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?


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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.