Monthly Archives: July 2005

Should be a bestseller, but won’t be

This week, I’ve been reading Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker. Brock and Parker take on the subject of violence, and suggest that the Christian tradition provides a fertile breeding ground for acts of violence; they argue for example that if God was willing to kill off God’s son Jesus, what does that say to a child who’s being abused by her/his parents? –it says, do what Jesus did, accept the suffering, and all will be well.

But do not imagine that this is a Christian-bashing book. Both Parker and Brock have stayed within the Christian tradition. Rather, they are trying to retell the Christian story so that it becomes less destructive. In that respect, they remind me a little of the great Universalist Hosea Ballou. 200 years ago this year, Ballou wrote A Treatise on Atonement, in which he pointed out that a God of love would not kill his son in order to atone for something. It strikes me that what Brock and Parker are really doing is updating Universalism, finding anew that God is love.

And if you have no interest in discussions of God or Christianity, the book is still worth reading. The personal stories in the book are absolutely riveting — this is one book of theology that truly is a page-turner. And even if you’re not Christian, the stories give you a sense of how violence has become endemic in our culture. Highly recommended.

Midsummer night

Twenty-odd years ago, I got into the habit of staying up late in the summer. I was living outside Philadephia, it was brutally hot every day for weeks. My job allowed me to pretty much set my own hours, so I stayed up late, sometimes all night, to take advantage of the cooler night air. I’ve been in love with summer nights ever since then.

This afternoon, it got brutally hot. I’m on vacation, so I had the luxury of not having to work, and instead I sat around in a stupor. Now it’s night, a magical summer night, and I can stay up late to enjoy it.

I can see some lights on in the upstairs apartment of the house over on Ford St.; at least one other night owl lives nearby. The moon has set already. The orange hazard lights on the construction crew’s sawhorses blink on and off all along Ford Street in an odd rhythm.

And I can hear the various hums and whines from all the neighbors’s air conditioners. The third shift of the Burgess Norton factory over on Anderson Boulevard has one of the doors open again, so I can hear faint factory sounds: machinery clacking away, the “beep-beep-beep-beep” as a forklift backs up. Across town, a late-night freight rumbles along the Union Pacific line.

The first light of day will come at about 3:30. That’s the time I came awake two nights ago, to hear a few birds idly start to sing. They thought better of it, stopped, and began again in earnest at 4:30 when dawn was more sure.

Drought

The drought keeps getting worse. NOAA’s National Weather Service Forecast Office has upgraded it to the category of “severe drought (D2).” They define severe drought in the following terms:

Crop or pasture losses likely; fire risk very high; water shortages common; water restrictions imposed.

Yesterday the air was dry, the easterly breeze we’ve had since mid-week continued, and the temperatures stayed in the eighties — a perfect summer day. I decided to walk to Batavia using the paved bike path along the river.

Walking down Hamilton St. to the river, I saw the leaves on some trees were beginning to wither with the dryness. Some shrubs and smaller plants were in even worse shape. One patch of Coneflowers appeared dead.

But once down by the river, everything was still amazingly green. Even the grass was green along the river, although everywhere else it has dried to a crisp brown. Duckweed is out now, and when I squatted down to look at some, I noticed all kinds of insect activity along the surface of the mud and of the river. I realized that I have seen almost no insects anywhere for weeks, not even mosquitoes. But there are insects close to the water, which must be why the swallows are flying so low recently.

The river remains low, and you can see it flowing over rocks that are usually well underwater. The surface of the water looked bright and cheerful beside me. I walked through a stand of trees, and could feel the coolness coming up off the river, and into the shade of the trees.

About halfway to Batavia, I passed an area of grass that had not been mowed. The higher stalks, which bore the seed heads, were dry and brown, but up to about eighteen inches the grass and the lower plants growing among it were green — not exactly lush, but green.

I passed two bicyclists who had stopped to pick mulberries, which are growing prolifically alongside the river, and still bearing heavily. “Good year for mulberries,” I said.

One of the cyclists,”Oh they are so good,” with an accent that sounded eastern European. He picked another handful. “Very sweet.”

