Growth Consultation and Transition Wisdom

One of the truisms of Ministerial Transitions is that everyone...ministers and laypeople...take a minister's skills and preferences for granted. Therefore a search committee is likely to look especially hard for the skills and preferences the last minister didn't have, assuming that "everyone" has the skills the last minister did have. So when Rev. Johnson, the world's most caring pastor, retires, a search committee goes out looking for someone who is a little more comfortable with teens. They assume that all ministers love doing pastoral care, and even when they have a candidate who says that's not her thing, she's inclined to spend her time creating a really good youth program, the committee doesn't hear it. And six months later, when the honeymoon is over, the people of the church are adjusting (hopefully) to their new minister, learning to better take care of themselves, telling their new pastor that they want her to pay more attention to the elderly shut-ins, which the minister is hopefully meeting them halfway on. Everyone looks back to realize that they had been making assumptions.

The ministers at the Growth Consultation didn't have much in the way of "nuts and bolts" of growth to discuss. We talked about vision, love, spirituality, and other vast topics. That may say something about a ministerial skill required to grow a church; grand and vast thinking. It may say something about this particular group which didn't include ministers who imagine that they have the one and only growth plan for everyone. But it may also say something about skills and preferences this group was taking for granted. Maybe we didn't want to talk about nuts and bolts of growth because some of those nuts and bolts are too obvious to bring up in an august group of colleagues.

For instance, I have a feeling that growing churches collect data. They know how many people are in church on any Sunday, how many members, children, and teens there are. They know something about the trends they are dealing with. They know how many visitors they have.

(We have, for instance, seen a marked increase in visitors since the Time Ad campaign out.)

Now, nobody mentioned data-keeping as a technology of growth. Too dull. Too obvious. But I know that not every minister insists on keeping and using data like this. We didn't talk about how we convert visitors to members, although I'd lay my money that every church represented had a method of doing that. We did talk briefly about how we assimilate members and help them find their own ministry in the church, in the context of staffing....many growing churches have Membership and Social Justice coordinators, and I'm so jealous. Somehow we limp by with neither. (actually with those functions spread amongst staff and volunteers.)

Perhaps those listening, who kept commenting that this was a very different discussion than they often heard amongst ministers, are better able to figure out what we were taking for granted, and that will be a very interesting report.

Marilyn Sewell on Growth and Love

My Colleague Marilyn Sewell, senior minister of the Portland, OR, congregation was at the Growth consultation and has weighed in here

Buzzing towards Growth

Last week we had a patio fair at coffee hour. (Last week it was warm enough. This week, not so!) There was a little arts and crafts sale, a local fair trade organization was selling gifts, and our Green Sanctuary Committee was selling light bulbs and had invited a representative from our power company to talk to people about their wind power initiative. It was a glorious Fall day and the social hall was deserted except for the folks serving coffee.

At the end of the morning, the Power Company representative approached our administrator, asking for information about the church. "There's great energy, here, " she said. "Everybody is happy!"

We called that, "the buzz" at the Growth Consultation, and we all agreed that (1) it existed and was important, and (2) that an unhappy or conflicted or depressed congregation produces a completely different "buzz". Our experience is that this is an often commented-on, very attractive feature of our congregation. Buzz is very valuable.

"Buzz" happens when the space is full, when people are excited about what and who they find in the space, when groups of people chatting are fluid and open to new people. (A group that is talking intently among itself and does not want to be approached or overheard...the sort of group that might exist during a time of conflict...makes a completely different kind of noise.)

"Buzz" is created by children, which is why we serve cocoa at Coffee Hour. Buzz is created by smiles, expansive gestures, and people calling out to their friends by name.

There comes a time as a church grows, that the members buzzing around at coffee hour don't know whether those around them are new any more, and taking care of those newcomers and helping them be a part of the buzz is really important. That's when versions of the Yellow Cup become important; we have to be able to identify a lot of newcomers in a short span of 10-20 minutes. That's also when some volunteers and staff have to keep firmly in mind that their job at coffee hour is to greet newcomers.

We do things to create buzz at our congregation. We encourage all our scouts to sell their wares, we invite groups to put out information, there are always tables full of sign-up sheets. And while we do wish that we had a larger social hall during the winter, we are glad that we don't have to deal with a cavernous hall, where it would be hard to create the buzz that helps people experience the energy of this congregation.

For churches not growing

I've been fortunate to serve churches which were willing and able to grow, and feel blessed to have been able to lead and assist that growth. But I've also lived out a period of non-growth; a decade in which we did mostly the same things we'd been doing and have done since, plus a building project, and the church see-sawed around on a plateau. There's no doubt in my mind that all the good intention and skill of minister and congregation together can't "produce" growth. I have a favorite reading on this subject, which is also a great reading for Mothers Day, Fathers Day, and to email to folks whose kids have taken an unexpected turn towards difficulty.

Do everything right,

all the time, and the child will prosper. It’s as simple as that, except for fate, luck, heredity, chance, the astrological sign under which the child was born, the order of her birth, his first encounter with evil, the boy who gilts her in spite of her excellent qualities, the war that is being fought when he is a young man, the drugs she may try once or too many times, the friends she makes, how he scores on tests, how well she endures kidding about her shortcomings, how ambitions he becomes, how far she falls behind, circumstantial evidence, ironic perspective, danger when it is least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstances, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies.” -Ann Beattie, from Picturing Will

Of course, it's all so important, our children, and our churches, that we do our best in spite of all the possible ways things might derail.

Saying Yes, Saying No

Side conversations at the growth conference convinced me that growing churches have what I've heard called a "permission giving" culture. That is, if you have an idea that fits in the church's vision, and want to give leadership to that idea, it is very easy to get permission to do that, to learn what you need to know about room use, publicity, and church policy, and get going with it. In our case most of this is encoded in policy; any staff person can help someone start a new program. We do a lot of saying yes. It may be that a growing church just has to manage this way; there's no way the staff and cadre of old leaders can manage demand by themselves; we just have to loosen up and (within reason) trust the the impassioned to go with their energy.

I have to comment here that I have learned that I'm a very poor predictor of which of these programs will "fly," so it's a good thing I don't feel the need to be controlling. Who would have thought that the group going to work in New Orleans would raise $7,000 by making one appeal on a Sunday morning? Who would have thought that the group splitting off of the young adult group and calling themselves the (old)parents of young children would grow to the point of having 24 adults and 23 children at their meetings? Or that the little group of techies who wanted to video-tape the sermon to put up on Utube and public access TV would morph into our current video ministry which serves two branches, a third service on our site, videos on our website and a sermon subscription service to lay-lead congregations?

But to some programs one must say, "no." Sometimes the program doesn't fit in the church's vision, or would compete with our core programming for space or use too much staff time or...this is the hardest...needs skilled or professional leadership to keep participants safe. There are any number of other times a minister has to just say no. It's one of the hard parts of the job. We started talking about this as the "fierce shepherd" role...the leader who loves the church...it's people and its vision...enough to keep them on track.

Someone advanced the theory...and I think it's a good one, that the minister of a growing church must be such a fierce shepherd, and shepherds who won't do this spend all their energy chasing troubled and troubling sheep around. Some ministers have to learn to step up to this role, others have to learn to codify it with policy and share it with other leaders. But it's gotta be done.

We also commented that female leaders pay a much greater price than male leaders for stepping into this role; even UU's want their female ministers to be tender mommies not fierce shepherds. We wondered if one reason fewer women seem to apply for senior ministry positions in larger churches is that by the time they are experienced enough to think of serving a large church, they've been beaten down by the unequal price of saying "no."

Readability

Well, this is fun! My blog tests out to a high school reading level. I think this is a good thing. We read blogs in our spare time, and too hard to too much like work. You can check out the reading level of any file on the web, so I checked out a few sermons from the church's website.
Mine run to Jr. High level. I think I should be pleased about this, too, after all, its an oral medium, but it's a bit harder...

Growth: Goal or Outcome?

The most heated discussion our little group of 12 had, in the end, was over the question of whether church growth should be a goal, or is better thought of as an outcome of church health.

On the goal side are those who believe that our way of doing religion has a saving message for the world and we should make a goal of reaching more of those people. On the outcome side are those who believe that the goal should be a healthy church and a program which feeds the spiritual hungers of the community (not the church as it stands, but the larger community, however that is defined.) The "Growth as a Goal" folks are gung ho for setting growth goals, since you gotta have a dream, and we who have such an important message outta dream big. The "Growth as an Outcome" folks believe that you should only set goals about things you can control, and you can't in the end, control whether people visit and like you when they do. They were further somewhat suspicious of numerical goals; it sounds like a too-simple, "bigger is better" trip.

Ours was a multi-generational group of ministers, ranging from three to going on 30 years in ministry and twentys to fifties in age. This particular conversation divided starkly along these generational lines. Newer, younger ministers had growth goals for themselves and their churches. Older, more experienced ministers spoke for growth as an outcome of a healthy, serving church. There was some passion in both groups for their chosen style.

