to give the 2/3 of our future ministers who go to other schools some benefit of our collective "seminary money."

It has definitely seemed to me that something has been awry with YRUU and its focus on Cons as the be-all and end-all of Youth programs. In our neck of the woods, that's meant our teens were doing a lot of carbon-intensive travel, and kids like mine, who had weekend activities of their own, start feeling like second class citizens. (actually, I should speak for myself: their moms start feeling like their kids are being treated like second class citizens.) And all ministers do notice that our High School programs are only serving a fraction of the number of kids served by our Mid-High and elementary programs. If we were doing a good job, La Amikoj would be the largest class in the RE program.

So I'm up for seeing if we can find something better.

Slacker-Blogger

Thanks, somebody, for voting for this blog in the UU Blogger Awards going on right now. (Have a look, here.. Not only can you vote, but it's a fast way to get to the best of last year's UU Blogging.)

I know I've been a slacker blogger lately. But blogging is a lot like my my work, and my work in a church which seems to have burst through another size category has been pretty intense lately. We're planning for a third service, probably a contemporary-style service, and it does seem that all the "ways we do things" don't work very well at the moment. I tell myself there are worse problems, but re-thinking church from the ground up is a lot of work. Ergo, no blogging.

I am taking care of myself, however, enjoying weaving in my spare time. Check it out!

The End of America?

I've been reading The End of America by Naomi Wolf in preparation for next week's sermon on Democracy. While it has some good points about America's founders and their constitutional reasoning, a great list of how governments can subvert freedom, and some good history of how that has been done all over the world in the past hundred years, her object is to frighten Americans into thinking that their democracy has toppled, and in service of that goal, she is repeatedly misleading, evasive, and manipulative.

I've been trying to make myself read this book for about two weeks now, and was becoming more and more aware of either sloppy writing or writing that is misleading, evasive, and manipulative, so I started checking footnotes and the internet.

Here's the thing she does in this book.

She tells the beginning of a scary story about the subversion of rights in America these days. Then she moves on to talk about why this sort of thing is dangerous and how it has been done before by Nazis or other totalitarians. Then she moves on to the next scary story. But she doesn't finish her stories. It's implied that the scary things that were threatened in part I of her story resulted in harm to people, but she never quite says it. She supplies us with reassuring footnotes, and I'm sure that most people get her point and skip the fine print.


She tells a story, for instance, about a lecturer on Islam at U-Wisconsin at Madison, who "disputed the official facts of the 9/11 attacks and planned to spend 1-2 weeks of a 16 week course on Islam and Society on post-9/11 matters, raising the hackles of the Right. She talks about the University response, the right-wing media firestorm, and pressure from some legislators, and quotes the president as saying that he doesn't want his faculty exposed to political tests.

Then she drops his story, and speaks generally about how governments moving towards totalitarianism often target university professors, talks about extreme views in America currently against academic freedom, and talks about how in Germany and Italy before WW II, dissenting professors were targeted.

What she never gets around to saying is that the Madison lecturer, who had been hired to teach for one semester, was on leave for a year and has not been hired back, is not simply a teacher who doesn't toe the administration line. He believes that 9/11 was engineered by the US government and has been outspoken to the point of disruptive to make his point. And while the university was pressured to fire him, they didn't do so. It carefully reviewed his work for the previous 10 years as a teaching assistant, and his course outline, reminded him that his job is to teach Islamic culture, not his opinions about the American Government, and let him teach the course. That's a triumph of democracy, not its swan song.

I researched another similar claim before laying the book down. If I can't trust an author to tell me the whole truth, I don't read. Anybody know a better source of information about our post 9-11 constitutional situation?

Church, State, and ID

Ogre (in the comment to the last post) nicely spells out the part of the ID-at-GA problem that seems to have pressed the most buttons in folks. In short, the REAL problem with the requirement to show ID to get into the GA neighborhood is not that some people won't be able to get to come to GA, it's that some people won't be able to come to the WORSHIP SERVICES at GA. Worship services, we feel, should by definition, be open to everyone. The specter of a federal official telling some people that they can't come to our (or any other, presumably) worship service seems especially scary. "What if the feds declared the blocks around your church a security zone and only let people through who had proper ID?" Ogre asks.