On the walk back, I picked some. The plentiful juice stained my fingers (and presumably my mouth) a bright deep purple-red. They tasted extraordinarily good, although that may be because I was getting thirsty by that point. Or because the mulberries from trees growing up away from the river are small and wizened, and taste eldery.

As I walked up State Street, climbing up out of the river valley, I noticed the trees started looking bedraggled starting at about 30 feet above the surface of the river. Our house sits beyond the height of land that marks the edge of the valley, and we are about sixty feet above the river. The house was built in the 1850’s, and still has the old water pump out front, sticking up out of the concrete cap someone put over the well. I wonder how deep that well goes, and what kinds of droughts it has seen in the past.

Religion and spirituality, v. 0.1

A perfect summer day. It got down to about sixty degrees last night, cool enough that I had to pull a blanket over me before morning. But the weather forecast says a heat wave is going to set in tomorrow. I believe the forecast. My joints are starting to ache, which means a change in weather is coming within twenty four hours. On perfect summer days like this, my mind seems to work more clearly, so I better write down the long string of thoughts I had this morning before the heat melts it away….

The big argument

You’ve probably heard the argument, too — people who say they prefer spirituality to religion, that they can be spiritual without belonging to a church or a temple or a Zen monastery. Here are some thoughts on this argument….

Spirituality fits the North American mood. Most North Americans have only been on this continent for a few short generations. For the majority of North Americans, we or our not-too-distant ancestors came here to find a better life. Our North American mythology says, we can leave Europe or Asia or South America, and come here, and make a better life. That mythology has even permeated the lives of those North Americans whose ancestors were brought here forcibly, or who lived here as indigenous people before the great flood of immigrants. We believe that North American myth, at least to some extent. We are do-it-yourselfers, we believe it is possible to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.

Spirituality means you can do it yourself. Henry David Thoreau, who resigned membership in the Unitarian church of his birth as soon as he became an adult, seems to be the perfect example of do-it-yourself spirituality that worked. He didn’t need his church. Instead of going to church, he’d go out and take a long walk. These days, not as many people walk, but they might do a weekend yoga retreat when the mood takes them, or read one of those books from the “Inspirational” section of the bookstore, or go to church when they feel like it. They chart their own course without reference to anyone else.

Religion is different. You do religion in a group, with other people. The fashionable way to say it is that you do religion “in community.” That means that in a religion, you are held accountable. You can’t just do anything you want. If you join a Zen monastery, you cannot say to the Zen master, I don’t feel like doing sitting meditation today, I’m going to take a long walk instead. Liberal religious congregations in North America have far lower standards than Zen monastaerys, but we do expect people to participate in the life of the congregation and give money.

Religion is more difficult than spirituality. Others in your religious community can question you about your religious life. They even have the freedom to make judgments about your religious path. And you have to question yourself as well. In do-it-yourself spirituality, if the yoga retreat doesn’t work out, you can always sign up for Zen meditation classes, leaving the yoga behind you. You can believe that no mistakes are possible. In religion, if your religious path doesn’t work out, you have to confront yourself and ask why.

It’s like music

You can make an analogy between religion and spirituality, and playing a musical instrument. Spirituality is like practicing your instrument. You can get really good at playing your musical instrument in the privacy of your own bedroom. But you’re just playing for yourself. It’s kind of solipsistic, with you in your own little musical universe where no one else exists. When you’re playing alone, you can easily ignore some of the wrong notes, and the changes in tempo, and the times when you stop in the middle of a piece and start over again. You can hear the way it’s supposed to sound in your head.

Religion is like practicing your instrument, and then going out and playing a concert or a gig, or at least playing along with some friends in someone’s living room once a month. When you play with other people, you get out of your own head. You know right away when you play a wrong note, and you know if you’ve played well or badly by the reactions of the other musicians, or the reactions of the audience if you’re playing a concert or a gig.

Any musicians will tell you that practicing is essential, taking lessons is good, but if you really want to make progress you have to play with other people, or play for an audience. Religion is something like that. Take those long walks. Go on a yoga retreat. And maintain regular contact with a religious community, who will let you know when you’re going astray (which can be uncomfortable at best), and who will take you much farther along your religious/spiritual path than anything else.

