Ministerial Support

Yesterday, I ended a 48 hour retreat with the New Mexico UU Ministers cluster, and met in the afternoon with the interfaith clergy support group I run as a part of the Lilly "Supporting Excellence in Ministry" initiative.

So I guess you could say I believe that ministers should get together. I'd go so far to say that you can't be an (XXXXX) minister for many years if you don't get together with other ministers.

At the UU group we did a day of meditative writing with a local Catholic priest who leads these kinds of retreats and we spent the remainder of the time sharing about our lives and ministries, socializing, and resting. (and eating, and worship, goes without saying...)

The interfaith group is sharing and prayer group. Both are very nourishing.

At the UU group we talked for a while about what factors contribute to excellence in ministry, and we agreed that some kind of clergy support/study/prayer/accountability contact is absolutely necessary. So one thing I'd put on the
to-do list for the Excellence in Ministry outcomes is to foster a set of initiatives that would support an expectation that all of our ministers would be in such a situation. Everyone has different needs, of course, so there should be many options. How much money would it take, for instance, for a UU minister in an isolated place to say to three colleagues of a liberal persuasion, "My denomination feels so strongly about my having the support of my colleagues that they've given me a grant. Will you join me for breakfast once a month in a quiet corner of the local diner? We can have breakfast, each person can share something about what's going on in our ministry, we can pray for each other..."

Just a thought. (but it's not so far fetched. I got my start in interfaith clergy support groups in a group run by the Chaplain at Baptist Medical Center in South Carolina. They fed us lunch every other week for 7 years. I have a soft spot in my heart for Baptists to this day.)

There are more obvious ways we don't take to urge and support this kind of support. The UUMA, for instance, will only give program money to chapters, not to small groups of ministers. But chapters are big and unwieldy and offer less and less opportunity for real intimacy. My district chapter covers tens of thousands of square miles, must have 80 colleagues in it, never do the same 40 come and rarely more than two or three come whose work much resembles mine. I make myself go once a year and am often sorry I did. They rarely spend the money available to them for programs. In contrast our New Mexico cluster...which covers more area than all of New England, (leaving out Maine) gathers 10 colleagues twice a year, often with retired and community ministers able to drop in for at least a while, and has a level of sharing and collegiality which we all find very precious. But we have to pay for all of it ourselves.

Sub-chapters are so much more likely to provide real support. Why can't we fund them better?

Apprenticing Ministers: Peacebang

Colleague-blogger Peacebang weighs in on congregational polity and ministerial education here.
Have a peek!

Supporting (xxxxx) Ministry

I had a meeting with the head of our local Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project leader today and told her about the conversations we're having here about excellence and about how my participation in her Lilly-Funded programs gave me a shifted attitude from what I was finding among my colleagues. (shifted from, "my God, how can they expect more of me," to "somebody cares about what I do and wants to help me do better.)

She said that even in the highly funded Lilly world, where resources flow like water, there was quite a bit of controversy about the word "excellence" as applied to ministry. Too business-y for most people, and that's in spite of the words from Paul's writings, "I will help you find a more excellent way."

Ok...it turned into a land mine, this word, excellent. When you find a land mine, the most noble thing is to step around it in service of the larger mission.

The larger mission is supporting (good, solid, competent, creative, satisfying,) ministry. It's fun to think about what that would look like, but even short of definitive definitions, we know enough about what prevents (XXXXX) ministry to begin thinking about better ways.

So let's think about what prevents (good) ministry. Let me start a list...please chime in!

1. No real recruiting leaves us relying only on those who feel called.
2. Limited opportunities for real Lay Ministry deprives people of the opportunity to experiment with their sense of call and encourages people who have "done it all" in their local church to take an unrealistic leap to ministry.
3. The cost of seminary. Perhaps we should put it this way:
4. THE COST OF SEMINARY
5. The length of the ministry preparation period
6. The perceived capriciousness of the RSCC and MFC experience and how much a bad experience with one of these bodies can add to the time and cost of ministry preparation.
7. The (dreary old) fact that Seminaries and Certification processes have not entirely compatible goals.
8. Student Debt
9. STUDENT DEBT
10. The need of most people for some kind of accountability structures throughout their careers to motivate them to stretch themselves.
11. Churches that would find a (XXXX) minister to be waaaay too challenging.
12. The generally low salary, benefits, and continuing education packages in this career.
13. The fact that most ministers by necessity work in isolation from colleagues and rarely see other ministers at work.
14. The fact that in any career where the reward scale is fairly flat and opportunity to excel is limited, excelling is viewed with suspicion.

Please do keep going....

Important Comments on Excellence

I hope my readers are also reading the comments of other readers, as some very important points have been made there!

More Excellence

Here's yet another perspective on ministerial excellence from the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence outfit. It argues that Excellent, like exclusive, can be an ugly word, or a lovely one, depending on where you sit. (a great story about Carl Sandburg for your sermon-fodder file...)

One Definition of Excellence

I just realized why this "excellence" language is not alarming to me..I've been speaking it for about 5 years. I've been a part of a Lilly grant in a program called "Sustaining Pastoral Excellence". It's all been about supporting ministers; about retreats, sabbaticals, support groups, learning communities, spiritual growth...wonderful stuff.

This granting program spares no costs to get various grant recipients talking to and learning from each other. Even at my level of involvement (I lead a pastoral support group for one of these grant programs and have once traveled to be a part of this peer group learning) I've been impressed. Anyway, I've been conditioned to respond to "Excellence" with relief, as in, "somebody has noticed my hard work and its importance and wants to help me do it better."

Another advance reading for our UU Excellence in Ministry Summit was a list from one of the SPE peer learning groups as they attempted to define pastoral excellence. You can see the original here. I'm going to take a stab at translating into UU lingo and add a few ideas of my own (they're in blue)

Excellences in UU Ministers

• Passion for the potentially saving message of Unitarian Universalism
  
• Integrity and self-awareness grounded in grace/ a grace-filled understanding of the bounty and beauty of the Universe
• The ability to articulate liberal religion.
• The ability to listen with compassion and respond with wisdom.
  

• The ability to work collaboratively and lead with vision in institution and in community
  
• Commitment to spiritual formation and disciplined life that includes rest, spiritual practice, work, worship, justice, and service.
• Life-long inquiry, unending curiosity, continuing discovery, and lively imagination.
• Hospitality and generosity of spirit that embraces diversity and receives the gifts of others, including “the least of these.”
• Humility before God and one another.
• Agility, energy, and balance in responding to the demands of ministry.
• Holistic health, in mind, body and spirit.

That was great fun! I wonder what lists others might make!

Resources for Excellence

David Pettee of the UUA staff provided the EIMS (Excellence in Ministry Summit) with some advance reading. The blog cited in the last post was one of those. Here is another. This is an article by the speaker who will deliver the keynote address. He's just written a book about the future of seminaries in general and how they might need to change to serve a new era. Both his description of the new era and his thoughts about the challenges for institutions are very interesting. Once again, it's good to notice that our problems are not so different than those of our mainline colleagues'.

One point he makes is that in the past few generations, there has been only one path to ministry in the Mainline religious world, and that is a masters degree from a residential program. Now there are several.

1. One can still go live in a Seminary community and get a degree.

2. The largest mega-churches are serving as their own seminaries, educating and interning their own next generation of ministers, and the majority of persons entering ministry. I have to say I am getting more and more interested in this way of doing ministry formation, but it is currently very frowned-upon if not impossible in the UU world. It is our bias that you can't learn to be a minister "in place"; that the move from "lay" to "minister" is too hard to make amongst the people who "knew you when." This is something that may be true in smaller churches, but not in larger ones. As I watch interns move around this 750 member church I see the nooks and crannies they find to practice their new skills and self-understandings. I'm also suspicious that some of these rules exist in a good-hearted but perhaps dysfunctional attempt to level the playing field of ministry. I hope that we will be able to have a look at these rules as a part of our conversation. I think that moving in the direction of "better" should mostly be considerable creativity on the part of institutions, rather than most imposing scary ideas on ministers.