This could be more of a difference in language than substance (the "Growth as a goal" folks know that to get growth, you have to have a vital program, and the "Growth as an outcome" ministers had experienced plenty of growth in spite of not aiming for it.) It could be a result of sadder-but-wiser ministers who have endured plateaus and declines in spite of all the good programming and church health they could muster. It could be that the younger folks are braver and bolder and more willing to take the risk of setting goals.

An observer commented that it seemed that this group of ministers believed that Unitarian Unitarianism has a saving message for the world and that growth is a good thing. The stunned silence that greeted that statement was eloquent testimony to this group's unquestioning passion for our movement and what it has to offer our world.

What about you? Is growth a goal in your church? Why or why not?

Afflicting the Comfortable

It's one of the things ministers are supposed to do, along with comforting the afflicted. At its most simple, this 19th century aphorism reminds ministers to do their pastoral care and their prophetic preaching, 'cause their sick folks are afflicted and need comforting and their pew-sitters are too comfy and need afflicting with the world's injustices.

Young ministers quickly discover that that's way too simple. There are some people who are way comfortable with their afflictions and will soak up all the comfort a new minister can give and still need more. There are some pew-sitters who are in so much pain only an ogre would afflict more.

There are some UU ministers who feel uneasy ministering to UU's, who tend to be among the knowledge and professional classes. Way too comfortable by the world's standards, they all have enough to eat, shelter, and heat, the majority have health insurance, especially if they are over 30, and an awful lot can entertain themselves in all the ways their hearts desire.

The world's standards are very low, and frankly, I think of my folks (and myself) as afflicted in spite of their relative wealth. They are afflicted with all ills the flesh is heir to and are often rather isolated. Their lives are way too busy and terribly stressful, the younger ones often carry huge debt, and most are puzzled and uneasy, if not downright frightened, by the current state of the world. I call that afflicted. Most of my preaching is aimed, not at afflicting the comfortable but offering a word of understanding and healing to the afflicted.

We talked some, at the growth consultation, about how we deal with the prophetic side of ministry, and this was an area in which the 12 ministers of growing church clearly had different philosophies. Some do a lot of teaching about social problems and organizing of social change opportunities. Most of what you read about church growth suggests that this is crucial, but Social Justice has never been this church's strong suit, and it has grown anyway. I preach on social issues on the occasions when I think I have an insight to share. Sometime I just share my puzzlement and talk about how to live with fear. What I never do is just wring my hands, or wave my fists, sermonically. If I can't wring some hope and a to-do list out of a situation (the Iraq war comes immediately to mind), it's not fodder for a sermon, it's fodder for the prayer.

The Other Side of the Story

I had imagined, as had the organizers of this growth consultation, that each of the ministers would have pet programs to share, tips about how to grow, and firm opinions about what had done the trick. This worried me because I wasn't sure what I'd say. I've got an interesting program going on now; our development of branches in small towns, but that has not yet been a very large factor in our growth. My church gets great marks for openness to newcomers and willingness to restructure, but we have not done anything to create growth, and which of the things we've done in the name of good ministry that have caused growth..well, who can say?

The session devoted to nuts and bolts was on the agenda but it turned out that most of the participants felt about like I did, and the conversation at that session turned to love. Our love for our churches, for this denomination, for our work. We all agreed on how key that was. Some of us told stories of our call to our churches that bordered on mystical. When called back to nuts and bolts, we mostly talked about worship, spiritual programming such as covenant groups (and Ken, do tell them about your month of gratitude!). There was some talk about the importance of staff work and how unprepared we all felt for the growing task of supervision, and how this always fraught subject is nearly impossible in our UU World. But then we returned to the relationship between minister and congregation.

I wondered what kind of a consultation this would have been if lay leaders have been invited, and if I were following up on this, I'd invite groups of lay people from churches which have grown to a special lunch at, GA, or the Large or Medium Sized church conferences. I'd feed them well, tell them how special and wonderful they are , and ask some of the same questions. I have a feeling they'd have an entirely different perspective.

They'd talk about good preaching much more than we ministers did, I'm sure, (it was a remarkably un-braggy group) but beyond that, I'm not so sure, and I think it's important to know.

What about it, lay readers of this blog? If your church has grown over the past five years, what has caused that growth? What do you think people come for and what keeps them? What has your hard work been devoted to and why have you done it?

Growth Consultation III-redevelopment

As we told our stories we noticed a stark pattern. With the exception of the brand new church, all of our stories were stories of redevelopment. Several churches, like mine, had been on a plateau for a generation. A couple had declined from previous highs. In one church the leaders had said to each other, "If this doesn't work, we need to think about closing."

A second set of stories, which I particularly resonated with, was told about trust, in particular, trusting the minister's leadership. This is not something that comes naturally to UU's, even less so when there has been difficulty between congregation and ministers.

I digress to tell a personal story. Before I accepted the call to Albuquerque, the retiring District Exec sat me down and told me about the difficulties my predecessors had had and had caused and said (to the 35 year old across the table from him), “You do know what this means, don’t you?” “Yes,” I said, in my most serious and grown up voice, “It means that it will be a long time before they trust me or follow me.” He looked surprised, and then relieved. “Well, he said, “As long as you know that, if you love them, you should go.” “I know it.” I said, and I went.

Now I look back fondly on my long dead colleague (he died within a month of that conversation). I wonder what he meant by “a long time”. I know what I meant. I’m embarrassed to report that I meant two years.

It was fifteen years.

Not that I didn’t do a good deal of leading in my first 15 years, but the lack of trust did make everything twice as hard and the toll on me twice as heavy. But about year 15, some of the invisible plasma that had impeded our life together fell away, and it has been so much easier since.

There is nothing like desperation to get an old guarde to grudgingly trust a new minister, and while desperation to grow can't show to the congregation at large, a little quiet desperation in the leadership is probably a necessary thing. It may be that a minister coming to a church that know itself to be in trouble is more likely to be allowed to help that church grow than a minister coming to a church that thinks it's doing a pretty good job already.

Growth Consultation II

The first question that was asked of us was to articulate the purpose or saving message of our church. I think we were all struck by the openly spiritual statements which were made. This group of 12 ministers of growing churches all believe that the purpose of their churches is spiritual growth of individuals and transformation of the world, in that order. Words like "community" and "like minded" didn't, as far as I remember, figure in the mix at all. The statement I made is my own purpose, I want to offer people an opportunity to deepen their lives within a theologically diverse community. I had considered this boldly spiritual but nearly all of my colleagues had even more specifically spiritual statements to make about the saving message of their church.

I've always had a hunch that one reason my church is a vital religious community is because our worship service, no matter who is leading it, is noticeably worshipful, our program is definitely heavy on spiritual growth opportunities, and our language spiritual, religious, and not dogmatic. I was hoping that that hunch would be confirmed in this gathering, which it was. It's an interesting experience to think you're "way out there" and discover that others of your successful colleagues are even more "way out." Very satisfying.

Growth Consultation

I’ve spent a couple of days now at this event, in Louisville. 10 ministers of churches which have had significant, sustained growth over several years, two ministers of churches we all hope will grow significantly, and a dozen lay and ordained members of the UUA’s growth team. The ministers were chosen to have a good mix of geographies, genders, generations and situations. I feel the honor and the responsibility of the thing, and I am very aware that a different dozen ministers could have been easily and productively chosen. Our conversation has mostly been trying to get at what causes churches to grow, how we encourage or cope with growth, and what qualities of ministry and denominational leadership make for growth. Although all of us, I’m sure, have thought about these questions on our own, read about them, and experimented, when there is only you and your church, there are no controlled experiments. My church has grown…from 400 to 500 members in the 90’s, and now from 500 to 700. My first church grew from 90 to 210 members. What did I do?

Well, gosh, and gee…I just did ministry and then struggled as open-heartedly as I could with the aftermath.

That’s no small issue. However growth happens, it is very clear that all it takes to stop or reverse it is inattention, exhaustion, a good church fight, unwillingness or inability to re-structure, unwillingness to relentlessly change old patterns, guide people in the paths of hospitality, mourn change and move on. In other words, growth is hard work. The observers have repeatedly commented on how much centered energy we 12 ministers seem to have. It’s a contrast to other groups of ministers that I don’t see as clearly as the observers seem to, but I trust them. Is the energy and centeredness the cause of the growth? It seems likely. But it also seems likely to me that the centered energy is a result of the growth. We’re shaped by what we do, and those of us who have managed, by hook or crook, to grow churches have, perhaps of necessity, developed an intensity by sheer dint of hard work and the focus it takes to lead a changing institution.

There's more. I've got lots of reflections and notes, which I'll be posting over the next week. A video is also planned.