(Ogre also remarks that us UU's with our backpacks and Birkenstock's can hardly be considered a threat to port security, especially in a port where containers are not well inspected. The container issue is a huge one, and I sure hope somebody is working on it, but I think we all could easily be convinced that a person with ill intent could certainly dress up just like us if they wanted to. The point of asking for an official ID is to save us all, especially those of us who "look" like foreigners, from the indignity of being singled out, profiled, or subjected to prejudicial activity. )

Back to church and state.

A case where Homeland Security cordoned off a church and required ID for entry would certainly be a challenge to separation of church and state and go to the Supreme Court, and I imagine that we'd all be sending our contributions to the ACLU for that one. There is a considerable body of church/state law in place about such conflicts of rights and values, and the church does not always win.

But my friends, GA isn't our church, though we might hold worship there. We're the most temporary of occupants of the Port of Fort Lauderdale. The doctrine of separation of church and state doesn't mean that anybody can do something they call worship anywhere they please and enjoy immunity from government regulations. We can't hold a worship service in public parks, in the middle of the street, or on other people's property. From the perspective of Homeland Security, we UU's have chosen to enter this sensitive piece of property, and we have to follow the rules that make the nation more secure. Consider this analogy. Suppose a church which had a prison ministry insisted that the prison gates must be thrown open so that anybody could attend because the government has no right to regulate attendance at a worship service. We're in the same position at our GA in the Port of Fort Lauderdale. If we protest showing ID at GA for reasons of separation of church and state, the world is going to laugh at us and wonder why they ever thought Unitarian Universalists were bright, well-read people.

We could, of course, be angry with our own GA Planning Committee, who signed us up for a GA in a secure area, on promises that the ID problem would be solved by now. That wouldn't be very productive, but at least it would be reasonable.

Actually all these "reasons" for the hullabaloo about ID at GA strike me as side issues to what is really bothering us. More about that in another post.

Disecting ID

There are a number of arguments in the "Why we should protest having to show our ID's to get into GA" fracas. I propose to take them one by one. But first let me say that "disliking" and "protesting" are two very different things. I'm going to find the whole ID business disagreeable, like most people will, I imagine. While I've gotten quite used to showing my ID to get on an airplane and kind of used to showing my ID to buy decongestant, showing my ID to get into a convention is new, and I don't like new. And the fact that the convention is my very own precious GA, where I want to be with "my people" and feel like we're powerful....that's going to be an ongoing grief about how things have changed hitting me in my very heart.

So. I'm sad and will no doubt get sadder. But protest? Let's see.

The most dramatic reason that some people will be boycotting GA or protesting is that in their minds, government requirement for ID's in possible terrorist targets such as the Port of Ft. Lauderdale is just another step on the path to fascism. I don't agree with this line of reasoning. I think that there are legitimate reasons for a government to ask for ID, and that there are ways to handle this which are just, democratic, and non-threatening to civil liberties. (There are plenty of other steps on the road to fascism which I worry about quite a bit more, but I still have faith in the political process and the good sense of Americans to deal with.)

For those who make this argument, I ask: Why draw the line in front of a Convention Center? Why not protest your local airport or Federal Court?

Contemporary Worship

Firstly, a shout-out to our church's band, "Spare Parts", a beloved group which plays for us as often as invited, sometimes even when invited on Very Short Notice. (as for the January 6 service featuring commentary on the famous figures who died during the past year, when they treated us to some Dan Fogelberg. Thanks, guys!) Spare Parts is an intergenerational folk-rock sort of band, but heavy on the baby-boomers. It's wonderful, if not quite what people picture when they think, "church band."

Secondly a note that we're starting to think seriously about adding a third service to our growing congregation which is currently almost filling two services. One possibility is to continue with the music and staffing we have for the current two services, and add a "contemporary" style worship service, appealing to young adults, which would be music-heavy and band-led. That's what most churches seem to do, and I'm willing, though pretty much illiterate in the current music set. (Dan Fogelberg was the last pop musician I paid much attention to. I'm totally out of it.)

