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Thesis Time

2011-07-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

When a Masters program is four years long, at the beginning it feels eternal. This is my life, this is what I do. I go to school and that is that. There are blessings to that closed horizon. If you are supposed to live in the moment, you are living in a four-year moment that feels protected somehow. School is life simplified.

Last week I started my thesis and if I have been in Plato's cave, its been a full of fuzzy shadows. I have a strong set of archetypes that I associate with school and my school has not always lived up to the archetypes. However, thesis is another time for fulfilling another dream.

I can feel myself trying to live out this ideal of the student focused on one pursuit. Someone who walks into walls as she thinks. So far it is going well. I am a little behind the imposed schedule, but not worried about it. I am clearing the decks. Today I need to write a paper on Islam to clear more space in my brain. The paper finishes the only other class I am taking -- then i can really concentrate.

Old Time Religion

2011-06-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

I am taking a history of Christianity in the middle ages class:

“The truth is that there was a price to be paid for the Frankish experiment in creating a Christian social structure and culture. It gave to the western Church a wonderful sense of unity and coherence; it gave to western society great dynamism, which lies at the source of the European impact on the world. But it involved a degree of doctrinal, liturgical and, at bottom, cultural and racial intolerance, which made an ecumenical Church impossible. Unity in depth was bought at the expense of unity in breadth. The Christian penetration of every aspect of life in the West meant a highly organized, disciplined and particularist ecclesiastical structure, which could not afford to compromise with eastern deviations.”

A History of Christianity, Paul Johnson, page 185

Johnson tosses off the point that the West had a dynamism that the East and other cultures didn't have because of this depth of integration. Is that why? Isn't this a weird kind of Western chauvinism? We dominated because of this integration which also made us intolerant jerks, but that is the price of empire. I am not sure if this is true. There were probably other reasons that we came out on top -- accidental reasons.

If you have read Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, you know that there were reasons having to do with geography that favored the broad temperate areas of Europe. If one is looking only at the history of religion, then one thinks it is running the show but perhaps it is just riding on top of other forces that are so integral that we don't see them.

If one looks at all the insanely stupid things that went on, coming out of the West (crusades anyone!), one has to think that we must had some advantage to maintain 'the West' during that time. I am just not sure it was the integration of church with society. In fact, history shows that the West really took off when society began to be dis- integrated. It was then that we dominated, not before when the Ottoman empire was the West's equal.

It is difficult reading the history of politics and the monastic orders, it's so horrific. There are some alternative movements that ran through the history which give a little relief. There were the Third Force people, who were reasonable reformers, and Millenarianists, nutty but populist.

In fact Johnson uses the Third Force as a wonderful writer's device. He could have covered the Reformation and then the Counter Reformation and it would have read like a tennis match. By focusing a whole section on the Third Force you have a counterpoint to the warring. They are like the narrator in the Great Gadsby, concerned but trying not to get burned as they watch the passionate people do their destructive thing; but also hoping it will turn out well against all the evidence.

I shared with my son some of the Sebastian Castellio's quotes “I have carefully examined what a heretic means and I cannot make it mean more than this; a heretic is a man with whom you disagree.” “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to kill a man.” “Who would not think that Christ a moloch, or some such God, if he wanted men to be immolated to him, and burned alive?”. (318) My son put them on his face book page.

As a Unitarian Universalist I feel that the history of my movement is in the Third Force people. This is a bit of a stretch but the Millenarianists are probably a part of our movement also, represented by the Universalist side of UU. Forgive me Universalist ancestors, the Universalists were not concerned with the end of the world, or violent like the Millenarianists or even focused on a particular charismatic figure, but they were a populist movement. Like the Millenarianists they had their day and just petered out. Now our movement is known most for its Unitarian roots, because they left a body of writing through Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. At the turn of the century, and in the 20's there were millions of Universalists, but by the time they merged with the Unitarians in the 60's there was a remnant left. They are both honorable traditions -- I am glad to have both of them backing me up. If I seem a little nervous it's because the Middle Ages were an Age and neither the Third Force or the Millenarianists prevailed during that long stretch of time.

Mytheology

2011-06-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

I have been putting off writing a paper. In blog land that must be a pretty common statement (Probably even common in tweet-ville too).

Today I make the first steps toward paper generation. I begin with the fingers rather than the brain. 'Ok, start OpenOffice Writer, name the new file'. Done--then I go do something else.

This paper is my final personal theology paper for my MDiv program. It should be freighted with significance, but by now I am just weary and beginning to write perfunctory papers. I am at least pleased that this final one is for a teacher who cares.

When I come back I can't find it, and have a moment of 'where did it go?' confusion. Then I see it. I named it My Theology, or as it shows mytheology. Hmmm, nice. I have invented a new word that is so different from what I originally wrote that it is unrecognizable. It seems to mean something special in its new incarnation.

Signs sometimes appear where least expected.

UU community of scholars

2010-12-27T11:30:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I long for a UU community of scholars. Perhaps it is time to seek out other UU's on some issues.

I am writing a paper on theological reflection. I've enjoyed the class and found some resources on the UU website that I shared with my class. There is a wonderful list of names for God that came out of the UU hymnbook. Every time I share that list, people, my people, the hungry spiritual skeptics, and some others, the non-skeptics who want to stretch out of the limiting box of names for God; jump up and shout, draw, sing and dance. It really is a wonderful list.

However the class on theological reflection makes me nervous about my own tradition. I love going deeper and digging into a tradition to find those precious theological insights. What could be better for a theology nerd? I have discovered Meister Eckhart, Rebecca Parker and Sallie McFague through my classes. All of these theologians are Christian although all three are pioneers and occasionally wanderers around the edges of the faith.

However, it reminds me of the no man's land of Unitarian Universalism. We don't have a central scripture or a place to dig deeper. We have permission to dig anywhere. We see the wisdom in all the worlds wisdom traditions, including earth based and humanism, plus our own experience, plus prophetic men and women. It brings to mind a bunch of people out there digging digging, one under a cliff, and one on top of it, one out on a plain, another by the sea. Perhaps we can shout our insights at each other and hope the wind doesn't carry it away.

I know this isn't the final answer (but I do love extending a metaphor :)) however if I was taking UU theological reflection at a UU university, perhaps I would have some strategies taught me that would help me do this in community. One of them is the names for God -- but then what does one do after the names for God. How to go deeper in community?

Voice Lesson

2010-11-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

Here is what I wrote after my first voice lesson this summer:

Today I had my first voice lesson.

My teacher is a young woman who teaches music to children at my church. Amanda is fairly adorable and I've always liked her.  Because she is so accomplished I forget how young she is; the age of my own children. When I came to her apartment for the lesson I said I was a neophyte singer. She looked at me funny and then said, "I don't know what that is." Oops. I get into trouble that way fairly frequently. Probably more often then I know.  I told her neophyte means beginner.

However, once she started the lesson I realized she was no neophyte.

She said "the energy needs to be high, come through you and out the top." I didn't know what she was talking about really, and yet I did. Singing is an expression of energy and it has to go somewhere. she explained that she likes to talk in terms of energy because it works, and the voice will follow the mind.

It wasn't exactly easy to sing in front of her but I had decided not to worry and just allow myself to be taught.  After all, I didn't want her to feel that she wasn't needed. She didn't waste time looking crestfallen, she had just cured her last student of tone deafness. Amanda told me, 'the second word is too glottle." Now it was my turn not to know what someone was talking about!

In spite of my determination to NOT be embarrassed, I sometimes felt very exposed. Singing is an extroverted act. In fact Amanda wants me to stand straight and breath and be, well, loud. Amanda reminds me of the nurse that sees you naked. You think 'I'm fat', the nurse thinks, 'hmm, i need to get her blood pressure.' and could care less that you are naked.

Still being a loud singer is a novel energizing experience.  Singing IS energy, and you can't feel bad while pushing melody and words up and out the top. Even when it sounds pretty terrible your body is breathing in such a lovely way.

Amanda noticed right away that I had a dog trot of a range. Everything I sang I brought down to my comfortable Alto range. I just naturally transposed to the lower octave. She gave me a shrewd look with her big brown eyes. 'Lets get you singing higher'. Well she did get me singing higher. It felt great. It didn't even sound so bad, at least not all of the time.

I can't wait till my next lesson, I went home...singing!

Ephrem the Syriac

2010-08-22T18:16:00.000-07:00

Ephrem the Syriac was a saint in the remote eastern edge of the Roman Empire in the fourth-century. And yet, with modern translations, his words are often timeless. This morning in my Unitarian Universalist church, a tradition that was formed by American idealism and Enlightenment philosophy many centuries after the time of Ephrem, I lit our worship candle to these words of his from Hymns on Paradise:

Learn too from the fire
how the air's breath is all-nourishing;
if fire is confined
in a place without air,
its flame starts to flicker
as it gasps for breath.
Who has ever beheld
a mother give suck
with her whole being to everything?
Upon her hangs the whole universe,
while she depends on the One
who is that Power which nourishes all. (Brock, Paradise, 141)

Ephrem was in love with Christ but also in love with the myriad ways he could find to describe God. In the above passage, he cleverly compares a candle going out, to a mother suckling her child. The mother is both a simple metaphor of God taking care of us, but also she hints at Mary, at mother church and the air we need to breath. The Baby is us, but also Jesus and also 'everything' in our dependent universe and the flame. While Ephrem creates the jump from fire to mother, he is using feminine imagery in an unselfconscious way that describes our usually powerful, male, father God as a nursing mother. If we asked Ephrem about it, he would probably answer with the fourth-century equivalent of 'so what is the problem with that?' If we tried to do this ourselves, with our centuries of male tradition, it might look a little forced.

All we can do is say thanks Ephrem for showing us how it is done.

Hard Writing Choices

2010-08-01T10:26:00.000-07:00

My "Hard Choices" post was printed in the Oregonian as a letter to the editor. I felt good about that. But I also felt dissatisfied even as I sent it off.

The piece is so glib and logical. I am generally afraid, in the public sphere, to offend. I DO believe in all working together. I do believe that we don't make hard choices as a people. We need to. I don't see the point in being negative about groups of people and so I don't do that. That particular set of beliefs pushes me toward a feel good, logical kind of essay. I wonder if it has other effects on me--more than my writing style.

I failed to communicate my key insight that these choices cause pain.

There is pain in these choices that we shouldn't cover up with other emotions.

I am logical, and ironically, logic moves me toward the pain of these decisions. If you cut schools you have beautiful young people who are abused, ignored, tragically undeveloped. They could become so much. To me that is painful.

Really, I think it's the emotionally driven who trick themselves out of feeling it. They can dive into another emotion that masks it. Or, stop themselves in some personal pain that distracts them from their community's pain. Or just not be logical about it and come to some other conclusion (teachers are the problem).

Hard Choices

2010-07-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

This morning the editorial headline read in part, "Oregon must spend the next year making hard choices about schools, services."

The phrase 'hard choices' brings up an image of Dad wagging his finger at a child who has run up a credit card bill. Time to stop buying drinks in bars, sell the convertible and get a bus pass, and maybe work part-time until you get it taken care of. It implies a dissolute past and a brighter more sensible future.

But Oregon isn't make hard choices, it's making easy choices. The easiest thing to do is to cut off the poor, elderly and the young.

Got a school funding problem? Shave off some days of school! That's not a hard choice. It is the easiest and about the only choice schools have now. It's also more like running up a credit card bill, it gives us a poorer future by failing to prepare our future citizens.

No the hard choice would involve all of us. The legislature would have to buck special interests to bring costs in line. Voters would have to stop voting their fears and start looking at the cost of ballot measures.

And harder yet, in these cranky times, we need to make the hard choice of working and sacrificing together for the future of our state.

God the Mother

2010-07-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

I recently took a class at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral from Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossen. It was called "Redeeming Christian Language" and I wrote a paper on it and received a Biblical credit for it. My program requires a lot of Bible based classes and these two are master teachers. I realize when I was writing the paper, which I wrote on the term "God the Father", that I didn't quite buy Borg and Crossan's argument. I felt that they wanted everything both ways. They wanted the comfort of the old language but with transplanted understanding. In one section of my paper, I was 'allowed' to critique the class using any theological reason I wanted and so I chose feminist theology. Ah, they stiffen my spine!

John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg are two compassionate and thoughtful Biblical scholars who are trying to reclaim Biblical words that have become offensive or problematic over time. It's a daunting task and one that can only be partially accomplished by exegesis (Biblical scholarship). The deconstruction of God the Father is a case in point. Dominic Crossan does an exegesis which shows that the metaphor of God the Father can be thought of as God the Householder, or more concisely, God the Head of Household. Crossan also shows that God as the head of a large household is concerned with justice. God as Householder equates to God being against “GROSS INEQUALITY in distribution of either poverty or wealth” (Crossan). It's a beautiful idea that may reclaim Christianity, but it doesn't entirely reclaim the phrase, God the Father. Why is that?

Let's first look at the leap that Crossan made from his exegesis of God the Father to God the Householder. He thinks it's deplorable, but just part of the ancient mindset, that Scriptures use a male pronoun. Crossan is interested in the family unit in Ancient Israel and he points out how central it is to understanding God in the Torah. Because the description of God as Father is about his position in a household, God the Father can be thought of as 'God the Head of the Household'. The logic here is fairly solid. Crossan is assuming that the God title was mostly about the function of the Father and not his identity as a man.

