Rough description of marriage in contemporary Unitarian Universalism

With all the current debate about the meaning of marriage, particularly in the context of the so-called “culture wars,” I decided to summarize what I know about marriage as it is practiced in, and understood by, Unitarian Universalist congregations today. This is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive summary; I am not trying to prescribe what “real” marriage is; I am not trying to tell how you should do marriage; I am trying to describe marriage as I have observed it in my affiliation with nine different congregations with varying theological emphases.

Covenantal basis | Forms | Same-sex marriage | Divorce | Changes and challenges | Life in the married state

Three dimensions of a covenantal basis for marriage

The most obvious thing to say about Unitarian Universalist marriage is that it is a covenant; that is, it is a complex of promises exchanged by individuals, promises that are designed to bind them together in relationship. Unitarian Universalist marriage has three basic dimensions: (1) a personal relationship between the individuals who are married; (2) a public or social relationship between the individuals being married and a wider social web of relationships (that wider web of relationships may include family, friends, congregation, wider local community); these first two dimensions may be characterized as horizontal relationships, i.e., relationships between persons. The third dimension may be characterized as the vertical dimension: (3) a relationship with something larger than individual humans or human organizations. This third dimension tends to be flattened or barely acknowledged in many Unitarian Universalist marriages, and may be acknowledged only as some implicit or off-hand appeal to larger ideals; other Unitarian Universalist marriages refer explicitly to a deity (God, Goddess, etc.) or deities, or to something like Bernard Loomer’s theological concept of the Web of Life. However each dimension happens to be understood, Unitarian Universalist marriage is a covenant, a set of promises, encompassing all three of these dimensions. Continue reading →

Responsibility and gratitude

Recently, I’ve been reading transcripts of seminars that Bernard Loomer gave at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. In a seminar on “Surrender,” Loomer said:

“My own feeling is that if you emphasize responsibility too much, you are undervaluing others or the other. Also, you are over-valuing yourself. You are operating with an individualistic conception of the individual, not a social conception of the self. If you have a social sense of the self, you cannot maintain that you are wholly responsible for what you are. You can be responsible within it, but there are limits to which your responsibility extends. I also think that within this attitude of responsibility there is the idea that gratitude beyond a certain point leads to dependence and this is a basic form of weakness. As much as we may not admit this intellectually, many of us feel emotionally that dependence is weakness.”

— Unfoldings, Bernard Loomer, 1985.

Commitment and community

Carol, my life partner, pointed me to an excellent post on John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report. The post is titled The Costs of Commitment, and it’s not a post about money:

…I don’t mean money. Communities need regular inputs of time and effort from their members, or they collapse into mass societies of isolated individuals — roughly speaking, what we’ve got now [in U.S. society]. Communities also need subtler inputs: a sense of commitment, of shared purpose, of emotional connection, of trust. To gain the benefits of living in community, it’s necessary to sacrifice some part of the autonomy that so many Americans nowadays guard so jealously….

And in fact one of the great weaknesses of today’s Unitarian Universalist congregations is that so many of the people who think of themselves as Unitarian Universalists aren’t willing to sacrifice any of their autonomy to participate in the congregational community. But here, as in so many aspects of life, ya gotta pay to play. Rule number one of congregational community:– if you want a Unitarian Universalist community, you have to give up the much-loved American autonomy that says it’s better to sleep in or go for a walk or play video games on Sunday morning. Then add some volunteer hours on top of that. Otherwise, you’re not part of a community.

And, as Greer points out, many of the people who claim to love-love-love community don’t actually belong to a functional community, and in fact deliberately participate in “communities” that are bound to fail:

I know a fair number of people in activist circles who speak in glowing terms about community; most of them don’t belong to a single community organization. I also know a fair number of people who’ve tried to launch community projects of one kind or another; most of these projects foundered due to a fatal shortage of people willing to commit the time, effort, and emotional energy the project needed to survive. Most, but not all; some believers in community have taken an active role in trying to build or maintain it; some projects have managed to find an audience and build a community, or at least the first rough draft of one. One of the reasons I don’t dismiss the Transition Town movement, though I have serious doubts about some aspects of it, is precisely that many of the people involved in it have committed themselves to it in a meaningful sense, and the movement itself has succeeded in some places in building a critical mass of commitment and energy.

It’s important, I think, to assess the ventures toward community that are under way now or have been tried in the recent past, both the successful ones and the ones that have failed, and try to get some sense of the factors that tip the balance one way or the other. It’s also crucial, though, to recognize that there’s a difference between fantasies of community that provides all the benefits with none of the costs, and the reality of community in which each benefit must be paid for by a corresponding commitment. I suspect the common passion among some peak oil activists for lifeboat communities that just happen to be too expensive ever to get off the ground, which often goes hand in hand with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for participation in real communities of real people that exist right now, is simply one way of evading the difference.

