In her first post at the new blog yUU’re a what?, blogger cUrioUs gUUrl talks about how she was a humanist until she had an experience of God a year ago. Speaking from personal experience, those transcendental experiences do have a way of breaking in on you and throwing into doubt long-held assumptions and beliefs. I look forward to seeing how this new blog develops.
How to follow GA
UU World magazine will be doing online coverage of the 2010 General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association on their General Assembly blog. Yesterday’s post provides convenient links to video streaming.
So far, I am not clear which bloggers will be blogging GA — if you know of someone blogging GA, please leave a link in the comments. With luck, bloggers will tag their GA posts — as a suggestion, the tag “uuaga10” would be consistent with past GA blogging tags.
Update: Bloggers who tag with “uuaga10” will be aggregated on the UUpdates Web site at the following URL:
http://uupdates.net/index.php?main=tags&tag=uuaga10
Chris Walton points out the Twitter users are using the hashtag “#uuaga” and you can follow those tweets at the following URL:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23uuaga
Kinsi is blogging frequently at Spirituality and Sunflowers, and his well-written personal coverage helps round out the reporting at UU World.
Summer
Three of us were driving across the Dumbarton Bridge from the Peninsula to the East Bay. As we came up over the height of the bridge, my eyes were drawn to the golden-brown Hayward Hills.
“The hills are brown,” I said, and sighed. “Summer’s really here.” I don’t like
“They were still green just a few weeks ago,” said Marsha.
“Well, our last rain was in, what, late May?” I said.
“The rains ended unusually late this year,” said Marsha, who grew up in California.
Julian sat and listened to us. He has just moved here from western Massachusetts, where it remains green all summer long.
June 21 is the day to “peecycle”
In case you’ve forgotten, Pee-On-Earth Day (in the northern hemisphere) is tomorrow, June 21, the date of the summer solstice. According to my partner, Carol, describes it: “Pee-On-Earth Day is a day to bring your urine outside to nourish plants and avoid using water to flush your toilet! Fertilize plants with your urine’s nitrogen and phosphorus. PEECYCLE either directly or by depositing your contribution in a container you take outside….”
Carol’s favorite way to peecycle at our house by pouring the pee into our compost pile — it doesn’t smell, and we wind up with nitrogen-rich compost. Look for the Pee-On-Earth Day fact sheet on Carol’s Web site for more ideas on how to peecycle.
And yes, Pee-On-Earth Day is my favorite summer holiday, mostly because I get to make lots of pee jokes.
New Orleans trip: two last thoughts
(1) A comparison of New Orleans weather with Bay area weather: When we walked into the terminal at the New Orleans at about seven this morning, it was already hot and humid, 80 degrees with a dew point of 74; when we arrived at San Francisco airport, it was cool, almost chilly, and dry, at 63 degrees and a 29 mile per hour wind, with a dew point of 48. Given the weather we’re accustomed to, no wonder we had problems with the heat this past week.
(2) You know it’s a good trip when the final leg of your flight is delayed two hours, but you don’t really mind because you so enjoy the company of the people with whom you’re traveling.
And one last bonus thought: While in New Orleans, I read the New Orleans Times Picayune every day, and they have absolutely the best coverage on the BP oil spill, combining repressed righteous anger with good solid reporting. Read their oil spill coverage online at NOLA.com.
New Orleans: Final day
On the last day of our New Orleans service trip, we had a short work day. One crew went off to Green Light again; another crew to the Animal Rescue League of New Orleans; and Dave and I stayed at the Center for Ethical Living to finish up one last project.
The Green Light crew went off to St. Bernard Parish to install compact fluorescent bulbs. They discovered that in St. Bernard Parish, swampland comes right up to the road in many places. At the one house they managed to work at, the owner told them that that area was under ten feet of water after the hurricanes in 2005. Our crew saw bare foundations where houses were simply washed away by the flood.
This afternoon, most of our group went in to the French Quarter of New Orleans for a walking tour, though a few of us stayed behind to take a nap. Then all but three of us went to get dinner and hear live music in the French Quarter. We get up at five tomorrow morning, so I’m staying behind in the dorm so I can get enough sleep to make sure we get on the flight and make our connections; two other people who are particularly tired are also staying behind for a little sleep.
Later note: The three of us who stayed behind went for dinner at Pyramids Cafe, just five blocks from the Center for Ethical Living, for a good inexpensive dinner; then we went to The Camellia Grill to get a banana cream pie and an apple pie to bring back to share with everyone else.
Excellent suggestions
“Safety Net,” a ministry of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville, Tennessee, has made excellent suggestions for changes to the professional guidelines of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA). Of particular note is a suggested revision to a clause of the guidelines that asks ministers to “strictly respect confidences given me by colleagues and expect them to keep mine.” This clause is legally and morally indefensible, for it means that if another minister came to me and told me “in confidence” that s/he had engaged in sexual behavior with a legal minor, I would violate the UUMA guidelines when I reported him/her to legal authorities. To state the obvious: in California, I am a mandated reporter and would be legally required to report any suspected child abuse, whether or not I was prohibited from doing so by UUMA guidelines — more importantly, as a human being, I am morally required to report any suspected child abuse, again regardless of UUMA guidelines.