The theory behind it

I’m taking my basic concepts for this little essay from a group of thinkers known as the American pragmatists. The pragmatists don’t have any particular interest in trying to figure out the “ultimate truth.” Maybe there isn’t any ultimate truth, or if there is we sure haven’t found it yet. But if we want to make our ideas clearer, if we want to get a little closer to assuming-it-exists ultimate truth, we can work out a pretty good approach.

You get together with a group of people who are all interested in a similar problem. Call this group the “community of inquirers,” because they’re a community who are inquiring together into the same or related questions. Different people in this community of inquirers put out provisional ideas, hypotheses, and then everyone kind of hashes things out together. Bit by bit, together you will make your ideas clearer. If there is some “ultimate truth,” this is probably the way to get there.

If you have any training in science, you will see that this approach is pretty similar to scientific method. You can’t do science alone. Once you come up with some results, you have to ask others in your community of inquirers to check your insights and findings, and see if they can replicate your results. (Interestingly, many scientists are actually willing to make some kind of claim that there is some “ultimate truth” out there.) However, I’m expanding this method beyond just science. I’ve already made the analogy to musical performance, which uses the same basic method, altered somewhat for the peculiarities of playing music. Musical performance probably provides a better analogy for doing religion.

When it comes to people who are the great innovators, there’s an interesting corollary to all this. Just as a great composer has to learn how to play at least one musical instrument, or just as a scientist doing pure research has to know basic lab skills and lots of mathematics, the innovators in religion and spirituality have to have some basic grounding in doing religion. (Just doing spirituality would not be enough, because it’s too solipsistic.) Yes, Henry Thoreau stopped going to church when he was an adult. But he grew up in a church, his family with whom he lived all his life were deeply involved in that church, and Thoreau had constant and regular contact with other Transcendentalists with whom he constantly checked his new insights. James Luther Adams, the great 20th C. Unitarian Universalist theologian, is a better example. He was active in church and denomination, and his work and presence (by all reports) did much to make Unitarian Universalism a better community.

In fact, what Adams wrote about “voluntary associations,” which are somewhat analogous to what I’m calling a community of inquirers, takes the whole idea a step farther. Adams’s idea was that a community of inquirers, a voluntary association, can in turn go out and transform the world for the better. That provides an interesting twist on the whole idea of some “ultimate truth….”

Questions? Comments? After all, what I’ve just said is entirely provisional, subject to correction and revision!

Moving, part one

Fill cardboard box. Tape up cardboard box. Label cardboard box. Stack in corner. Fill next cardboard box….

I hate packing up all our belongings. I haven’t done any packing for three days, but this afternoon I got up my courage again and started in.

The actual packing, the boxes and the tape, isn’t so bad. Handling things we own, one by one, is more complicated. I pick up this photograph and hear that conversation we were having. I pack up those odd-shaped rocks and hear the ocean. I find the box still mostly packed from our last move, and hear our late-night conversations with our housemates.

Packing books is easier. When I pick up a handful to put in a box, all I hear are snippets of what each book has to say.

Maybe I’ll go pack some books.

Remembering Maria Harris

In the past fifty years, which North American has had the most radical ideas on church life? My vote is for Maria Harris, feminist scholar and teacher. She’s best known as a religious education sholar, but I think of her as the expert on practical ecclesiology.

Harris is best known for her radical ideas about what churches really teach, as opposed to what classes they offer. Throw out that old notion that religious education is confined to Sunday school classrooms. Harris told us that we start learning about religion the moment we walk into a church building — or as she put it, the whole church is curriculum.

Think about going to a worship service at a congregation you haven’t visited yet. If someone welcomes you at the door, however shyly and awkwardly, you learn that this congregation welcomes the stranger, those who aren’t yet a part of the community. If people give money freely and gladly during the offertory, you learn that this is a generous people. And so on. It works the other way, too. If you want to teach people about generosity, it’s not enough to teach a stewardship class, which Harris would call “explicit curriculum.” We also teach each other about generosity through our actions, which Harris terms “implicit curriculum.” Andf the implicit and explicit curriculums teach different things, everyone’s just going to get confused.