3. Even amongst us, there is a large number of ministers who don't "go off to seminary," but who take courses in seminaries near their homes while continuing to work are raise families. They trade off the immersion in the "monastery" aspect of seminary for a longer, slower simmering of their call while they are immersed in life. (for a wonderful and gripping example of this style of ministry formation, check out this blog of a young seminarian whose baby has been treated for cancer.) These second-career ministers come into ministry with life experience, skills, and wisdom that 20-somethings just don't have, but for many reasons, they need a different kind of seminary, different options for internships, and new ways of thinking about supporting persons in ministerial formation.

I'm getting excited about this conference!

The "excellence" problem

Here is a perspective on the use of the word "excellence" in church life from the blog, "out of URl"
It's an emergent church perspective. (Emergent church is out-of-the-box, youth oriented Christian church movement) It's an interesting blog... I always think it's nice to know we're not alone in our agonizing about churchy issues!

Just a few more thoughts of mine on this issue; firstly, I never thought that "excellent" and "perfect" were synonyms. secondly, I wonder what word between "competent", which we surely must expect of everyone, and "excellent", which is seen as out of reach, might we want to put forward? For myself, I'm leaning towards thinking of "excellencies", as a way of suggesting that there are many ways one can be doing high quality work and they are likely to look very different.

Finally, and most importantly, I do hope that we go forward with looking at how to move in the direction of "better" even if we have not found the perfect words to describe our initiative.

Full Disclosure

(Full disclosure. That's a funny phrase that's come into use around me the past three or four years. It means, "In case you don't know I have an interest in this situation...here's what it is.")

What should iMinister's readers know about her so that they can understand where she is coming from as she writes about the Excellence in Ministry Summit? Hummmm

Firstly, iMinister is a cradle UU*. When it came time for her to choose a Theological school, close to 30 years ago, she asked for advice at every turn. UU school or non-UU school? Someone said to her...if you go to a UU school, you'll be surrounded by people who think like you do and you'll really have to work at it to develop your own theology. And if you go to a non-UU school, you will be surrounded by people who don't think like you do, and you'll really have to work to develop your own theology!" Others gave practical advice. "Go to a UU school and you'll make friends and good colleagues and be in on the politics." and "Go to a non-UU school. They have better scholarships." The later proved to be very true. As to the former...iMinister knew even then that politics wasn't her great interest and it seemed to her likely that UU ministers would be willing to form post-seminary friendships across theological school boarders. That has been true for the most part. If she had known before she chose her school that she'd spend her career in the outback of Unitarian Universalism, she might have put more stock in Seminary relationships.

She chose Boston University School of Theology, where the ghost of Martin Luther King still walked the halls and where 25 Beacon Street and two theological schools full of UU students (and the right to cross-register into their courses) were a subway ride away. She got a fabulous education there, balanced between academics and practical education, and had the chance to work her way through school as a dorm director as well as do several kinds of field work. She graduated $500 in debt, a condition that allowed her to begin her career working part time in a promising small church and jump-start it into growth. The Christian world was quite an eye-opener to her, considerably widening her religious horizons, and being a stranger in a strange land was a character-building experience. The world of New England Unitarian Universalism was also an experience. She was mentored by wonderful colleagues, mostly UU Christian colleagues, to the further enrichment of her faith, and came to understand the deep differences between New England UU'ism and the post-Fellowship Movement Suburban UU'ism which was her heritage.

Those were also the four most severe winters Boston had experienced; the Blizzard of '78, the two successively coldest winters on some record, and the earliest onset of winter. South Carolina, and then New Mexico looked really good after that!

iMinister feels she had the best of all worlds by attending a non-UU school in Boston, but she knows that some students in non-UU schools are terribly isolated and have great difficulty amassing the variety of UU experiences that prepare one for effective ministry. She thinks there are a lot of reasons to have at least one UU theological school and hopes that proponents of those schools will make that case in the comments!



*cradle UU: Someone born or brought early into this faith. Sometimes called "birthright" UU, but that's an unfortunate phrase for several reasons. Not only did it get co-opted by the anti-abortion crowd, it really does have unpleasant overtones of privilege to the ears of those who found and chose us later in life. If we weren't so dang RARE in this denomination, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much.

Origins of Excellence

iMinister is not into politics, so she doesn't really keep up with the world of the UUA, but here's what she thinks is the origin of this conference, the Excellence in Ministry Summit.

There are two UU theological schools, Meadville Lombard in Chicago and Starr King in Berkeley. They are both small by Graduate School standards...they are probably both tiny by graduate school standards. They are too small to serve all UU's who want a theological education, and anyway, the majority of students who want a theological school education can't or don't want to go to those schools. They are also too small to be economically independent and they have been supported by yearly grants from the UUA. A few years back, the two schools got together to talk about joining forces, but decided that there were too many difficulties with that to proceed. iMinister only heard rumors about what those difficulties were but she noted a high degree of partisanship, not to say, polarization, in what she heard. (iMinister went to a Methodist Theological school herself. More on that, later.)

Further rumor goes that when the merger talks stalled, the UUA board got exasperated and cut down its yearly grants to the two schools. They defended their cuts by noting that most UU ministers are not studying at these two schools and it's not fair and may not be an effective use of the funds to give them all to Meadville and Starr King.

(IMinister is sharing these rumors mostly to get people provoked enough to start leaving comments which will help us all discover the fullness of truth.)

The Board used some of the money they saved to put on this Summit, and some to fund some innovative grants. iMinister knows about two grants; one which has created a pretty intense continuing education program for 12 ministers newly serving large or could-be-large churches to help prepare them for the special challenges of large church ministry(more disclosure; iMinister is a part of the program of this grant.) and one adding UU elements to the education of theological students studying at Illif School of Theology, a Methodist school in Denver. No doubt there are other interesting projects going on...once again, please leave comments!

Just to finish with the rumor-mongering, there was alarm and grumbling amongst some ministers about the name of this overall project, "Excellence in Ministry." Some people felt that they, or at least their colleagues as a whole, were being implicitly criticized by this title. "Are we not already excellent?" they asked. Keith left an excellent comment on the dangers of fostering excellence below.

iMinister tends to see excellence in a different light. It's a star we choose to shoot for; no one and no group has already attained it, and nobody will completely attain it. Nor is it any one thing. There are all kinds of excellences and any number of ways that an institution such as the UUA can foster them, directly and indirectly. And all kinds of ways that excellence can be hampered; unintended consequences of otherwise good ideas, programs, procedures, and goals. It's my hope that this will be the focus of our conversations.

Excellence in Ministry Summit: What's That?

The UUA will be holding a big meeting in a couple of weeks, called the Excellence in Ministry Summit. You can find a little more information here. Not much more information, however. Basically, it's a convocation of a variety of parties who are interested in Excellence in ministry through the ministerial lifespan, from recruitment through theological school through continuing education for ministers in place. Representatives have been invited from theological schools (UU and other) funding sources, UUA staff groups, UU Ministers groups, the Fellowship Committee, the UUA Board of Trustees, and Religious Education interests. The idea is to have an overall conversation about how to manage these tricky and expensive programs and institutions and produce that "you know it when you see it but can't really define it" product called "Excellence in Ministry."