This is a leap conceptually. One could more easily use a title like Head Accountant, to transfer functions without considering gender. In the Ancient Near East both in the Israel of Exodus and the Greco-Roman Diaspora world of the Gospel of Luke, the role of male or female head of household was not interchangeable and certainly the word for Father was never confused with Mother. The Betab is translated as “Father's House” and within that house all property is transferred via the male line. A daughter is married out of the family and sons stay in it. An older wife may have had status, but she wasn't a father and was not able to perform all the functions of the 'head of household' even though she may have had personal authority. In the Ancient Near East there was no confusing the roles of mother and father.

Crossan tried to finesse this issue by joking that “everyone knows who is really in charge”. Ouch! It is true that the world has seen many a powerful woman who managed to use her relationships, fertility or personal strength to be the one in control. However, this kind of power was not institutionalized and was often apocryphal. At the death of any woman within the Betab, or father's house, there may have been heartbreak, but there wasn't the economic upheaval that could come at the death of the Patriarch.

Crossan is saying God's radical concern for the people trumps the crude inter-family oppression of this older family structure that included slavery, oppression of women, and other poor practices.

Therefore let's accept the logic so that we can move on to the second point of this essay. After all, it is a generous thought that God the Father, should be thought of as Head of Household and that this Householder would be concerned with the health, economically, and in all other Fatherly and Motherly ways, with the health of the world. This world needs such a compassionate and yet practical God.

Point two is that Crossan's logic relies on Christian woman seeing the words “God the Father” and then making the translation in their head's, “this metaphor includes me -- because it means head of household, and I can be a head of household, (even though those women of Ancient Israel couldn't be)”.

Feminist theologians have denied the idea of accommodating exclusively male language around God in this way. It isn't because God the Father can't have good qualities. God as Father can draw on the best of fatherly associations. When God is described as father, this can be the father who will love, care, and protect you. As Elizabeth Johnson writes:

The difficulty does not lie in the fact that male metaphors are used, for men too are made in the image of God and may suitably serve as finite beginning points for reference to God. Rather, the problem consists in that these male terms are used exclusively, literally and patriarchally.

Johnson continues that it isn't enough to neutralize metaphors for God. The word God itself which is often seen as neutral is “a term long associated with the patriarchal ordering of the world...” (44). According to Johnson's standards, using God the Father with a mental, internal translation is not going to 'take back' the word. What would take it back, is to continue to use God the Father, but also to use God the Mother at least as often, and as prominently, within Christian liturgy as God the Father.

This would be about, according to Johnson:

Reorienting the imagination at a basic level, this usage challenges the idolatry of maleness in classic language about God, thereby making it possible the rediscovery of divine mystery, and points to recovery of the dignity of women created in the image of God.

Is there more to recovering this word than using the female image? Would the almost impossible task of bringing female metaphor into the Christian Church in a non-token way satisfy me and other feminist women?

I am not sure it would because there still remains the problem of history. Crossan has gone back in time to recover the original meaning of God the Father. There is much healing in doing so. But frankly, not enough healing to cover the centuries of oppression that is part of the entire Biblical journey.

One of the reasons we flinch at the words is because they represent thousands of years of being excluded. Perhaps the original meaning was something benign, no, better than benign, they meant a Fatherly God who took care of His people. At the time that was the best one could expect, and in fact a Mother metaphor would not have been possible in that culture. It doesn't really make sense to hold a grudge against ancient peoples or expect any redress. Sensible thoughts like these however, don't always work, and at the very least don't make one fond of the term God the Father. History has left many women with a permanent aversion that can't go away with the knowledge of original intent.

We don't live in ancient times. Now, women can expect to be treated with dignity and respect. Marcus Borg writes “...this is not simply a matter of linguistic gender equality (important as that is), for these images affect the psyches of both men and women and shape attitudes toward society and nature.” It is time for Christianity to be generous and move toward a vision of God that gives everyone dignity.

And perhaps we women should also get a heartfelt apology.

Visions

2010-04-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

In almost every class we are asked to do what Marylhurst calls a Hermeneutic, or a direct response to the material. It always catches me off guard, and busy, and grumpy and not feeling like having a 'direct response to the material'.

Every once in while I do something that I like. Here is a poem that is a 'direct response' to all the shenanigans in Genesis.

Visions

Visions are not what they used to be,
God doesn’t easily walk in gardens.
Adam lives alone and is getting unemployment.
Lambs don’t acquire spots from the clever application of colored rods.

Some things do remain the same,
Rape is still timeless and still about property.

But visions don’t care about changing times, they pulse through in any way they can.

They come to me over radios spewing junk
and then somehow I hit the right band and the Universe speaks.

Power-lines snake past me in my dreams,
They course with life force from some Hooverish source of infinity.

Once I even saw a garden in my mind,
but in the lovely, leafy stillness there also came an earth-moving, scraping, killing machine.
It’s not what you think.
The dozer was telling me
I had a choice in how I see.

I want my visions to spring wet and green from creation like a Hallmark theme -
And God saw that it was Good.
Or, as in one hopeful translation
God saw that it was Beautiful.

Instead they come as they will, using whatever symbol is in the mind’s junk drawer
To tell us we have the power,
if only we would use it,
if only we would see.

White Culture I

2010-04-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

I tend to keep my head low when it comes to discussing race. After all what do I know about it? I do know my own culture though -- white culture.

I have had several conversion style revelations around race and racism lately.

My first was a few years ago. My children were going to a multicultural school and it was such a different experience than I had growing up. I was fascinated by how comfortable my sons were negotiating race. They noticed race, talked about it, but as an everyday occurrence and a part of that person's identity. It wasn't always completely politically correct what they said, but it had no heat. There was a comfort for them of the everyday. This guy was Asian, this girl was Russian and that meant they had to negotiate with their parents in a certain way. No big deal.

In fact I developed this theory that race was over. I thought, "what is all the fuss about race, it's over, the kids know what to do". They get race and gayness and all of that and its over, or at least just about over; all that uncomfortableness and the bad feelings, all of that. I even developed a theory that 'especially black was over' since there were so many different races now that they didn't have that duality relationship anymore with America. There was one of those tempest-in-a-teapot controversies going on in the newspaper. One person had charged racism. A white person had written back saying, 'why do you think that is racism? Maybe it was just grumpiness.' I was frankly inclined to agree with the white person. Arghh! Just writing these things embarrasses me quite a lot, but this is what I thought.

It was at the unlikely location of my practically-all-white church that I was disabused of my happy face racial consciousness. We were doing a service on Martin Luther King and one of the older members stood up and witnessed to an event that she still remembered. She was a woman in her 80's and she was visiting Washington DC in the war years. She got on a bus and watched a group of young black people get kicked of the bus because they were black. It had been so unfair that she had never forgotten.

Listening, I felt conversion sweep over me. Its a prickly feeling that I get sometimes, when I realize something in my body. I couldn't be comfortable any more and think what I had thought before. My cheeks even pinked at my own ignorance.

Of course race isn't over! This woman had watched the most blatant institutional racism perpetuated in her own lifetime! People remember, they tell stories! A young child born today can have a great-grandparent who had this happen to them! Memories, even other people's memories, can hold on to that feeling of aggrievement and shame. It isn't over until its completely over, and all of the memories are so old that they are no longer transmitted.

I was still pretty ignorant about how much racism a person of color encounters in their daily life, but at least I was not being 'Sunny Jim' optimistic. I now didn't automatically dismiss a charge of racism when I read it in the paper. I knew racism was an evil with a long memory and I should respect its staying power and its impact on those who experience it.

Now There is a Myth

2010-02-09T10:12:00.000-08:00

I went to a wonderful lecture last night with the Portland Enneagram Society about brain science and the Enneagram. The woman who gave the lecture was a One on the Enneagram so of course she did a good job with lots of detail. I need to make very clear that the following is NOT about the quality of the lecture. It was great.

But, when she started the lecture she got my ministerial juices going because she shared a quote about babies, about how they are born 'perfect' and then we screw them up!

Babies are born perfect and then we screw them up! What a perfect myth for this society in the 21st century on Earth in the US of A. It's got everything we value.

Lets start with the baby. It's young, so automatically that is good. It has no experience and so it is more perfect than someone who has it.

When it goes into relationship with its family and society it is automatically less perfect. Think about that one. Our relationships make us less perfect! Would we be more perfect alone then -- growing up all by oneself or with other perfect companions who would somehow leave us without mark. The whole vision seems somehow lonely and bionic -- a futuristic, spiritual utopia without suffering. Later in the lecture we learn, that no, actually, we need to attune with mother, or else we do not grow up recognizably human.

Well that is more like it.

I am as individualistic as the next person but I find myself growning tired of it. I do believe we have gone about as far as we can go down the road of being 'perfect'ly separate. We drive around alone in our cars, live in large houses with lots of unused space, buy things to prove and improve our individual lives. Carp about our families and the weird things they did to us. I do all that and more.

I am going to go visit my mother for lunch today. My mother doesn't ask much of me. I think I know some of the reasons; her mother could be pretty invasive. I wish she asked more of me, but lately I have been just calling her up to talk. I want to stop fighting the individuation wars of my youth. I am more perfect than a baby, lovely and intent as a baby can be. My mother is more perfect too.

I know a Goddess when I see one

2009-11-25T21:53:00.000-08:00

I liked the Tri-met MAX story with just enough villainy to make one pay attention and hiss, but no real tragedy. A man got ready to get off the light-rail train in Portland, and his three-year-old ran ahead. Something happened and the door closed between them. He pounded on the door. His toddler was already crying on the platform. A woman on the other side pounded on the door. Everyone was in an uproar. The train operator didn't hear, or didn't care, and the train pulled away. The frantic father waited for the next stop, got off, and took the next train back. It took him seven minutes. No parent can read that story without shuddering. A three year old! But when he got to the platform where he had left his son, a nice, young woman was waiting there with his little boy.

Here she is! The father was so distraught he didn't get her name. But then the newspaper tracked her down and printed her picture. What a perfect person to be on the platform for a little, lost boy! I mean, I take MAX sometimes; and the platforms are often full of people who look like they might kill you.

That is an exaggeration, the people are usually fine, but they don't look like this pretty, kind girl. It just nice to know they are still out there -- the good person who has to step up and comfort a toddler for ten minutes, missing their own appointment, or class.

There was more. The operator of the train said he didn't hear the father. But when they checked out the intercom system it seemed to be working fine. I am sure there will be more. But I don't need to hear the rest of it, because the best part was the little Madonna on the platform.

All about Bultmann

2009-10-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

I am taking a Gospel class and am amused by how often Jesus' identity is raised in the Gospels. "who do they say that I am?" is a typical question.

I have another identity mystery to solve however. Who is this Bultmann? As I do research on the Gospel John I keep running into his name. He seems to be a mythic figure to all the towering giants of exegesis. It’s hilarious in a way, I almost have to do research on the researcher. In John Ashton’s book, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, (boy is that misnamed) which left me cross-eyed and belligerent because of its insider, referential impenetrability (perhaps I should just say it’s a scholarly work), he treats Bultmann as a God.

And of course the name BULTMANN has the heavy sound of German authority; if God's name wasn't Yahweh it might just be Bultmann.

Ashton actually treats Bultmann as more of an idol than a God, because he is always trying to refute him. I put it down to an obsession by one exegete to an older, authority figure. Perhaps Bultmann was Ashton’s old professor, he has to be respectful while he undermines his pet theories.

But then I find in Raymond Brown (who himself is a towering something or other) this little bon mot "I do not think that the evangelist was either anti-sacramental (in a Bultmannian sense) or anti-ecclesiastic." Raymond Brown is more accessible than Ashton is, although not much. I cannot fathom the above quoted sentence though, and cannot imagine ever writing anything where I used the Biblical scholar Bultmann as an adjective.

Oh, then Malina and Rohrbach, who are very modern and try and be understandable, mention Bultmann as if everyone knows who he is and what he stands for.

They seem so happy and oblivious these Biblical scholars. It’s such a tempest in a teapot sort of environment where everyone knows everyone. These scholars of the Bible - not so long ago all male - obviously intelligent - very detail-oriented - learned - unemotional tinkerer’s of the Gospels. It’s as if the Gospels were car engines and they just have to have a go at them.

***

After writing a mild screed about Bultmann above, I felt a little guilty so I looked him up. He is all that I said, but also someone I think I might have agreed with. Wikipedia says "He carried form-criticism so far as to call the historical value of the gospels into serious question. Some scholars criticized Bultmann and other critics for excessive skepticism regarding the historical reliability of the gospel narratives." Interesting, he was really saying that the Gospels should be looked at in a different way -- actually sounds like he came to the post -modern conclusion that you cannot just take the Bible back and back until you finally have the truth of it, you need another paradigm. He was influence by Kierkegaard more than most people are now. His movement away from exegesis had a different flavor than it would have if he was writing today.

But Bultmann, it looks like you were all right, in a Bultmannian sense that is.

The Crab

2009-10-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

My friend and I were talking about making important decisions and I said "sometimes I can't look right at it, it has to come at me sideways like a crab."

She said "oh it makes you cranky."

"No it has to come in through my peripheral vision."

We went back and forth until we understood each other, but the crab was not her favorite metaphor.

But I like the idea of the crab.

If your unconscious is going to hoard something and not let you see it, its probably not a puppy or a kitten of an idea. Its going to be more like a crab.

Crabs are hard, unlovely, but undeniably real. And, it could be worse. I am not even talking snakes and spiders here. Surely those are in my unconscious too, but I am happy to leave them there.

