Delightedly annoyed (again)

The mail dropped through the slot in the door. Mr. Crankypants picked up the newest issue of UU World, the denominational magazine and mouthpiece, and opened it expecting to be delighted. UU World almost always has at least one article that annoys Mr. Crankypants, who delights in getting annoyed. And he was delightedly annoyed once again.

The first annoying article that caught his eye was titled “Not My Father’s Religion: Unitarian Universalism and the Working Class” by Doug Muder. (There may be other annoying articles in this issue, but Mr. C. is taking so much delight in being annoyed at this one that he hasn’t read any further.) Muder started off with one of Mr. Crankypants’s favorite critiques of Unitarian Universalism:– that we don’t welcome working class people. How true! But, annoyingly (delightfully annoyingly), Doug Muder places the blame on theology. Theology is a nice thing to write about, but to do so ignores a whole host of other, more than sufficient, reasons why working class people avoid Unitarian Universalist congregations like the plague.

What’s that you say? What are those other reasons?

You could start with social snobbery. Take, for an example, something Mr. Crankypants saw with his own eyes. The new Unitarian Universalist was talking with some long-time members at social hour one Sunday. The long-time members were talking about what their fathers did for work — lawyer, doctor, university professor, other professional high-status jobs. Wanting to include the newcomer, one of the long-time members turned to him and asked, “What does your father do for a living?” The newcomer replied, “He’s a janitor.” The conversation died abruptly and everyone drifted away from the newcomer. That newcomer lasted less than a year as a Unitarian Universalist.

You could add geography, demographics, and congregational lust for money. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, many Unitarian Universalist congregations decided to move their church buildings out of the downtown and into the suburbs. Mr. Crankypants has heard an apocryphal story that in January, 1953, the Board of Trustees of one Unitarian congregation was discussing selling its downtown building in order to move out to the suburbs. The minutes of that meeting supposedly record that the Board chair asked, “Why not go where the money is?” To which the minister (whose salary was dependent on contributions) replied, “Yes, why not?”

You could add the Unitarian Universalist obsession with college education, coupled with little support for helping people get a college education. In our snobbier congregations, one is simply assumed to have a college degree (preferably from a “good” college). But don’t bother to ask your typical Unitarian Universalist congregation for a scholarship, for tutoring, for moral support, or for any other help while you’re in college. They only want to see you when you get out of college, are married and in your thirties with children and a job. (Oh, and be warned:– if you want to be a non-traditional student, and finally go to college when you are middle-aged, expect even less support.)

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The Case of the Pointless Paperwork

This afternoon, I worked on organizing my office. I hate organizing my office. It’s boring. I want to be making something happen, not straightening up my desk and filing paperwork. Of course, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do those mundane office chores. Somewhere, the poet Gary Snyder talks about how important maintenance is — you can’t always be creating things, he says, you also have to maintain what you’ve got. So I tried to tell myself that I was doing Snyderian maintenance this afternoon, even though I think what Gary Snyder had in mind when he was talking about maintenance was more along the lines of sharpening his axe or cleaning out the barn, chores which would have been much more attractive than dealing with paperwork.

In my opinion, the greatest theorist on the subject of paperwork was the great philosopher, Perry Mason….

….Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.

Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”

“From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”

“Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”

Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”

“Yes.”

“And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”

“Yes.”

“And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”

“That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.

“And did you answer those yourself?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.

“Transferred them to another file.”

“What file?”

“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”

Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….

[from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1939.]

In the book, Mason works on paperwork for about ten minutes before a new client walks into the office with another high-speed murder case. I should be so lucky. In my office, I plugged away all afternoon. I kept hoping that a client would walk in the door and want me to investigate a murder case. That didn’t happen, although the chair of the House and Grounds Committee did stop in for ten minutes to let me know how the various building maintenance projects were coming along.

