Surviving General Assembly

I’ve begun planning for General Assembly, the annual convention of U.S. Unitarian Universalists. The key question to ask before going to any convention is where to find cheap food — no one wants to eat the expensive crap they dish out in convention centers. And when you’re at a convention in Fort Lauderdale in the summer, you really want to know how far you’re going to have to walk in the hot humid Florida air before you get to a restaurant.

I went to one of my favorite Web site, Walk Score, and typed in the address of the convention center: 1950 EISENHOWER BOULEVARD, FORT LAUDERDALE, FL 33316

The Walk Score Web site spit back its usual comprehensive list of nearby restaurants, stores, etc. Bad news: there aren’t that many restaurants near the convention center; only half a dozen restaurants and a couple of coffee shops within a third of a mile; and there’s a supermarket four-tenths of a mile away. More bad news: the nearest book store is half a mile away. Looks like we’ll have to choose between staying cool and eating yucky convention center food, or getting hot and sweaty walking in the Florida sunshine. On the other hand, it’s not as bad as it could be — the convention center gets a “walk score” of 66 out of 100, which is not as bad as it could be.

The good news is that Broward County bus #40 stops at the convention center — bus system map — schedule. The bus will take us to the downtown where there are lots more restaurants (and book stores and movie theatres) — or heading the opposite direction it will take us to the beach (South Beach Park).

From the comments: Scott M. has a Web site with basic General Assembly info up and posted here — thanks, Scott!!

Yup, another joke

Ken, who has one of the driest Yankee wits I know of, told me a joke today. (When you read it, you have to imagine it being told in a completely deadpan voice, with plenty of pauses.) Here’s the joke:

— How far is it to Westport as the crow flies?

— About four thousand flaps.

This joke will probably not seem funny to non-Yankees — I pity those people.

Local history

Sometimes you find the best stories in local histories. In The Meetinghouse on the Green: A History of First Parish in Concord [Massachusetts], Eric Smith tells a story about Elmer Joslin, who was both a member of First Parish in Concord and the Superintendent of Roads in Bridges for the Town of Concord:

“In days past, the Concord dump was open seven days a week. There was no nonsense then about a sanitary landfill. A column of smoke by day, a glow of flame by night, and a warm enduring odor floating down the wind, the dump was a center of social life, especially on Sundays. This happy situation ended in the 1950s. The dump was closed on Sundays, obliging all residents who worked out of town to bring their offerings on Saturdays. The resultant traffic jams were not conducive to socializing. Why did this happen?

“Allegedly Dr. Daniels, then the [Unitarian] minister, facing a small congregation one Sunday morning, announced that he would hold his service at the dump on the following Sunday, as he presumed that most of his parishioners would then be there. Elmer was in church and was heard to mutter that no such event would take place. Accordingly he closed the dump on Sundays thereafter, thus outraging some Episcopalians who, like the Unitarians, patronized the dump on the Lord’s Day.” [p. 263]

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story: That dump was finally filled and closed, and they built a new high school on top of it, the high school which my sisters and I attended. The new dump was built a little further down the same road, which placed it between a highway and a trailer park, just down the street from Walden Pond. The new dump served as a social center up through the 1990s; it was also a sure place to find various gulls during the annual Christmas Bird Count.

Alas, the Concord dump was closed for good when the Thoreau-followers complained about its proximity to Walden Pond, although I suspect Henry Thoreau would have liked it because it was a good place to scrounge free stuff. (If you sneak under the gate you’ll find it’s still a good place to go birding, though.)

Churches as over-55 communities

Mr. Crankypants loves Julius Lester. On his blog, he wrote this delightfully snarky post that sounds like it’s about politics, but is really about generational differences. Writing about Hillary Clinton, Lester points out that “her ideas are old.” In of itself this is not an original thought, but Lester goes on to add: “She’s 60, and she sounds like she hasn’t had a new thought in the past 40 years. I say this as someone who is 9 years older than she is, so I know an old idea when I hear it.”

