Hey, Massachusetts religious liberals…

This just in from the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry:

Constitutional Convention Recessed Until June 14th

Yesterday legislators voted to reschedule the Constitutional Convention for Thursday, June 14th. We now have five more weeks to get the votes we need to stop the anti-gay amendment from going to the ballot box. Please contact your legislators and let them know that it is neither fair not just to write religious and civil discrimination into our Constitution.

If you’re a Massachusetts resident don’t forget to contact your legislators and tell them why you, as a religious person, don’t support the anti-gay ammendment. If you’re a Unitarian Universalist, you might point out that our clergy have been officiating at religious marriages since at least the 1960’s.

And astute reader Craig found a great online drawing that might help Massachusetts legislators understand why same sex couples should not lose the right to marry: Link.

Concert

Every month, downtown New Bedford has an arts and culture night — AHA! Night — with concerts, art exhibits, lectures, and tours. For the past six months, our church has hosted a free classical music concert on AHA! Night. And tonight, Ann Sears, from the music faculty of Wheaton College, played Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

After the concert, Ann told me that the stillness was so profound that she was tempted to look up after the first variation to see whether everyone had walked out. I told her that was my experience of New Bedford audiences as well; that sometimes when I’m preaching everyone’s so quiet I wonder if anyone is actually listening; and I think maybe it’s a cultural combination of New England Yankee reserve and Portuguese politeness and reticence. Yes, said Ann, after the concert people came up to me and told me how moved they had been.

They had been moved. I greeted people as they walked out, and you could see it in their faces. The man who had shouted Brava! at the end of the concert had a transcendent smile. The hip young couple who had literally run in at the beginning of the concert, talking and laughing on their cell phones, went out smiling and she gave me a thumbs-up sign — Good, she mouthed (she was on her cell phone again). Everett, who’s a poet, stopped to talk with me for a while. Wow, said Everett, wow. I said to him, My head’s in a different place than when I came in.

I walked Ann out to her car. She said, It’s such a good thing to have free concert series like this. You know, I said, there were at least a couple of people there who didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She said, I thought so. And, I said, there was one woman who had just come back from chemotherapy today; this was very healing for her. Ann said, Yes. I said, You don’t get that kind of audience in a concert hall. Ann said, I know; I’d love to come back and play again.

Not watching spring…

Every May for the past five years, it has happened.

The spring migration of birds is one of the most spectacular events in the natural world, and the peak of the spring migration occurs in May. If you’re good (and a little bit lucky), you can see a hundred different bird species in one day, including birds that have flown thousands of miles to get this far, with hundreds of miles yet to go before they reach their summer breeding grounds. It is one of the wonders of the natural world.

Every May for the past five years, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to spend a day in the field looking for birds. And it’s happening again this year.

Sigh.

Email [curse | blessing] pick one

Yesterday’s issue of The New York Times Book Review reviews a new book called Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. The review was written by Dave Barry, and it sounds pretty much like everything Dave Barry has ever written, except that he doesn’t make any potty jokes.

Fortunately, the online version of the review has a link to the first chapter of the book. Here’s an excerpt that pretty much sums up the book’s purpose:

So what is it about email? Why do we send so many electronic messages that we never should have written? Why do things spin out of control so quickly? Why don’t people remember that email leaves an indelible electronic record? Why do we forget to compose our messages carefully so that people will know what we want without having to guess? We wrote this book to figure out why email has such a tendency to go awry — and to learn for ourselves how to email not just adequately but also well. Our Holy Grail: email that is so effective that it cuts down on email.

Those are good questions, and I think maybe I need this book. Some weeks, I spend two hours or more a day reading and writing email. Some days (today!) I find myself spending forty minutes carefully writing and rewriting an email message, when a five-minute phone call would have been more effective. Email is frustrating. Email is extremely useful. Somehow, I need to learn to make better use of email.

So I’m going to start a short series of posts on using email more effectively in churches and other small non-profits. Not that I know how to use email more effectively than you do — but if I put down some preliminary ideas, and you respond with better ideas in the comments, we might actually make some progress towards that Holy Grail — email so effective it cuts down on email.