More people wanted to come than could be included, and lots of people are interested or even concerned about the directions that might be discussed in this meeting so I was asked to attend and blog about it. It seems that I have a reputation for being an independent but sane thinker, grinding no axes but in no one's pocket...a designation that pleased me so much that I just had to say yes....to a three day trip in Mid December...just the busiest time of a minister's year.

I am crazy. But I do also care...I care a lot....about our denomination and I know of no single more important way to contribute to the health of our ministry than to be a part of discussions about fostering excellence in this profession.

After I said yes, I heard that the definition of "ministry" was expanded to include, not just the work of ministers but everything wonderful that UU's do in the world. I certainly hope that that's not the case. That would be a wayyyyyy to big subject for a two-day summit. I notice that the keynote speech will come from Executive Director of the Association of Theological Schools, so I have hope that our discussion will stay relatively focused.

The Summit is a couple of weeks away, but I thought I'd start posting about it, giving others a chance to weigh in in comments and perhaps help me to be more oriented when I arrive.

Blogging Excellence in Ministry

IMinister has been asked to attend next month's Excellence in Ministry Summit as its official Blogger, allowing all who are interested to follow along in "real time.".
She is, therefore, testing out the technology that will allow her to post during the meeting, which will be held at the University UU Church in Seattle, which does not have WiFi. IMinister's thumbs are no longer limber enough to do much keyboarding on her Blackberry, so she's experimenting with a portable keyboard. IMinister's eyes may no longer be good enough to follow the itty bitty type on her Blackberry screen for long, so it's a good thing that the motel has promised wifi there!
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Quick Notes

Yesterday I noticed a gas station selling regular gas for $1.99. Considering that it is the more expensive, environmentally friendly gas we have to use in the winter, that's quite a reduction in price from our Summer highs. I'm sorry to see this, frankly. It would be a lot easier for Joe the Plumber to focus on conserving if he didn't have the understandable suspicion that the availability of gas, like its price, is all a matter of market manipulation.

The good news? Bus ridership in ALbuquerque, which increased sharply as gas prices went up, doesn't seem to be going down.

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Purple America

Several people have asked about the "purple America" maps I held up in church on Sunday, asking for the source. Here are maps for earlier elections, including a cool one that shows an animated change over time. Here are maps for 2008. These maps show county rather than state results and results in shades of purple according to vote count rather than simple red or blue. The map below further distorts geography to show population density in each county.

Tears

I gave half a sermon last weekend, ceding the other half to a visiting minister and his interesting comments about the election through Canadian eyes. My 10 minutes took half a week to write, and I finally settled on a "concession speech", ending my comical, run for presidency sermon of last month. There were, it turned out, an awful lot of folks to thank.

At the first service, I got choked up on the first sentence and never did quite regain my voice. It was better at the second service but I was still aware of being awash in feelings that were not all mere celebration. I didn't have time until today to wonder why, and I was helped by a NYT opinion piece by Judith Warner called "Tears to Remember,"
a Salon article called by Michael Lind called "Obama and the dawn of the Fourth Republic,",
and even a reading of the AP article by Alan Breed of what preachers had to say about the election, in which I was quoted. (One version is here)

Tears. I wasn't surprised on election night, but I was surprised on Sunday. They were not all tears of joy, either. They were tears held back over all these years of watching the ideals I grew up with withering away. Watching our nation re-learn the lessons of Viet Nam has been so painful. When will they ever learn? Ronald Reagan was elected a few months after I was ordained. My entire career has been spent in what seemed to be an increasingly threatened counter-culture. It's been hard.

They were mostly tears of hope vindicated, however. My faith in God IS faith in the arc of history bending towards justice. Lind's article documented an intuition which I'd been too scared to think; that Obama's election is as much as anything a symptom history grinding into a new gear. That's big enough to weep over.

That Was The Week that Was

Any other old-timers remember that TV program? News and variety and, best of all (actually, the only thing I remember) was a Tom Lehrer singing songs like the "Vatican Rag" and "Whatever Became of Hubert (Humphrey)" and "Garbage."

Last week certainly lives up to that title. My ultra-blue church last week was anxious, this week was practically giddy.

It's not ideal, to my mind, for churches which profess to value diversity of opinion to be politically monolithic, but that is what happened to my church over the past 8 years. I was mostly aware of conservatives or Republicans leaving after being subjected to less-than-perfect tolerance on the part of their fellow UU's, or just weary of being a minority, but my co-preacher of the morning, Stefan Jonasson, pointed out that another thing that had happened over the 8 years is that moderate Republicans had become Democrats, or at least voted that way.

The end result is the same, however, which is that there's political talk but no real political discussion, and that's too bad. I hope we have entered a more moderate era.

A Final Hand

An African American little girl is often on the bus I ride to work. She's about 5, cute as a button, and rides with her elegant and attentive mother. Extroverted to the nth degree, she seems to work at catching her fellow rider's eye and smiles radiantly at anyone who smiles at her. This morning her mother's need to put gloves on her little hands got in the way, but I still got my smile.

It was a special joy to smile at her this morning. She may never remember a time in which there was doubt in anybody's mind that an African American could be president. She'll have a wonderful role model to take her smile to whatever success she has it in her to achieve.

Barack Obama is an important role model for another large group of children and adults; those of any race who had a less-than-ideal childhood. Kids raised by single parents and grandparents, kids dragged all over the world, kids whose parents were not attentive to them. Unlike the hordes of celebrating African American youth we saw on the TV last night, that's a nearly invisible group of kids. I hope those who care about them help them take the point.

And on third hand...

The draconian abortion ban proposed for the second time in South Dakota was defeated. Now, here's a place where the Bradly effect (telling pollsters one thing and voting the opposite) might still be in effect. (It appears to be dead in matters of race).

Why did the abortion ban fail in a profoundly conservative state while gay rights failed in a notoriously liberal one? Perhaps because, while some sheltered folks can imagine that they don't know any gays or lesbians and therefore can't empathize with them, there are very few women and their male partners who do not face, sometime during their childbearing years, an unwanted pregnancy or unwanted pregnancy scare. Add that to the number of parents who face the fear that their teen aged children's lives will be derailed by a too-early pregnancy and you have a large group of people who in their secret heart of hearts, understand profoundly the untold side of the abortion story; what it would be like to give up the most fundamental freedom of all; the freedom to control to whom you give your body.

Need we say it again? It doesn't matter a whit whether a fetus is judged to be human or not. It has no more rights than any other human, and therefore does not have the right to use someone else's body unless that gift is given freely. People die every day for the lack of kidney, and liver donations...that's 'cause they don't have the right to commandeer yours. Nor does a fetus have the right to my womb. Case closed.


Yes, we need to say it again. Because you NEVER hear it, not from left or right.

But in our heart of hearts, most of us really do understand.

And on the other hand

It appears that California's Proposition 8 has passed in a vote that was polarized in two ways; coastal counties against by a large margin, inland counties for by and equally lopsided tally.

Proponents of this basic civil right, that gays and lesbians and their relationships deserve equal protection under the law took a hit amidst yesterday's celebrations; perhaps in part because of yesterday's celebrations. Most people can only cope with so much change at one time.

But the train on this track is picking up speed. This too, will change in time, probably in our time. I can envision watching the TV with my grandchildren as the first Gay or Lesbian president
is elected because he or she is simply the better candidate. Can't you?

Images

What a night!
What a dawning morning!

My heart is full of images of celebration. Jessie Jackson's tears, and the image of the middle-aged administrator of Howard University who was with her cheering students but who, when the microphone was thrust at her was too overcome to say a word. And the cheering students and their peers, all over the world. Maybe it is this generation that will change the world! And John McCain's gracious, healing, dignity, and Obama kissing his wife and his girls and sending them back, it seemed, to safety before standing alone behind a simple podium and claiming his victory.

