Youth ministry and sleep

A few weeks ago, someone posted a question to the UUA youth advisor email list. I’ve forgotten who posted this question, I’ve long since deleted the original email message, but the question sticks with me: What do you do to recover after you’ve been a youth advisor at a district youth conference (or youth retreat, or local church overnight)?

For those of you who haven’t done youth ministry, a weekend-long district youth conference can last 40 hours. You might have to drive several hours to get to the conference, and several hours to get home. If the conference is not well organized, adult advisors might not get more than a few hours of sleep for two nights in a row.

You’ll likely get more sleep if you’re an advisor at an overnight for a local congregation. I’ll be one of the adults at an overnight planning retreat for our church’s upcoming New Orleans service trip. The overnight will last just 13 hours, and while I won’t get eight hours of sleep, I’ll be fine. Plus I’ll have time to recover afterwards.

After 15 years of doing youth ministry, I’ve decided I’m no longer willing to be an advisor at district youth conferences unless the organizers arrange for me to get eight hours of sleep two nights in a row. I was at a youth conference in a midwestern district, and they arranged for local adults to come in and take shifts through the night so that the adult advisors who had come from far away could get plenty of sleep. Not only are midwesterners generally better organized than people on the coasts, but midwesterners also recognize that they don’t want adult advisors driving home for long distances unless they’ve had adequate sleep. I loved that midwestern youth conference. I got enough sleep, I’m sure I was more present for the youth, I had a great time, and when I went to work on Monday I wasn’t totally exhausted.

If any of you are youth advisors, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What do you do to recover after you’ve been a youth advisor at a district youth conference (or youth retreat, or local church overnight)?

Another Guru Nanak story

Another story of Guru Nanak, presented in its barest form, as found in a dry analytical study of the janamsakhis:

“Sharing Food with Others”

“…Nearby Trivandrum and on its north-west were situated two small towns by the names of Palam and Kottayam. [note 317] Guru Nanak came and halted here. There was also an old monastery of the yogis here. During the course of his discourse with the yogis, Guru Nanak explained the principle of sharing with others, especially the needy, whatever you have. The yogis gave him a sesame seed and asked if he could share it with others. The Guru took the seed, put it in a small earthen trough and pounded it. Then it was distributed among all [those] present. The place is now called Tilganji Sahib. Here also stands a gurdwara wherein Udasi mendicants used to live up to the 1960s….

Note 317: “…Dr. Ganda Singh has visited this gurdwara, and he has told the author that Palam and Kottayam are two small towns in the north-west of Trivandrum and that there is a gurdwara between these towns. That is why this place is called Palam-Kottayam.”

Janamsakhi Tradition: An Analytical Study, by Kirpal Singh, ed. Prithipal Singh Kapur (Amritsar: Singh Brothers, 2004), p. 143. ISBN 81-7205-311-8

The point of the story, of course, is that the yogis were trying to confound Nanak; they tried to show that sometimes it is impossible to share, for example when you have only one sesame seed. Harish Dhillon tells the story somewhat differently. Dhillon refers to siddhas not yogis; the siddhas are “arrogant”; Maranda grinds the seed up and dissolves it in water, giving everyone present a sip of water to drink. The First Sikh Spiritual Master: Timeless Wisdom from the Life and Teachings of Guru Nanak,, Harish Dhillon (Mumbai: Indus Source Books, 2005; Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2006), pp. 93-94.

Spring

One of the little bushes just outside the window of my office rustled, so much so that they caught my eye. A black furry tail poked out of the bush; one of the fat black squirrels 1 that lives on the church grounds was in the bush. I was surprised that it bore its weight.

Five minutes went by. The bushes started rustling again. This time, it was a gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis). I realized that a couple of Oregon Juncos (Junco hyenalis oreganus) were chirping at the squirrel; maybe the juncos were nesting in the bush and the squirrel was going after their eggs! I ran outside and scared the squirrel away. I looked quickly in the bush for a nest, didn’t see one, then retreated into my office because if there is a nest I don’t want to drive the birds away from it.

The juncos are still noisily chirping away. The squirrels have returned to stealing food from the trash cans. I still don’t know if there’s a nest out there or not.

Later

A gray squirrel came back (perhaps the same one again), and nosed around beneath the bushes outside my window. A junco harassed it constantly, chirping, flying at the squirrel’s head, causing the squirrel to duck and twitch. At last the squirrel gave up, and scampered off with the junco chasing it.

1 Melanistic form of the Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), an invasive species which has been introduced into the San Francisco Bay region.