But crabs walk sideways moving faster than you would think, you can imagine them getting away from your hoarding unconscious onto that beach that is the place of between, of productivity and possible danger. Crabs are used to moving from one medium to another, sometimes living in the water, and sometimes venturing onto land. They are only going to come out at special times when they think they can do it safely.

If it happens that you catch something out of the corner of your eye and turn your head fast, you might just see a crab scuttle away because he is as scared of you as you are of him. But maybe a little bit curious too. So he might pause before slipping away in that hole in the rock and look right at your with his beady eye.

You will know that you have seen something that is usually hidden. And you should pay attention.

Conversion

2009-08-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

It has a ka-chunk feeling.

It's that feeling of satisfaction when a fact slips into place and suddenly you understood something that you didn't understand before. As a kid I remember having that feeling at school. Ka-chunk and suddenly I would understand what the x and y axis meant or get an image of water moving through the hydrologic cycle.

As I've gotten older I've noticed a similar feeling around a different kind of knowledge. I think of it as Knowing with a capital K. Its when my heart catches up with my head and I KNOW something. I usually already knew it with my head, perhaps for years. I had that feeling of Knowing when I drove by the low-income apartments on Sandy Blvd. one morning just as the school buses pulled in and watched as this huge horde of kids pile into the buses. I had always known that a lot of Parkrose students lived in apartments. But here they all were and so many of them! I could never look at the statistics the same way again. I had seen them and they now meant something to me.

I thought of that when I watched a clip of Wendell Potter being interviewed by Bill Moyer. Potter is an insurance executive who quit his job, and now works to expose how the insurance industry is trying to derail health-care reform. It's as good as my friend said it was, but I was fascinated by Potter's description of why he quit his job.

He had been visiting his family in Kentucky when he heard about a health fair at the county fair grounds. He was curious about it and drove over to check it out. What he saw appalled him. People in long lines, waiting for a free medical check up. Doctors doing procedures in horse stalls. He took pictures and showed them on air: hundreds of people waiting in line in the rain. He told Moyer, "I couldn't believe all the people." Moyers asks him "well didn't you know the statistics already." Potter answers "well I did, but this made it real, some of these people I probably grew up with." Potter didn't quit his job immediately but he finally did. The two realities of his high paying job and the people in the rain couldn't co-exist.

Potter had a conversion experience! We tend to think of conversion as only pertaining to religion. But Potter went through a rapid realignment of his heart, mind and soul that was as profound as the classic religious conversion. He looked out at people standing in the rain and felt that ka-chunk of real feeling. We can know something intellectually for a long time, but now and again we get the privilege of KNOWING it.

If you are interested in watching the video, Google Moyer Wendell Potter or try the link below:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07312009/watch.html

Polar Bear Psalm

2009-07-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

More school projects. I wrote some Psalms for my Psalm class and here is my polar bear psalm. Its a lament, which a very dramatic form that seems to me fits with the idea of a species dying out. Be prepared though, to be sad:

Psalm of the Polar Bear -- A Lament

I know you Lord as I know the ice -
It’s crusty thickness where I hide and wait is a testament to Your goodness

I know you Lord as I hunt through the icy depths
Your Arctic waters brings me the fat seal pup and rich narwhale meat

Oh God, who thickens the ice
Why do I hear the mumble and groan of cracking ice and the singing sound of melt water?

Oh God, who brings the cold,
every day I wake to a warm southern breeze - sweet smelling and false;
I lift up my nose and long for the hard white smell of the cold north wind.

But you, oh Lord, are the keeper of the ice,
You have cared for my people and our fierce, lonely hunt.

You, oh Lord, are the keeper of the ocean,
You have filled it with seal and salmon, whale and walrus.

You have given us immense strength, oh Lord, to swim tens of miles to the summer ice.
You have given us unerring smell, oh Lord, to find the aglus where the seals come to breath.
You have given us stillness, oh Lord, to wait by the aglus for the sweetest of seal prey.
You have given us sharp tooth and claw to grab and crunch the swift and wily walrus.
You have made us fat and strong, fierce and persistent and we adore you with our every stalking move.

Why then oh Lord do we swim out from land and never find the strong carriage of an icy ledge,

Where are you Lord as our limbs ache and tremble, and our power gives out in a limitless, edgeless ocean?

Why do we grow thin on poor meals of skinny birds and hard-caught caribou without finding the succulent seals we need to fatten and grow our children.

Where are you Lord as the sweet tender wind flows out of the Southern lands destroying your faithful hunters?

How should we live

2009-07-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

The following is a post I made for my environmental religion class. It's a little rough around the edges, but I didn't want to lose it so here it is:

I have a Catholic background and from there became a Unitarian Universalist. I have no experience with the end times. I don't like to judge other's religious expression but I am not impressed by that branch of theology. There is something spooky about it to me. There is this emphasis on the powerlessness of the individual and the irrationality and powerfulness of the savior. Your role as an individual is to be in with the powerful one. Saving means believing, and the ethical side of religion is undeveloped. The end-times theology is something both Berrys (Wendell and Thomas) have regretted because it takes the focus off of the sacred material world and puts it onto heaven.

However, oddly, I've always been attracted to end of the world stories in literature. I have a taste for science fiction and one of my guilty pleasures are stories about comets hitting the earth, and I will watch some pretty bad disaster movies! (If anyone has times for a beautiful end of the world novel, Kevin Brockmeier, "The Brief History of the Dead" is NOT a guilty pleasure but a treasure of a novel.) When I was a child I used to fantasize about being in a world without people, just walking around the beautiful Earth playing with the animals. I have no idea what that means about me. I think it might just mean that I was a middle child in a big family! I told my older brother about this old fantasy of mine and he just laughed and laughed.

Its hard to take in how vulnerable we are, we protect against it. We have a filter that tells us the past dictates the future. But anyone who has had an important person in their life die unexpectedly knows that is just a filter, things change sometimes in the wink of an eye. So will it be a comet that gets us or our terrible stewardship of the Earth? They have very different theological meanings. The comet would be entirely natural, and would mean that all our struggles were pretty pointless unless some remnant survived and then came back again (science fiction language :) ). I have a big picture theology and even I can't get much meaning out of human flowering on Earth only to be taken out by a natural cosmological event.

Having Global warming go too far has another meaning entirely. Wendell Berry says being "fallen creaters in a fallen world can only instruct us painfully in division and disintegration" . I have always regarded my Apocalyptic interests as some private expression of my psyche. The fact of it is almost entertaining in a generally positive and forward thinking person like myself. This whole global warming crisis has pushed me toward darker thoughts than usual. Some think that religion is our human response to the idea of death, that we have these interesting complex identities, that feel so real and important packed into a biological package that dies. But one of the comforts has always been that the world continues on without us. Many people believe either in an after life or reincarnation. So far my response to these dark thoughts have been to realize that I can only do what humans do. I can change my behavior a little, I can preach about this, I can maintain my hope. I don't even want to be an activist about it -- although I end up doing so out of interest and enthusiasm, I really don't think that for me activism is a response to the Apocalyptic challenge but comes more from the gut, not my heart. I think Berry is on the right track, the response to something so large is to grow a garden, to be more human, to make more connections, to be more open to friends and family.

Is it God or is it Nature?

2009-03-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

The experience of Nature is for many people the first memory they have of mystical union. A religious person who’s beliefs are under stress may look at Nature and say ‘Whatever else I believe, I know this is holy.’ In my Marylhurst Cohort, the diverse wonderful bunch of people I am taking classes with, we agree that Nature is holy. It’s a touchstone around which we gather, using its symbols to create unity between us.

However, if we dug a little deeper, if we wanted to discover our disunity instead of celebrating our unity, we might find that we don’t entirely agree about Nature. For some of us Nature may only be God’s handiwork. It is beautiful because God made it and it shows the world of men and women that God is good and great. Nature is holy because it is made by God. For others Nature contains some part of God. If we strip away the noise of impermanent things we will hear, as St Augustine says, "the very Self which in these things we love". I can imagine this as that deepest vibration within the world’s atoms. In this view, God is in nature not just the creator of nature. For some people this God in the world is explanation enough. God is as great as Nature because God is Nature, no more but no less. For others God is both in the world and also exists as some larger animation or principle. St. Augustine believed this and later in his poem asked his readers to imagine going "beyond ourselves to attain a flash of that eternal wisdom which abides above all things".

God’s relationship to Nature has acquired greater interest in the last fifty years with the rise of post-modern science. Post-modern science allows for mysticism in a way that Cartesian science did not. Post-modern physics has some theories about matter that almost require a mystical intuition to truly understand. People who have rejected religion often return to mysticism rather than to God. Sometimes that movement toward mysticism will begin a journey toward God. However, whether the journey toward mysticism moves one toward God it will very often lead back toward those original feelings about Nature.

In my tradition, Unitarian Universalism, we also gather around symbols and language of Nature in the way my Marylhurst cohort does. Nature is a ‘safe’ place for the modern skeptic to begin to reacquaint with the Holy and to rise above sectarian differences. The questions about the connection between Nature, Mysticism and God break out anew as a skeptic attempts to deepen his or her religious practice.

The other reason reason to look at God in Nature is our ecological crisis. Issues around God and Nature attract an energy and urgency they didn’t when our planet was not in mortal danger. The ecological crisis is becoming apocryphal and our duty and relation to the earth is not just an abstruse argument among theologians but is a common ethical discussion between people in their homes, in our new President’s speeches, in church, and on the letters-to-the-editor page.

Sallie McFague, in The Body of God, discusses the theological underpinnings of an ecological theology. She begins with the idea of embodiment. With all caveats in place, she asks us to consider a model of God as a body, and that body is our Universe.

McFague is a Christian and she makes, not such a great leap, and enlarges yet again who belongs inside the circle of ‘reconstituted Israel’. In 80AD Luke wrote a Gospel that enlarged the idea of who qualified for inclusion in God’s covenant with Abraham. The Good Samaritan is one example of what McFague calls "one of the central features of Jesus’ ministry--his destablizing parables that side with the outcast". McFague thinks it is time to enlarge that sense again and bring our suffering planet in "Indeed we might see nature in our time as the new poor of Jesus’ parables".

Although McFague does not mention my favorite parable, the Good Samaritan, it’s not hard to imagine that she would be sympathetic to an argument that compared the beaten man to our poor damaged earth, and the Good Samaritan as anyone moved by pity and love to step in and restore it.

(this is an extract from one of my academic papers. Its one of the good bits, where i got to stretch myself out a little :) ! )

Cyborg Skiers

2009-03-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

I was getting restless. My husband has been on an inhuman work schedule and I have been spending all my time in God country. I was beginning to feel like I needed to spend at least a little time in God's actual country.

I looked around for some playmates and signed up for a day ski with a local cross country ski club. I had been on their trips before, and they were decent people who generally knew how to ski. The weather looked good. I should have realized my folly when the guy organizing it said 'we are going 14 miles, have you ever skied fourteen miles?' Well I didn't really know if I had, but I said yes I had.

When I showed up at the car-pool location I didn't sense anything different. Middle-aged to slightly old participants with a lot of grey to white hair. Half retired, half still working. Nothing special in the way of equipment. We drove through the Gorge and up toward Wind River. I made a joke about working on the Bicycle Master Plan, I said ' I am trying to get them to put some kind of hook on the bottom of hills so you can grab on and get pulled up to the top.' They laughed politely than one said 'but bicycling is good exercise.' 'Yes I know' I said 'but those hills ha ha'. I laughed alone.

Except for the humor challenges it was a nice group. We got out of the car and got our gear on and then we went. There was an actual breeze as the pack moved out and I was quickly the very last one going uphill. Not only was I last but the gap was widening!!! I thought 'well sometimes it takes a while for me to warm up. I'll be fine.'

But I wasn't really fine. I respond to group pressure and so I started to really push myself. I was sweating and had to stop so I could take off my jacket. I puffed purposely forward but taking off the jacket had only put me farther behind. I came around a bend and the nice leader was there looking a bit anxious, "are you ok?". It is the question that the insanely, competitive dread. "Oh, I'm fine!" I trilled,"I guess I'm just not as fast as you are," stating the obvious. "but I will make it" I could only hope it was true.

Than it began in earnest. He chose to believe me, so he went ahead of me. On any ski tour some of it has to be uphill. That's ok, but on a 14 mile ski tour, at least five miles of it are uphill. In this case it was the first five miles. I began a series of legs where I would see them waiting for me far ahead, reach them puffing, wheezing and exhorting myself, and they would look back at me, ask me how I was doing and then move on. I knew they were probably getting cold waiting but I never got to take a BREAK. Everytime I would reach them they would move on and I would force myself to follow--it was like stalking a herd of elk!

Finally, finally we stopped for lunch. I struggled a little out of my skis because of an icing problem with my bindings and devoured my lunch. I was so hungry I was gulping huge bites of my sandwich but before I was done I looked around and they were DONE with lunch and getting ready to move on. They were even faster eaters than I was!

Then it happened. As they were packing up I said "I need to take a leak." They looked at me dumbly and said, 'we'll wait for you around the bend'. That was when I began to wonder. Am I skiing with cyborgs? They had eaten lunch with me, but maybe that was just to fit in. Not one of them stopped the whole day to take a leak. I only took one but I was the only one who did.