The theoretical and theological grounding for this post will be very familiar to Unitarian Universalists who have studied James Luther Adams’s work on voluntary associations (see, e.g., his collections of essays Voluntary Associations, ed. Ronald Engels, 1986, and/or On Being Human Religiously, ed. Max Stackhouse, 1976). If you read much of Adams, you will discover that he believes voluntary associations — a.k.a. “communities” — are the major line of defense in preventing fascism. This point is also implicit in Greer’s post.

Yet while there’s nothing really new in this post, Greer sums the main point up nicely when he writes: “There’s a difference between fantasies of community that provides all the benefits with none of the costs, and the reality of community in which each benefit must be paid for by a corresponding commitment.” Go read the whole post — it’s worth it. Then come back here and ‘fess up — do you really invest your time, energy, enthusiasm, and yes money, into a real living organized community? (And let’s be honest, “my circle of friends” is not a community, it’s a circle of friends.)

Life or death

A recent post on Mike Durrall’s blog keeps haunting me. Mike quotes William Easum’s The Church Growth Handbook:

“Churches grow when they intentionally reach out to people instead of concentrating on institutional needs. Churches die when they concentrate on their own needs. This is the basic Law of Congregational Life.”

Churches die when they concentrate on their own needs — that about sums it up.

The next state of being

Carol came home, made a sandwich, told me about her day, then said, “Did you hear J. D. Salinger died?”

“Finally,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said.

Twenty years ago, Salinger was one of my literary idols, and news of his death would have sent me into a tizzy. But since then I’ve grown tired of the way Salinger courted publicity by claiming to be a recluse; any time his book sales began to decline, he sued someone to get back in the news. Twenty years ago, I wanted to know what happened to his fictional family, the Glasses, after the events in the story “Franny and Zooey.” But now I’m bored by the preciousness of his characters’ dialogue, bored by Salinger’s half-baked mysticism, bored by his stories in which nothing much happens.

A year or so ago, I met one of Salinger’s neighbors, and this person knew Salinger about as well as a long-time neighbor in a small town could know someone. This neighbor described a man who was deaf as a post, with a long-suffering wife; someone who was cranky and mean but worthy of his neighbor’s amused affection. He was just what you’d expect of an outsider who had moved to a backwater hill town in New England and had tried to imitate an eccentric New Englander; he was not some immortal writer, he was just an ordinary nutty old man.

“Now that he’s dead,” I said to Carol, “maybe this will put an end to all the speculation about what he’s been writing for the past forty years.”

Given that Salinger’s last published story, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” was unreadable crap, you can feel pretty sure he wrote nothing of value after that. But I don’t think Salinger will be allowed to rest in peace. His literary executors will be tempted to follow the path blazed by J. R. R. Tolkien’s son, and cobble together scraps of left-over writing into bad books that will sell tens of thousands of copies. Right now, I’m praying that someone will burn all Salinger’s unpublished manuscripts before they are inflicted on the public. Let the old crank die a decent death.

Significantly, Salinger’s literary agents released a statement in which they stated there won’t be a funeral or memorial service. There are those who want no final end to his life. There are those who hope to turn J. D. Salinger into a zombie, neither alive nor dead, putrescent but tottering forward into a century in which he does not belong.

Random memory

Somehow I had gotten left off the attendance list for study hall in my freshman year of high school. I took to leaving school during that hour, and slipping off to the public library. But by late winter, a small group of my friends had somehow gotten permission to attend study hall in an unused classroom up on the third floor of our building, with little or no adult supervision. I would slip in and hang out with them. G—— was creating a literary magazine he called “Zeitgeist.” B——, on the other hand, liked making illegal things. He brought in a hash pipe he had made from brass tubing, and from that I learned about taps and dies and how to use them. He brought in a ballpoint pen from which he had removed the spring and the ink reservoir, replacing them with gunpowder; the button at one end was linked to a firing pin inside the pen. B—— clipped the pen bomb to a paper airplane, which he flew out the window. The plane hit the brick wall across the way and the pen bomb exploded, leaving a shower of tiny bits of paper. The janitor walking three stories below looked up in surprise.

Mindlessness as a spiritual practice

I had enough of a cold today that I went around in a kind of haze all day. It’s not that I’m particularly ill; I just feel tired and slow. Did it rain today? I’m sure it did; I do remember having to turn on my windshield wipers as I drove to work; but I can’t remember if it rained later in the day.

But am I feeling hazy just because of the cold, or am I usually this oblivious to what’s going on in the wider world? The Buddhists talk about the spiritual practice of mindfulness; that has never been one of my spiritual practices. Instead of mindfulness, I try to practice mindlessness.

“Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents”

What are today’s household gods? A few days ago, the New York Slime published Gary Snyder’s paean to his Macintosh computer, titled “why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.” There are several good lines in the poem, and here are two of them:

Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;

And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates…

The Roman household gods, the Lares, were less brief and not made of plastic. Yet many of today’s households have small altars devoted to personal computers, we give them offerings of electricity and our attention, and many of us pay obeisance to them on a regular basis; so I’d say at the moment personal computers sometimes fill the role once filled by Lares.