The Bus

November starts Air Pollution time in my beautiful city; the temperature inversions near our mountains keep all the car exhaust right down here with us and the smallness of our trees and the wideness of our vistas mean that (a) it doesn't get cleaned up and (b)it is all too visible. So starting in November we have to use more expensive gas and are invited to not drive to work one day a week. I'm lucky enough to live two blocks from a bus line that takes me right to church and have been taking the bus more and more often this last year. I bought a three month pass in July and today I sprung for a 13 month pass. Now I take the bus every day that I don't need a car.

It's a big lifestyle change. It adds a half hour to my work day, which has taken some getting used to, but I feel like I know my city and its people better, and I do get home more relaxed and somewhat better exercised. But mostly, it's my little bit, not only for the winter air quality in my city, but for the world; the island dwellers and polar bears and the African peasants who suffer the most from drought. It's a symbolic gesture which will do no measurable good, except to show that it is possible, even in a sprawling western city, to do a lot on public transportation.

Women in Ministry

A set of statistics has floated around lately; the results of the past two search years in the UUA. They go something like this: 3/5 of the persons in search for a new church are women. 35% of those women were successful in search, vs. 46% of the men. The larger the church, the more likely it was a man who was called to serve it. In congregations of 250 members and above, it seems, a man was twice as likely to be successful as a woman.

Ouch. This is disappointing. We UU's think that we're beyond this.

What does this mean? One possibility that there's a lot more sexism amongst us than we'd like to think. Another possibility is that male ministers pursue their career path more vigorously and are able and willing to move, to put in full time work while raising children, and to move into ministries where they must supervise staff and exert considerable, overt leadership. (ie, fewer of the women in search are applying for the larger churches)

It may be that women still have to be better than their male competition to get a job, and this phenomena gets worse the "more prestigious" the pulpit. It may be that churches and search committees have unconscious prejudices or that their expectations of their minister-to-be are so high that only a man with a wife to hold down the home front could possibly do them, especially if there are young children in the family.

It may mean that, these days, the average male minister (now a minority entity,) is more skilled and dedicated and "together" than the average female minister. (This is very politically incorrect to think, I know. But I'm sure I noticed the reverse when I was in theological school; the average women, though a minority, was more skilled and dedicated and together than the average man. This was much more obvious amongst my Methodist friends, where women were less welcome than in my UU circles. Why beat your head against the brick wall of minority-ness unless you're really good at this?)


Thinking about all of those women, many of whom are now retired, and their careers leads me to my own theory about sexism, women, and ministry. I'm inclined to think that search committees are fairly open minded on the subject of having a woman minister. I've been in conversation with a dozen or so over the years and I've only once thought I detected a real strain of sexism. But I think that the women ministers themselves have been beaten down by the difficulties of being a woman in ministry. It's not easy being a man in ministy, either, but to all those shared difficulties, women add the difficulty of the unconscious, unspoken sexism in our society, which means that women have to be twice as forceful as a man to be heard but are liked less and less the more forceful they are, and women ministers bear a burden of projection of people's "mother stuff". Male ministers get "father stuff", but in this society, "father stuff" is a lot less potent and troublesome than "mother stuff".

So a woman's first ministry is hard, the resistance is subtle, (and often from women, which is confusing and painful), and the line very thin between being a leader and being strident. It's extra hard for the woman minister to figure out, when she gets negative feedback, what's sexism and what she really needs to look at. Conflicts with others are always her fault...after all, women are supposed to get along, and women ministers are supposed to get along with everyone. So ministry for women is harder, more perplexing, not as much fun, always requires a kind of heightened survival instinct. Because of all that, it is easier to quit, harder to take career risks, harder to imagine oneself a minister of a large church.

So if it turns out to be mostly true that women are self-selecting less challenging ministries, that does not absolve us of sexism. And if we are making things harder for our talented women ministers, we're the losers in the end, after all. There are apparently not enough ministers willing and able to serve our larger churches; several very attractive larger churches didn't settle a minister last year. We can't afford to handicap 3/5 of our pool with the results of a sexism we don't believe in.

change

My grocery store closed. There's no grocery store within walking distance of our house any more. (well...there are two that are a half hour walk away. Abe Lincoln would have considered that walking distance. And there's Target, which sells safe groceries. No meat, no produce, mostly prepared things frozen, boxed, or canned... but no real grocery store close enough that you can get milk home before it turns sour.

My newspaper is going out of business. It's the liberal, evening paper. Albuquerque must be the smallest two-paper city in the nation, but...no more. I'd go out of the daily newspaper business entirely, but my son loves the comics and we need old papers for the iguana cage.

My gym class got less and less satisfactory and I finally quit. Of the two classes that fit my life, one is so crowded that it's unpleasant and the the teacher of the second class moves so fast and includes dance steps...I feel incompetent. It's bad enough that I have to lift weights for an hour...oh, do I hate lifting weights...but to also feel incompetent...it is too much.

Yesterday a hurricane-induced front rolled through Albuquerque during church. The wind blew, the clouds rolled around and it was suddenly very humid. Some people clearly found this exhilerating. "Change is in the Air!" they quipped as the came on to the church patio. "Fall is here!" Others were clearly uncomfortable and uneasy. I was one of those. Too much is too much.

First life Second life fame

The reporter from the Albuquerque paper said she'd been assigned to write a business article about the computer "game", Second Life. She'd gotten my name from google's UU World mention a few months ago, but was still quite hazy about Second Life and how it worked. So I tried to explain it to her. I gave her some names of other Albuquerque folks who were actually doing things on Second Life; it's been a long time since I was even there. I thought that would be the end of it, but a photographer called last week for an appointment; an article was to appear in the weekend paper, and they wanted my picture. So...my Avatar and I appeared, top of the fold on the front page this morning.

News is slow in August.

My congregation was thrilled, and for whatever reason, church was packed this morning.


Here's the text. Considering the fact that I very foolishly let my "reporter-gard" down completely, I thought it came out pretty well.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

People Do Business, Shop With Virtual Dollars, Even Worship in Internet-Based World