By the end of the day, I had found lots of paperwork that had once been relevant, but was now so irrelevant that I skipped the “LAPSED” file and threw it right into the recycling bin. Such was the sad end of the case of the pointless paperwork.

Now that my vacation and study leave are now truly over, and I can no longer pretend otherwise, I’m back to my usual schedule for writing posts, which goes something like this — Monday: Congregational life — Tuesday: Stories from real life — Wednesday: Congregational life (and marketing) — Thursday: Theology — Friday: Book review — Saturday: Anything goes — Sunday: Meditation. My evil alter ego Mr. Crankypants and new guest blogger Isaac Bickerstaff may, however, disrupt this schedule without warning.

Sweatshop-free dress shirts

All of a sudden, my dress shirts are wearing out. I bought these shirts six or seven years ago from Land’s End, so I automatically went back to Land’s End and looked at their Web site. The same shirt costs the same as it did six or seven eyars ago, about US$25. In fact, I remember that same shirt costing about $25 twenty years ago. According to The Inflation Calculator, “What cost $25 in 1987 would cost $44.31 in 2006.” That suggests to me that these days, these shirts are now made overseas by workers who earn just a pittance for their work.

My conscience held me back from ordering shirts from Land’s End. I did a Web search for “union made shirts.”

And I happened to find Justice Clothing, which supplies union-made clothing as “the sweatshop-free alternative.” They carry two lines of dress shirts. They carry Kenneth Gordon shirts, based in New Orleans, with a nice button-down shirt selling for US$56.25 each if you buy two or more — unfortunately there was nothing in my sleeve length. Fortunately, Justice Clothing also carry shirts by Forsyth of Canada, who make a line of tall sizes — blended fabric button-down shirts for US$40 each, and 100% cotton straight collar shirts for US$53 each (for two or more).

Just thought someone else out there might like to know.

Max Roach

By now, you’ve probably heard that Max Roach, the great jazz drummer, died on August 16. The thing that stands out for me about Roach is that he, along with drummer Kenny Clarke, moved the beat up to the cymbals. As the BBC puts it in their obituary of Roach:

Before bebop, jazz was primarily swing music played in dance halls, and drummers served to keep time for the band, Blue Note spokesman Cem Kurosman said.

Roach, along with fellow-drummer Kenny Clarke, changed that by shifting the time-keeping function to the cymbal, allowing the drums to play a more expressive and melodic role. [Link]

All of which opened up all kinds of rhythmic possibilities, moving jazz away from the strict 4/4 beat of the popular dances. Many people accused Roach and the other originators of bebop of making jazz undanceable — as if you can’t dance to 3/4 and 5/4 and polyrhythmic beats — as if moving jazz from the dance hall to the concert hall made it somehow less worthy. I like to think that Roach saw larger possibilities for jazz, just as Mozart saw there was more to a minuet than music for one kind of dancing.

What I didn’t know about Roach was how active he was in fighting for the rights of African Americans. Trymaine Lee, in a appreciation printed today in the New York Times, reports:

“It was his technique,” said Jimmy Heath, 81, a saxophonist. “And his concepts were so innovative. But he wasn’t only a drummer. The thing about Max was he was always fighting for the rights of African-American people, that we were creative, worthy people.”…

The group [jazz musicians Heath, James Moody, Jon Faddis, and Phoebe Jacobs] remembered an incident at a Miles Davis show, when Mr. Roach took to the stage with a protest sign — “something to do with Africa or black people,” Mr. Heath recalled — and sat there with the sign held high above his head. “Miles was like, ‘Man, why did you have to do that during my set?’ ” Mr. Heath recalled, laughing with Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Moody. [Link to NY Times article]

I’m also amazed at the range of musicians with whom Roach played or made recordings. Of course I knew he had played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. I did not know that he had played with Duke Ellington, nor did I know that he played with avant-garde composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, nor did I know that he had played rap music with a hip-hop group called Fab Five Freddy, nor did I know that he had performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Roach could play the full range of African American music — indeed, he played the full range of human music.

