The end of summer slow-downs

This is a busy time of year for many of us who serve congregations as paid staffers or lay leaders. The summer slow down is over, and it’s time to ramp up to the regular schedule. It can be a stressful time of year in congregational life.

And for the first time, I’m feeling impatient with the stress. Why do we even bother to slow down in the summer? I know I have pretty much the same religious needs all year round, and the summer slow-down doesn’t make sense to me.

Not that I don’t value seasonal changes in congregational life. I used to love summers in the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in because the senior minister would get other ministers to preach there while he was on vacation; we’d have several weeks of a rotating cast of characters preaching their best sermons from the past year. (Mind you, I have also been a part of a congregation where the summer services were led by ill-prepared and unskilled speakers; one member of that congregation called summer services “amateur hour”; but that’s a whole different blog post.)

But this idea of partially closing the congregation down in the summer no longer makes sense to me. Sometimes it seems like the only thing the summer slow-down accomplishes is increasing my stress and my workload in the month of August. I just want to put an end to summer slowdowns.

This is what you get when you raise your kids in a UU church

As a religious educator, when I watch kids grow up as Unitarian Universalists, I hope that when they become adults they will be thoughtful and critical of the world around them, they will value the arts, and they will have a sense of humor. Like this:

“A Song.” Written and performed by Eli Grober.

(Click through and leave your comments for Eli on YouTube.)

This year’s Berry Street lecture

The text of this year’s Berry Street lecture is now up on the Web. At the Berry Street lecture this past June, Rev. Dr. Deborah Pope-Lance spoke for over an hour to some six hundred Unitarian Universalists on the topic of clergy misconduct. I found it to be a riveting lecture in June, and it is well worth reading the text of the lecture, if for no other reason than the link to the Web page that discusses whom Carly Simon might have been thinking about when she wrote the song “You’re So Vain.”

After Deborah gave the lecture in June, I was one of the many people who crowded around her, wanting to shake her hand. She shook my hand, and all I could say was “Thank you.” I meant: Thank you for telling the truth of clergy misconduct, and for doing so with grace and humor, and in such a way that rather than provoking resistance perhaps we can deal productively with the aftereffects of misconduct. And now I would add: Thank you for pointing out the role of narcissism in clergy misconduct, and thank you for pointing out how “clergy misconduct is nested in an ecology that either promotes or inhibits breakdowns in the ministerial relationships.”

But enough of this. If you weren’t at the Berry Street lecture in June, now is your chance to go read this important document.

Earthquakes

My friend and fellow blogger E wrote a brief post on the magnitude 5.8 earthquake that hit Washington, D.C.: nothing was broken, the cats were scared, a few things fell. And as I started reading her post, sure enough Carol and felt a small magnitude 3.9 earthquake* here in San Mateo: there was a little bit of a noise, the house shook noticeably for about five seconds, and it was over. E ends her post by saying: “What a great reminder that we cannot change much of what happens, but we have a choice in how we behave in response.”

* Later downgraded to 3.6.

The choice for president in 2012

The presidential election campaign has already begun. Have you noticed? Mr. Crankypants has noticed. The Iowa straw polls — that’s where presidential hopefuls stuff scarecrows with straw and party hacks judge them on how scary they are (where “they” may refer to scarecrows, presidential hopefuls, or party hacks) — have already happened. New Hampshire is already trying to boost tourism in the state by creating a presidential-hopefuls petting zoo. And the presidential hopefuls are praying in public and raising the Christian banner, while at the same time refusing to join a church (Obama) or refusing to tithe (Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, and many others).

But as far as Mr. Crankypants is concerned, both major political parties are not worth endorsing. They are boring. Their candidates speak badly in public. Their candidates exhibit depressingly few signs of psychopathology. Therefore, just as in the last election, Mr. Crankypants will be endorsing a third party candidate: Cthulhu of the Great Old Ones Party.

The Great Old Ones Party has a refreshing party slogan: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” which is translated as “In his house at R’lyeh sleeping Cthulhu waits dreaming” — dreaming of how he will devour all humanity once he gets in office. The Great Old Ones Party has a refreshing economic proposal: after vigintillions of years, great Cthulhu will be set loose on the world, ravening with delight; this will put an end to economic woes by putting an end to the economy. And finally, the Great Old Ones Party has a refreshing proposal for ending the gridlock between Congress and the White House: Cthulhu will eat everyone in the House and Senate.

Now you may say that the Great Old Ones Party seems indistinguishable from the Republican and Democratic Parties. But Cthulhu is different. Where the Republicans merely claim they will make government smaller, Cthulhu will actually eat elected representatives, as well as ever federal employee he can grab with his writhing tentacles, thus literally making government smaller. Where the Democrats merely claim that they will tame Wall Street and Big Business, Cthulhu will actually do so, by eating bankers, billionaires, and plutocrats alive. And unlike the Republicans and Democrats, there is no hypocrisy about Cthulhu: he is evil, he admits it, and he glories in it.