And the crowd scenes from Chicago. Maybe the bright lights were washing out a rainbow of colors, but they seemed to be mostly white faces, and I thought...

In the end, America voted for a Black president, not because he was Black but because they thought he'd be the best president, not because of the color of his skin but because of the quality of his character, and mind, and heart, and values, and the people he had gathered around him.

That may be the greatest triumph of all.

Purple America

My state of New Mexico was besmirched two weeks ago by the head of the Republican Women of Otero County, who wrote an op-ed piece full of, bigoted, anti-Muslem fury. She was asked to resign, and refused. So...

The rest of her board of Republican Women of Otero county resigned out from under her. Every single one.

America Vindicated.

W's Great Accomplishment

The Vote America Act.

I was in a bad mood when I went to vote in 2004, and when I set out to vote after a quick dinner, I decided to walk to my neighborhood polling place to get over it. Turned out, they'd changed my polling place. It was too late to walk to the new polling place a mile away. As I spluttered about my predicament, a poll worker consulted another and offered me a provisional ballot. I'd never heard of such a thing but they explained it all to me, I filled out and voted in what turned out to be an extremely close race in my state.

Vote America brought us accountable voting machines, accessible voting places, provisional ballots and a variety of other mostly good reforms to voting practice. It was a bipartisan effort which was the result of the disastrous 2000 election.

I have my electoral passions (and I'm smiling at the moment), but the most important thing that seems to have happened today is the most people were able to vote their conscience and feel that their votes would be accurately counted. That was a victory of democracy, and a victory for democracy.

What will you be doing on Election Night?

They keep saying it's the most crucial election of the generation, and there are good reasons to be optimistic but there could be some tense moments. Not an evening to be alone.

Where are you going to be?

I'll be with my church extended family, or more accurately, they'll be with me, as we are gathering at our home with TV's, wi-fi, and NPR. I'm planning to serve Apple Pie...the kind you buy frozen and bake for an hour. I figure we'll have delicious smells for at least an hour to get us through the tense moments. Ice Cream and coffee...that should get us through. Eat your heart out, Plastic Manzikert; we'll miss you!

21st Century Elections

In the days of yore, it was fun to go with the whole world to the neighborhood polling place on the appointed day, , to greet one's neighbors on both sides of the issues and sign in in front of people who probably knew you. You Betcha.

Those days are gone. They've been gone for a good while. They probably never existed in lots of places but they're gone now.

How to have free and fair elections in the 21st century.

1. Election Day turns into Election Month, during which the polls are open six days a week, from noon to 8 or thereabouts. County clerks rent vacant storefronts in accessible places. School is not disrupted, parking is easy, you can vote near your home or your work. If there are problems, there is time to fix them. If fraud is suspected there is time to check into it. If intimidation is charged, there is time to put a stop to it. Lacking a mad rush, there is time to do things, as the Methodists say, "decently and in order.". (Maybe that's the Presbyterians.)

If the weather is poor or a person gets sick, no problem. Fewer voting setups are required. There are fewer possibilities for "October Surprise". The only downside is the nostalgic one....it's just not like the good old Election Day.

It is like the 21st century.

2. Settle on simple ID-checking rules. At my early voting site, I was asked for my name and address and given the most precious piece of paper in a democracy; a ballot. With a phone book and evil intent, I could have spent the past 10 days voting for every one of my (female) neighbors. I guess the poll workers were supposed to recognize their "neighbors.".

This is crazy nuts, 19th century idealistic small town foolishness.

I appeared to me from the signage that the poll workers had the right to ask me to tell them my birthdate, and to require me to take a provisional ballot if I didn't give the right answer. I wonder who they do ask? How can they ask some but not others without being open to accusations of prejudice.

I say, End This Foolishness! Require Voter Identification! You have to have identification to drive to the polling place and to buy decongestant at the drugstore. You need identification to cash a check and to use a credit card. You need identification to purchase a bottle of wine even if you are 55 years old.

I'm easy about what kind of identification. Drivers License, Utility Bill, Voter card...anything with your name and address on it. Liberals say that this will suppress voting because "lots of people" don't have these documents. Fine. Help them get these documents. They will thank you forever and remember you every time they vote.

Apparently there 's not much abuse of our current 19th century system, and requiring identification wouldn't change much. But it's not just the reality of sloppiness, it's the appearance.

And this is the 21st century.

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Election Anxiety

My seat mate on the bus yesterday was reading the paper. The editorial page headline was "Dems Seeing Ghosties and Ghoulies.". The point was that Democrats are so unaccountably anxious about their candidate that they don't believe the polls.

It's a conservative paper, and our liberal afternoon paper has closed within the year making that our only option, and I was annoyed at the innuendo. Then I got to church and all day the liberals in my congregation liberally shared their anxieties with me.

OK. Liberals are anxious. This doesn't have anything to do with their candidate and only a little to do with the worry that polls are wrong because of racism. It has to do with their belief that an election was stolen from them eight years ago and might be stolen from them again.

I don't share this fear, but I'm an optimist by nature and not very anxious as a rule about anything. I understand it. And of all the things that might happen Tuesday, it would certainly be the biggest disaster. Fair and Free elections are a defining feature of a democracy. I think a lot has been done in the past 8 years to solve the problems which surfaced then.

I have my private prayers for the outcome of election day. My public prayer is for our democracy.
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Yes, I Voted

I take voting very seriously. One of my first memories is going with my mother to vote when I was 4. I must have asked her who she was voting for and why, because I remember her answer. She and dad thought that generals shouldn't become president. I took my son voting we me until he was old enough to stay home by himself and we've always talked politics in our family. He's turned 18 now, and does not get election day off, so we all voted together in the Early Voting center a couple of days ago. It probably won't happen again; he's going away to college and will, presumably be voting from his college address in the future, so it was a sweet family moment.

Yesterday, a volunteer claiming she was from Obama headquarters called last night to ask if I had voted yet. I said yes, and she asked who I voted for.

Now, I was raised to think that that is a very personal question, akin to, "What's your salary", and "What kind of birth control do you use?" These are not things I talk to strangers about over the telephone. So I said, "I don't think I want to say."

"So," she responded, in an angry tone, "In other words, you voted for Bush".

I'm not one who is fast with cunning responses, so I said nothing. She hung up before I could recover. But I really was quite insulted.

What a wet blanket on an otherwise very pleasant (40 minutes, car door to car door) family experience. How sad to think that Obama volunteers, who have every reason to feel energized but relaxed about their work, have such a hostile streak to them which whatever training they have had has not erased.

Rude lips may not lose campaigns, but they don't make friends.

Come, follow, follow, follow

Remember that song from 7th grade music class?

Probably not. But there's a new way you can follow blogs...a sort of cross between blogging and facebook for the writing and reading classes. Sign on to Follow this blog in the right hand column. I'd love to see your shining face and know more about who my readers are!

Enterprises Requiring New Clothes

Henry David Thoreau said to beware of them. ("Beware all enterprises requiring new clothes"--Walden)

It's been a while since I read Walden but I can imagine that Thoreau had two hesitations about enterprises requiring new clothes. The first is that such enterprises may end up being too expensive. One of the reasons I've always liked to walk for exercise is that the only thing you have to buy is shoes. No Yoga pants, no bike shorts, no climbing harnesses, just shoes. The second reason to beware enterprises requiring new clothes is that new clothes make you a new person, and if you need them, perhaps were you are going is not who you really are.

iMinister did not buy any new clothes when she started her campaign. All she did was take off her preaching robe to reveal her ordinary Sunday attire on the morning she gave her campaign speech. But she is well aware that her campaign was a bit irregular. She has no problem with the idea that an unexpected candidate for Vice President of the US who is suddenly thrust into the limelight would need a major shopping spree. She wouldn't have been at all shocked to hear that it was necessary to spend some thousands of dollars on sufficient, high quality new clothes to get a new campaigner through her campaign.