She also talked about the “null curriculum,” what we teach by its absence — a very useful concept to anyone who’s trying to do anti-racism work in a local congregation.

That’s just the beginning of what this quietly radical scholar said. Over the past ten years, her books have been changing my entire approach to religion. Sadly, I just learned she died in February, 2005, after a long illness. You can read a wonderful tribute to her life and work by her former colleagues at Andover Newton Theological School [update: Feb, 2006, tribute removed from Andover Newton Web site], where she began her teaching career.

If you want to get radicalized, try reading these books of hers:

  • Fashion Me a People: Curriculum and the Church, Presbyterian Publishing, 1989;
  • Jubilee Time: Celebrating Women, Spirit, and the Advent of Age, Bantam, 1996
  • Reshaping Religious Education: Conversations on Contemporary Practice, with Gabriel Moran, Presbyterian Publishing, 1998.

Go on. Read one of her books. Radicalize your congregation. I dare you….

Summer rhythms

The herons and egrets have been back for about a month now. Breeding season is over, and they have moved away from their rookeries. Last evening, I saw a Black-Crowned Night Heron at the edge of the water near Island Park. It still wore one of the long wispy white breeding plumes trailing back over its black head.

Island Park isn’t an island any more. In spite of the rain we had yesterday, the Fox River remains low. The water is so low, Island Park is connected by dry land under both the north bridge and the south bridge, leaving a long pool of water on the eastern side which is no longer connected to the main river.

A fair number of fish must be trapped in that long pool of water. Night before last, I stood on the north bridge to Island Park and watched a Great Egret fishing, a big showy white bird completely intent on the small fish darting about in the water at his or her feet — and completely oblivious to all the people sitting fifty feet away on the deck of the Mill Race Inn.

The fishing appears to be good on the main river, too. One afternoon, I saw five people spread out across the river, wading in water up to their knees, and fishing. A Great Blue Heron waded the river a little downstream from them, and it was fishing, too. Some human beings have the conceit that we are different from animals, but I don’t see it. Like every species, we have our peculiar adaptations that help us survive, but the capacity to manufacture tools like graphite fishing rods does not make us unique, any more than the Black Crowned Night Heron’s breeding plume makes it unique. It’s summer, and all the plants and animals are responding to the ongoing rhythm of the year in their various ways. It’s enough to say that.

150 years of ecstatic witness

One hundred and fifty years ago today, on July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman published his first book of poetry with just twelve poems. According to Malcolm Crowley, in his introduction to a 1959 Viking Press reprinting of the first edition, central to the book is a mystical experience Whitman had in June of 1852 or 1853, which is perhaps best summarized in this passage from the first poem (which was later revised and titled “Song of Myself”):

I believe in you my soul….the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass….loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want….not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own;
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my borthers….and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or dropping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them
And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?….I do not know what it is any more than he.

No wonder Emerson felt a shock of recognition when he read Whitman’s first book. Emerson was more rticent about his private experiences, and more widely read in Eastern philosophy, but his poem “Brahma” says pretty much the same thing as Whitman: an ecstatic “all is one.”

Getting ready to move

My last official day as the interim minister of religious education of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva (what a mouthful) was yesterday. I cleaned up some paperwork, and went out to lunch with Lindsay Bates, the senior minister, for our last meeting. As of today, I’m on vacation.

But it won’t be a relaxing vacation. I still have to pack, and get ready to move. The packing is the worst part, because of the books. I admit it, I have way too many books. I’m still packing away the books in my office at the church, and haven’t even begun to pack up all the books in our apartment. Books, books, books. Red books, green books, books with feathers on the cover. Maybe I’m taking this idea of “a learned ministry” too far.

The move itself should be relatively simple, once the books are taken care of. We had a bad experience with a regular moving company last time, so it looks like we are going to rent one of those “Pods,” where you load up this big metal boxy container, put your own lock on it, and the truck comes and takes it all away and drops it at your new house. Should be simple, because we don’t own much of anything.

Except books.