Things did get better after lunch. We had done the major uphill stint. I could just barely keep up with them on downhill stretches. I was so exhausted though that I wasn't really enjoying myself. I still had to push like the dickens to keep up and I couldn't tell you what the woods were like.

This trip wasn't the idealic return to nature that I had hoped. I had turned into the 'little engine that could', following a pack of cyborg elk. I rounded a bend and negotiated a long challenging down hill, we were in sight of the broad easy road that would lead to the car. I was just thinking, hey this is finally kind of fun when my ski chattered over and hooked itself under a limb that was snow-glued to the ground. It is just the kind of thing that happens when you are beyond tired.

Wham bam, thank you mam! I went down hard. The limb stayed put and my ski was soundly hooked. I had to crawl backwards up the hill to push the ski back through the hole formed by the sturdy branch, my butt in the air, my chest and arms hugging the icy ground. I pulled the ski out. Then I found out I could not get back up, I was just too darned tired. I sat defeated for a moment, then gave it one more heave ho! I managed to move forward a little unsteadily, and there they were my cyborg friends. I got closer, 'man, I hooked my ski!' I shouted, they made sad faces at me and then turned as one and moved briskly away back toward the car.

Another kind of testimony - City Council

2009-02-20T14:06:00.000-08:00

I testified at a recent Portland City Council meeting that was held in East Portland, not the usual downtown council chambers. The city council was voting to accept a special report on East Portland. Here is my (very short) testimony. It goes remarkably well on a religion and spirituality blog since its all about equity. Warning, there is some wonk talk in among the equity talk! It's my secret side.

After thanking the council I said:

The East Portland Action Plan has a whole section on equity. The plan asks for equity reporting and audits. We want our fair share of investment in our neighborhoods and opportunities for the children and adults in East Portland.

Equity is about fairness and our desire to improve our neighborhoods, but it is also about our desire to be fully and wholly a part of Portland. You are familiar with those t-shirts that say, "this is what 50 looks like" and "this is what 60 looks like", well this is what Portland looks like. As proud as we are to say East Portland, we aren’t just East Portland.

Equity is one of those concepts that can come across negatively as "getting ours", but equity in the positive sense is about connections, about being a part of the larger whole. There is a sense of being cut off, when equity isn’t there. This symbolic city council meeting, like the earlier events of Sam Adam’s and, even before that, Ted Wheeler’s Parkrose inauguration, builds connections. The new East Portland swimming pool addition to the East Portland Community Center builds connections. I believe, that if the connections are there equity will automatically follow.

I invite you to continue to build connections with this part of Portland; and one way to do that would be through equity reporting. The equity audits and reports that are recommended in the East Portland Action Plan, need to become a part of the decision making culture at city hall. I was delighted to see Mayor Adams linking neighborhood equity reporting to the bureaus and to the future Portland Strategic Plan in one of his earliest announcements as Mayor. Someday the East Portland Action Plan will be old and outdated, but it won’t matter if you are systematically using equity in your decision making.

Thank you Mayor Adams: thank you Counselors, it was a pleasure to serve on the East Portland Action Planning Team.

Pickle-making

2009-02-11T08:51:00.000-08:00

The new look of my blog is inspiring me to write more. Just looking at that picture of Waldo Lake and remembering that I was actually there on a dazzling day in July is an inspiration. Yes the quality of the light was that magical and the water was an incredible clear blue.

I am writing my first exegesis paper for Marylhurst. Doing this is fraught for me because I have to take a LOT of Bible classes to get my MDIV. It isn't so much this particular paper, but the fact that I will have to repeat the process over and over. I wish very much, that the DIV part was more interfaith and I could fill my head with the theology of all the world's great religions.

I cringe a little when my teachers say bright little aphorisms about all that we will learn. The depth etc. I imagine that I could study pickle-making and take some meaning out of it. If you delve deep enough in any subject you learn something that you can take with you and apply somewhere else. Naturally, I have already learned much from this Bible look-see. I am saddened though by the opportunity cost. I have this time to study and I am going to have to spend it on the Bible. I am not denigrating the Bible so much as wishing for more balance in my studies. It saddens me. I am old enough to be sad, and a bit angry, about wasted time.

My original prejudice that the Bible is no more divinely inspired than any other spiritual writing is being confirmed. Once you know how copied, translated, changed and selected it is its hard to see God's hand there. Yes, there is faith and religion, which I respect. But each generation is yanking the book in one direction or another depending on the politics of the day. There is this great human need flowing through it. I am convinced it is a holy book, but more because of the faith and tears, and sometimes blood, of the readers and writers than because of some grand plan. And of course there are some beautiful passages.

Here is my pickle-making insight from the Bible. I was reading about Dick Cheney and his criticisms of Obama because he was closing down Guantanamo Bay and I though "He's a Roman!". Dick Cheney is all about empire and in empire its OK to level whole towns to preserve it.

In the Belly of the Beast

2009-02-10T10:50:00.000-08:00

I just signed up to get trained as a Trauma Counsellor through Trauma Intervention Programs of Portland Oregon. For my MDiv we are being asked to do practicums. I think that means get real and be practical. Its the doing rather than the thinking part of my program.

I tend to get lost in the thinking. I tend to enjoy the thinking. Many of my Marylhurst cohort (the folks I am travelling through the program with) are getting a slightly different degree called Applied Theology. I love the name of that degree and wish my own degree had such a nuts and bolts name. There is something nutty about acquiring a degree called Master of Divinity when one has so many doubts about said Divinity.

However, Trauma Counselling is a nuts and bolts skill of the Minister and I am oddly looking forward to it. Partly because I felt my intuition kick into gear when I read about it in the newspaper. 'I could probably do that' is what I thought. I confess I have been wondering about the pastoral side of ministry. Can I deal with other peoples problems? I feel I have the compassion gene; I am pretty sure I don't have the sympathy gene.

There is a part of me that probably needs a little roughing up, that needs examination, that needs a regular dose of humility, that does not like garden variety people problems. I try not to complain a lot myself, and there must be something in me that just shouts that to the world. People tell me nothing!!! They think I am going to disapprove! I don't think I do that, but sometimes I probably look puzzled, like huh, why are you telling me this. What can I say, I blame my mother. Why not, she doesn't have a computer. But I got to say, I don't think anyone tells her anything either.

I don't think I am going to need sympathy for Trauma Counselling. I think I am going to need empathy. It's scary and I hope I am strong enough for it. It feels a little like going into the belly of the beast. Or rather, like signing up to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

The Question

2009-01-18T09:30:00.000-08:00

I am beginning to think of it as The Question. Appropriately capitalized, because the convention of piety means that all references to God are capitalized. My question is, of course, 'is there a God'? It's starting to take on the urgency of 'does he love me'? It too, is a question we ask ourselves when we are young and in love.

I am surprised by this. I never thought I would get my stomach clenched over an existential question. The whole question of God was in my head before. It was a question as out there as anything, as remote and distant from every day as anything I could think of. I love my UU church but it keeps God at arms length in a comfortable fuzz.

Now that I am in this MDiv program I feel that I need a steady orientation toward God. It feels as if how I take in the information will be determined by this orientation. So now, it's thumbs up or thumbs down. What's it going to be?

It doesn't help that the Christians in the program point me to scripture as a way learn about God. Scripture is very interesting but I am a post-modern gal. I actually said that to someone, I am a 'post-modern person'. I couldn't believe those words came out of my mouth. It sounded so fat-headed but how else to put it? I want to do more wide reading, not focus narrowly on the Bible. I feel heelish saying that, but it is true for me.

Even my meditation practice with its age old passages points insistency at The One. Every time I meditate it grates against The Question like the wind flapping a lose tile back and forth. God, no God, God, no God. The wind blows.

My brother owns a Snowplow

2008-12-26T13:32:00.000-08:00

Portland is snowed in right now and my brother just sent me an e-mail saying he owned a snowplow, but had to use it at night so his whole neighborhood wouldn't require free service.

Here is my reply:

Indeed. We in Portland salute you, you are our God, by the way do you want to stop by and um, plow my driveway.

Yesterday I went starkers and made Michael take me out shopping just to get out of the house. He pretended to be concerned with my welfare so he agreed, but he had that gleam in his eye. I knew it wasn't for me when we went rocketing out of the carport at 30 mph! That is apparently how they do it in Anchorage (where he grew up). It has something to do with the laws of physics, the faster you go the more you can fake the laws out. These Anchorage physicists probably also get stuck in a big hump of snow like we did.

We finally made it past that impediment using shovels and old rubber mats laid down for traction. The worst part of the drive, was of course, our street. After that it was physical interaction with the world, oh baby! Ah Fred Meyer's my other God. Such friendly hubbub and and many treats and things to buy. We were able to pick up Scott (our 22 year old son), who was hibernating in his apartment and bring him home for a birthday dinner. We had Fred Meyer carrot cake and salmon and I gave him practical gifts like a coat and gloves which he promptly put on. He owned neither article. Poor, young men are so easy to buy for!

I am in the middled of writing a paper for my MDiv about my personal theology. Its due the first week-end in January. I keep telling my teachers, they don't want to know! Does He exist, oh wait, not He. Does It exist, hmm, that is kind of cold. Ah the Force, wasn't that in some movie? Ah -- the Force must be with my teachers because I am stuck in a snowstorm with nothing else to do but work on this paper and ponder the existence of God. I really wish it would stop snowing. Not a bad subject for the season however.

May the Force be with you!!

My Life as a Dog

2008-10-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

For my M Div program I need to do a lot of navel gazing. Over the next week or two I am writing a 20 page paper on myself!!!

It makes you kind of gag but its also satisfying in ways good and bad. Usually when I am obsessing about 'why I am the way I am'. I feel a little guilty about it. Not that again, I think. It's more of an adventure when you are a young-un and you first realize that yeah! mom screwed me up. Its really not so interesting when you are over fifty. Yeah, yeah, she screwed me up, the way every mother EVER screwed up their children. Like I undoubtedly screwed-up my children. She also turned me on to libraries and reading, politics and cooking and was a pretty good role model on how to be a bossy woman. The bossy woman training I have put to some very good use.

So what is good about it. Well there are new insights. Writing also clarifies the mind and deepens the thought. I am forced to put a narrative spin on my life, find connections where I haven't before. Sometimes I even appreciate myself more, I certainly understand myself more than I ever have.

So what is bad? I am not sure if bad is the right word. It is still sometimes occasionally hard to look at parts of my life. It seems as if the bad emotions, resentment, hurt feelings, heartbreak are in some special timeless place. Some fade but others take you right back, like a smell, homing back to the feeling. And you feel it all over again.

Generic Religion

2008-10-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

I have begun my Master of Divinity program at Marylhurst University. It has me hyper stimulated and happy to be thinking!

Unfortunately, while it gives me great ideas for blogging, it also brings on a case of that old familiar student's guilt when doing anything, ANYTHING, other than writing my papers. Expect slower posts.

While reading for my class on western mysticism, I read these words by Reb Zalman, a living Kabbalah mystic, "I see myself as a Jewish practitioner of generic religion." Those words knocked my socks off. They startle for a lot of reasons. For one thing generic isn't what most people aspire to. We all want unique expression, or deep expression, or perfect expression. Generic! who wants that? To hear such words from a deeply learned Rabbi is odd.

I picked him to write a paper on though, based on those words. I believe he is saying something important here. For one, he is expressing an appreciation for the oneness of all religions. We are all responding to the same phenomena. We all have the same questions. All religions are aimed at the same heart. He is basically saying, 'I use the Jewish Kabbala to see God. What do you use?' While the Fundamentalist have noticed that there are other religions and see them as misguided at best, and in some very well known sad examples, see others as evil even worth killing, the Mystics have been looking around the world and going 'huh -- you guys are doing the same thing as me. We are all alike.' The Dali Lama and Reb Zalman would have a gay old time together, if they haven't already.

Ok, that is fun, nice, interesting. But it also has meaning for me. As a Unitarian Universalist I belong, essentially to a 'generic religion.' Our lack of creed and our culture of inclusion makes us kind of generic. I have often felt ashamed of that. Is there any 'there' there? That is the question the rest of the religious world asks us. I may start proudly proclaiming it as Reb Zalman does "I am a practitioner of a Generic Religion!" Maybe not -- however there are still questions I want to explore.

Reb Zalman says he is a Jewish practitioner. Can UU's be a religious people without some practice. I imagine Zalman would say no. So should we all be triple hyphenated? Jewish Unitarian Universalist, Buddhist Unitarian Universalist, Wicckan Unitarian Universalist. It still leaves me with questions but I liked the feeling of recognition when I saw Reb Zalman's words.

testimonial time

2008-09-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

I was asked to do a testimonial for the service this Sunday. I don't want to 'waste' any UU writing so here it is:

Why do I come to Eastrose? What do I 'get' from Eastrose?

The simple answer is that I like church. I like being involved in an institution that is about community, about values, about caring, even sometimes about the mysteries of our existence on earth.

It is an extra institution in all of our lives. Everything else we do has an easy utilitarian explanation. We work for money and identity. We marry and socialize with our families for love, protection, and nurture. We have friends for entertainment and out of affection. We even join organizations, like my kayak club, for entertainment. While these all make sense from a utilitarian point of view, church doesn't.

Being involved with Eastrose connects me to the world and mystery through public worship with a community. For me the community creates meaning. Unitarian Universalists, you and I, all of us together, we create meaning here in our little fellowship. We say, by sharing our lives, that human life is important.