I set the possibility of a contemporary service before my church's young adult group yesterday, in frank hopes of getting them interested in helping out with such a venture. They were luke warm. We already have a good mix of classical, popular, and world music in our weekly line-up; they're happy with that, they said. (of course, they are the ones who are here...) Then somebody said something else which really surprised me, and they all seemed to agree. "In those Evangelical churches, they have to have a band and screens and all those toys to get people interested in coming and keep them listening. But you don't need to do that. We come because what we hear is helpful to us. We don't need any other rewards."

I'd never thought of it that way.

Do any UU churches have a true contemporary worship service, I wonder? Readers?

Proud to Present...

One of the young adults in my church, currently away at college, has written most interestingly on his blog about various candidates. Find it here.
He's a lot more informed than I am, so I'm watching him carefully. I commend his blog to you, too!

Hillary

Doesn't get it.

Her husband's behavior in the White House was not her fault, and I honor her for apparently forgiving him for it and continuing with the marriage, but in making him such a prominent part of her campaign she's forgotten something that nobody else has, which is what a miserable episode that was and how it laid an important part of the goundwork for the even more miserable time we're having now.

Maybe, in order to forgive Bill she had to tell herself it was all no big deal, but it was a big deal. So while I admire Hillary the wife, Hillary the politician has made a terrible mistake.

How to Find Your Daemon-a meditation

A reader asks exactly how we did this, so here is the script for the guided meditation.

Now, we are going to go on a journey of our imagination, to meet our daemon, or our animal guide…an animal who is just right for our personality. This might be an animal who is a lot like us…shy if we are shy, for instance, or a good runner if we are a good runner…but this animal might have a quality that we don’t have…slow and patient, if we are hyper and impatient, for instance, or smart if we struggle at school. You never can tell with daemons…and you can’t make up your mind in advance. If you go to the right place in your imagination, your daemon will find you. It may be a surprise.

So I want you to wiggle one last wiggle and get yourself comfortable. (big breath…sigh loud, medium, soft) Keep breathing. notice how your breath feels as it goes in and out of your chest, your tummy, your nose. Just breathe. Now, in your imagination, picture yourself taking a walk on a road or a path. Notice what is around you…trees? sky? mountains? And notice what you are walking on. Grass? dirt? pavement? ice? Keep walking. Is the wind blowing? Are you hot? cold? As you walk, you are hoping that the daemon you are about to meet will be just right for you.

Up ahead you see a shelter of some sort. A little house, perhaps…it has a door, and you know that behind that door your daemon is waiting for you. You walk up to the door and stop and take a deep breath…and you open the door.

Your daemon may be right there. If so, say hello and make friends with it. If you don’t see anything, look around the room and wait…see if something comes. Or perhaps you overlooked a very small animal. You were looking for an animal, but some people have invisible daemons, or daemons who are more like people…even objects sometimes.

If you have identified your deamon and made friends with it, tell it, thank it for showing itself to you. Promise that you will come back and visit in your imagination, and ask it for help in your life.

Now, it is time to return. Remembering that you can always come back to this place in your imagination, say goodbye to your daemon, go outside, and start walking back down the road.

When you are ready, come on back and open your eyes….

Now I invite you to turn to the person next to you, or perhaps two of you, and tell them what you found on your imaginary trip.

And now Daylene is going to bring the microphone around so we can hear a variety of daemon stories. If you’d like to tell everyone about your daemon, think up one sentence….

The Daemons discovered ranged from family pets to dragons and Shrek.

I have to say that the intergenerational ongregation was dead silent through this entire guided mediation, which is not something I can say many Sundays!

At Goldencompassmovie.com, there is a widget which will assign you a daemon after a short personality inventory.