But too much was too much ....way too much. Palin's buyers clearly forgot that they should be sticking with "necessary, high quality, and attractive" and wandered into the "foolish, expensive, and high status" categories. It was an expensive mistake in more ways than one. She may be feeling that about the whole campaign. I certainly would be!

Michelle Obama has always appeared to my untutored eye to be very well dressed, and somehow it does not surprise me the she's a bargain hunter. One gets the feeling that being the First Lady wouldn't change her very much, and that she won't let it ruin her kids. Even new clothes won't go to her head. Henry David Thoreau would be pleased.

Creativity in Politics

In a campaign year drearily and anxiously focused on disaster and even more drearily replete with lack of truth-telling (on both sides, but particularly, as one would expect but not excuse, the side that has the larger challenges), I find one delightful, creative, wonderful, win-win strategy.


The huge swing state of Florida contains many elderly Jewish voters who have often been Democrats in the past but who are wary of Obama. Every vote counts in that state. What to do? Send in Jewish young people to talk to their grandparents and grandparents' friends about politics, Obama, and, presumably, life. It's called the Great Schlep. What grandparent could resist a visit from a grandchild who not only wanted to talk to them but talk to their friends! Think of the fun, the heart-warming, the family values, the brag-potential. Sheer genius.

iMinister knew a Weatherwoman

oh, gosh, another reason I can't be president. I actually knew my would-be "terrorist" when we were both 20. Her name was Loralie. She dropped out of music school to hit the streets. I don't know if she actually hurt anybody, but she talked a good line. I was filled with morbid fascination.

And you know, I kind of assume that she grew up and grew out of her radical ideas, that she settled down, repented any evil she had managed to do, and became an upstanding citizen, raising good kids, and making a contribution to whatever her work turned out to be. If I met her today it would be with a glad heart. Because people change. Glory, Hallelujah!

It doesn't matter how old Obama was when Bill Ayers was a Weatherman. Nor does it matter when he came to know Ayers' past. All that matters is Ayers' present, which according to all who know it, is that of a peaceful, productive, good citizen.

Obama belongs to a church which requires him to forgive the repentant. So does Palin, but she seems not to have absorbed the lesson.

The Second Debate

Was as boring as the first debate was interesting...in part because the VP's went over the same, often shaky ground, the P's went over, even some of the same blatant mis-statements about the others' record. These candidates must think we don't think.

The part of me that always wants a woman to do a great job and had anticipated biting her nails to the quick if Palin continued to act like a slow High School student ended the 90 minutes with 9 nails intact. The part of me that wanted to see the Republican ticket continue to implode was disappointed and ashamed of herself.

The part of me that was a candidate last week, (Yes, I figured out a way to go ahead with my "Christine for President" sermon. It was a great hit, huge fun, and available here)
was awed at what a candidate has to go through and is glad that she suspended her campaign before any debating went on.

And the part of me that loves the truth and thinks it should be told and the rules followed was outraged more or less continually, and especially by Pailn who played fast and lose with both and did a great job of covering her lack of experience and poor education.


My son said it best. Palin won the political game. Biden won the debate.

The Debate

Well, it was a riveting 100 minutes, which is more than I can say about most 100 minute TV segments. I thought both candidates did pretty well. I was impressed by the breadth of their knowledge and I got the sense that they both have a dignity and integrity which the current incumbent has always lacked. Whatever happens, it's gonna be better than it was.

There was one thing that really irritated me. Even given the propensity of politicians to compare the best of their actions with the worst of their opponents, I thought that John McCain went overboard in a couple of his accusations of Obama's record, edging from putting one's opponent in a bad light, which is to be expected, to misleading the public, which I suppose is to be expected but I don't like it at all. A person who attempts to mislead the public about the task of ones opponent's committee assignment is a person who will attempt to mislead the public on other occasions when it suites him...like when he wants to go to war but doesn't have the facts on his side.

Clean up your act, Mr. McCain.

Pulpit Initiative to Tease the IRS

iMinister was going to run for president this week, announcing her candidacy in a sermon, but this brilliant sermonic ploy was spoiled by a real life civil disobedience campaign. iMinister is annoyed.

This campaign of about 30, mostly Evangelical pastors (they tried to get others involved) will challenge the IRS's rules that tax exempt organizations such as churches can't engage in candidate politics, only in issue politics. They are going to go ahead an endorse their chosen candidate from their pulpits this Sunday and take the consequences. They say they'll sue the government if they do loose their tax exempt status. Read more here.

iMinister thinks this is a bit foolish, but she's aware that the IRS has been both negligent (especially to conservative churches) in enforcing its rules and out of bounds (especially to liberal churches) in harassing ministers who are staying on their proper side of the endorsement line, and she'd appreciate a clarification of the situation which is, after all, what often comes out of court cases and high drama publicity.

She also thinks that any preacher who can't figure out a way to preach "on the issues" such that the congregation can't figure out who the preacher wishes his or her people would vote for is not a very skilled preacher, so she doesn't put much stock in complaints about this particular rule being any real infringement on religious needs. She suspects that this the real inhibition these preachers feel is to their own egos, which are pinched when they can't tell their flocks how to vote.

IRS specializes in slow response, so I doubt if we'll know by Monday.

And if you want to know about iMinister's platform, check here on Tuesday.

Dear Misters Paulson and Bernanke,

If you really believe that it is crucial for the congress to quickly approve this bailout, it was your responsibility to propose a reasonably balanced, passable bailout plan. Since the plan that you proposed was so unbalanced and unrestrained that not even Republicans like it, you must not really think this is an earth shaking crisis. So Congress, take your time. No more playing responsible villagers to the foolish shepherd's cry of wolf!

Putting Lipstick on a Pig

Obama said it about McCain's policies yesterday
McCain's supporters have morphed that into an insult against Sara Palin, as she is "the only one of the four candidates who wears lipstick."

McCain has himself used the expression several times in the campaign, always to point out just what Obama was trying to point out, which is that you can make a small change in the packaging of something but it's still the same inside.

Obama is right that this tempest in a TV screen is EXACTLY WHAT MAKES ME HATE POLITICS AND DESPAIR FOR OUR NATION. WE'RE AT WAR, FOR GOD'S SAKE. WE'RE BANKRUPTING OURSELVES. OUR KIDS ARE GETTING an inferior education and everybody's getting inferior health care. Our population is skyrocketing. The Globe is warming up.

And on the other hand, it's a distressingly sexist-sounding statement. There's too much in the culture that links women, lipsticks and pigs. Like the world "nigardly", which doesn't mean what it sounds like it means but is close enough that no smart person uses the word any more, let's retire this folksy statement. In the end, it does only harm.

On Cultural Mis-Appropriation

Monkey Mind, who is a Buddhist religious leader as well as a UU minister, has commented wisely, here on the problem of adding language to the UUA bylaws dealing with this sticky topic of cultural mis-appropriation. I agree with everything he said, and added a comment that writing bylaws to attempt to regulate practices about which there is not clarity or even agreement, not to mention experience with appropriate procedures is a dangerous mis-use of bylaws.

I want to also add that my experience with this "I know it when I see it but can't define it" area is that our lack of clarity on this subject already puts a dampening effect on robust sharing in our ministry of spiritual and worship practices and does not help ministers take spiritual risks with their colleagues or in their congregations.