Our human lives are important and complicated. Sometimes sad, sometimes filled with joy. All of it, the births, deaths, marriages, defeats and joys is intensified by sharing. Even the most pragmatic, prosaic person cannot explain the pain and joy of being human. We make meaning out of that experience by gathering here.

Well that is all very high falutin! but true. When I think about why I am at Eastrose that IS the reason. I am also a logical sort of person and If I believe something is important I support it. Because of that Michael and I give generously to Eastrose. Because of that I find myself putting together the budget for Eastrose last year and this year, even though financial matters don't interest me much.

Generosity is the theme, topic, consuming passion of the canvass this year. Generosity too is one of those extras that show up in human culture. Why church? Why generosity? They are both about meaning. Giving yourself to something in an open ungrudging way gives it meaning. Generosity is a choice you make about what is important in your life. As part of the canvass I've been almost forced to think about generosity and I've decided that this year I am going to try and do all my giving to Eastrose in a generous spirit. That means money giving, that means putting on the Strategic Planning meetings, that means putting together the budget in a generous spirit. It should be an interesting year.

Emotion breaks out

2008-09-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

My parents took my sibs, my in-laws and me on a cruise to Alaska. It was a preemptive move of generosity. They were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary and I guess they didn't want to do a reception. Didn't want it real bad!

We had fun of course. I knew we would -- a bunch of middle-aged people with a shared wit and one older couple looking on and joining in. But I was a bit leery too. My family is allergic to emotion and the whole idea of 60 years together is dripping with emotion. Celebrating a good marriage is an emotional thing especially when you are looking at its end.

My parents are finally old. They weren't old at 60, or very much at 70 but now at 80 they are old. They don't walk as well, they don't even think as well. I could see the change on this cruise and it was hard for this middle-aged lady to see.

They have been the kind of steady, capable people we all relied on. Sure, we are independent with our own homes and families but when you needed a hand it was always there. And never with an "I told you so", always gladly.

Still the cruise seemed like a huge distraction. Don't think, don't feel, enjoy, make a joke.

I don't always want to live out the family mythos, even as benign as it is.

Therefore, I was glad emotion broke out on fore deck 12, in the Port room on Thursday at 2:00pm on their actual anniversary. We had reserved the room and gathered the family. NCL wanted to know if we wanted cake and balloons. No, we said, we have eaten enough. We did buy a bottle of champagne. While we drank the champagne we read poems of our own creation. They were all different. One came from my sister in-law about the impact Joan and Dave's easy, loving marriage had had on her when she was a girl and first met my mother. Her parents were not like that. We started to leak. We turned away so we could finish our awkwardly rhymed sentences. We knew we loved each other. We knew we loved these old people who were our parents.

Brother David brought out his guitar and we sang "What a wonderful world." It was a perfect moment, if not a perfect chorus.

"like they just walked away for a moment"

2008-08-31T09:01:00.000-07:00

Eastrose loses its members the hard way some times. People die.

Michael and I went to church this morning in the car. I turned on a tape I had been playing on my own. I wanted Michael to hear it. It was Ava's man by Rick Bragg and also read by the author in a soft, sexy southern voice. It is some of the greatest southern writing you can read or listen to. Almost every sentence has some phrase or image that makes your ears lift with happiness.

We were going to church for the second time in a three day week-end and knew we would go again on the third day. We might not have gone today, there being only so much church a person should go to, but Lee's ashes were going into the ground after the service.

I turn on Rick Bragg and he reads about how his people, hill people from the border of Alabama, Georgia, have the intelligence to forget funerals. He is writing a book about his grandfather and can't get anyone to tell him about the funeral. He says they don't want to remember the funeral and the pale bodies in open caskets. They want to imagine that person is just in the next field, gone for a little walk or drive. It's better that way.

I feel that about Lee. He was a gentle presence at Eastrose. Quiet and good natured, getting quieter every year. He paid attention though, surprising me recently by knowing the year my oldest son graduated from college. Underestimated (perhaps) by all the bright wits we have hanging around our little fellowship. He hunched over more and more leaning on a cane. Maybe he just went down the street, to see a man about a dog. He'll be back later.

Relax, Just Say It: Part 2

2008-08-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

In my last post I wrote about meditating on passages that do not completely conform to my own theology. How it was intellectually odd, but quite comfortable, even joyous. Some of that comfort comes from my Enneagram point. I am a Nine, happy as a clam to hold two, three or four competing ideas in my mind at the same time.

Here is Part 2 of Relax, Just Say It:

Another odd thing is the comfort I experience in my meditation and the discomfort I sense in my fellow UU's (Unitarian Universalists) each time the GOD word comes up.

UU's are some of the most tolerant, intolerant folks you will find. They are pretty darn tolerant of exotic religions. Anything that is not Christian is fascinating and important. Our openness to a variety of faith traditions is one of our strong points.

We have trouble with Christianity for two reasons. Reason one, Christianity is where most of us came from, we got shaken out of that tradition, unwilling to say a creed, unable to believe in God or at least THAT God and we are mad about it. Mad the way we are mad at our parents because they didn't love us perfectly. This reason is painful and personal. The anger we feel varies in intensity depending on if our religious training was just wrong for us or actually abusive.

The second reason is because we pride ourselves on tolerance of belief and lifestyle and some brands of Christianity are intolerant. We doubly feel the sting of Christian intolerance because it is against our UU religion and because it is against our liberal political principles. We are mortal enemies of the beliefs of the Christian right. Its hard to separate the religion of the Christian right from its political beliefs. UU's don't always make the effort and neither does the Christian right.

At the heart of all this anger is the God word. Even if you believed in God as a UU you might object to the God word in worship. You might feel it forces people who do not believe in God to worship a God. Saying God, in the context of the traditions many UU's came from, the anger and pain some UU's feel, is tantamount to saying a Creed. UU's can end up in a circle of flight from others anticipated hurt feelings so that they never say God, never come close.

I wonder how good it is for us to have this prohibition. Will we ever be truly tolerant if we cannot say GOD? The fact that anger and pain are so much a part of this prohibition against the word, that we are re-acting against childhood practices makes me think we should be taking a different path. Instead of avoiding it we should move right into it and desensitize ourselves so that we can be religious people and live in the whole landscape of religion.

We should have God training. When my son's were going through sex education one of their teachers had them chant the 'giggle' making words until all the charge went out of them. If you walked by their class during sex ed you would hear 30 sixth graders chanting in unison Vulva or Penis until they were bored with it. We should ask each other 'What do you mean when you say God?' Do you mean, Light, Love, the World, Nature, the Planet, Gaea, a Being that watches over all of us, Truth, Buddha, Tao or Jesus? Its a big word with lots of meanings and I wonder when we are going to get it back?

We should chant it out loud and all together until it becomes our word again and loses the charge of anger and pain that makes us shy away from it.

Relax, Just Say it: Part 1

2008-08-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've written that I do daily passage meditation. It's now my spiritual practice. I haven't been doing it very long, but its power and sturdy compassion, make me think I will do it my whole life.

The passages I meditate on come from all the worlds great religious traditions: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Islam and Earth-based. They don't always conform to my own beliefs. The old testament God is not my Lord really, but when I am meditating on Psalm 23, The Lord is My Shepherd I say each word of that Psalm.

I'm meditating not evaluating. I say in my mind "the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." I try not to have side conversations in my mind or any kind of cross talk.

I remember that there were some rebellious thoughts generated at first, especially when I would meditate on the passage "He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies." What is that all about, why is the Lord concerned with my enemies? It reminded me of the irony of two football teams praying for victory from the same God. And more tragically about the war in Iraq with Christian and Islam soldiers praying in competing forums to the same compassionate Lord.

I'm uneasy with the idea of a personal God but the Sages are not. God weaves in and out of the passages I meditate on; sometimes He/She is very clearly a being to adore while in other passages They/He/She/It are portrayed as an intrinsic quality as austere as my pantheistic faith. The God talk makes me uneasy while at the same time I feel utterly at peace and at home.

It's what the soul wants really. It wants to adore, it wants to let go, it wants to fly into ecstasy. The soul, our psyche, understands the language of relationship intimately, and knows what it means to cleave, to bind, to connect with another. The soul is not a theologian! The soul is more like a drunken teenager dancing with a cute stranger on a Saturday night!

A friend of mine who maybe does, maybe doesn't, believe in God, told me "I started praying. It just works better if I talk to God as if he is there. I don't know if he is, but I calm right down. I pray regularly."

Faith Journal: Epiphanies

2008-08-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

What do you believe if you are a Unitarian Universalist? The usual, sloppy UU answer is that you can believe anything you want. Well, let's hope not. You don't have to believe in a creed, thank goodness, or Jesus Christ is Lord of All, or even that there is any Lord of All. That leaves a big wide field to walk around in. Its no wonder that UU's want some kind of short cut when talking to others in this culture of the sound bite. They may even want a sound bite for themselves!

It's work to put together your own theology. Please forgive me and other UU's like me, if we haven't always done as much work as we should.

One of the pieces of my personal spiritual philosophy, is a belief in the importance of epiphanies.

I cultivate epiphanies because they are my version of a primary, spiritual experience.

An epiphany is when your world looks different after you have had an insight. A whole area of your personal world view that stood straight up before now is toppled over and points in another direction. An epiphany is Urban renewal of the soul.

Epiphanies can be dramatic. When I had the epiphany that I didn't believe in a personal God, the world was suddenly a very different place. And not necessarily a better place. In fact it was colder and lonelier. There was no going back on it though. It was a true epiphany.

In college I took a class on Existentialism and it fit my new thinking about God. I read Albert Camus's The Stranger and the Myth of Sisyphus. I learned more about this territory of no God. It was exciting, but it filled out the contours of my mind without changing it. Existentialism is pretty grim stuff but I took it in and accepted it. What else was there if there was no God?

It was another class, a hybrid English class called "What is Man?", that gave me my next epiphany.

This time we read more Camus, a book of short stories called Exile and the Kingdom. We also read Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. I don't remember the stories well or much about Hero with a Thousand Faces. I do remember them transforming the scraped earth landscape of Existentialism into some kind of garden. I didn't return to a personal God but I did, through these wonderful stories begin to see the richness of interconnection.

The epiphany I had was that Existentialism looked at the world as if there was nothing human but individual existence. If you run a buldozer over a forest you don't have a forest anymore. The forest existed though, even if it's now destroyed. Just because you CAN get down to bare earth doesn't mean you should or that bare earth is any more real than the forest that was there originally.

I developed the conviction that the connections we have with others are real and holy even if they end, break, sometimes are false, or superficial. The sum of them hold the world together. Not only are these connections holy but we can chose them, we can increase them or we ignore or deny them.

It's a choice, like the Existentialist said, they just didn't believe that you could choose a world with color, sound and a thrumming heart.

Connections to Random Events

2008-08-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Summertime and the living is easy, except that the news is full of random death and madness. Yes, it's random, but there are connections to me.

It starts with a UU church in Knoxville invaded by a madman with a gun shooting parishioners attending a children's theater production. I hear it on the radio and start the rationalization process, the distancing process, before I even get all the facts.

He is mad, I think, the same thing happens in post offices -- its just chance that its a UU church. But I am a UU, and I can't imagine a safer place than my church.

Next a terrible plane crash on the Oregon coast where a light plane crashes into a home filled with a vacationing, extended family. Its bad enough the empathy I feel because of the entire innocence of the victims. They aren't taking risks by playing on logs in the surf. They are sleeping in vacation bedrooms, eating breakfast and getting shoes on for a walk on the beach. It turns out that I have a long ago connection to the family. I knew their brother, a beautiful young man who died twenty-five years ago in a climbing accident. The facts and the sorrow of it just sit in my mind, unexplained and terrible.

Then another crash, a helicopter crash taking down nine summer firefighters. They are young and vital men with their whole lives ahead of them. They have no direct connection to me this time except they are from Oregon, but it echos and amplifies the earlier tragedies.

I meditate this morning saying a passage I've been using from the Tao te ching. While I meditate I am aware of my mind trying to find an explanation for all this random death and violence. I also know its a cheat. Meditation isn't the same as thinking. Rumination is a classic distraction.

There is a line in my passage about how a being "takes on a physical body, let's circumstances complete it." Although the Tao is full of compassion for the whole world, it feels remote and not a comfort. I can't reconcile this old wisdom about the cycle of life with the immediacy and lose of all that young life. Sometimes there is no explaination.

Hummingbird

2008-08-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

I've been meditating daily with ony a few slip ups for a couple of months. I have a meditation group to keep me motivated (Eastrose on Tuesday nights). We do Easwaran's passage meditation. Easwaran gives a pretty indepth discussion of how we avoid going deep into meditation and allow distractions. There are lots of ways.

My typical distraction is to fall asleep. The passage I am meditating on often appears in my mind as it does on the page. As I go through the passage the words light up one at a time. When I start to fall asleep the lines reassemble in different order. They dangle like melted clocks in a surealist painting or end abruptly. These are all signals that its time for me to breath deeper and sit up straighter before I start to snore.

But yesterday morning the mind did something charming to distract me. A Hummingbird swooped right in through my passage. It hovered, as hummingbirds will, in the center of my mind allowing me to admire its brilliant blue and green colors. And then, when I regretfully realized that it was a distraction, it darted away.

Faith Journal: the Creed

2008-08-05T12:47:00.000-07:00

I haven't had many psychic experiences. This might not be one, but it felt like one.