A story of Guru Nanak from the janamsakhis

Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, grew up as a Hindu in the Punjab in India, where Muslims and Hindus lived side by side. Nanak famously preached that there is no Hindu and there is no Muslim, because there is one God for all religions; and there is neither lower caste nor upper caste, for we are all simply human. The following story about Guru Nanak is probably not historically accurate;1 it comes from one of the janamsakhis, collections of tales about Nanak collected a century or more after his death in 1539. This story may wind up in my growing collection of stories for liberal religious kids.

Once upon a time, on one of his missionary trips or udasi, Nanak camped beside the Tigris River. Nanak had been teaching all day, and in the evening an old woman, a Muslim, came to visit him. Weeping, she bowed down at his feet. Nanak asked her to sit next to him and tell him her problems.

“I have been waiting for you for twelve years,” said the old woman. “It was twelve years ago that my son got onto a ferry boat at this very spot to travel to the other side of the Tigris. He was twenty years old, and he was going across the river to visit his sister. The ferry was well out into the river when it suddenly capsized. I watched in horror, trying to see if my son would be safe. Some of those aboard were able to swim to shore, but many were lost. My son was one of those who did not make it back to land.

“I waited all night by the side of the river to be sure,” said the woman, “and at last went home to sleep. I saw you in my dreams, a holy man who held up his hand so that a light shone upon me and filled me with warmth. I knew that you would come and bring back my son to me.”

“Where has your son been for the last twelve years?” Nanak said.

“He has been with Allah,” said the woman.

“Is he content and happy to be with Allah?” said Nanak.

“Oh, yes,” said the woman, “of course he has found perfect happiness with Allah.”

“Then surely you would not be selfish enough to ask your son to leave that perfect happiness to come back to this world,” said Nanak. “For as you know, in this world happiness is rare, while misery is a constant.”

The old woman was silent.

“And have you really been without your son all these twelve years?” said Nanak. “Has he not lived on in your memory? Can you not remember the way he played as a child, the trouble he got into, all the time you spent with him? He was so much a part of you while he was alive that he can never completely go away from you. You have lost his body, yes; but his soul and spirit will remain with you always.”

So it was that Nanak brought her son back to the old woman; though he had really never left her. She touched his feet and went on her way, her soul at peace at long last.

The source for this story is The First Sikh Spiritual Master: Timeless Wisdom from the Life and Teachings of Guru Nanak, by Harish Dhillon (Mumbai: Indus Source Books, 2005; Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2006), pp. 166-167. Although the bulk of the book is a popular historical biography of Nanak, Dhillon also retells several stories from the Nanak janamsakhis, stories which his grandmother told him when he was a child.

1 Not historically accurate according to Dhillon, pp. 155-156.

I have been able to identify only one English translation of a janamsakhi, the B40 manuscript in the possession of the British India Office, translated by W. H. McLeod and publsihed in Amritsar c. 1979.

The eternal Spring of the Bay area

San Francisco Bay, the land of eternal springtime: there are flowers in bloom all the year:

“San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills. They yield a generous vegetation. All the rare flowers which people in ‘the States’ rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses — I do not know the names of a tenth part of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands off and let them grow.” (Mark Twain, Roughing It)

At the moment here in San Mateo, the rains have just ended, and for most of twelve hours a day the sun shines out of a cloudless sky, and everything is green and beautiful. The acacia trees are covered in thousands of little yellow blossoms cover acacia trees; bright orange California poppies appear along the roadsides; white flowers, purple flowers, red flowers, there are flowers everywhere.

Nor is the beauty only visual; the rich heavy scent of flowers fills the air. I wheeze and find it hard to breathe; our downstairs neighbor sneezes explosively about ten times an hour; our car is covered with a faint yellow film of pollen and I have to wash the windshield twice a day. It is beautiful in this land of eternal springtime, except that I can’t breathe and the pollen in my eyes makes me want to claw them out. I wish we could have a good hard frost and maybe some snow to end this eternal springtime and kill all these damned flowers.

Diminishing Google reliance

Scott Wells links to a good post on getting Google out of your life, a post which reads in part:

But is it dangerous to give all our information and to rely so completely on one corporation? Should we be worried? Should we be looking for alternatives? Should we be moving our data out of Google as soon as possible?

Answers: Yes. Yes. Yes. Maybe not all, but anything that is the least bit sensitive — as a minister, I have steadfastly refused to use Gmail because Google stores email data for a too long, and doesn’t seem to have any real understanding of confidentiality, and the only documents I put on Google Docs are ones I’m willing to share with the whole world.

I’ve placed some links to alternative Web sites in the sidebar. Feel free to add your own non-Google favorites.