Monthly Archives: March 2006

Circle worship and extended families

Two new resources now up on my Web site:

We’re going to start an Extended Family Group here at First Unitarian in New Bedford, and I’ve put up forms, FAQ’s, and other material about this multigenerational group. I believe Extended Family Groups would be a great supplement to a small group ministries program. Link

In going through the hard drive of my old computer, I came across a description of an alternative worship service I was involved in at First Parish in Lexington (Mass.) five years ago. It was a weekly evening worship service, and it was so-called “circle worship.” Yes, Virginia, there is more to alternative worship than “Soulful Sundown” and youth worship. Link

Nothing to say

Some days there is nothing to say. I sat looking at the objects that had collected on the kitchen counter — sea shells, an electric fan we never put away after the summer, a wooden bowl containing odd keys and coins and pens, a butternut squash, another wooden bowl with garlic cloves, three sweet potatoes that are sprouting, a big jar of honey, Carol’s wallet, a scrap of paper, two small pumpkins that I am letting dry like gourds — thinking about nothing. Except I thought about how the late afternoon sun came through two windows, reflected off a white wall, and lit the butternut squash such that the shadows were light purple; and I thought about a book of photographs I had once seen showing every building on the Sunset Strip; and I thought about a book of photographs showing every object on the kitchen counter. The light faded, I had no camera, the idea died. It got dark, I turned on the lights. I still had nothing to say.

Spring watch…not

My stupid alter ego, Dan, seems to think that springtime is wonderful. He writes these little nature observations about birds and plants that show that springtime is coming. Pfeh. Mr. Crankypants does not like spring. Spring means happiness and hay fever. Mr. Crankypants agrees with the late great Dorothy Parker, who wrote:

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

Enough said.

An Art

Art Buchwald, the inimitable newspaper columnist, is dying. A writer to the end, of course he writes a column about dying, which appeared in newspapers this week, on Tuesday, March 14….

Ordinarily, people don’t talk about death. Yet it’s very much a part of our lives. I’m in a hospice and seem to have a lot of time to talk about it. My friends and I discuss what death is and where we’re supposed to go after it happens.

People constantly ask me if there is an afterlife. It’s a good chance for me to philosophize. I tell them, “If I knew I would tell you.”

This does not mean that everyone knows more than I do on the subject, including priests (Christian and Hindu), rabbis and imams.

I haven’t made up my mind which one of these groups has the answer, but the nice thing about a hospice is we can talk about death openly. Most people are afraid that if they even mention it, they will bring bad karma on themselves….

He writes about dying with honesty and without sentiment. So maybe it isn’t art, but with his trademark wry humor, it’s worth reading the rest of this piece by Art. [Link]

Another Friday night

I made it up to Cambridge at about 7, picked up Carol at the sub-let, and we went out to eat at Whole Foods in north Cambridge. You can get a decent meal there that’s cheaper than going to a restaurant, and with much better people-watching.

I opened up a tray of cheap sushi. Carol stole a piece of my avocado roll, then started on her chicken soup. Two young women, both blondish, apparently sisters stood at a cash register nearby: both smiled readily but both had a firm set to their mouths that I felt indicated strong wills.

Look, said Carol, that woman has mesh bags. Three youngish people shopping together, all with pale skin, milling about as their groceries got rung up; they had mostly vegetables and bulk food. I said, I used to use mesh bags all the time, but then I had two break on me and I stopped trusting them. Carol said, They have canvas bags too — look, that one has a beautiful design (drawing of a moon and plants, labeled “People’s Coop, Ann Arbor”).

Carol went to get another cup of coffee. A middle-aged man walked by, thick lenses in his glasses, medium brown skin, friendly expression, half-smiling half-bemused; I characterized him in my mind as a software engineer, though I had no good reason for doing so.

A slight woman wearing a Muslim head scarf and an employee apron kept walking past us, apparently a manager overseeing the cash registers. She was short but there was no sense of her being small.

Carol got up to ask one woman where she had bought her boots. The answer: Filene’s, five or six years ago. Carol sat down and said, I should have asked her what brand they were.

The food was long gone. Carol downed the last of her coffee. We got up and left. Another cheap date for Friday night.

Why do you visit liberal religious Web sites?

At this year’s General Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists in the United states, I’ll be leading a workshop on creating great Web site content. Here’s the description that will appear in the program book:

You don’t need a huge budget or technical wizardry to create a great church website. What you need is great content. Learn how to create rich content to attract guests and to help existing UUs deepen their faith. From case studies and presentation get practical, immediately useful ideas and techniques. Keywords for GA program index: website, electronic technology.

Now I’m looking for some input from people who read religious Web sites, and also from people who create liberal religious Web sites.

On the one hand, I’d love to hear from readers….

  • What kind of content do you like to see on a liberal religious Web site?
  • What kind of content keeps you coming back to read a Web site, week after week?
  • What kind of content would make you tell a friend about a religious Web site?

On the other hand, I’d also love to hear from religious bloggers and people who maintain liberal religious Web sites….

  • What kind of content gives you the most hits on your Web site or blog?
  • How much time do you spend each week creating content for your blog or Web site?
  • What strategies do you use to organize your content so visitors will have easy access to it?
  • And of course, if you have a magic formula for great Web content, let me know!

If you are moved to do so, spread the word — I’d love to get input from people other than the people who read this blog. You can leave a comment below, or if you’d prefer you can send an email message.

Sunrise

Winter is when the memories seem to rise up unbidden, and winter is coming to an end. Even though I tend to stay up late, I keep getting awakened by the light of sunrise, now about 5:30 a.m. Springtime is overtaking memory.

But somehow, a memory of a sunrise slipped into consciousness just now….