We UU's have a profound ambivilance about spirituality of any kind already, and a tendency to pounce, sometimes viciously, on the scary notion that any bona fide UU's would be experimenting with ways to deepen our own spirituality and our corporate experience of spirituality.


Ours is a faith which is open to the wisdom and practices of human religious experience, and that can not simply mean that we learn about other people, although many a preacher or RE director has done only that. Of course understanding others is good, but if our knowledge is only a head-trip, we really have not finished learning. Anything we try to practice is going to fall, at least loosely, into the category of cultural misappropriation. There's not much new under the sun. We don't even all agree that practices like Sweat Lodges are disrespectful to Native Americans. (Nor do all Native Americans think that. ) What about using the tactic of having children ask questions of their elders about the history of their faith to engage them? That harkens to the Jewish Seder practice, and that's where I came across it, so it is a mild form of appropriation. How mild is mild? Who decides? The Orthodox rabbi up the street, the person of Jewish heritage in my congregation? Is the well-established UU Thanksgiving Seder a bad thing? Only a bad thing if it's called a Seder? Only bad if it is a congregational meal? Do we apply the same rules to the communion service? On and on we could go with the questions. They are interesting questions, and I'm not against asking them. What we need is not a by-law but a respectful conversation and learning opportunity. Simple prohibition will only dampen our already small talent for spiritual seeking together.

R.I.P. Ninja

Our household iguana died on Friday, and I'm still feeling shocked and sad. He had escaped his cage, something he'd done before, but then knocked out a screen and escaped the house. He must have made a beeline for the biggest tree he could see...that's what iguanas do. Unfortunately, the biggest tree in our yard is a utility pole, and he electrocuted himself. I was out looking for him by that time, and heard the bang of the fuse blowing and saw him flung off the pole.

He knocked out electricity for three blocks for three hours. Went with a bang, as they say.

He had always been an adventurous iguana. He'd roamed the world by himself as a yearling; I got him from a rescue organization where they figured he'd been on his own for some months. He was kind of wild his first year with us, but after that he settled down, allowed himself to be carried, and loved his outdoor cage. He had a good life. And died doing what he loved to do most; looking for sun in all the high places.

I'm gonna miss him.

Dan Harper's Purposes and Principles

Fausto notes in the comments that fellow blogger Dan Harper proposed a new Purposes and Principles in his blog last June. I had a peak and fell immediately in love. I promote Dan's alterego, Mr. Crankypants for king of the universe! (UU Universe, at least!) You can find his work here. Of course there will be quibbles with it, and more voices will want to be heard. But let's start with this. It's simple, you could imagine reading it in worship (even reading it responsively), it has a horse-like grace rather than a camel-like clumpiness. Thanks, Dan!

New Try at our Purposes and Principles

The Commission on Appraisal has come up with a proposed draft of the first few articles of the UUA bylaws, commonly called our purposes and principles. It's here.

I have liked our current purposes and principles, and while I agree that such statements should be revised from time to time, I don't like this revision. One reason I don't like this revision is that I don't like the way the purposes and principles have moved into a creed-like place in our life together. People are taking them way too literally. I heard it just yesterday: "Our purposes and principles say we are for Peace and Justice. Therefore YOU SHOULD support (our idea of how to gain these two things.)

The Purposes and Principles have taken over RE in the same, concrete way. Ugh.

Given that background, I have to say that I don't like the basic format of the Commission's work. It has given us too many more words to make concrete in the "principles" section, and it has collapsed the "sources" section into a paragraph of prose (verbose prose at that) which is not suitable for use in liturgy. That will mean that those italicized principles will be all the more elevated and concretized in our life together.

It also elevates our paranoia about "cultural misappropriation" to by-law level and seems to permit others rather than ourselves to decide what is appropriate and respectful. I can tell you that there are millions upon millions of Christians who would say that our use of any kind of communion service is disrespectful to their doctrinal Christ, and that any prayer which does not end in the name of Jesus is an insult to the word prayer. These bylaws would allow them to criticize us and give us no way to make our own decisions. Even worse, they would allow some us to criticize others. I'm all for exercising sensitivity to other's sensibilities. But my experience with discussions of cultural misappropriation leads me to believe that this "sensitivity" is mostly used amongst us to distance ourselves from spirituality and dis those spiritual leaders who take the risk of introducing us to spiritual practice. With a bylaw like this, we will reduce ourselves again to classical music, intellectual sermons, social action and a moment of silence as our only legitimate shared spiritual practices. It just won't do.

And there's the statement that the highest purpose of our congregations is to "worship together to create beloved community" (sorry, that's not my primary goal and I think it is a very dangerous one)

It's been hard enough navigating the shoals of congregational life around seven principles. (see above). Navigating around seven principles, cultural misappropriation, and beloved community is not going to make us healthier.

(political) Life is a Riddle and A Mystery

I think that amongst the most interesting things that is happening in our world today is how people are having to stretch themselves in order to stay true to their values. I first noticed this amongst the Episcopalians. Some of the most socially conservative Episcopal churches in this country have disaffiliated themselves from the American Episcopal body because of women priests and gay priests, and put themselves under the discipline of socially conservative African bishops. This shows an open-minded willingness to accept something new that I hope they take some pride in. I'm sorry they are doing it for the reasons they are doing it but I think God works in mysterious ways and up until last week, I thought that this was one of the great Mysteries of our time.

That is until another group of social conservatives welcomed with open arms a woman candidate for Vice President of the US whose major credential is her feisty track record against good old boy corruption. (Also she's against abortion and for guns and has a son in the military. I wonder when is the last time an American president or vice president had a near relative in the military?)

But she is a woman, and not only that, she's the mother of an infant. An infant with special needs, at that. I've got a fair number of feminist credentials and I have to say that it makes me queasy to imagine how much that little boy is going to miss his mommy even if she becomes Vice President, much less, president. These are not exactly 40 hour a week jobs which easily combine with family and child care. Nor is he the only child in the family; there are three others still young enough to need a big slice of parental time and love, and it's not like they have a full-time dad. He's the owner of a small business. And whatever became of "I am my children's mother!"(and therefore only work, at most, part time while they are in school.) ?

No doubt they will work something out, and I think it is wonderfully open-minded of American Conservatives to let them do that in peace. And should Ms. Palin become VP, I look forward to seeing what the old boys make of their feisty leader.

But I am drowning in the Mystery of it all...

Terms of Belittlement

I've been spending time in doctor's offices lately. Nothing major, just my annual stuff and my son's broken arm. What that means is that I've been hearing a lot of professional women referred to as "girls".

As in children.

As in "please hand this to the girl at the window" (meaning the highly trained, apparently competent 50-something person entrusted with sensitive papers and distressed people) and "just sit there and one of the girls will call you back. "(Ditto)

At first I tried being confused. "I don't see any girls here." (blank stare...right over there, can't you see?) Then I tried being shocked. "Surely you don't hire children to work here." (puzzled cluelessness. "No, of course not". ) Then I tried the direct approach. "It's so demeaning to call the professionals you work with girls." This approach was to the male techs who were waiting around to put a cast on my son's arm. (Funny, nobody called them "boys". ) However the response was quite revealing. "Well, they act like girls!" one of them guffawed. His partner sensed dangerous territory and hastened to add. "Of course, they think we're nuts too!"

At the Mamogram office this morning, when told by the clerk to wait for the "girl" to call me back, I said again, "It's so demeaning to imply that the people who do such important work are children." The clerk was taken aback and finally responded. "I'm sure its a term of endearment." But I saw a shadow cross her face as she heard her own words. No doubt employee relations are just fine in that big office, but it was crystal clear that the person who was going to call me back was not "dear" to the one who had just called her a girl. It's not really a term of endearment, after all. No, actually, it's a term of belittlement. It bespeaks a lack of respect for persons doing important but adjunct work in a medical office because of their sex.


