Old Time Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.