Fun Sunday

I've long thought that the "down Sundays" (the Sundays after holidays) are as much self-fulfilling prophesy as anything, and I always try to do interesting things on these weeks. The Sunday after Christmas is one of the hardest and most interesting, since we don't have RE that day and it has to be an intergenerational service. This year we tackled the Golden Compass. Both services were full and I think everyone had a good time. (Since someone asked, here's what we did. We talked a little about the story for those who had not read the book, I lead a guided meditation for the purpose of letting everyone find their daemons, after which people shared their experience with their neighbors, I talked about the UU values in the story (about thinking for yourself, and about being open minded to new understandings of words like God) Ron did a brief theology of Dust, and we ended with an "imposition of dust", inviting all who wished to come forward and get a smudge of glitter on their hand or forehead or just get dusted with glitter. We used the new, tiny glitter so I'm still in good with my janitor, and somewhat to my surprise, most of the people who came up wanted glitter on their forehead. It was great fun.)

Also present at the service was someone from my first congregation. She introduced herself as having known me from the days "of the church of Jesus Christ of the Air Conditioner." That got a non-comprehending laugh and took me back years and years, to the early 1980's, when the church I served in Columbia, South Carolina, owned a tiny church which had once been an Episcopal chapel in a Mill Village. it did indeed have a lovely stained glass window of Jesus in the back, and at some point, the bottom panel had been removed for an Air Conditioner. John Buehrens, later the president of the UUA, visited the congregation before I arrived and dubbed it with that name.

At the second service there were a couple of guys from Knoxville, a church which I served for a Summer as an intern and then for a year as a part time interim.

So many people told me they'd seen The Golden Compass for this service that if there is a sequal, I'm going to take credit for pushing this movie over the top.

Boxing Day at the Hospital

My husband had some elective day surgery today, so I spent a bunch of time hanging out in a nearly empty hospital, mostly, as it turned out, listening to staff chatter. We were there early, as folks were coming to work, and the conversation went like this. "Hi, how was your Christmas." and the answer, "Good, I'm glad it's over." The same thing happened in the cafeteria. I must have heard a dozen variations on that exchange. The nurse for the empty recovery bed next to us confided that she had awakened this morning to a broken clock that told her it was December 23...what a nightmare, she laughed...to have to do it all over again!

It didn't seem that anyone had had a terrible experience on Christmas, it was just too stressful overall. It seemed as if the hospital staff's Christmas was a little like our Boxing Day... nothing awful, but we were glad that it was over with.

Christmas Celebrations are not completely voluntary, but this universal elective surgery response surprised me. I wonder what celebrations would suit people better? Is it just too much of a holiday for families with excited children aged 3-15? That's a relatively small proportion of us, after all. As a family with a 17 year old, we've noticed that it's not quite the same any more. (These days, parents put together the gifts in the morning. The teen now goes to bed after we do and gets up late, too!) But we had a very nice day yesterday, all working our our art projects for nearly a full day. That's a luxury! Late in the evening we made a quick Christmas Visit to drop off gifts at a friend's, which topped off the day nicely.

We have a few treats planned for later this week and a New Year's party to go to. Tomorrow's work is to get ready for the Golden Compass service on Sunday, which, we hope, will bring in the kids who usually don't come to church the week after Christmas. Since most of you, dear readers, can't come to church and discover your Daemon's wisdom, check out the movie site (Goldencompassmovie.com), where, after a short personality inventory, you'll be assigned a deamon of your very own!

Certain Poor Shepherds

Christmas Eve Homily

Last year, someone informed me that when she was a kid, she thought that the Three Kings brought the baby Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth. I smiled for 24 hours. I wrote about it on my blog, and someone commented that when he was a kid, he had confusions about Certain Poor Shepherds.

The way this young person puzzled it out, “to certain” must be a verb, meaning,” to reassure,” so the angels came to reassure some poor shepherds in their fields. Which is not far from the mark, after all. This young person, when told the “real” meaning of the carol, that the angels appeared to “particular” shepherds, wanted to know why some and not others? A young Universalist in the making!