Selected videos of Max Roach:

Roach with Dinah Washington in “All of Me”
Roach playing Ellington’s “What Am I Here For”, with Billy Taylor and big band
Roach with Fab Five Freddy and break dancers
Roach soloing on just hi-hat

New music resource

If you’re interested in new American music (mostly contemporary classical music but some other musics as well), there’s a great online resource called “Art of the States.” The Web site, produced in collaboration with WGBH radio, has a large collection of recordings of new music available online, with composers ranging from John Adams to Evan Ziporyn. You won’t hear most of this new music on the radio, nor will you find recordings of it in your local library, so I’m finding this Web site to be a great way to explore the music without having to spend tons of money (which I don’t have) to buy CDs. (Requires RealPlayer and broadband access.)

Link to Art of the States

The loss of a good blog

Over the past six months, one of the best religious blogs out there has been Speaking Truth to Power. Written by the pseudononymous uugrrl, it chronicles her thoughts and feelings as someone who was a victim of clergy sexual misconduct. But now she has announced that she’ll be taking the blog down for personal reasons. You have a few more days to read her well-written posts on clergy sexual misconduct.

I’m going to miss uugrrl. In the past, I’ve been in churches that had suffered from clergy sexual misconduct. I discovered that clergy misconduct can poison an entire congregation for years — and I learned that misconduct can have a negative impact on everyone in that congregation. Reading uugrrl’s blog has helped me to come to a better understanding of the evil of clergy sexual misconduct.

I’ll leave you with some critically important advice uugrrl offers to anyone who is a victim of clergy sexual misconduct in a Unitarian Universalist congregation (or in almost any denomination, for that matter):

If you are a victim of UU clergy misconduct, don’t report it…. To be clear, by “don’t report it,” I mostly mean don’t file a formal complaint. I don’t mean you shouldn’t tell anyone. It’s even okay in my opinion to tell the UUA [denominational headquarters], as long as you make it clear they do not have your permission to share your name or to consider you a complainant. Just do what feels safest. And be very careful. One good option is contacting Marie Fortune’s Institute.

Me and the Dalai Lama

I usually don’t touch politics on this blog, but I do touch on questions about the nature of reality. I note with interest that in the looking-glass world of United States politics, nearly all politicians lean towards authoritarianism, conservatives seem like liberals, and the few anti-authoritarian liberals run marginalized campaigns with no hope of success. According to the Political Compass Web site, all but two of the current U.S. presidential candidates are conservatives, and even Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are not particularly liberal or anti-authoritarian. Unreal. Link.

For the record, my political compass scores are as follows: Economic Left/Right: -9.62 (on a scale of -10/Left to 10/Right); and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.31 (on a scale of -10/Libertarian to 10/Authoritarian). In other words, according to the Political Compass people, my political position is far closer to the Dalai Lama than to any of the current U.S. presidential candidates. This helps to explain why U.S. politics makes me feel as if I’ve gone through the looking glass — and no wonder I so rarely preach political sermons. On the other hand, if the Dalai Lama ever needs a running mate, I’d be up for it.

A curious story

In an old book from England, I read the following curious story: When Muhammed (or Mahomet, as the book had it) was about four years old, the angel Gabriel came down to earth, pulled the young lad away from his playmates, took him far away from other prying eyes, plucked the boy’s heart from his breast, and squeezed a drop of some unpleasant liquid out of the living heart. Having removed this one nasty bit of impurity from the future Prophet’s heart, the angel replaced the now purified heart in the boy’s breast, and took the boy back to his playmates. Now the future Prophet’s heart was pure.

I thought to myself, “If only we could purify people’s hearts in that way.” The angel Gabriel had mystical powers those hundreds of years ago, that he could pluck a living heart out of someone’s breast, and purify it. Today, surgeons can cut open a living person’s thoracic cavity, take out their heart, and perform miraculous surgeries on it. But we still can’t purify someone’s heart.