This and the other revisions proposed by Safety Net are excellent. The UUMA should adopt them as soon as possible. You can read the full text of the revisions here, and an explanatory open letter to the UUMA here.
New Orleans, day six
We split into three crews today, on our sixth day of our New Orleans service trip. One crew went to Animal Rescue of New Orleans (ARNO), the local no-kill animal shelter. It turns out ARNO has only one paid staffer, and relies on volunteers for just about everything else. In a city where volunteers are already maxed out, it must be tough to be so reliant on volunteers. And we’ve all heard how animals had to be abandoned by those fleeing the city, so working at ARNO feels like we’re supporting the overall volunteer effort.
A recent issue of Christian Century magazine carried an article on short-term service trips. Many people who go on service trips feel strongly that they must see tangible results, regardless of what the community they’re serving happens to need:
Noel Becchetti of the Center for Student Missions tells of a local pastor in Mexico who tries to get visiting teams to help with his mission of outreach to men. Some teams, however, are dead set on building something: they want to see some (literally) concrete results. So the pastor has a wall that he has such teams work on. He has no idea what the wall will ever be or become, but building it keeps the visiting teams busy and out of his hair, and at the end of their time they can rejoice and be glad that they accomplished something tangible…. [“Misguided Missions: Ten Worst Practices,” by Mark W. Radecke, 18 May 2010 issue]
I think that many volunteers who go to New Orleans to help with the rebuilding effort think that they should literally be rebuilding, and they are disappointed if that’s not what they do. But in a stressed city like this, there’s so much to do that what’s most important is to ask the people who are in the place you’re serving what they need done — and then do it, cheerfully.
Our second crew went back to Green Light today to install compact fluorescent bulbs in people’s houses. I was on the third crew. We went back to help out the Growing Homes program, finishing up the planting that we had started yesterday. It took us all morning to finish, and when we got done Mrs. Washington fed us hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch (our vegans had to eat potato chips and wait to eat lunch). Several members of Mrs. Washington’s extended family, along with her two sons, sat down while we ate, and we had a good time talking.
After lunch, we came back to the Center for Ethical Living and did some repair work here. We also began putting mattress covers on the foam mattresses in the home-made bunk beds in our dorm rooms; we will complete that task tomorrow.
The Center staff did a final debriefing session with us before dinner. They asked us each to say a high point and a low point of the past week, and then say what we’re going to bring back home with us. What I said was this: my high point was the people, both the New Orleans residents like Mrs. Washington whom I got to meet, and the other relief workers whom I met here (Americorps volunteers, people who moved down here to help rebuild, etc.), and also the people in our group whom I got to know better; my low point was the day I didn’t drink enough water and got overheated; and what I’m going to bring back with me is ideas of what we can do where we live, considering how bad the finances of the state of California are, and how many state-funded services (schools, etc.) are being cut.
Tonight, everyone else is going to the French Quarter to eat begniets and see the sights. I’m going to head off early to bed; I’ll be getting up in the middle of the night to drive one of our people to the airport because she has to leave a day early.
New Orleans, day five
We were assigned to two different jobs today, on our service trip to New Orleans. One crew went to work at Rev. Josie’s food pantry, bagging groceries for people in need to pick up. The second crew went to work for Growing Home; I was part of the second group.
Growing Home is a non-profit agency that helps people claim vacant houses next door to them. According to their Web site: “Buy the lot next door, beautify it, and we’ll deduct money off the purchase price. The Growing Home program of New Orleans would like to help. Through Growing Home you can receive up to a $10,000 discount off the cost of a qualifying Lot Next Door for landscaping improvements that you make to the property.”
We went to the house of a Mrs. Washington, who was improving the lot next to hers with the help of Growing Home. Abigail, a landscape architect who works with Growing Home, had designed some nice plantings, and we began digging out plots for the plantings. After we had been working for about two and a half hours, a thunderstorm moved in, and after waiting half an hour we decided to take our lunch break. It just poured buckets of rain, maybe three inches in an hour. When the rain finally stopped, all the areas we had dug out were filled with water.
We figured out a way to keep working, which meant getting incredibly dirty. (Some of our crew took pictures of us at the end of the work day, and I will try to post some of them here eventually so you can see just how dirty we were.) Abigail had to get a truck load of soil for us, then some drainage gravel, and by the time moving the dirt and gravel it was 5:30 and past time to knock off work. We promised her we’d go back tomorrow morning for a few hours to finish the last remaining plantings.
Unfortunately, Rev. Josie’s food pantry had so many volunteers that they only had three hours of work for our other crew. They came back here and basically had nothing to do, which was disheartening. We’re going to have a meeting tonight to see if we can figure out a way to become more effective.