When my son's were 6 and 8, Michael and I took them to a Smith family reunion in Ohio.

We had a good time. It was a bit more stressful for me than Michael because I was meeting a lot of new people. The Smith's were welcoming, though, and I enjoyed myself. The boys were about as cute as they could be. I was proud to show them off to this family of strangers.

Still I was starting to look forward to going home. We had one more event, a Catholic mass that was being put on for the Smiths. They were a pretty religious family. They had nuns in the family. Michael was from the 'fallen away' side but everyone else was still very Catholic. This particular mass was in honor of Michael's Aunt and Uncle and their marriage of 50 years. The family whispered that they weren't doing so well. Indeed, they only lived a few more years.

I felt snappish and a little false in my nice clothes. What is the difference between honoring another's traditions or smothering your own feelings? Attitude, I guess, and mine was deteriorating in spite of my best intentions. The idea of sitting through a mass finally gave shape to my own suppressed feelings of rebellion. It had been a long vacation spent in small talk, in group settings with new people, in projecting my own booster feelings of pride in my small family. I was starting to wear out.

The chapel filled with the Smith clan.

The mass began, and the old ritual took hold of me. I know the mass. A childhood of Sundays puts it at the synapse level. I started to relax. I marveled at my good memory. Since this was a special family Mass for older Catholics, part of it was in Latin. The Catholic church stopped doing the Latin Mass when I was six years old and yet I can still remember the words. I said all the words to all the prayers, trying not to think too much, as if they were mantras, or nursery rhymes.

My mind drifted while we said the creed. ‘I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’ A jarring thought jumped into my head, without any invitation, "The Creed is a test. In the old days if you didn’t say it you were killed!’’ The thought came in with full force and I was stunned to silence.

I stopped my simple recitation. I had never thought of it before; they put the Creed in the mass long ago so the priests could check on the faithful. People have probably died because they wouldn’t say these words.

Right in the middle of this lovely Catholic ceremony I began to shake. I vividly saw, the people burning. I smelled the fear and the smoke. I sat down and grab my husband’s hand. "The creed's a loyalty test! How can they have something like that in worship". He turned and smiled at me, not hearing a word.

Even if he had heard me, how could I have explain such a peculiar vision.

I sat through the rest of the service quietly not moving with the service or saying the words. What had taken place? The Catholic church is so old that even the shaggiest old horror can mellow and lighten with time. The creed doesn't have power anymore except as an element of worship, but at one time it did. For a few moments I had felt the church’s bloody history.

After the Mass we went to a party for Michael's aunt and uncle. I shook Uncles’s hand and he smiled vacantly at me. It was all a bit much for him, poor old man.

Pantheist or religious Naturalist

2008-08-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I am such a reader these days. I just finished Standing in the Light, My Life as a Pantheist by Sharman Apt Russell. Its a spiritual biography that I bought from the author at a reading at Powells. I couldn't stay away when I read about it in the Oregonian.

My life as a pantheist, I thought, maybe that is me! Indeed. It seems to be. A pantheist believes that God can be found in the world and only in the whole of the world. Russell considers herself a scientific pantheist in that her understanding of science gives her a greater feeling for the intricate ways that the world connects.

Standing in the Light is a pretty good book. Beautifully written by a careful writer who admires and often writes about science. She alternates chapters on her own life living in rural New Mexico on the Gila River, with very informative chapters on Quakerism, the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, the Transcendentalists, Taoism. The chapter notes alone are worth the price of the book with its list of books I should read and now want to.

Her presence in the book is rather restrained as if she wasn't quite willing to be the center of attention. If I have a criticism, and I don't really, it would be say more about you Sharman! Still, since I have met her, I can see her walking on a mountain mesa road, reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. (Yes, she walks and reads at the same time).

She mentions two websites I plan on checking out: http://www.iras.org/ (the Institute of Religion in the Age of Science) and http://www.pantheism.net/ (The World Patheist Movement).

Oh, what the heck! -- here is a list of books that Russell inspires me to want to read:

The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb. This is one I wouldn't normally even consider but Russell calls it "engaging and stimulating " in her chapter notes. Really!

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. trans. Gregory Hays. I will read it in bed however. It must be good because Russell confesses a crush on Aurelius.

Drawing down the Moon by Margot Adler

Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio or Spinoza: A Life by Steven Nadler. Well, it is a stretch that I would ever read a biography of Spinoza, but if I do, I will for sure brag about it here.

Goatwalking: A Guide to Wildland Living and a Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom by Jim Corbett. This sounds wonderfully strange.

Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotion by Martha C. Nussbaum. Another one to brag on if I read it.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I've read this but not since I was in my teens. It has to read differently now.

Deep Ecology by Bill Duval and George Sessions

The Dream of Earth by Thomas Berry or his The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

Buddha by Karen Armstrong and The great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions also by Karen Armstrong

The Tao of the West by J. J. Clarke

Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia by Stephan Harding

Books by James Lovelock -- the founder of the Gaia theory

The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough. Who has, by the way, a name that I envy. She calls herself a religious naturalist, not a pantheist. It kind of goes with her name. Religious naturalist is good enough, I don't need some fancy unusual title for my religious impulses, I can imagine her thinking.

More from Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, maybe The Essential Transcendentalists ed by Richard Geldard

The Machine

2008-07-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

"I'm just a cog in the machine!" I've protested after a lousy day of work. Its a modern complaint and words like 'dehumanize' and 'alienation' were invented to express being treated like a machine. The protest comes as I feel edges being shaved off my unique, organically shaped persona so that it fits into the small square space that the world sometimes gives me.

I can also feel dehumanized when I go too long without feeling alive. Or, when I try performing for someone else's expectations. Or, I act in the grip of a compulsion without apparent volition. Again, the feeling is of taking complex behavior and simplifying it and repeating it like a machine does--only in this case its me thats allowing it!

So why is it that I get so much comfort from all the machine metaphors in Eknath Easwaran's book "Meditation". Its a lovely little treatise full of wisdom about how to grow in spirit. Easwaran taught at Berkeley for many years. He is full of cute stories of his American students and how to meditate and live a more spiritual life.

He treats the mind as if it is car being driven by unruly desires. Or a coat that you put on or take off. He has no compunction in thinking of a part of himself that many of us view as our self, our mind and emotions, as something mechanical. Its an idea I've run into before in psychology and counselling and I found it a comfort there also.

In counselling I was told to treat my emotions -- at least the hot emotions that run through your mind in the middle of a fight -- as an interesting phenomena, like lighting. Lightening flashes through and then is gone and so too are these hotter emotions. Yes, they are real, but do they reflect any particular truth? I'd watched so many Hollywood movies where the heroine realizes that her fiance is a jerk in a flash of sudden insight. I was relieved to findthat just because I had thought someone was a jerk during a fight didn't mean that he was one.

The mechanical metaphor is soothing when Easwaran uses it and soul sucking when we experience it in the world. So what is the difference? Easwaran and my counsellor are giving me control of my mind and emotions by pointing out that these parts of me are not my essential self. When the world acts on you or you allow others to control you then you have lost control.

If the mind is a car then it seems to matter who is driving.

The Shadow Children

2008-06-03T15:27:00.001-07:00

Everyone who has had children knows some shadow children. They are the playmates of your own children that didn't make it. They got cancer, drowned or, now, as my boys have grown, were killed in Iraq or Afganistan.

They don't have to be very close to your children for you to remember them forever. They play along side your children, staying the same age while your own children grow up.

The shadow children made me sad and scared when they died. Of course, they reminded me that my own perfect children were mortal and could be taken away. They raised theological questions. The real questions. Not, why do bad things happen to good people? That question has never bothered me very much. 'What, you think if you are good, you are exempt from the laws of chance?' The question I've never been able to answer is, what does a Unitarian Universalist say to a dying child? I mean a UU like me, who believes that it matters how we live, but doesn't believe in a personal God, and doesn't believe in heaven.

One of my shadow children died of brain cancer at seven years of age. He had time to know that he was dying. His parents are strong Christians and do believe in heaven. It made it easier. Not easy, don't get me wrong. They went through hell, knew it, and didn't have any false piety about it. However, they could say to their son 'you are going to Jesus in Heaven. We will join you later.' in full serenity and belief. I was just glad I never had to come up with such a strong, story for my children.

The wars in Iraq and Afganistan are adding to my shadow children. For years, I had only two, that's how safe our world is in Portland, Oregon.

I've added two in the last two years. One young man, went to school with my oldest son, but in the stratified world of high school, my oldest says 'didn't know him mom' with relief. Well, they are MY shadow children after all. I claim him because the school community I am a board member for had a memorial service for him after he was killed in Afganistan. He was in the HS video production program and was a newscaster for the internal news service the students put on. He was such a recent graduate that they still had all his footage where he was the star. On the montage they put together he was funny, bright, everything. He joined up because of 9/11 and, probably, a lack of cash for college.

Alex Funcheon is another shadow child. He died in Iraq from an IED blast. He had been there for two months. His mother was my friend and babysitter when we lived in Tempe, Arizona. My oldest son and Alex were best friends in diapers and training pants, running around the back yard together on short, stubby legs. We moved away when they were four and the two families became Christmas card friends. I hadn't talked to Karen in fifteen years when she called out of the blue. 'Alex is dead.' she told me. ' I just wanted to talk to someone who knew him as a baby.'

Shadow children reflect the worst of what could happen to your child. Our children are all marching toward the future together and then death steps in, here and there. Before the war deaths, it had just seemed like cosmic bad luck. The war deaths hit me in a different way. They bring up questions of class and culpability. I feel equal parts anger and sadness, with some guilt thrown in, because these boys died when mine didn't. My family never voluntarily joins military service. We are polite enough not to bad-mouth the military in that careful way of respecting others choices. I can't think of a single cousin, niece or nephew that has joined. I am glad of that frankly, but it doesn't make me feel good. It's something I would like to keep in the shadows.

How it feels

2008-04-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

More Oregonian newspaper reactions, this time to an opinion piece published by a black woman living in Oregon and feeling alone and misunderstood. It was called 'What it feels like to be Black in Oregon".

Race is on my mind with Obama's race speech so recently given.

I was hoping that her words would give me some insight but instead they reminding me, yet again, that its all so particular and subject to the 'eyes of the beholder'.

It didn't help that the piece was all about feeling and not hung on specific details. However, I do admire the writer for giving voice to her reactions to us white Oregonians.

We white Oregonians have to be odd to watch. When I was growing up, Oregon had very few African Americans, I remember when my entirely white, and fairly upper-income, high school was integrated. The black kids that were bused to our school where very different then I was expecting. I was expecting white people with black skin. I though the only difference would be the skin color.

Well they were quite different at least in the superficial ways that high schoolers notice. They were poorer and tougher than we were. I can't say I connected with any of them and it was a shock. Now looking back, I can't imagine what a shock it must have been to them.

I am a little more sophisticated now. I live in a multicultural neighborhood and for a while I flirted with the idea that racism was basically over. I saw how common and matter of fact my kids were around people of other ethnic backgrounds. They didn't ignore race but it was no big deal. Racism is over, the kids will make it go away, I thought. Plus the sheer number of different races was diluting the intensity of Black and White interaction. It isn't all about that old history of slavery I thought.

But I had an epiphany at church brought on by a story from an older white woman. She stood up and told about getting on a bus in Washington DC during world war II and having the bus driver order some black kids off the bus. They wouldn't sit in the back.

It hit my liberal phantasy about the end of racism, pretty hard. This woman is still alive and she has this memory of active institutional racism. These stories are still in peoples heads, in their memories. Even the young ones have heard the stories. And unfortunately, they probably have a few of their own.

I do believe it is better. I do believe that the young ones are the way. But it isn't going away in a generation. Maybe not in two, three or four. Racism is real if you have seen it or your father or grandfather have felt it. Its not a paranoid fantasy of black people. It should not be treated as such.

Whiny Women

2008-04-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

Guys aren't the only humans who don't like the whiny women.

Marie Cocco just had a column in the Oregonian that is a classic example of why you will sometimes find women running, screaming holding their ears when a full-on feminist starts to wind it up.

I am a feminist and proud of it, so my complaint is more about the style rather than the substance of Marie's argument.

Is there something to what Marie Cocco says -- that Hilary Clinton is being asked to be a 'good women' and bow out of the democratic race by the men of the party. There might be.

I wonder though if it does any good to point it out especially in that plaintive angry tone. The accusation is so far inside the territory of unconscious bias that one would have to be a scientist with a probe in your brain to know if the request was sincere or just a ploy. It certainly is an easy one to deny.

It also reminds me that any president is going to have to deal with more than a little gender bias. How about wrong headedness, veniality, psychopathology, hyperpartisanship and plain, old common-as-dirt-stupidity. He or she had better be ready for these and more. If she is not, if she is going to get all whiney about it -- I really don't want her to be my president --because she will be whining all of the time!

Being asked to be high-minded and step down for the good of the party is an almost charming, rather old fashioned, piece of bias. The very idea that women are better than men and more interested in the common welfare! Only in America is this an insult. Only in America are women eager to disprove it.

Seriously though, when should feminists complain? I think those idiots yelling 'clean my shirts' at her rally's are over the line and should be chucked out of any venue they attend. In a just world they would be cleaning her shirts.

I was offended when Hilary was accused of 'pimping' her daughter out because Chelsea was campaigning for her. I was glad that provoked outrage and backlash.

There are enough real instances of bias and prejudice that we don't need to drag out the maybe its bias arguement.