Mr. Crankypants smells a new generation gap. The Baby Boom generation is so doggone big that they wind up spending most of their time talking to one another, not to younger people, and avoiding new ideas. And because they are such a big market, capitalist culture caters to their every whim to the point where they can pretty much insulate themselves from many new ideas in the world. As someone who lives at the tail end of the Baby Boom (being a few months older than Barack Obama), Mr. Crankypants knows this to be true — if he wanted to, he could spend all his time hanging out with people a few years older than himself and talking about the great music of the 1960s and the great literature of the 1960s and the great political movements of the 1960s, etc., none of which have ever been equaled, blah blah blah. (Actually, Mr. C. hates the 1960s, but you get the idea.) Baby Boomers tend to be full of old ideas, even when they think they are full of new ideas.

Not that anyone at this blog is much of a supporter of Barack Obama. It’s tough to get thrilled about a rhetorician who is further to the right than, and probably just as authoritarian as, Richard Nixon; and who doesn’t seem to understand what it means to be a member of a church to boot. But this isn’t a post about politics, this is a post that uses politics as an example of this new generation gap.

For another example of how how this new generation gap seems to work, we need look no further than racism. Julius Lester has this to say about Hillary Clinton: “Even worse, however, is her pandering to white racism has made us a far more racially divided nation than we were before her march to the White House was stopped by Barack Obama. I cannot ever forgive her for that.” But it’s not Hillary Clinton alone who tends to pander to racist tendencies — the Baby Boom generation as a whole tends to do the same thing. It seems to Mr. Crnakypants that many Baby Boomers (of all skin colors) believe that American racism got solved in the 1960s, between the Civil Rights movement (if they’re white) or the Black Power movement (if they’re black). Those old ideas tend to miss the fact that since 1980 racism has mutated and gotten more virulent, and it no longer responds to the old cures. Thus in Unitarian Universalism, Baby Boomers are still using second wave feminist techniques to try to fight racism, without seeing that second wave feminist techniques like consciousness-raising and identity groups were designed for a racism that no longer exists (nor do they see the class bias inherent in those techniques, but that’s another conversation).

And don’t assume this new generation gap (no capitals) is like the old Generation Gap of the 1960s, because they’re utterly different. The younger generations today aren’t bothering with open rebellion, as allegedly happened in the 1960s, they’re just creating new forms and ideas without bothering to talk much to the Baby Boomers.

So how is this new generation gap playing out in liberal churches? The Baby Boomers are in firm control of our local churches and our denomination, now that the GI Generation has started dying off. Baby Boomers are setting up the churches to suit their needs and their worldview, with the result that younger generations are staying away in droves. Our churches are starting to look like those over-55 communities where children and younger adults are allowed to visit but not stay for very long. This is perhaps most obviously manifested in the intensive efforts to create “young adult programming,” which sounds good on paper but in practice functions pretty much like those restrictive covenants in over-55 communities.

Mr. Crankypants is thinking about making stickers that say, “This Church Is An Over-55 Community,” the idea being that you could buy such a sticker and slap it on your church’s sign when no one is looking. Truth in advertising, don’t you know.

“Not a good day,” said Carol as she came in the door about midday. It was not a good day; it was a bad day; nothing seemed to go right. I was supposed to write a sermon today, and it went very badly indeed. Carol had her own problems. Of course plenty of things did go right today or at least didn’t go wrong; but when one or two particularly bad things happen those things can make the rest of the day seem all bad. We took a long walk in the evening twilight, the low clouds threatening rain which never came, and we talked it all out. By the time we got back I almost felt worse than before talking it all out; but we ate dinner, and I sat down to read in a good book, and all the things that had gone wrong receded from consciousness. Forgetfulness is a gift from the gods.