One June, when we were living over by White Pond in Concord. Carol was away on one of her trips to Mexico; I was sleeping alone; I came wide awake before dawn. Say four o’clock. Couldn’t get to sleep, didn’t want to. Put the canoe on the car and drove down to the river.

Untied the canoe as the sky was just starting to turn light, paddled down river to Fairhaven Bay. I drifted into the bay as the sky started to turn from black to blue. Mist rising over the bay. I tried a few casts in the shallow, upstream end of the bay; nothing. In the downstream end of the bay, there’s a deeper hole, and there I hooked a big bass on light tackle and with barbless hooks; after maybe quarter of an hour I brought him to the boat, wet my hand, and held him while I released the hook then let him swim away to keep breeding. I turned around to see that the sun had just hit the top of the rising mist, about twenty feet above the river; an Osprey circled overhead in the sun, a far more efficient catcher of fish than a single human could ever be; a Great Blue Heron stalked smaller fish along the shore. I drifted in silence for a while. The sun crept up over the horizon: gold light in the mist; but as I paddled into the mist, it only appeared white.

The mist was gone by the time I reached the boat landing.

…a memory that doesn’t translate into words very well. A memory that dissipated as I tried to write it down. Something about a gut-level, direct knowledge of my place in the ecosystem, in the universe — but that’s putting it badly. It’s gone now.

Spring watch

The past few days, I’ve been awakened against my will at 5:30 in the morning, in spite of having stayed up late the night before, by the dawn light creeping past the window shades. The sky turns light at an ever earlier hour; the rate of change increasing day by day, up until the spring equinox a week away.

It rained this morning, briefly. I walked home for lunch: the rain had released the smell of spring from the earth, it had washed the pavement clean, I couldn’t help but inhale deeply and fill my lungs with that scent.

At sunset this evening, a walk down to the waterfront. My mind was busy with work, but slanting light pushed even that away for a minute or two: blue sky and fast-moving dark clouds and bright sun: spring sky.

The Quail and the Bird called P’eng

Part of a series of stories for liberal religious kids. This story is from the Taoist tradition: adapted from section 1 of Chuang Tzu, from translations by Lin Yu tang, and by Burton Watson. The closing paragraph is derived from a line that may have been lost from the text (see note 5 in Watson).

The Quail and the Bird Called P’eng

Copyright (c) 2006 Dan Harper

Many years ago in ancient China, the Emperor T’ang was speaking with a wise man named Ch’i.

Ch’i was telling the Emperor about the wonders of far off and distant places. Ch’i said:

“If you go far, far to the north, beyond the middle kingdom of China, beyond the lands where our laughing black-haired people live, you will come to the lands where the snow lies on the ground for nine months a year, and where the people speak a barbaric language and eat strange foods.

“And if you travel even farther to the north, you will come to a land where the snow and ice never melts, not even in the summer. In that land, night never comes in the summer time, but in the winter, the sun never appears and the night lasts fro months at a time.

“And if you go still farther to the north, beyond the barren land of ice and snow, you will come to a vast, dark sea. This sea is called the Lake of Heaven. Many marvelous things live in the Lake of Heaven. They say there is a fish called K’un. The fish K’un is thousands of miles wide, and who knows how many miles long.”

“A fish that is thousands of miles long?” said the Emperor. “How amazing!”

“It is even more amazing than it seems at first,” said Ch’i. “For this giant fish can change shape and become a bird called P’eng. This bird is enormous. When it spreads its wings, it is as if clouds cover the sky. Its back is like a huge mountain. When it flaps its wings, typhoons spread out across the vast face of the Lake of Heaven for thousands of miles. The wind from P’eng’s wings lasts for six months. P’eng rises up off the surface of the water, sweeping up into the blue sky. The giant bird wonders, ‘Is blue the real color of the sky, or is the sky blue because it goes on forever?’ And when P’eng looks down, all it sees is blue sky below, with the wind piled beneath him.”

A little gray dove and a little insect, a cicada, sat on the tree and listened to Ch’i tell the Emperor about the bird P’eng. They looked at each other and laughed quietly. The cicada said quietly to the dove, “If we’re lucky, sometimes we can fly up to the top of that tall tree over there. But lots of times, we don’t even make it that high up.”

“Yes,” said the little dove. “If we can’t even make it to the top of the tree, how on earth can that bird P’eng fly that high up in the sky? No one can fly that high.”

Ch’i continued to describe the giant bird P’eng to the Emperor. “Flapping its wings, the bird wheels in flight,” said Ch’i, “and it turns south, flying across the thousands of miles of the vastness of the Lake of Heaven, across the oceans of the Middle Kingdom, heading many thousands of miles towards the great Darkness of the South.”

A quail sat quietly in a bush beside the Emperor and Ch’i. “The bird P’eng can fly all those thousands of miles from the Lake of Heaven in the north across the Middle Kingdom, and into the vast ocean in the south?” said the quail to himself. “Well, I burst up out of the bushes into flight, fly a dozen yards, and settle back down into the bushes again. That’s the best kind of flying. Who cares if some big bird flies ninety thousand miles?”

The Emperor listened to Ch’i, and said, “Do up and down ever have an end? Do the four directions ever come to an end?”

“Up and down never come to an end,” said Ch’i. “The four directions never come to an end.

“That is the difference between a small understanding and a great understanding,” continued Ch’i. “If you have a small understanding, you might think the top of that tree is as high up as you can go. If you have a small understanding, you might think that flying to that bush over there is as far as you can go in that direction. But even beyond the point where up and down and the four directions are without end, there is no end.”

But the quail did not hear, for she had flown a dozen yards away in the bushes. The cicada did not hear because it was trying to fly to the top of a tree. And the little dove did not hear because he, too, was flying to the top of the nearby elm tree.