First installment: Meetings via email

For those of us who sit on boards and committees, it is very tempting to save time by using email to conduct business outside of regular meeting times. In my experience, conducting board or committee business via email is ineffective when either (a) it takes longer to conduct the business via email, (b) the business is too complex to conduct via email, or (c) the business item is not presented well initially. Let’s look at these problems one at a time:

(a) It takes longer to conduct the business via email. Emotionally-loaded business items never translate well to email — email discussions have this uncanny ability to go from civil discussion to outright war in less than five seconds — meaning it’s much more efficient to conduct emotionally-loaded business face-to-face. Business items where not all members of the board or committee have the same depth of knowledge never work well via email — the knowledgeable people are constantly re-explaining to the others what’s going on — so here again, face-to-face is better.

(b) The business is too complex to conduct via email. Complex business items do not seem to translate well to email — people ask the same questions over and over again, or the original details get forgotten as the email discussion drags on and on — so it seems more efficient to conduct complex business face-to-face.

(c) The business item is not presented well initially. If you present a business item badly in a face-to-face meeting, you know instantly from the blank looks on people’s faces. Since you don’t get that kind of feedback with email responses, you can find yourself deeply involved in an email discussion only to realize that people have very different understandings of what’s being discussed — in which case, you’re probably better off cutting your losses and postponing the business item until your next face-to-face meeting.

So what kind of committee or board business does work well via email? Well, setting an agenda for a face-to-face meeting works well via email — little emotion involved, no depth of knowledge required, it’s a simple task. In another example, here at First Unitarian in New Bedford the Board of Trustees has to approve all building rental requests, and mostly these routine votes are done via email (in rare instances where a building rental proves contentious, the vote is postponed to a face-to-face meeting). Related to this, routine votes and approvals can often be effectively handled via email. Finally, email is very useful to distribute staff reports or subcommittee reports prior to a face-to-face meeting.

There must be other examples where committee or board business is conducted effectively via email — what examples do you have from your own experience? Has your committee or board come up with any magic techniques for carying out effective business via email?

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing], part two

Noted with comment

I’m lucky I’m a religious liberal, because religious liberals find absolutely no contradiction between the poetic truth of the Bible and the scientific truth of evolution. However, as reported in the New York Times on May 5, in an article titled “A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin,” that is not true for some of the candidates for the Republican nomination for President:

[T]he [Republican] party’s 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three — Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado — indicated they did not.

Silly boys:– saying they do not “believe” in evolution because their religion forbids them to. Yet their religion tells them that their God is omniscient and omnipotent. If their God is omniscient, then that God understands the difference between scientific evidence and metaphor; and if their God is omnipotent, then that God knows how to use metaphor in the Bible to communicate eternal truths.

Silly Sam Brownback. Silly Mike Huckabee. Silly Tom Tancredo. Don’t you think your God is smart enough to understand science and metaphor both? (And don’t you know that you’re embarrassing many of your politically conservative friends whose God is smart enough to understand that?)

In the comments, Philocrites, a.k.a. Chris, shows me where I’m wrong. I reply, admit he’s right, and try to recover my balance. Although I still say you should vote for one of the other Republican candidates.

Reading Boswell

Over the past ten years, I’ve been desultorily reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Today we’d call it a masterpiece of non-fiction that combines psychological insight, reportage, collage, anecdote, and narrative. But really, it’s a book about the moral and spiritual life of a public intellectual.