By Autumn Gray
Copyright © 2007 Albuquerque Journal; Assistant Business Editor
Members of a local Unitarian Universalist church know their senior minister as Christine Robinson. In her second life, she is Cathryn Cleanslate.
Albuquerque marketer Reid Givens calls his digital persona Reid Delaid.
And local software designer Lynne Whitehorn-Umphres assumes the name CoyoteAngel Dimsum in her virtual existence.
Each has taken up residency in an Internet-based realm called Second Life— a world of three-dimensional graphic design that imitates real life and has attracted 9 million users worldwide.
SecondLife.com, created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab in 2003, offers a virtual society designed completely by its resident members. Members appear on-screen as animated representations of themselves, called avatars. They work, shop, play, dance— do practically anything they
can, or can't, do in this life. They even marry other avatars.
"It's fascinating how like real life it is," says Robinson, who has presided over a virtual wedding.
Second Life has also become a venue for business, networking and education. Even the University of New Mexico has property there, intending to expand its distance-learning capabilities.
International corporations like IBM, as well as small entrepreneurs, use the site to market their products and sell their wares— both virtual and real.
In one 24-hour period at the end of last week, Second Life residents had spent a little more than $1 million (yes, that's real money) on virtual purchases or activities.
The site has made national headlines recently due to its popularity. Last week, a Wall Street Journal story titled "Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?" wrote about concerns that users were neglecting their First Life to spend time with their Second Life.
That doesn't appear to be the case with Robinson, Whitehorse-Umphres and Givens— all appear to use it to enhance their real life.
Business opportunities are ultimately why Whitehorse-Umphres became a resident. Not only has she begun helping her spouse set up a jewelry store in Second Life, she also intends to begin her own high-tech, money-making venture.
Givens uses it as a continuing education tool— attending virtual meetings with others of similar professions to talk shop.
And Robinson says having a virtual church in Second Life gives her a chance to connect with a broader audience.
"We're basically in the business of helping people discuss their spiritual life," Robinson said of the church, "and this was just another way to do that."
Virtual worship
The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life is an example of how the site works. It holds regular virtual services and has built a sanctuary on virtual property it purchased.
A three-dimensional visual wonder created by a UU artist, the church offers attending avatars cushioned seating, a flaming chalice, stone pulpit, lush plants and a waterfall flowing over rock walls.
Robinson found the church through a search engine on Second Life once she became a resident in the spring. On sabbatical from the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, she began ministering to the online congregation.
"They had worship services that were as real and as meaningful as anything I've felt in real life," she said.
Personally, Robinson says she has spent money for the virtual collection plate and has bought materials to make a virtual necklace for her avatar.
Be prepared to pay
Second Life has its own economy, based on the Linden currency, and real money gets exchanged. Roughly 275 Lindens ($L), which buy Second Life goods and services, can be bought with one real dollar ($US).
Registering for residency is free— if all you want is to exist and move about. Just create an avatar name and password, and you're in. A 3D graphics card, high-speed processor and broadband connection are helpful, too.
But, as in real life, property costs money, and if your goal is to start a business, own a home, or do anything of permanence, be prepared to pay.
Multinational corporations have gotten involved.
Pontiac and Nissan both have car dealerships in Second Life, and Nissan offers avatars a test-track to try out their driving skills on virtual cars; Coca-Cola recently launched a Hollywood-style premier there; and Microsoft has begun conducting interviews with the avatars of software engineers for real-world jobs, according to a recent segment on National Public Radio.
Avatars buy and sell everything from virtual sneakers at a store created by Nike, to textures for their hair and skin (avatars may have scales or horns, for example, as opposed to just looking human), to planes, and, yes, even sex. All are graphic renderings that can be used or worn or carried by avatars.
Software designer Whitehorn-Umphres is pursuing a job creating computer programs specifically for virtual technology.
She is also helping her spouse, Albuquerque jeweler Dana Whitehorn-Umphres, set up a gallery there.
The shop would allow avatars to try on virtual models of jewelry that exists in this world. An avatar could then purchase the graphically depicted item for wear online or a person might click an accompanying link allowing them to buy the real thing for the big bucks in this world.
Either way, Dana makes money.
"For people who are actual entrepreneurs, it's a brilliant environment to try this out," Lynne said.
Way of the future?
Futurist Lowell Catlett, a dean at New Mexico State University, has been speaking around the state about virtual worlds.
He says technologies like Second Life afford businesses one of the first living labs where social behavior can be watched and studied in real time.
Coldwell Banker earlier this year established an office in the virtual world, built more than 500 homes for sale and even purchased a helicopter to give avatars aerial tours of the subdivision.
Michael Wilsher, qualifying broker for the Rio Rancho offices of Coldwell Banker, has been encouraging his sellers— as recently as August— to create their own avatars and start networking and selling through the virtual land.
"I tell my agents, 'Guys, don't wait til everybody's doing it. Do it now. It's a no-brainer.' ''
"Yes, a lot of it is for fun," he says, "but people are actually buying things, and people actually make decisions (in Second Life)."
Educational uses
Second Life is also proving beneficial for education.
UNM's New Media and Extended Learning Department is interested in using the online environment to improve distance learning, says its director, Debby Knotts.
The department obtained property in Second Life through a national entity called the New Media Consortium, which bought an entire island in the virtual world for its members. UNM's plot sits adjacent to the Center for Digital Storytelling, Knotts said, though no UNM building exists yet.
Givens, who works in Albuquerque, uses Second Life more for continuing education than as a money-maker. He just became employed with a marketing company called MindSpace and says he attends a meeting called Coffee with Crayon developed by the marketing company Crayon.
The online forum attracts people in his profession nationwide.
"Everybody just talks shop," says Givens, who adds he also attends an occasional concert through a nightclub in Second Life.
"It is a tool," Givens says of the virtual world. "It's not going to revolutionize business and marketing, but it is going to have an impact. How much depends in part on the goal of the company."

By the numbers
9 million
Number of residents on SecondLife.com
456,000
Number of people in-world in a recent seven-day period
$1 Million
Amount spent in a 24-hour period

Happiness Is

My 18 year old apple tree, which had for several years been so overcome by coddling moths that we didn't get a single apple, has recovered to the point where almost half of the crop is worm-free and another quarter only lightly damaged. I had tried every organic thing I could try over the years; spraying is out because the tree overhangs our neighbor's narrow patio. In the end, I guess, the trick was several years of cleaning up under the tree (coddling moths bore a hole in the developing apple, eat the core leaving a disgusting mess, and when the rotting apple drops to the ground, burrows in the soil for the winter) and something called sticky traps; red apple-sized globes which are coated with the most remarkably sticky stuff ever invented. They're awful to deal with; the sticky stuff gets in everything, but they seem to be working, and I have apples again! I have such a sense of accomplishment: I've nursed a tree back to health. You don't do that every day! Joy, joy, joy!

Apple Sauce, apple butter, baked apples, fried apples, apple crisp, apples in hand, apple bread, apple cake, apple juice. Glory, Hallelujah!

Daily Prayer Books

mjae left a comment below asking about daily prayer books. The one I've used for years is to the right: Sounds of the Eternal by Phillip Newell. It's a non-Christian, Celtic Spirituality-based book, meant for interfaith worship. Phillip Newell is from Scotland, but spends a couple of months in residence at Casa del Sol at Ghost Ranch here in New Mexico, and after spending some time with him last Summer, I started working through Celtic Blessings..also to the right. It has daily Bible readings...beautifully rendered, about 6 weeks worth. I'm enjoying it as a structure to my morning time.

I'd love to hear more (see comments!) from readers about any daily prayer/meditation/reading they use!

The Postlude to Deathly Hallows

If you don’t want to know the ending of this book, don’t read on.

Several people in my church have told me how disappointed they were with the epilogue to Deathly Hallows, when Rowling relates the small doings of all the people who survived the era of Voldemort. What they named their children, what those children’s lives and anxieties were like, a few hints as to what the parents did for a living…it’s a domestic scene so utterly unlike the ferocious unreality of the body of the 7 books that, frankly, it’s a bit hard to take. All that blood, sweat, and tears, so that we’d know that 19 year old Teddy is kissing 18 year old Victoire, (oh, how I hate that Brittish expression “snogging”: I refuse to use it!) and that little Albus Severus is worring himself sick that he will be sorted into Slitherin House at school? It just doesn’t seem quite fitting. It just goes against our ironic natures; it’s a little too happy for UU’s, I think. It’s better suited to our neighbors in the Church of Religious Science from which we return, when we stray, shaking our heads saying, “They’re so….optimistic!” We want a few more scars, more PTSD, another generation family dysfunction. We think that is “realistic.” We UU’s didn’t fall very far from our Puritan tree.

I was disappointed too, but this odd little add-on is growing on me. A bit of a poem by my colleague Lynn Unger put it in perspective. She’s talking about the Lillies of the field and our obsession with our appointments. She ends,

Of course

your work will always matter.

Yet Solomon in all his glory

was not arrayed like one of these.

Life is supposed to be lovely and happy and free and focused on the small doings of our families and gardens. That’s what Jesus was trying to say. Lynn softens it to reassure us that the stands we take and the accomplishments of our appointments do also matter. But they are derivative. The lily itself is the important thing.

Wiki Wise

Yesterday, I had a little rite of passage; I edited my first Wikipedia article. (Wikipedia is a user-written, on-line encyclopedia) After avoiding Wikipedia for years because of its unreliable start up, and at the urging of my always correct (in matters of internet) 17 year old son, I started using it in my research and finding it useful and valuable. But then came a need to look up the details of the Half-way Covenant, an obscure piece of Puritan churchmanship which laid the foundations for Unitarianism. The Wikipedia article didn't explain the situation very well, and there was a banner at the top of the page begging for source material. So I got out of my chair, got my seminary American Religious History text down, looked up what I wanted, re-wrote the Wiki, and added chapter and verse. I wasn't absolutely sure I was doing it all right, but today when I checked, my edits and source were all there. It was a bit of a thrill!

Today's UUWorld.org article comments that a web-based world might be good for liberalism in religion in the same way that the printing press was good for liberalism in it's day. When people started reading the Bible for themselves instead of just hearing sermons about it, it got them to actively thinking about what they believed and which church structures were biblical. Similarly, the information glut on the web and the user-activity of it all might get more people thinking actively about their faith. I hope he's right!

iMinistering

The book manuscript is IN!
All congratulations accepted!
Now the editors at Skinner House will do their magic on it. No doubt there's a bunch of work left, but this feels like a milestone. My co-author is celebrating with a vacation in England. I'm celebrating by getting back to blogging.

The book will provide resources for spiritual sharing groups, covenant groups, small group ministry, by whatever name. Most of the book consists of materials to help group members think about the topic, so that when they come to the group, they will not be speaking "off the top of their heads." Our title at the moment is Upon Consideration.

Now...back to the garden, the knitting, the reading, and the normal activities of Summer!

Hiroshima Day

The picture is the peace memorial in Hiroshima, depicting the child victim of cancer who died before she completed folding her 1,000th paper crane....which Japaneese folklore says gives the folder a long life.

It is so hard to hold two contrasting truths at the same time.

The suffering of Hiroshima was horrible, and the Bomb and its possible use has been a scourge on humanity ever since, hovering in the background of nightmares.

But it ended a war; a war which was justly fought against an aggressor. As my father (who, if I remember the story correctly, was boarding a ship for Japan when it happened) reminded me several times in my pacifist youth, if we hadn't dropped the bomb, I might not be here. The projected loss of life in the assault on Japan was very, very high.

It is hard, but it is possible, to mourn the terrible consequences of a thing that was rightly done. Indeed, I believe that if we are not to loose our humanity in the hurly burly of life, it is necessary to mourn the terrible consequences even of things rightly done.