I must have dozed off thinking about the story, for suddenly my head fell down on my chest, awakening me with a start. It was late at night. I closed the musty old book, and there before me stood a strange being, neither male nor female.

“I am Gabriel,” the strange figure said, looking quite ordinary in jeans and t-shirt, although I could see wings fluttering behind. Distracted by the fluttering, I didn’t notice when Gabriel darted a hand into my chest, and plucked out my heart.

“Ow,” I said, but it didn’t really hurt and Gabriel took my heart in one hand and a small glass vial in the other hand, the one hand squeezing my heart and the other hand holding the vial to catch the foul-smelling liquid that ran out of my heart.

“There, that’s done,” said Gabriel, putting my heart, which now looked a good bit smaller, back in my chest. “Now that your heart is pure, you may accompany me while I examine the hearts of some of your politicians.”

Gabriel raised his hand, we whirled through the air, and found ourselves in a hotel room. A well-coiffed man stood admiring himself in the mirror. Gabriel plucked his heart out, and showed it to me. The heart was covered in fat like a cheap cut of bacon. Gabriel explained that the man rarely used his heart so that it was weak and flabby. I suddenly recognized the man as a presidential candidate who supported the war in Iraq but who discouraged his children from joining the armed forces. And when Gabriel squeezed, drops of green rancid goo ran from it; because, so the angel explained, the man spent too much of his large fortune on his political ambitions, rather than on the real needs of the world. Gabriel wrung the fat and goo from the heart, and replaced it in the man’s chest; but the heart must have been unaccustomed to the exertion of serving as the metaphorical moral muscle, and I became aware that it stopped. Oddly enough, the death of his heart didn’t bother the man in the least.

Gabriel raised his hand, another whirl through the air, and we found ourselves in another hotel room with another presidential candidate; this one was talking self-importantly on the telephone. Gabriel plucked out and showed me this man’s heart: it showed a swirl of red and blue on the outside. I recognized this man, too, for he had expediently switched from one political stance to another so that he could improve his presidential chances. Gabriel squeezed the man’s heart to purify it, but there was nothing inside and it popped like a cheap party balloon. Gabriel put the little rubbery scrap back in the man’s chest. The man just kept on talking on the telephone, sounding more self-important than before.

Gabriel raised a hand, another whirl through the air, and we found ourselves in another hotel room with another presidential candidate; this one was clipping his toenails. Gabriel plucked out his heart, and showed me how it was infested with small sharp bits of something that looked like broken automobile glass. I recognized this man as one who used his military record as one of his primary qualifications for running for president. “This kind of heart is almost impossible to purify,” said Gabriel. “These shards of self-righteousness are almost impossible to pick out.” We were short on time, apparently, because Gabriel plopped the man’s heart back into his chest without trying to purify it.

Gabriel raised a hand, but before we could whirl through the air to see another presidential candidate, I said, “Stop! I’ve seen enough. I’m sure there are some good and moral politicians, but they have been hidden away by their political parties so that even you can’t find them. What use is it to watch these ineffectual attempts to purify that which cannot be purified? Only a true prophet can be…”

“You are a pompous ass,” said Gabriel, interrupting me. A raised hand, a whirl through the air, and we were back where we started. Gabriel plucked my heart out of my chest, unstoppered the little glass vial, poured the foul-smelling liquid back into it, and replaced my heart in my chest. “I don’t understand you mortals,” the angel continued. “You think that the hearts of your politicians must be absolutely pure, yet I can’t see that your own hearts are any more pure.”

“Oh,” I said. “Perhaps I spoke too hastily. Can’t you purify my heart once again so that, my heart being utterly pure, then I could with good conscience criticize all the politicians?”

“You’re going to criticize them anyway,” Gabriel said, “so why should I bother?” A small clap of thunder, and he was gone.

— Yr. obdt. humble servant, Isaac Bickerstaff