Last night, I came to this passage:

1777: Ætat. 68.]–In 1777, it appears from his Prayers and Meditations, that Johnson suffered much from a state of mind “unsettled and perplexed,” and from that constitutional gloom, which, together with his extreme humility and anxiety with regard to his religious state, made him contemplate himself through too dark and unfavourable a medium. It may be said of him, the he “saw God in the clouds.” Certain we may be of his injustice to himself in the following lamentable paragraph, which it is painful to think came from the contrite heart of this great man, to whose labors the world is so much indebted: “When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body, and disturbances of the mind, very near to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults, and excuse many deficiencies.” …

If Boswell were writing today, he would no doubt attempt to psychoanalyze Johnson; he would find that Johnson lacked sexual outlet following the untimely death of his wife, that Johnson’s “constitutional gloom” was in fact a clinical depression which could have been cleared up with a mood-elevating drug, that Johnson had Tourette’s Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that the disability of being blind in one eye (the result of a childhood bout with scrofula) affected him throughout his life. And if Boswell lived here in the United States, he probably would have gotten infected with our national mythology that the “pursuit of happiness” is the highest good, and he would have recommended a combination of psychoanalysis and happy consumerism to end Johnson’s woes.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have surveyed my own life and thought, What a barren waste of time! –How little I have done (nothing, really) to leave the world better than it was I came into it! Better to say what is true than hide behind a bland psychologizing:– The usual liberal psychotherapy provides a pitifully meager answer to the question, How ought I to live out my life? Nor do the conservative platitudes of our time offer anything more; they just cloak psychology and pointless pursuit of happiness in strident nationalism or religious excess.

So we find more and more essentially sane people getting diagnosed as crazy-depressed and dosed up with anti-depressants. Our public discourse doesn’t allow us to carefully and honestly survey our lives, let alone admit that when we do survey our lives we are likely to find a good deal that is barren. Last night I took a long walk, thinking about what I’ve done with my life; and I found much that was barren. Anyone who is honest would find the same. What to do? Having already rejected strident nationalism, prosperity theology, religious fundamentalism, bland psychotherapy, over-medication, happiness through consumption, and a few other pointless things, I settled on some good honest soul-searching. I was not particularly happy to do so, and it’s never pleasant to realize that the barrenness of one’s own life is in part a reflection of the barrenness of public life. My deficiencies and faults didn’t go away. But when I went to sleep, my dreams were rich and untroubled, and I awakened with renewed energy.

May afternoon

Three o’clock on a beautiful bright May afternoon in Davis Square. I walked out of McIntyre and Moore Used Books, blinking at the sun. Two cops were standing just outside the door, looking down the street.

“… why I don’t like him,” said one cop to her partner.

“He’s a troublemaker,” the other cop replied.

“Well, let’s try not to antagonize him.”

They were slowly moving up the street on the edge of the sidewalk. Without thinking about it, I moved over to the other side of the sidewalk, next to the buildings.

Twenty feet further along, a man was just sitting on the edge of the curb. Corduroy sport coat, much the worse for wear; slicked back messy hair; filthy bike messenger bag over his shoulder. He had to concentrate hard in order to sit down — drunk, or strung out on something.

A third cop was talking to the man saying, “No, you got in trouble because…”

I didn’t wait to hear what the cop was going to say. When you pass three cops lined up waiting to deal with one guy, it’s always best to keep walking. I threaded my way through the hipsters and students who populate Davis Square during the day, walking along under the bright sunshine of a May afternoon.

No Internet access yesterday, so I’m posting this a day after the fact.

Theological humor from a humanist

The recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist, that is, he did not believe in God. On a number of occasions, Vonnegut riffed on his disbelief in witty and thought-provoking ways.

During one interview, Vonnegut told this story:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association… I succeeded Isaac Asimov as president, and we humanists try to behave as well as we can without any expectation of a reward or punishment in an after life. So since God is unknown to us, the highest abstraction to which we serve is our community. That’s as high as we can go, and we have some understanding of that. Now at a memorial service for Isaac Asimov a few years ago on the West Coast I spoke and I said, “Isaac is in heaven now,” to a crowd of humanists. It was quite awhile before order could be restored. Humanists were rolling in the aisles.

“Knowing What’s Nice” from In These Times, 6 November 2003. Link.

But in 1999, he told the story differently. This is from the book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resemble solemnity could be restored.

I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.

So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, “He’s up in Heaven now.” Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

My epitaph in any case? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.” I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

(I love the way he throws in that wry “God forbid.”) In 2006, he proposed another, different epitaph for himself:

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC.