Today is Hiroshima Day. With the now rebuilt city of Hiroshima, we must pray for peace.

Fruit Season

We're coming to the end of fruit season for the year. The blackberries are dwindling down to one serving a day. We've made our last blackberry sherbet for the year. The plums petered out last week, although the birds are still feasting on the remains. Peaches, cherries, and raspberries are long gone. The apple tree is heavy with fruit, but this tree is infested with coddling moths, so we'll get some apple juice out of it and perhaps one apple dessert.

We have several kinds of fruit pureed in the freezer, awaiting the smoothies which are a regular part of our diet. And we'll buy apples, oranges, and grapes through the year. I can't quite wrap my head around the experiment that Barbara Kingsolver made with her family and eat only in-season, local food, though I very much admire her values. (see side bar...it's a great book about food, cooking, gardening, and politics).

Still, the fruit season is a wonderful time of the year, and it's about over now.

Vegetable season is starting up. We have squash, peppers, and tomatoes, with cucumbers and beans on the way. But one does eat those last blackberries with great relish!

Deathly Hallows

My son and I had to spend 10 hours in airports and airplanes yesterday, so I bought us two copies of the new Harry Potter book. Most of the afternoon and evening we were within about 5 pages of each other, and he finished the 750 pages about five minutes before I did, an hour out of Albuquerque. Reading speed much be genetic. We were not the only persons on the plane reading the book, which caused me to wonder. On the outgoing trip we'd been told our plane was overweight and that one of us would have to get off. I had no idea that they calculated weight so closely, and I wondered if the excess weight of so many persons with 750 page hard backs rather than 200 page paperbacks would throw off the calculations.


I thought it was a better all around book than earlier ones, which could go off on boring tangents. This one held my rapt attention until the second to last chapter.

I'll wait a few days to give my review, as I realize that not everyone has been able to free up the day of reading required to get through this book. All I can say at the moment is that the book ended without saying anything about the damage done to the survivors of being on either the good or evil side of this epic battle. Only grief was mentioned. So in the end, it was a kids book, rather than a new mythology. It sure was a great way to spend a travel day, though!

I'll be preaching on the book in a few weeks; one of my preaching traditions is to give a kid-friendly and kid-topiced sermon the week after school starts. I think we'll tell the kids they can come in HP costume that morning.

Senior Exercise

I like to get my exercise the natural way, by walking places, gardening, and such, but it's not always possible, so I've belonged to a gym for about 20 years now, 15 of them the same gym (Sports and Wellness) It's changed owners since I started, and I don't like it any more. But there are not many other gyms on my beaten trails, except for a Senior Fitness Center run by the city which couldn't be more convenient. I told my husband that I was looking forward to getting old so I could use it, and he informed me in the nicest possible way that I was old and could use it.

It took me about 3 months to "get around" to checking it out. I walked in and asked the woman at the desk how one got to use this gym? And she, bless her heart, said, "well, you do have to be at least 50 years old." "Oh, I'm all of that," I said and...double bless her heart, she carded me! Made my day.

In spite of the fact that I've apparently been eligible to use this gym for half a decade, it was clear that if I did, I'd be about two decades younger than the average user. And frankly, I'm not really sure I'll be quite comfortable there. The people using the gym the afternoon I visited were, well, practically frail, gingerly treading their treadmills. And good for them for taking care of themselves! Still, I'm worried that it would feel like showing off to go through my paces. But since it only costs $18.00 a year, (about a third of the monthly rate at my gym), I decided to sign up and try it out.

But I haven't done it yet.

Nor have I been back to the gym I don't like any more.

I'm stuck between self-image and practicality.

Stay Tunned

Farm Wife

I mowed my alfalfa field today, I'm drying apricots, making plum jam, and I've put up two batches of pesto. I also fertilized the vegetable garden. It's only 11am, and I've also put in a contemplative hour on my knitting.

I feel like a veritable farm wife, but the fact of the matter is that I live in a very suburban home with a back yard that is about 120*40, and includes a pretty big patch of grass and two patios.

Now that I have your attention I have to admit that the alfalfa "field" is a 3*3 plot, and I "mowed" it with grass clippers. The hay and green alfalfa is the iguana's fare. Like most humans, he prefers prepared, corn-based food, in this case, commercial iguana chow, but the alfalfa is good for him, and much closer to his native diet, so we insist.

Everything else mentioned above is "life sized", although the apricots came from another family's garden. We'll be returning the favor with plum jam in a bit, along with blackberries, which are my husband's project. Our little yard contains five dwarf fruit trees which provide a bounty of fruit for us , the birds, and the neighbors who live on the other side of the wall. Also, at the moment, 15 tomato plants, 12 pepper plants, squash, cucumbers, and a bean tower. The beans are not doing too well, but everything else is thriving, along with sunflower plants which will feed the songbirds once the fruit season is over. It's all semi-organic; we use no pesticides and half doses of fertilizer; other nutrients are supplied by compost, which is my husband's major contribution to the family farm.

I know that some people consider food growing and preparation (not to mention composting) to be just the sort of torture that the industrial revolution was supposed to free us from, but I ask, "so what were you freed FOR?" And at what cost? Every plum we enjoy from our own tree saves the world the carbon cost of the 1500 miles the average grocery item travels to get to our table. And of course, the taste of a homegrown tomato is simply unavailable anywhere else.

So I don't make it to the gym much in the Summer. I get my exercise the old fashioned way, and my tan, and my sauna, too. I'm a farm wife.

Carbon Off Sets

The UU World has an article about UU's going to GA and taking other trips with a clear conscience by using carbon offset payments. The essence of this scheme is that individuals and companies can go about their activities without guilt by paying a fee according to how much carbon dioxide they have created, with that fee going to projects that are good for the earth like tree-planting.

Although I can see the utility of this scheme as a way to force our capitalist system to recognize some of the costs of their activity which currently are going un-registered and will be paid for by future generations, I have some real questions about the moral value of carbon offset payments for individuals. I prefer actual offsets to voluntary activity like flying to GA or Transylvania. If you are going to spew tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by flying, how about taking the bus to work or lowering your a/c use or planting a vegetable garden? Getting a sticker for your name tag by paying an extra $6.00 at GA is, given the magnitude of the problems facing us, is better than nothing but so lame as to be evidence of denial.

I hasten to say that I was at GA. And I'll be going next year, apparently, as I'm giving a lecture and have a book due out from Skinner House. I'm planning to combine it with some vacation to maximize the benefit of the the plane trip and I plan to just say "no!" to all enticements to go to GA in 09. If our denomination was really serious about reducing carbon emissions, it would put major effort into regional gatherings and go to biannual GA's.

How then would the work get done? Already more than 1/2 of GA attendees are not delegates. They are attending for the workshops, worship services, and networking available at GA, and GA has gotten so big that these things are less and less satisfying. Time to downsize, regionalize, and virtualize both the business and the fun of GA.

Book of the Month

One draw of Ghost Ranch this week was J. Philip Newell, the chaplain of the month, whose little daily prayer book I've used for about five years. Now after a week of listening to him read from his adaptations of scripture, the Celtic Treasure, I'm planning to switch to this book for a while. Such lovely passages; Here's a piece from Genesis, about the seventh day of creation.

On the seventh day there was silence in heaven.
The mighty wind of life was still.
The sea was calm.
The morning stars glistened.
The Earth slept.
The work was finished.
Creation had been born.
And the Mother of all things rested.

The book includes scripture passages and prayers.

There's a link to this book at Amazon.com in the right column.

Ghost Ranch

I spent last week at Ghost Ranch. It is one of Earth's most beautiful places, and the Presbyterians, its current stewards, share it with all who come. I've been to many an off-season ministers' event there, but the accommodations used to be so rough and the service so iffy that we quit going. Reservations lost, no heat, that sort of thing. But a couple of years ago, traveling with a friend who was serving on a Ghost Ranch Committee, we stopped there and I attended her meeting (pretty sad case, aren't I? Attending somebody elses' church meetings in my spare time?) It turned out to be a soul searching sort of meeting and my take away message was, "I like these people. I like the way they think about their faith and their lives and their responsibility to the world. I ought to try coming here on vacation." It took a couple of years, and this year was the year.

I watched the scenery. I learned to weave and turned out a couple of pretty-good- for-a-first- try pillow tops. I found it so absorbing that I hardly thought about my church at all, and that makes for a very successful ministerial vacation. Their resident theologian/spiritual director, Philip Newell offered morning services which were just lovely and open to all. Even the communion service. "These are the gifts of the Earth," he commented about the bread and the wine. "They don't belong to this tradition or any other tradition. All are welcome." It's been a long time since I took communion anywhere except at the UU Christian Fellowship's GA communion service. It felt very good. The only disappointment: it was surprisingly hard to have a good conversation. There were plenty of possibilities for "Where do you come from and is this your first time at Ghost Ranch" kind of conversations, but harder to get deeper. It seemed that most people had come with friends or had been coming for many years. This is something they need to work on.