Mr. Crankypants is sure you’ll agree. Support Cthulhu! Vote the Great Old Ones Party ticket in the 2012 election!

Fog

I had to drive up to San Francisco early this afternoon. When I left Palo Alto, it was sunny and warm. Heading north on highway 101, when I got to San Mateo I started seeing low clouds to the north. By the time I got to San Francisco, the sky was gray, and some people were driving with their headlights on.

In San Francisco, it was cloudy, damp, and down to 60 degrees, a good ten degrees cooler than it had been in Palo Alto, with a bracing northwest wind. You could sense the huge old mass of water in the Pacific Ocean just a few miles away.

At 4:30 I drove back to San Mateo along Interstate 280, around the Pacific Ocean side of San Bruno Mountain, and then up into the hills of the Coastal Range. Fingers of fog were creeping over the mountains, winding down through the tree-covered hills around Crystal Springs, but the sun evaporated them before they got very far.

When I arrived home in San Mateo, it was sunny and warm. But almost as soon as the sun set, the fog drifted over the Coastal Range, and became low clouds that now cover the sky above us. The temperature is down to 60 degrees, and outside it feels like it did in San Francisco this afternoon: cloudy, damp, and cool.

Reading notes

From the essay “It’s about Faith in Our Future: Star Trek Fandom as Cultural Religion” by Michael Jindra:

Most Americans think of “religion” as a system of private, conscious, and articulated beliefs, usually expressed in churches and formal creeds, and set off from the other “spheres” of life such as work, politics, or leisure. This view of religion, however, stems from the specifically Western process of societal “differentiation,” in which institutional religion was given a specific function. After the medieval era, when religious practice was intimately connected to everyday life, the practice of Christianity became “abstracted,” or disconnected from everyday life. As a result, we now tend to regard “religion” as something connected to institutions such as churches and denominations. Alternatively, we view it as something personal and private, a psychological aid that is only peripherally connected to a person’s life.

This view of religion severely limits our understanding of it….

Religion and Popular Culture in America, ed. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, rev. ed. 2005), p. 161.

Using a more expansive definition of religion, Jindra goes on to demonstrate how Star Trek fandom can be understood as a kind of humanist religion. He supports this in part by citing an interview with Rodenberry published in the March/April, 1991, issue of American Humanist, in which Rodenberry said he saw Star Trek as based on a humanist philosophy wherein human beings take control of their own destiny.

October2011.org?

Pallas just posted to the local minister’s email list telling us about October2011.org. At first glance, October2011.org looks like an antiwar demonstration that will take place in Washington, D.C., beginning on October 6. But unlike conventional demonstrations, they are modeling themselves after the protests of the Arab Spring. Here’s the pledge that they ask participants to sign:

I pledge that if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan on Thursday, October 6, 2011, as that occupation goes into its 11th year, I will commit to being in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., with others on that day or the days immediately following, for as long as I can, with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo, our Madison, Wisconsin, where we will NONVIOLENTLY resist the corporate machine by occupying Freedom Plaza to demand that America’s resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation…. [caps in original]

The focus of this demonstration will be civil disobedience. And it sounds like anyone who goes may risk arrest, based on what they say on in their FAQ:

There are important roles for those who choose not to risk arrest such as jail support, observation and other responsibilities during the occupation such as food, medical care and cleanup. That said, there are no guarantees because we cannot at this time predict the response by the DC police. Our experience in the past is that they give warnings prior to making arrests so that those who choose to do so may leave the action.

Speaking as a peacenik, I’m a little skeptical of this demonstration. Although the pledge quoted above seems to focus on an antiwar message, no Quaker or Brethren groups have yet signed on as sponsors; if this were a peace demonstration I’d expect to see at least one Quaker meeting as a sponsor. And when you read deeper in the Web site, this demonstration is not really an antiwar demonstration; peace is merely one of a list of fifteen issues. And this does not look like a broad-based coalition, but rather the usual narrow coalition of the usual leftist groups; as a leftist myself I can tell you that we are a vanishingly small segment of the U.S. population, so I’d expect a tiny turnout.

If you know more about October2011.org, I’d love to hear from you. Especially if you’re a peacenik, or have a religious perspective on this.

Directory errors

D——, another minister, pointed out that my entry in the UUA’s online directory appeared to have errors. I went and looked, and sure enough, the entry was filled with errors.

A moral of the story: If you’re a religious educator or minister, it’s probably worth checking your entry for errors, if you haven’t already done so.

Another moral of the story: This is a fine example of UUA budget cuts at work: funding drops; staff hours are cut; chaos starts creeping into the system.

(Thanks, D——, for pointing this out!)