Call her a tech or a receptionist, a nurse or a patient rep. (hey, then I know more about what I can expect from her!) Call her a lady, a person...heck, call her a woman.


If you play bridge with "the boys" or go out with "the girls", that's your affair. But if you refer to the woman in your office who is older than I am as a "girl" you belittle her, and her work, and by extension, you belittle me.

Chili Roasting Season

Its the weekend before Labor Day and I'm patiently standing in line to get my 30 pound bag of chili roasted at my neighborhood grocery store. You can roast chili at home, but it never comes out as well as it does from the great rotating barrels with their extra hot burners. The wait is going to be nearly two hours, and eventually I'll go back in to do the rest of my shopping, letting my neighbor read my magazine in exchange for keeping my place in line. For the moment I'm enjoying the beautiful day and the indescribably heavenly smell of roasting chili. New Mexicans go around sniffing the air in the Fall hoping for a whiff of roasting chili like we all hope for that increasingly elusive whiff of pine at Christmas.

They say that the chemicals that make pepper hot cause the body to produce endorphins, and that New Mexicans are so addicted to chili-high that they pine away without it. College-bound New Mexico teens are promised care packages, not of cookies but of chilis packed in dry ice.

Even the smell is addicting. Its the New Mexico high

The Anthrax Scare

So it seems that a suspect in the 2001 Anthrax scare/murders had committed suicide. Now we may never know what exactly happened and why a respected researcher put anthrax powder in envelopes, killed two people and scared the nation half to death. (remember, no powder allowed in gym dressing rooms?) ..either because the man who did it will now never tell, or because the suicider will be presumed guilty and the case closed.

One thing I've not seen much about in today's news about this strange case is how the Anthrax scare was originally blamed, with supposed substantial evidence, on Iraq. It was another reason we had to go to war. One of the supposed weapons of mass destruction was germ warfare. The notes in the envelope were supposedly from Iraq and the powder itself had some especially Iraqi chemical makeup. That turned out to be flat out made up somewhere in the "information" chain. For a long time now (once we started the war), the FBI has focused on domestic sources of this little terrorist event that we've mostly forgotten. But that little terrorist event was a major cause of this disastrous war. And now the person they were about to finger is dead.


It's an unsatisfactory, not to say downright fishy ending to a very strange, not to say, downright fishy episode in American life.

Avoiding Tragedies like Knoxville

Two are dead and 5 critically injured after a man fired on the UU's of Knoxville yesterday. One of the dead apparently heroically stepped in front of the shooter. Two brave congregants tackled him while he was re-loading his gun. The Presbyterians across the street took in the shocked apparently during their own worship service and has opened their building to the congregation for a de-briefing/vigil this evening.

The perpetrator apparently planned and practiced this attack for reasons not yet made public. How anybody can be so evil as to shoot innocent people in a church is one question of the day. How people can risk their lives for others and offer their love and their building to grieving victims is the questions of goodness.

There's another question that is not being asked, which is, why we are putting up with all this gun violence in our society. As the minister of a Knoxville Baptist church mused in his blog, "The last place you'd expect gun violence is in the peace-loving Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church." There's no escape.

Of all the comments I read in news blogs yesterday, 98% were offering prayer and sympathy, 1% had been deleted as crass and hateful, and one...exactly one, suggested we ought to do something about guns. One minute later someone flashed back, "no law would ever prevent a man like this from getting a gun." In other words, all control is completely hopeless.

I don't think so. It would take time and effort to buy back guns in our society, but if a person had to go underground to get a gun, fewer people would do it...fewer and fewer with passing years. Just as there are far more people who use (legal) alcohol to get high than there are who use illegal drugs, so, as guns got harder and harder to find, maintain, and but annumition for, fewer and fewer people would shoot their fellow human beings.

The TVUUC perpetrator was observed by his neighbors in target practice. If that was an unusual enough and fraught enough activity that someone had alerted the police, this tragedy might have been averted. Or at least, without practice, his aim wouldn't have been so good.

This is the 5th church shooting in the past year or so; there have been more shootings like that in schools. Churches and Schools are the open places of our society. If we must close them down, disallow backpacks and guitar cases, be suspicious of the stranger or the angry...we will all lose far more than if we just start cracking down on guns.

Praying for the People of Knoxville, and for us all....

Multi-Minister Staffs and the Lone Ranger

There's a lot of pain in our ministry about the issues of multi-minister staffs. We're a denomination of small churches, and most ministers never experience this situation, and the ones who do are in a spotlight. This is not something we've done well as UU's, and this is an impediment to our growth. We're going to stay a denomination of small churches unless we can figure out appropriate, workable structures and mindsets for two ministers to work together. So here is my morning's thought on this subject.

If you've never tried to work with another minister on a staff, let me tell you...it's a learning curve, a spiritual discipline, and a Damed Growth Experience all wrapped up in one...one of those ministerial tasks that nobody in their right mind would try unless they were deeply called to a specialized ministry or the church they served couldn't progress any other way. (A different sort of call.) Worse than a building program. Worse than a Sexual Offender, just to name two ministerial experiences that more of us are familiar with.

Whether you talk to people who have served as Senior ministers in such pairs or Associate/Assistant ministers, you scratch the surface and find pain and blame. Sometimes it seems as if our conversation assumes that anybody ought to be able to step into these roles and if things don't instantly go well, they just have bad intentions or a character disorder. A little charity for those who have chosen or found themselves in this very tough learning curve is in order, I think, especially from those who have not stood in those shoes.


All of us learned to be lone rangers in ministry. Even if we've been lone rangers with lots of volunteer rangers, part time rangers, or even a few sheriffs to work with, we have a major shift if we find ourselves one of Two Rangers Working Together, especially when the situation calls for (and in my opinion most of them should) one of the two to have some authority over the other.

Onlookers to these rather public relationships cluck and shake their heads when they don't work out well. (Most of them probably do work out well, often for many years, but we don't hear so much about those.) Mostly they cluck at the senior ministers who are accused of being jealous, protective of their place in the congregational sun, and unwilling to share the perks of ministry. There is, of course, another side of the story, which is the story of Associate/Assistant ministers who couldn't learn to work on a team, couldn't take direction, couldn't NOT be in the spotlight and generally continued to be Lone Rangers when the situation called for working with someone else.

Most UU Ministers, I think, wouldn't want to serve in multi-minister situations. We like being in charge...and whether you serve as a Senior or Associate/Assistant, you give up a good deal of 'being in charge.' For those called to serve in churches which are just too big for one minister and those called to specialized ministries...we just gotta work this out.

Grocery Matters

I'm ecstatic, 'cause I just discovered that Sunflower Market is moving to my neck of the woods (corner of Montgomery and Juan Tabo)! Yes! Ever since my beloved corner grocery store closed a year ago, I've been a grocery shopper adrift, and what used to be my favorite family chore turned into a ...well...a chore. The chain grocery stores cater more and more to people who don't cook, they just nuke and eat. Aside from the fact that even the produce sections are more and more taken over by expensive, ready-to-eat items, the check-out lanes more and more use those "scan-it-yourself" machines which may work well for people who never buy produce...I wouldn't know...but I do know that they are torture for people who do buy produce. So we who eat fresh food stand in ever longer lines for old fashioned checkers.