On the other hand, they've been doing some hard work on their accommodations and have some really lovely new residences, and their phone, computer, and reservations systems seem to be working now, too. Church retreat, anybody?


.

Tidbits from Portland

Tidbits from yesterday's GA experience

I had been aware that there was enslavement of Africans all through the Americas, but heard at a workshop that a full 90% of Africans taken from their homes were transported to and enslaved in Central and South America. The workshop leader was helping us understand something about racial issues among Hispanic people. Apparently they don't know this history in South and Central America either, and talk about how "we're all mixed", but in actuality have a strong racial hierarchy that is invisible. (At least to lighter-skinned people. It's a cinch that the darker-skinned people know all about it.)

Another interesting tidbit from the same workshop; There were African people in South American before the Spanish got there.

Another workshop: UU's have been growing at the rate of about .3% a year for the past 25 years. During that time most Mainline Christian denominations have shrunk by 50% and most conservative denominations have grown by 50%.

But...that drop in the mainline has not been in every single church. Some churches have done very well. The tendency is for churches which are either very conservative OR very liberal to have grown. The churches which were trying to please everyone across a huge theological spectrum have failed and declined.

Another experience; Walking by the river, I came across a garden dedicated to the Portlanders of Japanese ancestry who were deported to detention camps during World War II. This park featured the full text of the official apology for this act from 20 years ago...a text which cited racism, war-time hysteria, a failure of the courts and congress to prevent a dreadful human rights abuse.

At least there are not hundreds of thousands of people detained at Guantanamo. But it's so obviously the same failure.

That's probably it for my GA. Interviewing a couple of intern possibilities this am, then it's off to the airport (on the fabulous light rail system, I might add), and home.

GA's Living Tradition

The first minister I knew as a kid was Robert J. Lewis. He was honored at minister's day yesterday for 50 years of service in ministry. The newest couple of ministers I know, my ex-intern and soon-to-be colleague Ron, and John, who will serve Los Alamos, were welcomed into ministry at the Service of the Living Tradition last night. We also honored ministers who had died during the year, those retiring, and those who have finished their probationary period and have full credentials.

That's a lot of honoring for one service; I didn't count, but 100 or so names were read. In years past those 100 would have also walked across the stage (the live ones, anyway) graduation-style, while the officiants struggled to keep a bored crowd from bursting into applause, whistles, etc. at its favorites. The new UUA staff person in charge put an end to that, thank heavens. After a few years she won't have to spend 5 minutes requesting that the congregation act like a congregation; we'll be used to the new dispensation. While she's paring time off the more than 100 minute service she can also work on cutting other parts of the service down to size. It really shouldn't take 5 minutes to tell a touching story to motivate people to give to the offering, for instance, and those 100 names no longer have to be read at funerial pace. If each honoree submitted a picture of themselves in their ministry setting to be flashed on the screen when names were read, the often clumsy camera work would have been unnecessary and we'd have been able to not only honor the absent but we could have enjoyed seeing the breadth of our ministry. It would have been much more engaging to the congregation.

What most touched me? Beth's announcement that, while there would be no shaking hands with dignitaries, graduation-style, Bill Sinkford had already done that before the service, and further, had prayed with the to-be honored ministers. Nice.

It's all a great change and improvement, and done in a culture in which change is usually resisted and the attempt to improve anything is a brave risk. Congrats, Beth Miller!

Secret's Out

The Berry Street Lecturer this year spoke movingly about an aspect of ministry that has to do with keeping certain boundaries. He said that he exercised at a gym far from his New England Town Center (where his steeple is likely the biggest around and everybody knows him as Rev. Ken.) Exercising far away means he doesn't have to talk to anybody, be nice, or attend to anything except his exercising, and should anyone say to him, "Are you THE Rev. Ken?" he can say, "No, I'm the other one."

(This annual lectureship is the oldest continuing lectureship in the US; it was started by William Ellery Channing as a continuing education experience for the ministers of New England. It's now the last event of Minister's Day at GA, and a pretty big deal )

I had urged my lay delegates to crash this event, if they could. I told them that it was because the lecture is so very good, and they had some interesting comments about how the necessities of ministerial role somehow necessitate something on their part. They were not quite able to articulate it, but I was touched by how touched they were by this lecture, which was really, really good. I mostly wanted them to be there to share with me the thrill of what happened at the end, which was, the always dramatic announcement of next year's speaker, who will be, in 08 me, myself.

I was asked to do this some months back, and of course, I said yes. (This is not the sort of thing one says "no", to.) I was asked to keep it a secret, which I did do, and now the secret's out. But all evening, as people said, "They asked YOU to do the Berry Street," I was tempted to say, "No, they asked the other one."

Today this feels like a most intimidating honor and I can't imagine what the committee was thinking. In situations like that, it is good to be surrounded by friends.

GA in Portland

What an amazing plane trip that was! We flew from Phoenix over the Grand Canyon, the Utah red deserts, and then into Oregon, where the snow-covered Cascade Mountains poke up from the trees like the Matterhorn at Disneyland.

I can certainly see where Portland gets its reputation for being a livable city. The streets are tree-lined, small enough to cross, and (this is such a small and yet welcoming thing) a pedestrian does not have to push a special button to make the pedestrian lights work. They just cycle through with the traffic lights, as if pedestrians were expected. This mixed-use neighborhood where our hotel is includes business, residence and hotel properties, including an intreuging world percussion store which was not open at 6 but to which I'll have to return. All the streets are one way; that's hard on motorists, I realize, but it sure simplifies life for pedestrians.

I have a little investment in those one way streets. My father was the Assistant Traffic Engineer in Portland in the early 50's, and he oversaw that transition. We moved when I was 2, so I don't remember living here, but it is good to return.

Events start today, and I've already run into some of my delegation and my two ex-interns. The family reunion begins!

iMinister at GA

I'm working furiously on two workshops for this year's General Assembly; one on using Video to help grow Unitarian Universalism, with three members of my church, (4:30 Thursday) and one on Blogging with Philocrates, Chalice Chick, and UU Planet. (4:30 Friday). Both have been assigned enormous rooms, so, come one, come all!

Great Silence

This unusual movie about monks whose vow of silence and solitude extends even to eating most meals in their cells came to Albuquerque, and it's been the topic of several conversations. It not only depicts the great silence, it is mostly silent; there's perhaps 15 minutes of talking in the 2 hour plus movie. It's still quite clear what is going on; postulants are accepted, meals prepared, wood chopped, psalms sung, studies, haircuts, even a bit of play. It is not an easy movie to watch, and the silence has little to do with the difficulty, what is difficult is that it is so difficult to imagine ones self living such a life.
One startling scene depicts the monks in their one weekly "communal" meal. They have washed their hands one by one, filed in to the dining hall and taken their seats. They eat in silence while one monk reads aloud from their Rule of Life. "We eat together once a week," the rule goes, "So that we may experience the joys of family life." It doesn't however, look like any family life you or I know.

In a scene that touched my heart and life, the camera shows the prior's office; alone of all the work spaces we've seen, his desk is cluttered with bills and a fund raising appeal. There is even a phone on his desk; this prior has to talk. Isn't that a capsule of religious leadership: the sacrifices are not simply material or even familial; they are spiritual.

It is a beautiful film, full of still life shots of simple things; hallways, fruit in the sun, clouds, faces. "I got it long before 2+ hours," someone said to me. "These people live in a beautiful place."

The director/cameraman (he worked virtually alone, living with the monks in silence himself) is an artist, and artists learn to see beautiful things and express them. The Monks are not in it for the beauty, at least not directly, they are attempting to develop a deep relationship with God.. God, like beauty, is here with us, if we can only learn to see, so the artist's vocation is not so different from the Monk's vocation.

You'll enjoy this silent movie more (ironically) if you know a bit of Latin and some French.

Estate Sales

My neighbor of 18 years died last winter, and this weekend, our neighborhood has been mobbed by an estate sale.

Not normally a "sale" kind of person, still, I had listened to this man's tales about his exotic art and furniture over the 18 years. He had lived in Spain and Mexico for many years and had a lot of art and artifacts. Also, after his wife died about 5 years ago, I helped him clear out her sewing room, and myself inherited most of her stash of beautiful fabrics and other sewing goodies. I wanted to see if there was anything I'd missed.

Anyway, I went over to the sale.

Tomorrow, I'm adding a "No Estate Sale" clause to my will. Let it all go to Good Will, boxed up in one fell swoop by the mentally challenged who need jobs and sold at a good price to the poor who need good prices.

If I have to imagine people pawing through my underwear drawers and old dishes, and chatting out loud their outrageous imaginings about my life, I would simply refuse to die. Talk about lack of dignity! As I wandered through the house, trying to remember the stories I'd been told, not to mention these lovely people who were such good people and such good neighbors, I overheard and oversaw things that broke my heart.