“Vonnegut’s Blues For America,” Scotland’s Sunday Herald, 5 February 2006. Link.

So of course the article isn’t really about his epitaph at all, it’s about how the rest of the world perceives the United States. A few paragraphs later, Vonnegut wrote: “Foreigners love us for our [blues]. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.” The epitaph, in other words, isn’t for Vonnegut so much as for the increasingly theocratic United States.

But analyzing Vonnegut’s humor is like analyzing one of Louis Armstrong’s solos. If you gotta analyze it, you’re never gonna know.

In the bagel store

This morning, I burned the oatmeal. By the time I noticed it had burnt (the scorched smell seeping into my sleep-fogged brain while I dreamily ironed a shirt), it was too late to salvage any of it, and too late to start cooking more. I went to work without breakfast.

Fortunately, I had to run an errand at about 9:30. On the way back to the office, I stopped in at the new bagel place, which is in the same location as the old bagel place, but with new decor and a new owner.

“Hi,” said the young woman behind the counter, putting down a sandwich and smiling. “What can I get you?”

“Are those all the bagels you have left?” I said, pointing to the glass case under the counter.

“No, no,” she said, reaching down, and talking quickly. “I just haven’t had time to put anything out. It doesn’t look it now, but it was crazy in here just a few minutes ago. I just now was getting to my breakfast, and I’ve been here since five a.m. I’ve got spinach back here, and whole wheat and cinnamon raisin and… I guess that’s it, but I might have more out back.”

“Could I please have two whole wheat bagels with cream cheese?” I said.

Just then, a man walked up. He was about fifty-five, pencil-thin moustache, bit of a paunch. He looked like the tradesmen I used to see when I worked at the lumberyard.

“Hi Charlie,” said the woman behind the counter. “The usual?”

“Yeah,” he said, putting a travel mug down on the counter.

“You still sick?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I feel tired.”

“You got that bug that’s going around?” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Don’t get too close to me, I’m contagious!” He had a twinkle in his blue eyes.

“No, I already had it,” I said.

“I’ve gotten sick a lot this winter,” said Charlie. “Most winters, nothing. This winter, I’ve been sick three times,” holding up three fingers.

“Me too,” I said.

“Me too,” said the woman behind the counter, fixing Charlie’s coffee and slicing my bagels and spreading cream cheese and talking, all at a fast pace. “I’ve been sick a lot. I think it’s because it’s been so warm this winter, so you get sick more often. Last week, I had this feeling in my head, my head was pounding, right here behind the eyes. Someone said it’s allergies, but I knew it wasn’t allergies. But I couldn’t take time off to be sick, I just opened this business. So I had to come into work anyway.”

She gave Charlie his coffee, and he slowly stirred it. “Thanks,” he said.

“Plus, I’ve been eating like crazy, nervous eating, you know?” said the woman. “Starting this business has been really stressful, I eat all the time. I get nervous, I grab something to eat. I’ve put on twenty pounds since I opened up.”

“You gotta watch what you eat,” said Charlie. “Me, now I eat only organic vegetables, and I feel healthier. It helps you keep up your resistance. I get the organic milk, too.” (The thought flashed through my head: Boy, he’s not your stereotypical buyer of organic food.)

“Milk, bleah,” said the woman while she wrapped my bagels. “I don’t like milk. I just don’t drink it any more.”

“We eat organic, too,” I said to Charlie. “I don’t like milk either,” I said to the woman.

“Well, I might put some skim milk on my cereal in the morning,” said the woman, equivocating a little. “That’s a dollar ninety-four. Maybe skim milk on my cereal, but I don’t drink milk. I haven’t had a glass of milk to drink in years.”

I gave her two dollars, and put a dollar in the tip jar. Charlie told us how good organic milk tastes, nice and foamy like it just came out of the cow. I exchanged a glance with the woman behind the counter — he was a nice guy, but neither one of us was going to drink milk, organic or not.

Burning my oatmeal cost me three dollars and ninety-four cents, money I would have preferred not to spend. I guess the conversation was worth it, though.