Logic Feeler meets dream time

2008-03-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

I've been seeing a career counselor and as a result of some non-enneagram personality profiling I now think of myself as a 'logical feeler' (Myers Briggs). I like it. If I had known the expression earlier I might have used it as my blog name.

So if I am all logical in my feelings, how to explain my recent dreams? Dreams really are the anti logic.

About three weeks ago I had a dream that would have been worthy of the old testament in its command and specificity. It was a voice that said clearly to me "you will have a going away party for your son". Well it didn't tell me to take the people of Israel anywhere, but it did concern the Old Testament obsessions with lineage and journeys. My son is going to Bulgaria as a Peace Corp volunteer. He will be gone for two years, an almost biblical amount of time (seven years is the Biblical unit). I tend to blither and worry about whether to party or not to party. No problem with this one, we are having it.

Then yesterday I took a short nap and my sister-in-law called me. I didn't get up but I could kind of hear her answering me with her reasons for not coming tothe party and making some kind of request. I have good ears and I heard 1:30 and knew I would have to listen and answer.

This morning I remembered about the message. I checked the machine. No message. I queried my husband in an imperious manner. Well there are only two of us so one of us must have deleted it. I called Heidi and found out she hadn't called.

It must have been a dream, but a dream that mimicked reality in all its mundane details.

Ingathering of new members

2008-03-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

We have a ceremony at Eastrose welcoming new members. They stand in front of the congregation and the membership committee chair says something, then the president, then the minister, then the Congregation, then the new members and then everyone says something together. Usually the new members get a candle (our symbol is a flaming chalice) or a flower. Its welcoming, friendly and fun to see the new folk coming into the church.

But there is a one thing that it isn't, and that is inspiring. The words we use to welcome new members thud into the room (see below). We have a Membership Covenant with too many multi-syllabic Latin rooted words . Welcoming words should ring with poetry and power.

Ah those Latin rooted words like 'congregation', 'inspiration' and 'individuality'. Say one out loud and you're on a roller coaster and you have to ride it to the end. I don't have a classical education so I am winging it a bit here, but you can see how the word is constructed. Look at 'individuality', with its original word sitting somewhere in the middle. Who knows what 'divid' alone means, but it has all these mumbly syllables packed on the front and the back like pillows piled around a man on a couch. Like pillows they muffle.

The Latin isn't the only problem with the Membership Covenant -- there are also run on sentences and poorly chosen words. My favorite (as in hardest to say) is this sentences inflicted on our poor new members who must say "We join you with eager anticipation, understanding the responsibilities of membership, and aware that we are choosing this as our church home." It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue does it.

What else? It seems to be avoiding some issue -- it is so careful and abstract. If it was a body part it would definitely be a head, not a heart.

So here is the whole thing for you to read. I am going to play around with it a bit and see if I can improve it in future blogs. Join in if you want. Give it your own go, or if you want send me a link to an existing Membership Covenant you like better.

Membership Covenant

President: We welcome you with joy and pride as members of Eastrose Fellowship. We place our hands in yours, offering you our friendship and support, and receiving you as new companions on our journey.

Minister: may you find within these sheltering walls both inspiration and wisdom for daily living. May you also find here the strength and courage to go beyond these walls to serve the needs of others.

Congregation: we welcome your choice to join us in the search for truth and meaning in our lives. We celebrate your newfound commitment to this Unitarian Universalist congregation. We pledge to honor your individuality and freedom ,and we look forward to the new insight and vitality you bring.

New Members: We join you with eager anticipation, understanding the responsibilities of membership, and aware that we are chosing this as our church home. We bring to eastrose Fellowship our talents and energy, our doubts and concerns and our willingness to serve the needs of this community as we are able.

All: Let us build together a community of celebration, inspiration, sustenance, welcome, and service. In this spirit,we renew our commitment to seek the truth in love, to answer the call of justice, and to help one another. so may it be.

Crying in Church

2008-02-21T21:39:00.000-08:00

As an adult I find myself crying in church and I never have a handkerchief. Neither does my husband. (I confess I have a weakness for men who can easily tie things on the tops of cars and hand me a clean handkerchief when I need one -- maybe I will marry one of those guys in my next life).

Other than church I hardly ever cry, but crying got me started going back to church (Faith Journal: First Entry) and it has followed me into my pew.

At first I though it was just the stress of being mother to a growing family. When I came to church in those early years I would sit in a grateful daze. It was just so peaceful -- just sitting -- with the two little lala's in the back somewhere playing with the other baby Unitarians. The words and songs would just wash over me.

If I shut my eyes I got the same feeling I had when I was a child and we used to drive to Mt. Hood to go skiing. The car would be packed with gear and family, with parents, sibs and me there were eight. If I was lucky I would get a seat near a window and lean against my puffy ski jacket wadded up against the door as a pillow. I would be in and out of sleep, listening to the conversations in the car while the Oregon woods flashed by on either side. Every once in a while a vine maple would fill the window with a green, clean light as it fluttered in unselfconscious beauty. Those vine maples gave me a shiver; on a sunny day they glowed in among the dark woods.

The crying would come because I would relax into the space of church and then something would reach me like those vine maples. A story of pain would make it to my heart, and as open as I was, I would cry.

It still happens all the time. Now it is often a story about someone in my church community who I've known for a long time. Or maybe the choir sings a song that reminds me of something. There are a million different triggers but they reach me because of a certain receptivity that I have when I am there. The same story or song doesn't have the same power anywhere else.

It happened at 12

2008-02-07T22:15:00.000-08:00

What is it about twelve years old that brings such insights. At twelve, your brain must grow like a son-of-a-gun. You look like a kid. All the nobs and bumps on your face grow at different rates. Maybe you have braces and you don't make easy eye contact with adults. Adults still talk around you as if you don't understand them but now you suddenly do.

Twelve was when I stopped believing in God. I used to remember the moment but I don't anymore. Just that it happened at twelve and it was a reverse of Saul on the road to Damascus, one minute I believed and the next I did not. I doubt there was a blinding light just a feeling of emptiness and the click of the world making more sense.

I remember a year later spending the night with my best friend Sidney. Her Dad was on a date so we were alone in a house out in the woods. We were in bed telling stories when someone started walking around the house shining a flashlight in. We were terrified. The light from the flashlight swung wildly around the living room. We were in a loft bed-room looking down.

Sidney clutched my hand and started praying wildly out-loud. "Oh Jesus, Jesus, save us." Even in my terror, maybe because of my terror, I thought how wonderful it would be to cry out to the Lord with that sincerity. If we were murdered she would be praying to God while I would be looking directly into the eyes of my murderer. I had God envy and decided to start believing again.

For about two weeks I held belief in my mind while my heart really saw Sidney clutching my hand and praying. It was her faith that had touched me and gave me the strength to hold off my own reality for that length of time. I couldn't do it for longer than two weeks though -- hard as I tried.

Fantasy read

2008-01-05T22:05:00.000-08:00

One of my guilty pleasures is Science Fiction and Fantasy--

If I want to sound intellectual I can call it speculative fiction. It started when I was a kid and my brother introduced me to the books of Robert Heinlein. I read all the Robert Heinlein in the Youth fiction area of the Library.

I love Ursula LeGuin, The Tolkien Ring Series, the Phillip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials, Garth Nix who wrote a wonderful trilogy called the Abhorsen Trilogy.

That out-of-body sensation you get when reading is even more intense with good speculative fiction. You are not just out-of-body you are out of the universe!

The trouble with Speculative fiction is that the bar isn't set very high for publishing, and there are a lot of so-so books out there. I don't even find a good one once a year, while good fiction, biography, and history is everywhere.

So I loved discovering The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Its beautifully written with a world that makes sense even if its not verifiable.

Laura is the heroine of the story. Stationed in Antarctica on a corporate sponsored science trip when a plague hits the earth, she lives but everyone else around her dies. The book follows her as she tries to find her way out of Antarctica. Brockmeier also keeps giving scenes from a city in flux, but it isn't a city that any of us know, it's the City of Remembered Dead.

You may have had the almost logical thought that someone isn't dead until all the people who remember them have died. This book imagines such a world actually exists. Its based on an African belief that there are three states of being: living, dead but remembered by the living, and no longer remembered.

People arrive in the City of Remembered Dead in some confusion but settle down into a different life. No one seems to need to work there although some do anyway. There's a lot of cafe sitting and coffee drinking. Life is real, with relationships sometimes extending from the old life, and sometimes with new relationships starting up.

But the plague is also throwing this world into confusion. The City is filling up with the new dead and long time residents are disappearing.

And then it begins to empty out and we realize that Laura is the last person left on earth.

The still remembered dead start to figure things out but there is nothing they can do. They even figure out that it is Laura that is holding them in place and that Laura is in trouble.

I don't want to give to much away -- but it doesn't exactly have a happy ending.

Its a book that makes you think in a humanistic spiritual way. Its really about what is lost when a person dies.

We tend to think of the world moving on after we die and we get some comfort from that. This story turns that on its head and points out, not that the world goes on without us, but that in some ways it doesn't. Its dizzying the way it makes you aware of the multiple connections we each carry around inside our memories.

When I finished this novel I didn't feel like crying but I had to sit and be quiet for a while. I let the story rumble around in my head and thought about it for days.

The Ragged Old Flag

2007-11-11T21:51:00.000-08:00

Veterans Day makes me think of these two old guys, Ray and Gus, who used to go to all the Eagle scout ceremony's that I was ever at. They would give out a flag to all the new Eagle scouts and recite The Ragged Old Flag. I knew better then to smile ironically at anything at a Eagle ceremony, but it was pretty cornball.

It grew on me though. They never missed a ceremony! When my own son went to design his Eagle ceremony he said "yeah, I'm not sure what I want but I want those two old dudes doing the flag poem".

Ray and Gus kept getting older and more feeble. Ray was the extrovert and he would get up and make little jokes and recite the poem and Gus would stand there holding the flag. They did a wonderful handshake and always wore suits. Finally Gus started showing up alone. He gave reports about Ray who had had a stroke, but we never saw him again. Gus didn't have Ray's glibness and when Gus recited the poem it had a seriousness and sadness it hadn't had before. Gus wanted those boys to know that patriotism was a serious business.

And somehow it was.

Faith Journal: First entry

2007-11-03T22:45:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me to tell the story of my beliefs and how I became a UU. It might make a nice counterpoint to my more polemic pieces.

Here is a start:

Michael and I were living in Arizona in the 80's. We had met in Oregon but wooed and married in the hot desert away from both of our families. Not being part of a church was fine with us. Our wedding was officiated by a judge. I was a former Catholic and Michael grew up without going to church.

I got pregnant and had a baby boy. Motherhood was a surprise because it was so darned emotional. I fell in love with my son and used to wonder why they didn't write top forty songs about mothers and their children. Why all these songs about romantic love when maternal love was equally as strong and true? I was gaga. I was also working full time and was often tired, stressed and lonely for my Oregon family.

One day we went to a Catholic wedding that included a Catholic Mass. I hadn't been to a mass in 5 to 10 years but I knew when to sit, stand and kneel. The prayers and responses came out of my mouth without thinking. I beat my breast in time while I said " through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault". My eyes began to fill with tears for here were the ritual words and movements of my childhood all in celebration of this lovely young couple. She wore a long white dress and was attended by five pink-cheeked flower girls. He was tall, handsome and gazed worshipfully at his new wife. Both families beamed at them from their respective pews.

When we got out to our car to drive to the reception, I burst into tears. Michael was aghast of course and wanted to know what was wrong. I told him about my strong feelings during the mass, about its familiarity and how it connected me with something I hadn't known I was missing. He listened and finally said "Well, if you feel so strongly about it. I guess we had better find ourselves a Catholic church."

That just made me cry harder, I lifted my face to him and choked out "But Michael, I don't BELIEVE a word of it."

It was only a few weeks later that we packed up our son, went exploring and discovered the UU church in Mesa Arizona.

Little Cat Feet

2007-10-20T16:03:00.000-07:00

"THE fog comes on little cat feet. " is a fragment from a Carl Sandburg poem I half remember from childhood. It's a textbook perfect image with the staying power of an advertising jingle.

I think of quiet cat feet when I think of global warming.

Now Iraq, Iraq's a big noisy deal, especially if you have a son or daughter over there. It's the loudest deal in town, dragging your heart and attention toward it's exploding center.

The warming is a quiet crisis that comes to us in the pale blue shades of ice dripping and changing into water.

Iraq is the red, beating heart of human suffering. Children are crying. Women raped. Every day men are found on the street with drill holes in their bodies. These horrors are punctuated by daily car bombs. How can we look anywhere but there?

When will we feel the water seeping into our shoes?

Working Class II

2007-09-02T20:46:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine from Eastrose read my last post and e-mailed me. I thought I would share what she wrote.

Good old class differences! They divide us in ways personal and profound.

"I too read the article on the working class in the UU World, as well as your comments on your blog. I didn't see the mechanism to post a response on your blog, but this has always been a deeply personal issue for me. I wrote something to respond to both the article and your blog that I wanted to share with you. It's too long for the UU World, but I would value your thoughts and comments. Maybe we can start a dialogue in our congregation!

Here it is:

As the daughter of a working class family, I have so often wanted to loudly tell my UU friends to WAKE UP! I’ve found over and over that UU’s are unaware of the real life situations of the majority of Americans who are “working class.”