And the best of the artifacts were priced so high they didn't sell. At least, not yet. Today everything is half price, apparently, and perhaps even, "make us an offer". So I suppose I'll go back. He had a couple of wonderful pictures...

I'm painting a worse picture of the scene than it warrants, I know. Jostling crowds always put me in a bad mood. But I realize that most of my reason for going over was to have my own private little memorial service, so I was the odd person out.

I missed his service. Her service was at the Episcopal cathedral and, as a memorial service, it was very unsatisfactory. It was focused on the mass, not on the deceased. That's no way to say goodbye. It is better, however, than an Estate Sale.

Once the fuss is over and before the house sells, I'm going to climb the wall between our back yards and sit a bit on their back patio and say my Adios (to God!) to Victor and Jessie, good neighbors, good people, good world citizens.

Snark

It's a new word, I believe, a linguistically delicious combination of snide, sarcasm and scorn.
Delicious linguistically because the word sounds so like what it means, but gad, what an unholy trio of substitutions for conversation, wit, and respect!

What it does to discussions is end them. Sometimes it also turns them into arguments, sometimes simply hurts people's feelings. Which is what it is supposed to do. Snark is the growl of the angry or hurt dog, a warning directly to the deepest levels of our self-protective systems to back off or else.

Most dogs don't actually deliver, and most snark doesn't either, but the intent is, well, the intent. My policy: if people want to end a discussion so badly that they resort to snark, I comply.

Makes for very bad discussions, poor truth finding, and tentative community. But...such a great word!

Brown Bag of Pain

This month's CLF mailer included a sermon that included a story about a moment from Starr King life a few years ago, when, apparently, there was a decree that lunch meetings would be called BYOL rather than Brown Bag. Exactly who had decided that and who was effected by the decree is not clear in the story, and bloggers have been taking the issue to town with various assumptions and diatribes about PC language. (And most of us have learned a painful bit of history; that once upon a time, in the Black community of New Orleans, some people judged how "black" people were by reference to the common paper bag. Just another little bit of evidence for original, or at least ubiquitous sin, but that's another issue) But it does bring up the question of Politically Correct Language.

I am both a big fan of the power of language and suspicious of PC language campaigns. There are times when language hurts. Calling grown women "girls" and grown black men "boys" takes a chunk out of their dignity and gives not-so-subtle permission to society to treat these people, well, as less than full adults.

Where I get off the PC language train is the demand that since certain words have meanings which cause some people pain, "good" people don't use them. Such as, "The 'brown bag' reference is so painful to me because of the history of my people, that you can't use that word around me without doing me damage."

Now, this is not a completely bad argument. I imagine that most of us don't use the word, "niggardly" in spite of the fact that it has nothing to do with the extremely painful word it sounds like, because...well, that what it sounds like and the pain to all who hear is real. There's enough pain in the world, who wants to cause more when "stingy" will do just fine?

If that's one end of the PCLanguage argument spectrum, the other end veers quickly into something not very healthy, which is, "I've discovered this obscure reference to badness and I'm going to pretend to feel hurt by it so that I can test how willing the people around me are to cater to my pretend hurt. " That end of the spectrum is a hypersensitivity and a demand to extra consideration because of one's status as a victim. Not only is it unhealthy behavior for individuals and communities, it actually causes hurt, because it tests persons "goodness" by reference to a fake test, which is whether they are willing to alter their behavior because of what turns out to be an arbitrary demand for consideration. And that is why PC language riles people up so much. Most people like to be thought of as "good" without reference to arbitrary tests, just like they like to think of their skin color as acceptable without reference to paper bags.


I don't know what happened at Starr King over brown bags. It may be that the community contained someone who had been repeatedly tested for full humanity against the color of a brown bag. If I had a classmate or professor who had experienced that horror, I'd start talking about byolunch in a heartbeat. That's real pain to a present person and life is fraught enough already to be causing more. From the telling of the story, however, it sounds like this was more like, "This bad thing happened a long time ago and a long way away and someone here has decided to feel hurt by it and so everybody has to conform themselves to that hurt or they are being insensitive, racist, bad persons." That's actually too sad to be called silly. That's an unhealthy community. That's fake hurt masquerading as vicitmhood and nobody willing to say that this emperor has no clothes.

The good news is that the point of this benighted story in the original sermon was that someone DID ask what the point of the language change was so that the issue could be discussed. Yeah, Starr King! Discussion is where PC language becomes "this is my hurt, can you honor it?" and "now that you explain this to me, I'll never see lunch bags in the same way again," or "you know, I don't see that this really is causing you pain and I don't like this game of "gotcha!" that you seem to be proposing." Or something in the middle and a community that has listened, learned, and weighed, in a rational way, their choices of words.

Museums, Theme Parks, Church

My son has been fascinated by theme parks since he could first say the word, "Disneyland", and a year or so back he joined the Themed Entertainment Association, a very specialized group of design and architectural professionals who work on theme parks, malls, casinos and themed restaurants such as the Rainforest Cafe. With his membership comes the most fascinating magazine introducing this minister to worlds she had never imagined but which have some relevance to church work. It makes great breakfast table reading.

Today's opening article muses on what Themed Entertainment can learn from Museums. Museums, of course, have lately been learning a lot from the amusement industry, so here's the turn around. The gist of the answer to the question is that museums offer authentic experiences; real meteorites, live fish, and amazing but true tales about our world, our universe, our history, and ourselves. This author believes that truly attractive themed entertainments will have some of that authentic quality of "realness" to them, and not try to offer too much "story-ed" theming. I was reminded of the best amusement park ride I ever went on, at the Epcot Center. It was a simulation of a trip to Mars, and when, after all of the wild "G's" and and other "ride" stuff, I saw the earth rise in the little window of my "space ship", I felt a thrill as authentic as any I've known.

The author ends his article this way:

Why do people go to museums in the first place?....if you ask visitors why they came, the top answer isn't generally "to learn something," so purely educational motives don't explain the attraction. What does? I think the answer is at the core of what drives much of the human experience. It is the same reason some people read books, raise families, go to church..."meaningfulness". We'll go to the aquarium to feel a connection to the environment, the science center to ponder mysteries of the universe, the zoo to witness the truth of our evolutionary human ancestry. We go to quench a thirst, fill a void...Of course, many TEA members know this instinctively, and even at our most cynical moments on entertainment projects yearn wistfully for more. We call it heart.

There's a lesson here for church, especially for people responsible for worship. Why do people come to worship? It is not to learn something. (Repeat after me, please, every new minister and every member of a worship committee: It is not to learn something. ) It is to quench a thirst, fill a void, connect with mystery, experience meaningfulness, find heart. If the people who design Legoland and the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai (largest indoor ski mountain on earth) know this and think they can deliver on it, we who do church should be able to be instantly articulate and extremely skilled at it, too. But, we're not.

How do we church folk do any of this...and without animatronics and special effects budgets? Not to mention for the same clients, week after week? I think I have a knack for some of this, but I don't feel very articulate and I don't have a recipe. To some extent there is no universal recipe; what quenches the thirst of one person leaves another dehydrated. I know that energetic singing, real silence, beautiful music, and sermons that use new information and humor to entice people to open their hearts to a new place are some things which are likely to help some people fill a void, experience meaningfulness, and connect with mystery. I think that offering rituals is helpful to people. More and more often we are giving people a chance to do something towards the end of the service: today, Memorial Day Sunday, those who were remembering deceased loved ones were invited to come forward to light a candle, but we've done things with stones and for several years the church's Christmas Tree has been decorated only with white lights and paper doves on which members have written their prayers. Mostly, I am touched and humbled by the fact that even the designers of amusement parks know that it is "heart" and "thirst" and "meaningfulness" which bring real satisfaction to a human life.

RIP Jerry Falwell

I'm researching Spirituals today, getting ready for a sermon to go with our Choir's Sunday Celebration of the music they've been working with all year. They'll be singing mostly old favorites; but I've been struck with several spirituals that I've never heard and with the layers of meaning and sly humor they contain. Here's one...a celebration of Nat Turner's slave rebellion, which seems an appropriate last word for the Rev. Jerry Falwell

You might be a Carroll from Carrollton
Arrived here night before the Lord made creation
But you can't keep the world from moving along
and NOT TURN HER (pronounced Nat Turner) back from the gaining ground.

Jerry Falwell believed he was the Entitled One of Christendom, and was comically willing to speak for God about the reasons of things. He was particularly inclined to blame homosexuals and feminists for the ills of the world, for which I hold him no love.

But he couldn't keep the world from moving along.

(Nor did most Evangelicals think of him as an appropriate spokesperson for their increasingly diverse and more spiritually oriented causes any more. If our media wasn't so religiously color blind, they would have quit giving him their attention long, long ago.)