Sunflower Markets specialize in produce and meat and sell at wonderful prices. For instance, you can by a big bunch of Collards for .99 a Sunflower, while they're $1.99 at Smiths and at Whole Foods/Whole Paycheck a small bunch is 1.99. (Collards, you ask? Collards are the staple diet of green Iguanas, and a 10 lb Green Iguana eats a lot of collards.) That's just an example. Many produce items cost half what they do in the chain stores.

Sunflower is not perfect. They sell only minimal canned/boxed/household goods. But I'm so glad they are moving to my part of town and even...this is too good to be true...on my bus line!

Thanks, Sunflower, you made my week!

Terminating Fellowship and New Media

The UU World has changed its headline to reflect accurately on the new by-law change. Apparently I wasn't the only person who complained. Hopefully, someone thought to complain directly, which is only polite. Now, I'm embarrassed that I didn't think to do that. I actually know these people personally...what was I thinking?

Well, I was thinking old-style media, that's what I was thinking. A Headline is a Headline. A Headline has been printed on thousands of pieces of paper and sent out to the world. There's no recall (in old media) No point in complaining. What's done is done.

What a Luddite I am! This is On-Line. Corrections easy.

And I do appreciate the willingness to make them.

Terminating Ministers

"Ministers can be terminated for incompetence," screams the UU World headline. It's a misleading headline with nasty overtones, and I expect better from the UU World.

Aside from the fact that it is ministerial fellowship (credentialing) which can be terminated, not ministers, for incompetence, I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks "killed by organized crime" when the verb "terminated" is used in that way.

The text of the article shocked me too, and this is not an editorial problem. When this new rule was explained to the ministers, it was couched in terms of, "When a minister has experienced several negotiated resignations..." they can be judged to be an incompetent minister and removed from Fellowship. The article implied that it would be possible for someone to be removed from Fellowship because they didn't meet current competencies. This would make it possible to remove any minister from fellowship because I can promise you, there's not a minister amongst us who perfectly meets current competencies. I've had an opportunity to look at the list of questions the MFC has lately asked candidates and there are lots and lots that I'd have difficulty with, and more still in which the "competent" answer is impossibly subjective.


So while I think that there is need for a provision like this, without carefully drawn guidelines, it could be a very dangerous new rule.

GA Connections

Every year there is a service celebrating ministry at the GA. New ministers are congratulated, retiring ministers honored, and the deceased are named. At the beginning of a minister's career, they likely know many new ministers and few retiring or deceased ministers, and that changes; slowly for people who work around Seminaries or are in ministerial chapters with many Seminarians, rapidly for people like me who spent a career in various UU outbacks. The moment of silence for the deceased gets more and more poignent as the years pass. Ministers talk a lot about this particular rite of passage.

But this year I noticed something else. Between old interns and people who left Albuquerque to go to Seminary, my GA is getting richer and richer. Last week I cheered on an old staffer, Michael Corrigan, who received Preliminary Fellowship, my first intern, who got Final Fellowship, and had breakfast with an Myriam Renaud who left Albuquerque for seminary 7 years ago and is deep into a PhD program in Theology. I knew more of the deceased ministers, but I know these new ones better. That's good!

And speaking of the Service of the Living Tradition, it lived up to its name this year for the first time in a long time...a dignified worship service that was still alive. The 19th century form, created for a small group of ministers and meant to be held in a church, had not translated well to a convention hall and a hundred honorees, and the SLT had taken on the overtones of a circus. Beth Miller has made changes over the past couple of years which have made the service both more interesting (I loved being able to see photographs of the honorees as their names were called!) and more dignified. There were a few adolescents who attempted to continue the circus atmosphere with their calls and whistles, but I imagine they will have matured before another year passes and the Service of the Living Tradition will continue to thrive.

UUSC Awards

I have to be honest...the moment I finished the Berry St. Essay, which has been a burden and a privilege and an obsession for 15 months now...that was the high point of my GA experience. My gracious colleagues received it well and my new colleague John Cullinan delivered a response that was substantive and well done. What a relief!

But that was really Minister's Days, not GA, and the highlight of GA was, hands down, the UUSC annual meeting, specifically the awards ceremony. Awards were given to an amazing youth...one of those kids who has done more work for justice by the time they go to college than most people do in a lifetime. Last year's youth honoree, who had not been able to be present last year, was also given a round of applause. The adult awardee was a young adult Navy officer who has begun UU worship and other activities at the Great Lakes Naval Base, including values education and decision-making courses for young recruits, some of whom are getting this kind of education for the first time at a very vulnerable times in their lives. With him to celebrate this award were two other leaders, one in uniform, one the parent of a pre-school boy, dressed in his army costume. The moment was a celebration of the terrible and joyful complexity of the reality of war and the hope of peace.

ScareIguana

Yesterday was my last sermon of the program year, and I celebrated by making an outdoor cage for our household iguana. This is something I've been wanting to do ever since he calmed down enough to be carried around and learned not to bite.

Iguanas are the genius of the lizard tribe; they need interaction, change, and movement to thrive, just like dogs and cats. Also, they need real sun or are at risk for serious illness. Cage lights help, but, well...nothing replaces straight sun. Ninja has been roaming the house (under supervision) for 9 months now, and it was time for an outdoor cage.

Ig's don't do change well, so his first trip to the cage was an anxious one, but today, he seems content to sit on his high shelf and watch the world. An unexpected benefit; his presence has scared the pigeons away, so we'll just call him our scareiguana!

Hilary's Triumph

Today is the 89th anniversary of the proposal of the 19th ammendment to the constitution, giving women the right to vote.

Yep...it's only been 89 years. There are woman alive who were born disenfranchised. What a long, long way we've come!

Today it seems clear that we will not have a woman president this time around, and even though I didn't vote for her, there's a sadness in me about that.

Let's give her her due. She dared to dream, she braved criticism (no...not criticism, scorn) that would have withered a cactus in the desert, and she almost won. If she can get that far, one of her sisters, sitting watching the TV last night, will get farther. And a generation of girls knows in a new way, "I could be president."

And that's a triumph. Thanks, Hilary.

Earth Peeves

They say that use of public transportation is up drastically this quarter, all over the nation, and it seems that that's true of ABQ, too. Good for everybody!

At the same time, it's gotten hot in ABQ, and one thing that means is that some people sit in their cars with the engines running in parking lots, getting 0 mpg, so they can stay air conditioned.

I saw it yesterday at the Sunflower market; a man was sitting in the car next to mine blasting CO2 and pollution all over this beautiful world. I was annoyed. But I was even more annoyed when I returned to my car 20 minutes later and he was STILL THERE!...blasting CO2 and pollution all over this beautiful world. And you know, not 20 steps away, under the store's portico, nicely decorated with basil plants, were cafe tables. (Not to mention the possibility that he could have gone in and helped with the shopping...or...if he was really too frail to do any of those things, he should have stayed home.

Long lines at drive-thru's bug me, too. Park and go in, for pete's sake. Most times it's faster.

We need an attitude adjustment about drive-thrus. They should be for the handicapped and for people who are lugging around two little kids in car seats.

Able bodied adults....park your cars!

Playing By The Rules

My major objective for November is a Democratic win, and I preferred Obama over Clinton a little bit...until the last few weeks and the fight over illicit delegates.

Amongst the problems of the past 8 years is that we've had a president who doesn't play by the rules...international rules, UN rules, Geneva convention rules, compassion rules...any rules but his own rules. It's been destructive and damaging and scary.

A president needs to live by the rules, abide by the things s/he negotiated, and live gracefully with the result. That's adulthood. This playground squabble in which one party wants the agreed-upon rules set aside so that she might win the game, and complains when the rules are set aside but in a compromise...that's not my president. That's not even a grownup. And God knows, it is high time we had a grown up in the highest office on the planet.

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!