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Monthly Archives: December 2007
Snowfall, New Bedford
A vignette of yesterday’s snowstorm in downtown New Bedford. (Now in the new Blip.tv viewer.)
1:30 (short).
Friendly beasts
The folk ensemble here at First Unitarian in New Bedford will be singing “The Friendly Beasts” in the worship service this Sunday. Above is the simple descant part that the high voices will be singing. A soprano recorder will double the high voices on the descant part this Sunday (the folk ensemble will also include guitar, mountain dulcimer, and mandolin). Click the image for a full-size PDF file.
This descant part is easy to learn and sounds good, so I thought I’d share it here in case you’re looking for a way to spice up your Christmas carol singing. You can find the basic melody of “The Friendly Beasts” in Singing the Living Tradition, the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, as hymn #243, under a different title.
Christmas, commercialization, and ecotheology
The December 11, 2007, issue of Christian Century magazine, has an interview with theologian Nicholas Lash. Noting that Lash has written sympathetically about Marxism, the interviewer asks if Marxism is “still a philosophy that Christians need to engage.” Lash responds that there is no doubt that Christians still must engage Marxism:
Those who doubt that Christians still need to engage with Marx are as foolish as those who doubt that we still need to engage with Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. At the heart of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production was his insight that it led, with almost mechanical inevitability, to what he called “the universalization of the commodity form,” the transmutation not only of things, but also of all relations, into commodities….”
Lash is British. Here in the United States, as we drift farther and farther to the right, most people simply dismiss Marx without seriously engaging his thought. Thus we have Christians and other religious persons in the United States decrying, say, the commercialization of Christmas (which is simply a specific instance of commodification), but refusing to engage in a serious critique of the capitalist system that has commercialized Christmas — understandably so, because after all it is not a good idea to be branded as a “communist” or a “socialist” here in the United States. Lash addresses the refusal of many U.S. Christians to take Marx seriously:
May I risk being a little polemical here, out of friendly exasperation? I can understand why, in a culture as driven and absorbed by messianic capitalism as is the United States, versions of socialism of any kind are hard to comprehend with sympathy. But please do not drag us [British Christians] in with you. There were, as any historian can tell you, the very closest links between 20th-century socialism in Britain and Christianity, especially Nonconformity…. We do not find Christian socialism in any way difficult to understand, because we remember it.
In my own Unitarian Universalist denomination, which is essentially a post-Christian denomination at this point, I see pretty much the same refusal to engage with Marx. Lots of Unitarian Universalists are worried about the commercialization of our lives, the breakdown in human community, the degradation of the environment, etc. But it seems we are culturally unable to draw on the analytical tools that Marx develops in Capital — tools which provide deep insights into things like the breakdown of community and the devastation of the planet.
Indeed, one of the weaknesses of current Unitarian Universalist theology, as it is practiced in our congregations, is that we pretty much ignore philosophers after Kant. The end result is that our theology, like our social justice programs, tend to be fairly irrelevant to the late capitalist situation. As someone who is concerned with developing a relevant Unitarian Universalist eco-theology, I’d have to say that it’s probably time for us to start reading Marx.
Boredom is good
Back in August, 2005, I read a stunningly good story by an author who was then unfamiliar to me. The author was Kelly Link, and the story, “Magic for Beginners,” was a sort of magical-realism-science-fiction-fantasy story with characters that were very well drawn. Since then, I’ve read some other stories by Link, and while I feel “Magic for Beginners” is her best story, everything I’ve read by her is good enough that I’m willing to listen when she says something about writing.
In an interview in the November, 2007, issue of Locus magazine, she asserts that boredom is useful, perhaps even necessary, for writers:
Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write…. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think. Boredom allows time for thinking. Even in writing, boredom serves a useful function in writing — if I’m boring myself when I write, it means I need to stretch myself, try something I haven’t done before….
I don’t know if boredom is useful to everyone who writes, but boredom certainly is useful for me when I’m trying to write. When I get overly busy — and I have been very busy the past month or so — I don’t write much, and what I write isn’t worth much.
Yet another reason for not letting excessive busy-ness creep into my life.
On top of everything else…
December is a busy month for people who work in churches — even those of us who work in post-Christian Unitarian Universalist churches still have lots of Christmas madness to contend with.
On top of the usual Christmas madness, here at First Unitarian we still have a number of building improvements going on. When I first started working in churches, the old battle-scarred religious professionals all said, Make sure you never have building projects going on during December, because it’s just too much — yet here we are, with building projects still going on.
On top of Christmas madness and building projects, we’ve been experiencing 20-30% increase in Sunday attendance each month since May. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — growth is a stressful thing for churches to undergo.
On top of Christmas madness, building projects, and the stress of growth, I’ve got whatever virus has been infecting everyone here in New Bedford. It’s one of those lingering viruses that sticks with you for weeks — I’ve been sick off and on for over a month — and it’s gotten so many people that supposedly one of the clinics in the city had to close down at noon one day because they had so many sick people wanting treatment.
The upshot of all this is that I don’t have time to write anything tonight. I’m going to bed instead.