A matter of simple dislike

An astute reader points out that there are any number of Web sites devoted to giving advice on what to do if you don’t like the minister of your congregation. But these Web sites are all written from an evangelical Christian point of view, and may be summed up as follows: if your minister cannot be accused of heresy or unorthodoxy, then it is your duty to stay in the congregation. This advice is useless to Unitarian Universalists, who are by definition unorthodox and heretical.

So here’s my advice on what to do if you don’t like the minister of your Unitarian Universalist congregation.

First of all, let’s assume that you simply don’t like your minister. If you know your minister is engaging in misconduct, that’s an entirely different conversation; or if you can prove gross incompetence, that would also be an entirely different conversation. Let’s assume that you just don’t like your minister. There are some people whom we just don’t like, and there’s not much we can do about it. (My Unitarian mother used to say this sort of thing was based on sense of smell — some people just smell wrong to us — and while it sounds a little kooky I think there’s some truth in it.) Given that assumption, what would you do?

When I was in my teens and early twenties, I didn’t much like the senior minister at my UU church. I respected him, and he was obviously competent and clearly ethical — but I didn’t like him. So when I was in my teens, the assistant minister became my primary minister — I got to know him because he led the youth group, and I really liked him. After he left, when I was in my twenties, I’d just go to church and sit up in the balcony where I could hear the organist better, and I’d pretty much ignore the sermon. Sometimes I’d be one of the ushers, and I’d slip out of church after we took the offering and go downstairs to talk with the sexton or one of the other ushers.

I suppose this will sounds horrible to some people — here I am, a minister talking about how I avoided my minister. It will sound even worse when I tell you that the minister I avoided was Dana Greeley, one of the truly great UU ministers of the 20th century. In partial defense, I will say that I have never been a strong auditory learner, so that listening to sermons has always been a struggle for me; I will also say that I knew the problem was mine, not Dr. Greeley’s, and I dealt with it in non-destructive ways. I don’t know if Dr. Greeley ever noticed that I never paid attention to his sermons, but if he did he was far too gracious and far too much the compassionate minister to let that bother him.

And I think this is a fairly common phenomenon. In my ten years as a religious educator, there were lots of good Sunday school teachers who were the people who either couldn’t stand the senior minister, or who couldn’t sit still through a sermon. There is no cosmic rule that says you have to like the minister in your church. And let’s face it, the church is far more than the one human being who happens to be the minister, so there is no earthly reason why anyone should feel compelled to like any given minister.

Therefore, my advice on what to do if you don’t like the minister of your church is quite simple: do what you have to do to avoid the minister, without making a big deal out of it. Go to worship services and enjoy the music; or teach Sunday school; or join the men’s group or the Women’s Alliance; or go to the Sunday morning forum and then drink coffee instead of attending worship; whatever you can do without being destructive.

Because ultimately I believe church is not about the minister, and it’s not about your relationship with the minister. Church is a spiritual practice, and no one said spiritual practices are easy; in fact, any good spiritual practice should make you confront parts of yourself that you don’t really want to confront; so if you dislike the minister, fold that into your spiritual practice of going to church. Church is a covenanted community in our tradition, and you don’t step out of a covenant just because you dislike someone, and there’s always someone in a covenanted community whom you will not like.

(Actually, maybe I need to write another post on church-going as a spiritual practice. It’s funny how lots of people are willing to suffer the agonies of sitting in the lotus position while meditating for hours, but don’t make the connection between that kind of pain and the pain that inevitably comes through regular church-going in a covenanted community. But some other time for that….)

I’m sure many of you will disagree with the above, or will have very different advice to give on this topic. I hope you will comment, and let us know what you think about this — just remember that this is not a forum to talk about clergy misconduct or incompetence (see third paragraph) — also, be sure to be polite and thoughtful.

Spring watch

at a ministers’ retreat, Wareham, Mass.