My father, who did not finish 6^th grade, was a logger and later a truck driver (and a Teamster). My mother was a bookkeeper. Higher education was not valued in my family; my father considered it elitist and was convinced that people who went to college did not want to dirty their hands with real work. My mother, like so many in my family, was a fundamentalist, born-again Christian, and allowed her independent thinking capacity to be subsumed into the rigidity of that faith.

While I did not go to college, I did succeed in a “professional” career, and eventually found my way to a UU church in Maryland where I felt somewhat comfortable. But even there, one UU woman told me that she (of course) did not expect our church to reach out to people without college degrees. When I told a friend that I had not gone to college, his jaw dropped open and he eventually said, “Jean, I won’t hold that against you.” I referenced the fact that one-half of American high school youth did not go on to college in a conversation with a PhD physicist. He refused to believe me, even though I had a valid citation. So often I felt excluded when it was assumed that everyone had advanced degrees, had traveled extensively, and had children who were accomplished both in education and careers.

One of the reasons I moved back to Oregon from the Washington, D.C. area was that I was tired of upper middle class pretensions. From my childhood in Portland, I remembered positive values, such as the integrity of a full day’s hard work, personal sacrifice for the needs of your family, relying on yourself, commitment to your extended family no matter how much conflict there might be, keeping your children safe, taking care of aged parents, and returning your library books on time. I never heard about such things as personal choice, fulfillment, and career rewards. And there was certainly no assumption that parents would pay for college for their children -- their goals were paying the bills on time and saving a penny for a rainy day.

After he died, I learned that my father was brilliant in his own way, with a patent for a mechanical device he had designed. I think he would have been comfortable with UU religious principles, but would never have been comfortable in a UU congregation. There are others like my father and myself out there who could benefit, and could contribute, to Unitarian Universalism.

If you’re wondering how to provide a safe religious home for working class individuals, I suggest that you begin by learning more about the working class, realize that you already have working class members, and reflect this knowledge in the language that is used in worship services and sermons."

The Working Class

2007-08-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

There is a great article by Doug Muder in The World magazine about why Unitarian Universalism doesn't appeal to the working class.

My first reaction to the article was he got it just right. I was pretty excited because it pulled together ideas I had had over the years into a coherent argument.

I have wondered why we don't attract more working class people or people of color to Unitarian Universalist congregations. I had put it down to culture rather than religion, but Muder makes the case that there is a difference between classes in what they need from religion. For example, in a consumer culture,successful people need help making good choices. He writes "The primary spiritual challenge of the professional class is discernment."

For the working class, its more about sucking up and doing what needs to be done, without being consumed by rage and going off the deep end. In short, the spiritual message that resonates with the working class is "Resist temptation."

Muder does a good job of drawing distinctions between the working class and the professional class without judging either. But he draws a picture of very different worlds -- so different that when he calls for unity in the end, its hard to think it could happen.

Muder says we don't have to give up anything, we need 'both subtle discernment and doing the obvious hard thing. Inspiration and self-control'. Without the unity of those ideas we aren't anything but a boutique religion. Its at this point that I need to get stop thinking of models of behavior and hear just how this is new robust religion is done. What would it look like? What would a sermon sound like and would I want to hear it?

Pollyanna Post

2007-08-17T19:59:00.001-07:00

It took a while for me to come up with the name of my blog. The quote from E.M. Forester 'Only connect' was just a chance resonance. I ran into it while I was looking for something from the American Unitarian past-- some Emerson perhaps -- a little Over-soul reference. But here was a quote from a British author that I knew nothing about.

Only connect. It had the right Bloggy qualities. I didn't even know the context of the words. After I picked it, I found myself saying it to myself like a little mantra. Only Connect.

Then I found myself saying it when I was facing generic personal encounters like grocery store check-stand money hand-offs. I would say it to myself and look at the check-out clerk directly and listen. The irritation and the blankness dropped away.

I tried it for other encounters where there was more at stake. Especially when there was an element of fear, complexity, competition, irritation, all the nasty things that can interfere with, well, connecting! Just saying it to myself drops my shoulders down from my ears. I relax.

I think it works as a reminder that success in the encounter is not about the transactional aspect of our being together. Its not about if they do what I want, check my groceries quickly and error free, or consider me the smartest person in the room. Its whether I connect.

I've since looked up the quote and Forester used it differently. He was writing about connecting the parts of a single person. Loosely paraphrased, connecting the practical to the emotional. Making a whole person.

But I like my interpretation of the phrase. Try it yourself -- OnlyConnect.

Old critique style VS instant blogging feedback

2007-08-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

My writing group met last night.

Rather than come to the group empty handed I brought one of my blog posts. A day or two before the meeting I send out this blog address so they could see the whole thing.

I got a traditional critique from my writing mates on this new medium. It was a mix of the old with the new and very helpful!

E wanted more connections. "if you are writing about Unitarian Universalism, why isn't there a link somewhere." Good point! She was using it as a blog and found herself taking the Enneagram quiz to see what she was. She found all that on her own because I hadn't done a link. She wanted me to do more about MY credo, MY journey My beliefs.

Its been so long since I became a UU that I don't find that story as fresh as hearing others. Then N said, speaking as a devote and entirely liberal Catholic, "I think it would be interesting to see why your sister stayed a Catholic and you became a UU." Does anyone have that kind of time!

They all chastised me for having such a negative "about me". I was trying to be funny! I knew it clunked a bit. My excuse, and its a true one, is I found it difficult to compose in that tiny little box Blogger gives you to write your profile in. Going back and forth between the box and the final reminded me of the old days of computing when you had to save, do three more things, look at it, go back. Enough! I will compose it somewhere else where I have elbow room and then plop it in. It will be much more polished.

They thought the blog was fun, and showed a side of myself they hadn't seen. There wasn't much said about the writing. In all the rush to publish, the fast pace of putting words out there is a blog really about the writing? I say yes, but its definitely a different style from a carefully crafted story.

Credo Service

2007-08-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

If you're a UU and reading this, you probably know what a Credo Service is. If not, a credo service is built around several UU's standing up in church and telling the congregation what they believe.

It must be a uniquely UU style of service. I can't imagine any other faith where we all sit and avidly listen not at all sure what we are going to hear. It could be anything really.

We hadn't had a credo service at Eastrose in quite a while. I had forgotten how powerful they can be.

We had four strong speakers this time. What strikes me is how much there is that is common in all our stories. For most UU's there is usually a background of questioning the beliefs they grew up with (except for those unusual people who grew up as UU's). The questioning persists until the person no longer feels authentic and makes a change. The beliefs expressed in a credo service are rarely surprising. We all seem to need the freedom to question, we have a comfort with knowing that we will never really know about the existence of God. Somehow we all come to a belief that this world is important and how we live in it matters. Not because of God, but just because.

Interesting how we still want a religious community and don't just stay home or go for long walks. I bet a lot of people never do find a community. Perhaps they don't need one. I do.

Body World

2007-07-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

My husband and I went to Body World this week-end at OMSI.

I had put it off, the way I put of watching a 'heavy' video until I'm in the right mood. Sometimes I end up sending them back to netflix because I've had the damn thing for three weeks and life hasn't reached the right philosophical balance and never will.

But here I was at Body World, not feeling especially good anyway. My stomach had been rebelling against some aspect of my recent life. It didn't feel any better at Body World where I could look at an actual stomach, either alone, or in the company of its fellow organs.

My husband was in heaven. Scary stuff revealed! Here is a man who loves science fiction, science, horror movies.

I suffered. The big questions were coming at me. Is this ethical? Would this be ethical if they didn't display the bodies doing skateboard tricks? Are we just meat? How big a wuss am I? (that last question was easy to answer -- a pretty big wuss)

But never mind the big questions how about the big exclamations. He is holding his own skin! The circulation system! That's where the heart is! Liver! Spleen! Oh my god look at the size of those male sex organs. Her butt is in the air showing everything! You name it, I had no idea where it was.

I really wonder what everyone else trooping through the exhibit was thinking. My mind was following two tracks. On the first track I was horrified at the whole jolly show. Everything was merrily transgressive. Here you have a dead person and they are chopped up in artful ways and doing some sporting maneuver. The showmanship, which is integral to the whole show was the opposite of respectful. I guess I think a little dullness is in order when dealing with the human body.

I had to admit though, and this is track two, that it was amazing. Could it be that the people who donated really don't care that their bodies are used in this way -- might even think its a good thing? The crowd wasn't solemn but they were respectful. Lots of parents were there with well behaved children. The children didn't look traumatized like I did.

My one take away that I wasn't expecting was an empathy for social conservatives. They are always going crazy about a movie, a fashion. They think its terrible; it doesn't show respect. The rest of society goes, 'huh! What's the big deal! if you don't like it don't wear it or see it." I'm usually the no big deal person. Now I know how it feels.

Hope Global Warming isn't a Step Function

2007-07-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot I remember from my engineering degree. What I have are some graphs that stick in my mind with metaphorical weight. One of those graphs is a step function.

An example of a step function is an on-off switch. When you flip the lights on the current goes from 0 to full instantly. A graph of someone flipping the lights on and off is a series of boxes like you are stepping up on a step and then down from a step.

Most change is linear or exponential. Sea level rises in increments of inches, or feet over years. If the rate of change is constant its easy to deal with. Not so easy to deal with is exponential change. That's when the rate of change starts increasing and suddenly a population of rabbits goes from 10 rabbits to 100 and then the next time you measure its 1000. Hmm. That's the worry when we talk about temperature and sea levels. How can we keep it linear and stop the move to exponential change.

We worry and fuss and start slowly to action.

But what if it's step! We think of linear change as natural change, but step functions are common in nature. A Tsunami hitting the shore is a step function. Every year in Northern lakes there is a day where the warm water at the bottom flips up to the top when the seasons change. All the fish in the lake wobble around for a week or so trying to figure out what just happened. Its drastic but its natural. Its a great day to go fishing!

There is one more perfectly natural step function that we are all familiar with. Its the step we all have to face one day. Death is a step function. One day we are alive, the next we are dead and nothing is more natural then that.

Lady Bird

2007-07-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

She has been out of the public eye so long its a rediscovery to hear her name. In the paper I see a clear-eyed woman of evident sense. She's an attractive brunette who looks engaged with life. My, who knew that Lady Bird Johnson was a beauty.

I was young in the sixties and didn't bother being fair to a president who could send my brothers to fight in Vietnam. My disdain extended to his family. Add on to that, Lady Bird followed Jackie Kennedy who was in some other category of cool. What an act to follow. The picture of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in says it all. They are on the plane back to Washington. Jackie is standing next to Lyndon in the place that Lady Bird should be. Lady Bird stands to one side, an onlooker, giving first place to the shocked and suffering widow.

We made fun of her. We made fun of all the Bird girls also, as if their Texas background was the most ludicrous thing on earth. Lady Bird wasn't as young, thin or photogenic as Jackie was, end of story. I realize I do the same thing to Laura Bush and to those little Bush girls. I think I need to knock it off. They don't deserve it.

The New Standard for Renewable Energy

2007-07-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

I stopped at the brow of a hill in my car,where I could see the freeway right at eye level. The road I was on continues down the hill and through an underpass. I probably stop there every day or so without thinking about it. if anything I look past the freeway at the Columbia River and the mountains on the skyline.

An enormous white blade like a huge feather or a gigantic whale bone went by on the freeway. It was strapped on to the back of trailer rig taking up the whole trailer. So much natural grace went by, it took my breath away. It must of been the blade for a wind turbine heading out to the Columbia Gorge. It looked like it wanted the air; it looked like it grew into its form rather than being engineered. It was, at one fast glance, some organic thing that needed to be strapped down so it wouldn't fly away.

Perhaps that is how we should judge the new renewable energy sources we need to reduce carbon emissions. Does it look like it belongs in the natural world? Does it make your heart stop with it's beauty? Yes? Then it is both useful and beautiful. What more can we want in this world.

OnlyConnect

When did we become the bad guys

2007-07-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

It seems right on the Fourth of July to speak out about torture done by the United States or condoned by the United States.

It isn't often that I feel unambiguously in the right. Even on issues like the war, gay marriage and stem cell research, part of me understands the red state point of view. Torture though is different. I don't even want to understand the other sides reasoning.

It isn't just the pain, fear and injustice to torture victims that gets me angry. It's the damage to ourselves. Taking part in something so debased, corrupts everyone that touches it: our allies, our armed forces, the CIA, the state department. There should be a special place in hell for people in power who direct others to use unlawful torture.

Torture works hand in hand with secrecy and lack of habeas corpus.

In a democracy when you allow your leaders to break the law, you are breaking the law.

Identity Crisis

2007-06-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

It was not a good portent for my first blog that setting it up got me stalled for a night and a day.

I was stymied by the blank space I needed to fill with my blogging name! Identity for this blogger is always an issue. What should I call myself? Should I go with something cute, regional, religious or perhaps all three? I intend this to be a Unitarian Universalist blog and so considered many options that included the characteristic UU initials. They are lovely pillars that when pronounced point our attention away from ourselves - you and you. However, they can also look strident, standing there as if they are blocking something off.

I couldn't decide on a name, and had to sleep on it. I woke thinking of E.M. Forester's admonition, "Only Connect". And so here I am OnlyConnect. It will remind me, when I write that that is my intention in doing the blog. Connecting with others is at least one of my intentions, the other are self expression, keeping myself writing and giving myself a ready forum for ideas and feelings.

OnlyConnect