Return of the laptop
At long last, I finally have my own laptop back again. It’s been three weeks — a week to get a firm diagnosis of the problem (hard drive failure), another week to figure out how best to fix the problem, and then a week waiting for the repair shop to make the repair.
It felt strange to not have a computer of my own at home. I came to realize that I now organize my writing inside my computer. I keep outlines and drafts filed on the computer, and I have different folders in my computer filing system for different writing projects. Over the past three weeks I wrote a good deal by hand, far more than I usually do, and I enjoyed spending more time in the physical act of writing. But I no longer have the elaborate physical apparatus of writing that I used to have — three-ring binders and Pendaflex folders in file cabinets, and even note cards. Separated from my new computer-based organizational system, I wrote less and my writing was choppier than it should have been.
I also noticed that writing by hand produces somewhat different results than writing on a computer. Two weeks ago, I wrote my sermon by hand. Even though it was slower to write it by hand, the sermon needed far less rewriting. In the end, it took no longer to write a complete sermon by hand than on the computer. Yet although I found it harder to read my own handwriting when in the pulpit, in some ways it was easier to preach from that handwritten sermon because the sermon seemed to stick in my memory better. As for my non-professional writing, I think my prose might be better when I write by hand.
In any case, my computer has returned to its accustomed place on my desk at home. Now all I have to do is spend several hours re-establishing my file system and reinstalling all the software I used to have on it.
Independent prayer groups and engaging worship
Meg, an old friend back from the days when I was under 35 and heavily involved with Unitarian Universalist young adult programs, recently sent me an article about “the independent prayer groups, or minyanim, that Jews in their 20s and 30s have organized in the last five years in at least 27 cities around the country.” You can find the blog of one such independent prayer group here.
The article, written by Neela Banerjee, was titled “Challenging Tradition, Young Jews Worship on Their Terms,” and ran in the November 28 issue of the New York Times. Bannerjee claimed that these young Jews and their independent minayim “are challenging traditional Jewish notions of prayer, community and identity.” But Bannerjee also quotes a rabbi who sees these independent minayim as being a very positive force:
“If we were to say, ‘We are sticking to one institutional form or go away,’ then we would die as a people,” said Rabbi Feinstein, who is at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, Calif., a Conservative synagogue. “Is it going to take young Jews that synagogues are counting on? Yes, unless you offer something better. Or better yet, invite the emergents in and make common cause.”
Indeed. Why not invite the emergents in and make common cause? That’s one of the reasons I fully supporty having CUUPS pagan groups affiliated with Unitarian Universalist congregations.
In any case, hearing from Meg reminded me about my days in Unitarian Universalist young adult groups. Lord knows those groups had their problems — chaos, disorganization, and conflict being chief among them — but when we managed to do worship, it was mostly very compelling. Indeed, the only time my partner Carol has regularly attended Unitarian Universalist worship was when we were going to young adult worship together.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: most Unitarian Universalist worship is pretty boring. Now that I’m middle-aged and no longer belong to young adult groups, where would I go to get a deeply spiritual experience? Personally, I would teach Sunday school rather than attend worship at almost any Unitarian Universalist church — not only do I find hanging out with Unitarian Universalist kids to be spiritually challenging and life-affirming — but most Unitarian Universalist worship doesn’t engage me, challenge me, help me to deal with my life or the wider world, feel like a celebration, or do any of the things that I want worship to do.
I can count the exceptions on my fingers: one worship service at All Souls Church in Washington, DC, where I felt truly uplifted in spite of a mediocre sermon; once at Church of the Open Door in Chicago’s South Side back when Karen Hutt and Alma Faith Crawford were ministers there; two or three worship services in the outdoor chapel at Ferry Beach, the Universalist conference center in Saco, Maine, led by Paul Boothby and one or two others. And I’ll add that I attended worship services regularly at First Parish in Concord, Mass., when I was in my early twenties and Dana Greeley was preaching there — his sermons managed to be spiritually fulfilling and outwardly directed at the same time.
Not that I know how to create truly dynamite Unitarian Universalist worship services that result in redemptive, transformative experiences — I’m all too well aware that the worship services I lead often leave a lot to be desired.
So, dear reader — even though there’s no such thing as a sure-fire recipe for truly good worship, tell me your ideas. What makes for truly kick-ass worship? How do you feel about independent UU prayer groups? Where do you go to find “redemptive, transformative experiences that give rhythm to [your] days and weeks and give meaning to [your] lives”? I’d especially like to hear from people in their 20s and 30s, and from middle-aged folks like Meg and me who are kinda bored by the usual Unitarian Universalist worship.
Can you tell me?…
The Unitarian Universalist Association recently sent out information about Leading Congregations into a Multiracial, Multicultural Future, a conference that’s taking place in February, 2008. I’m very interested in the topic — here at First Unitarian in New Bedford, we’re slowly heading towards becoming a multiracial, multicultural congregation — but I want to be really sure the conference is worth the thousand dollars per person it will cost if we send people from New Bedford.
So I’d love to know if any of you attended this conference last year. If you attended last year, are you going again this year? and did last year’s conference help you to effect change within your congregation? Tell us about your experiences in the comments….