After the high winds died down midday, I went out for a walk in the woods around the retreat center. There were birds everywhere: after spending twenty four hours hunkered down in shelter from the gale, they were out busily feeding and defending their nesting territory. They were so busy that they paid little attention to me. I managed to get within eight feet of a Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, a tiny little bird: it was carrying a feather in its bill, presumably to add to its nest. And then I rounded a bend in a trail, just as a Wood Thrush started singing in a tree nearly over my head: that ethereally beautiful call, those four liquid notes, so close: it provoked a deeply emotional response, a surge in my heart, a lift in my spirits, a feeling of sudden intense joy. It sang twice, and flew away, and the moment was over.

Loomer says: Web of life = Kingdom of heaven

When speaking of the “Web of Life,” most Unitarian Universalists today would not make an immediate connection to Jesus’s Kingdom of Heaven. But Bernard Loomer, a liberal theologian who taught at the University of Chicago and then at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, did make such a connection. Loomer said:

Jesus has been according many titles. He has been called Savior, Leader, Shepherd, Counselor, Son of God, Messiah. But his intellectual gifts have not been recognized (even when the term “intellectual” has been more carefully defined). It was he who discovered what he called the Kingdon of God — what I call the Web of Life — surely one of the great intellectual and religious ideas of the western world.

As I define it, the web is the world conceived of as an idefinitely extended complex of interrelated, inter-dependent events or units of reality. This includes human and non-human, the organic and inorganic levels of life and existence.

Jesus discovered the reality of the Web. He began his public ministry by announcing its presence and its fuller exemplification (the “coming kingdom”)…. [Unfoldings: Conversations from the Sunday morning seminars of Bernie Loomer, 1985, First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, pp. 1-2]

Thus Loomer connects the ecological concept of the Web of Life with the theological concept of the Kingdom of Heaven:– intellectually and religiously speaking, the two concepts are the same thing. And the moral and ethical challenges facing us have to do, not with getting into heaven in the future, but with a “fuller exemplification” of the Kingdom here and now.

However, says Loomer, conventional Christian theology has lost this intellectual insight of Jesus, partly by de-emphasizing the Synoptic Gospels (those three books that actually tell of Jesus’s life) in favor of later writings:

When you come to the Gospel of John and the writings of Paul something has changed. In the Synoptics, Jesus is not the central reality. The Kingdom is the central reality. He [Jesus] describes this reality, but the Kingdom does not exist for his sake. He serves the Kingdom and draws his power from it The Kingdom was not created because Jesus was of supernatural origin. The Kingdom was never created. The discovery was that the Kingdom is a given of life itself. It was not created by Jesus. It was not created at all. It is simply inherent in life itself. Its actuality is simultaneous with existence. [Unfoldings, p. 2]

At an ontological level, I believe what Loomer is trying to tell us is that the Web of Life, the Kingdom of Heaven, and God are identical in this way — each of these was not created, but always is and was and shall be. While the dogmatic humanists and the dogmatic liberal Christians among us may find this distasteful for their various reasons, I find this to be a very useful theological point, with profound moral and ethical implications. Loomer goes on to say:

Sin is a distortion of our relations to God and to each other. Forgiveness is a restoration to those relationships. In sinful acts we act against the Web of Life. In seeking repentance we open ourselves to the forgiveness that is already there, as a fundamental condition of life. We make ourselves accessible to it, or it accessible to us. We are related to each other through the Web. Those others have free choice as to whether they will accept our forgiveness or not. In all cases we are trapped with an inescapable web of connectedness. [Unfoldings, p.3]

Loomer goes on to add that it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe the Web of Life is impersonal, or whether you believe it is personal:– you still have to face up to the reality of the need for forgiveness. Furthermore, as social beings we humans also exist within a “social web” and thus forgiveness requires “at least one other.”

Loomer’s remarks interest me for two reasons. First, while many of us talk about the Web of Life, there’s not enough serious reflection on the moral implications of the Web (and saying something like “The Web of Life means we have to care for the planet Earth” is not a serious reflection, it is merely trite). Second, while I have sensed a strong connection between Jesus and ecological theology, Loomer articulates it better than I have heard it articulated elsewhere.