What Makes a Church

My church is involved in an exciting program...we're adopting some new folks into our church family in our Branch Ministry Program. The congregation is growing branches long enough to stretch to two towns in New Mexico 40 and 90 minutes drive away. The members in these branches will have a full program in their town, with sermons delivered by video.

The Branch Organizer and I talked today about what constitutes a "full program"? for a small (or big!) group of UU's? Here's what I think.

Worship and Celebration for all ages is the core of what a church does. Our Branches will have weekly worship services, with the first 15 minutes for all ages. They will sing, celebrate milestones, affirm their faith, and hear a story/sermon appropriate for all ages, have a brief moment of quiet, and take an offering. After the kids leave, the adults will continue with more complex fare.
Spiritual Growth and Learning The kids will have an RE program and adults will have covenant (spiritual sharing) and discussion groups and classes.
Community of Relationships and Care The branch congregations will get to know each other, take care of each other in times of difficulty, and celebrate life's milestones. They'll have potlucks and memorial services and visit each other in the hospital.
Serve their Community Together Each Branch will have a local service project to give the coins from their offering and time and talent. Members will have the opportunity to join the rest of our church in opportunities like Just Works trips, UUSC membership, and so on.

Members usually come to churches by ones and twos and fit into existing nooks and crannies in the congregational house. Getting ready to adopt whole groups of people...that's requiring building an addition. What fun!

A Seat in the Sanctuary

Watching the congregation from pulpit and chair, ministers soon learn, if they didn't know before, that many people sit in the same seat, or at least nearly the same seat, week after week. And when they've come as a couple to church, and one of them dies, the other, after an absence, returns to church and usually sits in a different part of the sanctuary. It's just too painful to sit in the old place where one sat with one's beloved, by one's self. So they make a change.

(There are exceptions to this rule, of course. The one I remember most vividly was a woman who had been attending the same New England Unitarian church for nearly her whole life, and when she lost her husband of nearly 50 years, she began a practice of hanging out in the vestibule with the ministers until a stranger came in, then attaching herself to that stranger and asking them to sit with her. Sometime during the service she would confess to that stranger that when her husband died, she had tried all other parts of the sanctuary and didn't like any of them and then had decided that what would make her old seat, "new" was to invite a newcomer to sit in it. She always thanked them, invited them to coffee hour, introduced them around, and disappeared. That church had a good retention rate of visitors, and every new member class produced at least one, usually several people who told that story of being welcomed and made to feel useful on their first visit.)

These past few weeks a newly widowed woman has come back to church, and she has also tried new places to sit in the sanctuary. Last week she found a seat in a nearly empty section of the sanctuary only to discover that it fills up late with young adults and their babies. (Ministers see all these little dramas...you don't think we notice, but we notice everything.) But this week, I was gratified to see, that she was sitting in a new place with another widow...a woman who, this time two years ago, had to find herself a new place of sanctuary in the sanctuary.

This is a big church, and most people are a part of a discrete sub-group and of course, ministers don't know everything but I didn't think that these two women knew each other. But somehow, they got together and they sat together during a mother's day service without the spouse who was, for each of them, the center of their lives and even their motherhood. Somehow the larger community that is the church worked its little magic, and this minister saw it and found it very, very good.

Technology makes things harder

This morning, I spent almost 2 hours making two fairly simple plane reservations; one for my son to go to a Summer program, and one for me to pick him up at the end of it. (Not that he needs picking up I hasten to add, but said Summer program is near my parents home and I want to visit them as well as attend the end of program festivities.)

I have more than once made on-line reservations for non-refundable tickets for the wrong day, or for Robinson Christine rather than Christine Robinson (security took a dim view of this, I can tell you) so I'm slow and careful and a bit anxious. Shopping around took a while. I had to read an entire page of information to figure out that a 16 year old, while still a minor can travel unaccompained without a fee. (A relief. My 6'3" son would have felt pretty silly being hauled around the airport by a stewardess.) However if the passenger is not traveling as a child, the person making the reservation has to have the same last name as the passenger, unless the reservation is made by phone. And after waiting for the phone I discovered that there was a $10 fee for this, unless one is a frequent flyer on that airline, which I'm not, but I returned on line, signed up to become one and made reservation #1. (They said this was for security purposes, but the ease of signing up to be a frequent flyer puts the lie to that excuse.) But it insisted that I was giving the wrong security code for my credit card, which I wasn't, so I changed cards, entering all the data again. And dealing with streams of numbers in an accurate way is one of my weak skills, so that took a couple of tries. Reservation #2, was easier, (being a frequent flyer, now, all those numbers were magically remembered) but still the whole thing took, as I said, almost 2 hours.

Once upon a time, one called a travel agent. But travel agents have been put out of business by internet ticket sales. Or one called one's favorite airline, and if they didn't fly where you wanted to go, they'd take a quick peak at their computers and tell you who of their competitors had the best deal. That used to be free. Now it costs extra. People are "supposed" to get their tickets on the internet.

This is how it is that technology has made things harder than they used to be.

Real Men Don't Stink

At the gym yesterday, I was toiling away on my elliptical trainer and a fellow started his work out on the one right next to me. And he stank of old sweat. As I was trying to decide what to do about this unpleasant intrusion, I glanced at him. He appeared not only well-groomed but quite fresh; clearly just starting his work-out and a man who took some care of his appearance. A man, in other words, who doesn't use deodorant and had had a hard day.

I know, it's a gym and you have to expect sweat. And I do expect it and I even exude it. No problem. But this wasn't the smell of gym sweat, it was way too old for that. It was sweat from some toil or trouble of 6 hours before which had been attacked by bacteria and stank. Just exactly the problem that deodorant was invented to solve.

I moved to another machine. Too unpleasant. I've belonged to this same gym for 15 years now,exercising twice a week in close quarters with men and women and this is the first time I've moved away from someone who stank. Never happened 10 years ago or 5 years ago. Still never happens around women. But actually, I've had the same problem out of the gym several times this year with well-groomed men who obviously care about how they look and take care of themselves, and I'm starting to wonder if someone has started whispering that real men don't use deodorant.

The one man with whom I could have a conversation about this told me that it had something to do with how artificial scents bother people, and as one person who is sometimes (in allergy season) very troubled by artificial scents, I can appreciate the concern but I have good news for us all...deodorants are available in unscented versions! Yea, Chemistry!

As I moved and set myself up on a new machine at the gym, I wondered if the real reason for not wearing deodorant is an unconscious need to make space around one in a crowded world. If so, it's gonna get worse. In reality, of course, the more crowded the world, the more important that we take care not to create a large olfactory footprint. If you are herding cattle in the wild west all day, you can get away with taking your shower before you go home. If you exercise, work, and move 10 inches from everyone around you, it's only polite not to stink. I'm glad I use deodorant, and I wish that everyone else did, too.

And please, no comments about women and perfume. I agree with everything you say and will catch that subject another time.

Comments

In church we have to be scrupulously fair to everyone. It's not a club and we bend over backwards to make sure every voice is heard. This isn't church, this is my blog, and in this weekend of unprecedented traffic (who would have thought!) and commenting, I've been pondering what my rules for comments are.

Gosh, I do like comments. They are what turns a blog into a blog, rather than a personal journal kept on line. I don't get many comments, until last weekend, anyway, and it did add a bit of sparkle to my days. But I also feel that, since it is my blog, it is my obligation to keep some standards of communication.

In the end, I've removed three comments. One because it was a link to one person's unrelated obsession with the past history of his church, which I removed as quickly as I've removed the occasional links to commercial enterprises. It's my blog. The only shameless self-promotion allowed is mine.

The harder decision was to remove two comments because they went beyond my standards of politeness to others which in my opinion apply even more to internet communications than to in person communications. The verbal viciousness that characterizes lots of internet commenting is a great sadness to me, and I just don't want it here. After pondering for a while, I decided that I really didn't want anything on the Blog which, if I'd been a part of in a face-to-face conversation, would have made me leave the conversation. To the fellows who did it, I say..thanks for the defense, if that's what it was, but really...I can take care of myself.

Falling into Spring

In spite of the fact that it spit snow at us this morning at church, it really is Spring here. The trees are fully leafed out, the roses are in bloom, and the city is scented with pyracantha blossoms. If it seems a little chilly for this time of year, at least it LOOKS like Spring.

Therefore I was more than surprised on my walk around the neighborhood today, to notice a lovely autumn leaf flutter to the street at my feet. It was perfectly formed, red and yellow; just the sort of leaf that gives Fall it's glory and moves grade school teachers to wax eloquent about letting go and Winter's long Sleep.

Out of season, however, a colored leaf it is a harbinger of death, for only trees stressed unto death color their leaves in the Spring. I picked up the leaf to save it; not only as a reminder of the ever turning seasons and soon-enough-Fall, but as a reminder that death comes to all, even in the Spring.