While we were away at General Assembly back in June, some of the plants we had growing on our little balcony shriveled up for lack of regular water. So today we went to the little nursery down the street from our apartment and bought a couple of drought tolerant plants — a good-sized lavender, and a small aloe vera. At home, I dug up some garlic chives and put them in a large pot, repotted an aloe vera plant we already had, and planted some nasturtiums in the planter box. It is remarkable how good this made me feel: I find taking care of plants to be enormously satisfying. I am only a few generations removed from a time when most of my ancestors grew or raised or hunted or gathered a significant portion of their food. We did not evolve to be “knowledge workers.”
Whining and complaining post
I need to whine and complain about one of my professional associations, the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA). Not everyone likes to read whining, complaining posts; therefore I’m warning you right at the beginning so you can skip this post if you want.
UU kids and politics
I’m often impressed by Unitarian Universalist kids. They have this tendency to take our values seriously, and actually try to live out our values.
Here’s a video about the presidential election, from a second grader whose family is part of our church here in Palo Alto (her family gave me permission to share this on my blog). Whether or not you share her political opinions, she is articulate, personable, and fun — able to express her views politely and respectfully — just the way we want our UU kids to be. Nor is it surprising that a UU kid would get involved in politics at a young age — after all, we do encourage our kids to live out their values in the real world.
Really stupid UU joke
In response to this comment, here’s a really stupid UU joke:
Werner Heisenberg was a Seventh Day Adventist. Then he became a Unitarian Universalist. After becoming a Unitarian Universalist, he still went from door to door, but if you opened the door and asked what he was doing there, he was uncertain.
Three steps for getting rid of your rotten minister
Carol pointed me to a wonderful essay in The Lutheran e-newsletter titled “How to get rid of your rotten pastor.” The author gives six steps for getting rid of your rotten pastor.
For those of you who don’t have time to read the original article, I’ll condense it for you. Here are three steps for getting rid of your rotten minister:
(1) Make sure your rotten minister has two days off every week, a day for errands and a day for spiritual reflection and renewal. This will reduce the time your rotten minister is around to annoy you. Get them out of your hair even more by giving your rotten minister sabbatical time, and raising money to send your rotten minister to continuing education events and spiritual retreats. And make sure your rotten minister has a month of vacation and a month of study leave, and that they take it all. Oh, and if an emergency comes up on a day off or during vacation or study leave, make sure they make up the time off.
(2) Take over the tasks your rotten minister does badly. Of course ministers should excel at everything: administration, preaching, youth work, pastoral care, counseling, teaching, spiritual leadership, etc. But your rotten minister is probably rotten at one or more of these tasks. Organize volunteers to take over tasks your minister is rotten at: start a pastoral care team, find more adult religious education teachers, etc. Or if your congregation has enough money, hire staff to take over tasks your minister is rotten at: get a trained Director of Religious Education, hire a qualified business manager, etc. When your rotten minister can concentrate on the few things they actually do well, this will reduce your annoyance considerably.
(3) By now, your rotten minister should have free time to fill up. Encourage your rotten minister to spend more time reading theology, more time on reflection and spiritual practice. If they do more reading, reflection, and spiritual practice, maybe you might actually get a decent sermon out of your rotten minister once in a while, and maybe they might actually turn into a real spiritual leader. And your congregation will be getting great care from the pastoral care team, top-notch administration from the business manager, and so on.
This is how you, too, can get rid of your rotten minister. If you follow these steps, your annoyance will be reduced, you’ll soon be hearing better sermons, your congregation will be thriving, and best of all you won’t have to go through the time and expense of searching for a new minister.
Stupid geeky joke with a religious twist
One Sunday morning the Higgs Boson walked into a Catholic mass. The service is about to start, and the Higgs boson shouts, “Stop!”
The priest turns to look at him, and says, “Why should I stop?”
The Higgs boson says, “Because you can’t have mass without me.”
(This joke appears to have been told first by science comedian Brian Malow.)
Rain
I heard a funny sound on the roof a couple of minutes ago. “That sounds like rain,” I thought to myself. But it couldn’t be rain, because it doesn’t rain in the Bay area in the summer time. The sound on the roof continued: it really was rain.
I opened the door to our little balcony, and stuck my hand out. I had to feel the rain. A rain drop hit my hand, then another drop. There were low clouds overhead. A few more raindrops hit the balcony, and then it stopped.
Excessive cuteness
Litterboxcam has gone the way of all mortal things, and is no more. What to watch instead when one is trying to procrastinate? Carol pointed me to Puppy Live Cam: Holly’s Half Dozen. The best thing is it prevents me from procrastinating for too long: I can only stand watching it for about a minute before I have to go back to work or be overwhelmed by excessive cuteness.
The punk rock of choral music
Public radio station KALW ran a short piece recently on Sacred Harp music recently, calling it “the punk rock of choral music.” I was one of the people interviewed for the piece, and you can hear it or read it on KALW’s Web site here.
How to write quickly
According to biographer W. Jackson Bate, Dr. Samuel Johnson could write with extraordinary speed. Bate points to Johnson’s work for the London Magazine, when he was in his early thirties, and writing out Parliamentary debates as if he had recorded them verbatim, but based solely on second-hand and often fragmentary reports of the debates:
[Johnson] had always … been able to write rapidly. But now, as John Nichols said, “Three columns of the Magazine, in an hour, was no uncommon effort, which was faster than most persons could have transcribed that quantity.” Since a column there contains a little more than six hundred words, this would mean an average rate of at least eighteen hundred words an hour, or thirty a minute. On one day — “and that not a long on, beginning perhaps at noon, and ending early in the evening” — he wrote twenty columns (about twelve thousand words)…. —Samuel Johnson: A Biography, W. Jackson Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1998), pp. 205-206.
At my most productive, I have only been able to write about 2,500 words a day, which I found mentally exhausting; Johnson wrote nearly five times that amount, and what he wrote was of better quality than mine.
Bate goes on to quote a passage from James Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides, in which Johnson is quoted as saying:
BOSWELL. “We have all observed how one man dresses himself slowly and another fast.” JOHNSON. “Yes, sir, it is wonderful how much time some people will consume in dressing: taking up a thing and looking at it, and laying it down, and taking it up again. Everyone should get in the habit of doing it quickly. I would say to a young divine, ‘Here is your text; let me see how soon you can make a sermon.’ Then I’d say, ‘Let me see how much better you can make it.’…
Since I am in the process of writing a sermon (in which Dr. Johnson makes a guest appearance), I had better take his advice, and begin writing quickly.