That got me to thinking about other meanings of the word “certain.” Here’s another possibility. They were not “reassured” poor shepherds, or “particular” poor shepherds, they were “confident” poor shepherds…sure of what they have seen and heard. They see an angel in the sky, and nobody says, “Ho, boy, it must be indigestion” or “I’m so stressed out I’ve started imagining things!.” They are certain: it’s an angel. The angel says “Go and See!” and nobody asks if by any chance this is the devil in disguise, or moans about a long walk into town: they Go and they See. They are sure that what they are seeing is their next king in that cold stable, and that’s good news to the poor.

Angels appearing in the sky with crystal clear messages makes for good stories, but it’s never happened to me that way, or to you, I’d wager. The times I’ve thought, maybe, I felt a nudge from God, the message was kind of…well, let’s just say, subtle. Easy to ignore, easy to miss, not at all clear. Never angelic voices. Mostly just a feeling; at a concert, on the bus, hiking, reading, listening to someone. The messages only come when I really need them. They often have a shine of good feeling with them, but no hosanna’s, no voices, no heavenly lights… nothing certain. Always a matter of “hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses,” as the poet T.S. Elliot complained

My experience, really, is much more like what the Magi’s experience must have been: You see a new star in the sky. What does it mean? Who knows what it means? Maybe nothing. maybe Everything. There’s an obscure prophesy about a baby or is it a king? Or is it just restlessness, boredom, avoidance?

Most people, even Magj, would have stayed at home by the fire. They’d have responsibilities, doubts, plans of their own to easily trump the lovely new star. The shepherds had it easy. Big voices. Bright Lights. Clear Instructions. Go and See the Baby! The Bible says they went, but there are any number of folk stories about the Shepherd who stayed behind. Someone had to tend the flocks, after all, and there’s always a skeptic in the crowd. That would be me. Maybe it would also be you.

Certainty or not, the task of our lives to follow the hints that come to us, whether in heavenly voices or, more likely, in the voices of friends, authors, musicians, teachers, and that still, small voice inside us.

They urge us to grow in love and spirit,

and remind us that the journey begins with single, tentative steps.

They urge us to open our hearts to what comes into our lives,

and remind us that it is the unexpected that is often the greatest blessing.

They urge us to look inward.

and remind us of the jewels beyond price that reside there.

They urge us to appreciate the world around us.

and make the things of the world our sacred teachers.

They urge us to give away what is precious to us,

and remind us that when we give in joy, we receive one hundred fold.

They urge us to test our voices and discern our best path,

but remind us not to turn away from new faith and new hope, waiting for a certainty that may never come.

Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon is a little tool for your web browser. Set up a few categories you are interested in (I've got knitting, alternative energy, on-line games, and religion going right now), and whenever you have a few idle minutes, click and get websites in those categories. I've found some wonderful knitting blogs, interesting alternative energy ideas, and browsed a world of religious websites. Every time you get a site, you say if you like it, and Stumble Upon gets better and better at entertaining and enlightening (and addicting) you. (more info and download here)

How do websites get chosen for this kind of dissemination? By vote of users. If you're a stumble upon user, and you click the thumbs up on your toolbar...right now, for instance, this blog would get a vote. If you don't use stumble Upon, I've provided a button at the bottom of this post.

We early adopting UU's can help get the UU word out by voting for UU websites in this way. The more web-users who stumble upon UU websites, the more people discover us.

Evangelism...and you don't even have to explain UU!

Gold, Frankencense, and Mirth

Reprise from Last Year.....


A woman at church yesterday said that when she was a kid, she thought that the three Kings brought the baby Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth. I've been smiling ever since.

Those three universal beings (in the folk tradition from which manger scenes are made, they are an elderly European, a middle aged Oriental, and a young African) on their strange journey to bow down before a baby and bring gifts, were supposed to have brought three items of financial worth, gold, a precious incense used in religious ritual and worship, and a precious spice used in, of all things, embalming. Some make something of the latter; a gift for a person whose life was destined to be short.

I'd rather universalize these gifts, making them symbolic of what we need for a good life; a modicum of financial resources, the spiritual resources symbolized by Frankincense, and the emotional and relational resources symbolized by mirth.

Food and fire, hope and spirit, love and community. May your Holiday season be blessed with Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth.