Rev. Hank Peirce found a 1795 translation of the Koran in the attic of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Mdeford, Mass., which had belonged to an 18th C. minister of the congregation — and here’s the online story. A brief excerpt of the news story follows the jump.

Medford [Mass.] — You never know what sort of treasures might be hiding in your attic. That’s just what happened when a researcher came to check out some old books hidden in the attic of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Medford.

The Rev. Hank Peirce said the books are part of the library of the Rev. David Osgood, who served the church in the 1700s. Upon his death, Osgood’s books were divided, with half going to the Medford Public Library and half remaining in the church attic, which now serves as a records room.

“I wanted to see what was here,” said Peirce, of the hardcover books still neatly lined up on a shelf. “If there was something we should donate, we wanted to have an answer.”

And while there was nothing of value in Osgood’s collection, there was an oddity — a small brown book that caught Peirce’s attention. Tucked in towards the end of the row is a translation of the Koran written by George Sale, which was published in 1795.

“This was the second translation,” Peirce said. “The first one was not a good translation and was very heavily opinionated. This one is a pretty straightforward translation.”

Peirce said that first translation, published five years before Sale’s book, might have been valuable. Yet, this particular book says something to Peirce about Osgood.

“He had a real intellectual curiosity,” Peirce said. “Here he was at the end of the American Revolution and it was a time of great change. Here was a religious book and he wanted to see what it had to say.”

“If you treat an expert like a novice, you’ll fail.” — This is how Seth Godin ended yesterday’s blog post about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. If you’re not familiar with the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, you might have run into Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager, which is another system that gets at the same basic idea — that you have to treat a rank beginner differently than you treat someone who’s been on the job for years. This is more than an idea; it’s an essential rule for any effective organization.

Unitarian Universalist congregations routinely break this rule. On the one hand, we take rank beginners, people who are new to Unitarian Universalism and new to volunteering in a congregation, and shove them into important committee slots and Board positions that really should be filled by long-term, committed Unitarian Universalists with experience in running our kind of congregations. In so doing, we break the rule by sticking novices into positions that should be filled by experts. On the other hand, we often treat experienced volunteers as though they are imbeciles, and the perfect example of this is when we give one of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s curriculums (which are all written to be “teacher-proof,” to support rank novices) and hand it to someone who is a skilled and gifted teacher and expect them to follow that curriculum. In so doing, we break the rule by treated an experienced volunteer like a novice.

In many Unitarian Universalist congregations, volunteer management consists of trying to find warm bodies with no real skills to fill volunteer job vacancies. Instead, we could think of volunteer management as a way of equipping and transforming persons over time so that they acquire valuable skills that will help them carry our larger mission in the world. Take the example of Sunday school teachers: We would still offer the UUA’s teacher-proof curriculums to all teachers, but we would set the expectation that the more experienced a teacher is, the more we expect them to draw on their own skills to create transformative experiences that will help their classes live out the larger mission of our congregation.

To quote Seth Godin once again: “If you treat an expert like a novice, you’ll fail.”

“The two main elements of which American democracy is compounded may be seen united in the familiar phrases of the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ One element is the idea of equality; the other is the idea of liberty. These are not only different ideas — they are in some ways quite contradictory. Equalitarianism implies the individual’s responsibility to and dependence on the community; libertarianism implies the community’s responsibility to and dependence on the individual. … Although the equalitarian and libertarian tendencies were each predominant at one or another period in our history, neither alone defines American democracy. Rather, it is their imperfect fusion, their interconnection, and their interaction.” — from “American Democracy and Music (1830-1914)” by Irving Lowens, in Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 265-266.

The problem with American democracy in the past three decades, it seems to me, is that the libertarian impulse has been slowly swamping the equalitarian impulse.

This problem pervades our society, and our congregations are not immune from it. The question facing us, then, is simple: How can we promote a better balance between the equalitarian and libertarian impulses within our congregations?

“In the long run we are all dead.”

So said economist John Maynard Keynes in “A Tract on Monetary Reform” (1923). That’s a delightful statement in and of itself, taken completely out of context. It’s even better in context. Keynes is making an argument reductio ad absurdum, pointing out that it’s rather too easy to take the very long view. If you really want to take a long view as an economist, you can simply say that in the end everyone’s going to be dead, which means it’s really easy to make economic predictions, e.g., in a hundred years the current economic crisis won’t seem so bad, because we’ll all be dead.

It’s easy to make this kind of mistake in your local congregation. In a hundred years, it won’t matter if the roof is leaking. Compared to the infinitudes of Transcendentalist theology, it doesn’t matter if the grass is all dead on the children’s play area at church. Both these are true but pointless statements. This kind of attitude doesn’t get you very far.

It’s also easy to make the opposite mistake: only paying attention to the problems that are staring you in the face right here and now. Don’t fix the roof until it leaks, and then wait a couple of year until we have enough money in the operating budget. Don’t worry about the lack of grass in the children’s play area until the rainy season begins, until the children’s favorite game becomes mud wrestling. As with the previous attitude, this kind of attitude doesn’t get you very far.

In my sixteen years of working in local congregations, I have found one of the hardest tasks is finding a good balance between these two extremes. It’s easy and ultimately useless to take the very long view that we’ll all be dead. It is equally easy, and in the end equally useless, only to pay attention to problems that hit you in the face. It’s really hard to try to predict problems far enough in advance to deal with them in a timely manner, but not so far in advance that you’re wasting your time solving them now.

A big welcome to a new eco-blog, Flowscapes: Everday Adventures for Ecological Resource Solutions. It’s not your average eco-blog. There are thoughtful posts considering ecological issues you’ve never even considered, like why the World Toilet Organitzation’s “Big Squat Day” might not be a good idea. There are posts offering different perspectives on topics you’ve probably been thinking about, like whether wind turbines are too loud or not. There are posts on bigger issues, like the importance of “followership.” And there’s fun random stuff, like a photograph of an art car. Did I mention this new blog is written by my sweetheart, Carol Steinfeld? So what are you waiting for? Go check it out.

Carol and I were talking about the ongoing trend of civic disengagement.

“I think it might be a crisis,” she said.

I think she’s right. There are fewer people than ever before who understand how to be good institutionalists. Most people don’t belong to more than one or two voluntary associations. There are many people who spend all their non-work hours doing nothing more than passively consuming entertainment.

We all know that civic disengagement has an adverse effect on democracy. But in a democracy, where religious organizations are voluntary associations, civic disengagement also has an adverse effect on organized religion. I’d be willing to say that of all the social factors that are pushing organized religion into decline, civic disengagement may be the most powerful such force.

Of course you already knew that October is Clergy Appreciation Month. If you’re wondering whether to bother observing it this year or not, Parsonage.org offers their reasons why you should:

Pastors and their families live under incredible pressures. Their lives are played out in a fishbowl, with the entire congregation and community watching their every move. They are expected to have ideal families, to be perfect people, to always be available, to never be down and to have all the answers we need to keep our own lives stable and moving forward. Those are unrealistic expectations to place on anyone, yet most of us are disappointed when a pastor becomes overwhelmed, seems depressed, lets us down or completely burns out.

I’m one of the lucky clerypersons who gets a lot of appreciation already. My ministry here in the Palo Alto church is primarily with children and teens, so I get hugs and warm smiles and friendly waves from dolls and stuffed animals nearly every week, and it doesn’t get any better than that. On top of that, the lay leaders here in Palo Alto are supportive and appreciative and just plain good folks. But what is true of me is not true of every clergyperson. So maybe it’s worth considering whether your clergyperson needs appreciation or not.

If you decide to appreciate your clergyperson, the Parsonage.org Web site has a few suggestions. Below are three additional suggestions:

1. If you are moved by a sermon, tell your clergyperson so. (Three years ago, someone told me that one of my sermons changed her life, and just thinking about that improves my mood — wow! someone actually listened to me! and paid attention! and that was a good thing for them!)
2. If you are a lay leader and you think your clergyperson is looking stressed, call them up and ask if things are OK. (Thanks Kathy, it made all the different when you did.)
3. If your clergypseron does something worth thanking them for, send a thank-you note. You know, a physical note, using paper technology. (I keep every thank-you note I have ever received from a parishioner, and every year or so I re-read them and have warm memories of the people who sent them.)

As I said, I don’t need any extra appreciation this month, and yes I will delete your comment if you try to appreciate me here. Furthermore, I figure you’re a responsible human being, and can figure out on your own if your clergyperson needs your appreciation or not. (Note to Palo Alto folks: Just a reminder that Amy’s a good preacher, and it would be good practice to tell her when her sermons move you.)

Camp Meeker, California

The retreat center I’m staying at for a couple of days is in the middle of second growth redwood woodlands. This morning, I walked around a bend in a trail , and there were two mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) standing in the middle of the trail They both froze and looked at me, although they were obviously not particularly afraid to see a human being. I froze and looked back at them. The three of us stood there frozen for four or five minutes until the mule deer decided that I was either not a threat, or stupid, or both. They twitched their big ears, and started browsing again.

They were bending their heads down and eating something that lay on the path. There was no greenery for them to browse on; all I could near them see was old redwood cones; so I couldn’t figure out what it was they were eating. I watched their jaws move sideways as they chewed. Little bits of stuff fell out of the side of their mouths as they ate. They were not very attractive eaters.

At last I got bored, and started walking again. They looked at me as if surprised that I was moving, and then bounded away in a leisurely fashion. When I got to the place where the deer had been, I saw what it was they had been eating: acorns from the tan bark oaks (Lithocarpus densiflorus or, according to some taxonomists, Notholithocarpus densiflorus. The bits of stuff I had seen falling out of the sides of their mouths were bits of the outer husk of the acorns.

We were out walking a couple of nights ago. As we crossed one street, I realized there was a raccoon looking up at me. It was standing inside a storm drain. “There’s a raccoon,” I said in surprise.

Carol didn’t see it at first — you don’t necessarily expect to see a raccoon in a storm drain. It kept bobbing up and down: it would poke its head up above the grating, then duck down back under the grating, then back up, then down.

Carol said something like, “Hello, raccoon,” and gave it a wide berth. So did I. It was not a cute raccoon; it was a little creepy.

Ταυτ ειδως σοφος ισθι, ματην δ'’ Επικουρον εασον
που το κενον ζητειν, και τινες αι μοναδες.

— Automedon

Samuel Johnson includes this as the epigram preceding his essay “The Study of Life” (Rambler 180, Saturday 7 December 1751). Johnson provides the following translation:

On life, on morals, be thy thoughts employ’d;
Leave to the schools their atoms and void.

This is a nice commentary on the current disagreements in our society about whether science provides all answers. Clearly, these disagreements have been going on at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. Johnson, addressing the same problem in the eighteenth century, provides the following anecdote, in which no one comes out looking perfect:

“It is somewhere related by LeClerc that a wealthy trader of good understanding, having the common ambition to breed his son a scholar, carried him to a university, resolving to use his own judgment in the choice of a tutor. He had been taught, by whatever intelligence, the nearest way to the heart of an academic, and at his arrival entertained all who came to him with such profusion, that the professors were lured by the smell of his table from their books, and flocked around him with all the cringes of awkward complaisance. This eagerness answered the merchant’s purpose. He glutted them with delicacies, and softened them with caresses till he prevailed upon one after the other to open his bosom and make a discovery of his competitions, jealousies, and resentments. Having thus learned each man’s character, partly from himself and partly from his acquaintances, he resolved to find some other education for his son, and went away convinced that a scholastic life has no other tendency than to vitiate the morals and contract the understanding. Nor would he afterward hear the praises of the ancient authors, being persuaded that scholars of all ages must have been the same, and that Xenophon and Cicero were professors of some former university, and therefore mean and selfish, ignorant and servile, like those whom he had lately visited and forsaken….

“A man of learning is expected to excel the unlettered and unenlightened even on occasions where scholarly attainments are of no use; and among weak minds loses part of his reverence by discovering no superiority in those parts of life in which all are unavoidably equal.”

Alas, I still have no way of including the diacritical marks with ancient Greek — those of you who are classicists (which I emphatically am not) will notice that I had to include a couple in the above passage, but many more are missing. Sorry, classicists!

μετρον αριστον

— Cleobulus the Lindian

Samuel Johnson translates this phrase as “Mediocrity is best”, where we should take “mediocrity” to refer to “the quality or condition of being between two extremes… a quasi-technical term, with reference to the Aristotelian theory of ‘the mean.'” (OED)

sin, noun. 1. An action which deserves universal condemnation, and which promotes evil rather than good in the world. Sin exists among politicians and other secular leaders who set policies with which we disagree; however, sin does not exist among religious liberals. The following sentence is a proper use of the word — When Governor Sanford cheated on his wife, it was a sin. However, when the speaker is a religious liberal, the proper construction would be as follows — When I cheated on my spouse, we went into couples therapy together so we could resolve our issues. (N.B.: For those religious liberals who agreed with Governor Sanford’s policies, his action was not a sin, but was instead evidence that he needed therapy.)

Answers to yesterday’s quiz below.

A. Bible knowledge

1. Moses — Isaiah — John — Abraham — Esther.
2. Jesus — Paul — Judas Maccabbee — Peter — Mary.
3. Different Bibles have different numbers of books — Jewish Bible has 39, Bibles that include the Apocrypha can include 80+.
4. False. “Revelation” is singular, it is only one revelation.
5. True.

B. Knowledge of Christianity

1. All 5.
2. False. Many Quakers have no communion at all, many Protestant congregations have communion less often than weekly.
3. Christmas — Easter — Thanksgiving — Pentecost — Ash Wednesday.
4. False. Universalist Christians, for example, do not believe in hell.
5. False. Unitarian Christians, for example, do not.
6. False.

C. Knowledge of Judaism

1. Tanakh. Torah is the first five books of the Jewish Bible. Kethuvim is the last section of the Jewish Bible, the other writings. Leviticus is a book in the Bible.
2. Approx. from sunset on Friday to dusk on Saturday. From a few minutes before sunset, until Saturday when three stars appear in the sky.
3. Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur.

D. Knowledge of Islam

1. Salah, or daily prayers — Zakat, or giving alms to the poor — Hajj, or making pilgrimage to Mecca at least once if possible — Sawm, or fasting during Ramadan — Shahada, or profession of faith that there is only one god — Jihad, or struggle to further Islam.
2. All four.
3. Sunnis — Arabs — Shi’ites — Sufis — Kurds.

E. Knowledge of World Religions

1. Bhagavad Gita.
2. Buddhism.
3. Confucianism.
4. Sikhism.
5. Buddhism.
6. Judaism — Christianity — Zoroastrianism — Islam — Baha’i.

You’ve heard about the Pew Forum’s “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey”, where U.S. atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Mormons correctly answered an average of 20-21 out of 32 questions, while U.S. Catholics and Protestants answered 15-16 out of 32 questions correctly. I wonder how Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals would rate on religious knowledge. After looking at the 32-question quiz online (you’ll find a summary version of the quiz at the end of this post, without answers), my guess is that we would rate between Mormons and Protestants.

I love quizzes like this, and I’ve been thinking about developing a similar quiz that would test the religious knowledge of both adults and teenagers who have attended Unitarian Universalist religious education programs. What religious knowledge (facts) should all religious liberals have? Back in June I posted a quiz on Unitarian Universalist religious knowledge and facts. Now here’s my attempt at a multiple choice quiz to test the religious knowledge that religious liberals should find important and useful.

A. Bible knowledge

1. Which of the following are characters in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament? Moses — Isaiah — John — Abraham — Esther.
2. Which of the following are characters in the Christian scriptures, or New Testament: Jesus — Paul — Judas Maccabbee — Peter — Mary.
3. How many books are there in the Bible? 39 — 65 — 81 — Different Bibles have different numbers of books.
4. The final book of the Christian scriptures (New Testament) is “Revelations.” True — False.
5. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace their religions back to Abraham in the Bible. True — False.

B. Knowledge of Christianity

1. Which of the following may be considered types of Christianity? Roman Catholicism — Protestantism — Orthodox Christianity — Mormonism — Pentecostalism.
2. All Christians have communion (also called eucharist or Lord’s Supper) every Sunday. True — false.
3. Which of the following holidays do Christians trace back to stories in the Bible? Christmas — Easter — Thanksgiving — Pentecost — Ash Wednesday.
4. All Christians believe in hell. True — false.
5. All Christians believe in the trinity. True — false.
6. All Christians believe in the literal truth of the Bible. True — false.

C. Knowledge of Judaism

1. The Jewish Bible is called: Torah — Tanakh — Kethuvim — Leviticus.
2. The Jewish sabbath day lasts: Approx. from sunrise on Saturday to sunrise on Sunday — Approx. from sunset on Friday to dusk on Saturday — Approx. from midnight Saturday until midnight on Sunday — Approx. from dinner time on Friday to dinner time on Saturday.
3. The Jewish High Holidays are also called: Sukkot — Pesach, or Passover — Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur — Hannukah — Shabbat.

D. Knowledge of Islam

1. The Five Pillars of Islam include which of the following: Salah, or dialy prayers — Zakat, or giving alms to the poor — Hajj, or making pilgrimage to Mecca at least once if possible — Sawm, or fasting during Ramadan — Shahada, or profession of faith that there is only one god — Jihad, or struggle to further Islam.
2. Which of the following are considered prophets of Islam, that is, human beings chosen by Allah to teach humanity? Moses — Elijah — Jesus — Muhammad.
3. Which of the following are types of Muslims: Sunnis — Arabs — Shi’ites — Sufis — Kurds.

E. Knowledge of World Religions

1. Which of the following is a book important in Hindu traditions? Bhagavad Gita — Rabindrinath Tagore — Ramadan.
2. Which of the following religions would refer to the Eightfold Path? Buddhism — Confucianism — Hinduism — Sikhism — Taoism.
3. Which of the following religions would refer to the Five Relationships? Buddhism — Confucianism — Hinduism — Sikhism — Taoism.
4. Which of the following religions would affirm the phrase “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim”? Buddhism — Confucianism — Hinduism — Sikhism — Taoism.
5. Which of the following religions would refer to the Four Noble Truths? Buddhism — Confucianism — Hinduism — Sikhism — Taoism.
6. Which of the following are considered to be Abrahamic religions, that is, religions that consider the story of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible to be important? Judaism — Christianity — Zoroastrianism — Islam — Baha’i.

I’ll give the answers to the quiz tomorrow. In the mean time, think about what questions you would ask on such a quiz. What would you include, and what would you leave out?

I’ll also include the Pew Forum quiz below.

Pew Forum Religious Knowledge Questions
[source: http://www.pewforum.org/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey-Who-Knows-What-About-Religion.aspx]
Questions below have been paraphrased for brevity.

Bible

What is the first book of the Bible? (Open-ended)
What are the names of the first four books of the New Testament, that is, the four Gospels? (Open-ended)
Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born? Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth or Jericho?
Which of these is NOT in the Ten Commandments? Do unto others…, no adultery, no stealing, keep Sabbath?
Which figure is associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering? Job, Elijah, Moses or Abraham?
Which figure is associated with leading the exodus from Egypt? Moses, Job, Elijah or Abraham?
Which figure is associated with willingness to sacrifice his son for God? Abraham, Job, Moses or Elijah?

Elements of Christianity

What is Catholic teaching about bread and wine in Communion? They become body and blood, or are symbols?
Which group traditionally teaches that salvation is through faith alone? Protestants, Catholics, both or neither?
Was Mother Teresa Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Mormon?
What is the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Reformation? Luther, Aquinas or Wesley?
Who was a preacher during the First Great Awakening? Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney or Billy Graham?

Elements of Judaism

When does the Jewish Sabbath begin? Friday, Saturday or Sunday?
Was Maimonides Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu or Mormon?

Elements of Mormonism

When was the Mormon religion founded? After 1800, between 1200 and 1800, or before 1200 A.D.?
The Book of Mormon tells of Jesus appearing to people in what area? The Americas, Middle East or Asia?
Was Joseph Smith Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu?

World Religions

Is Ramadan the Islamic holy month, the Hindu festival of lights or a Jewish day of atonement?
Do you happen to know the name of the holy book of Islam? (Open-ended)
Which religion aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering? Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam?
Is the Dalai Lama Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic or Mormon?
In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva central figures? Hinduism, Islam or Taoism?
What is the religion of most people in India? Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Christian?
What is the religion of most people in Pakistan? Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian?
What is the religion of most people in Indonesia? Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian?
Who is the king of Gods in Greek mythology? Zeus, Mars or Apollo?

Atheism and Agnosticism

Is an atheist someone who does NOT believe in God, believes in God, or is unsure whether God exists?
Is an agnostic someone who is unsure whether God exists, does NOT believe in God, or believes in God?

Religion in Public Life

What does Constitution say about religion? Separation of church and state, emphasize Christianity, or nothing?
According to the Supreme Court, can a public school teacher lead a class in prayer?
According to the Supreme Court, can a public school teacher read from the Bible as an example of literature?
According to the Supreme Court, can a public school teacher offer a class comparing the world’s religions?

I’ve been comparing two metrical paraphrases of Psalm 19.1-4, one by the poet and writer Joseph Addison, and one by the poet and hymnodist Isaac Watts. It’s instructive to see how two different hymnodists handle the exact same subject.

First, they use two different meters: Addison’s version is in Long Meter Doubled (L.M.D.) which is somewhat easier to find a tune for, while Watts’ version is in 8.8.8.8.8.8. Second, both take liberties with the original text, adding imagery, emphasizing and de-emphasizing what appeals to them. Third, they reflect different theological stances: Watts begins with the straightforward phrase “Great God,” while Addison prefers to use more oblique references like the “great Original”, “Hand” and “Creator”, and Addison also refers to “Reason” which since it is capitalized is personified. Fourth, Watts’ hymn directly addresses God, while Addison’s hymn speaks about God and God’s works. Fifth, while both are enjoyable hymns to sing (considered in terms of the rhymes, rhythms which aren’t too herky-kerky, “mouth-feel”, etc.) Watts’ verse is sturdy, bold, and tends towards the ecstatic; Addison’s verse is more nuanced, lower-key, and feels more subtle. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, both hymns are worthy of being called poetry — I don’t cringe when I sing them, and they’re worth singing more than once.

This kind of comparison is helpful for those of us who want to think about how to evaluate new hymns written by religious liberals hymnodists — and/or for those who may want to take a stab at writing new liberal religious hymns. Not that we should imitate Addison or Watts (although that may be a good idea), but we should start thinking about articulating criteria about what makes a good or poor hymn text.

I’ll include the full text of both hymns, plus the text from the King James Bible from which the hymns were drawn, after the jump. Update: I’ve added the Scottish Psalter’s metrical paraphrase of this same text at the very end of this post.

Joseph Addison’s paraphrase may be found in both the 1993 Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition and in (#283, with alterations noted in brackets) Oxford Book of English Verse ed. by Arthur Quiller-Crouch:

Hymn

The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.
Th’ unwearied Sun from day to day
Does his* Creator’s power display; [“its” in SLT]
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The Moon takes up the wondrous tale;
And nightly to the listening Earth
Repeats the story of her* birth: [“its” in SLT]
Whilst all the stars that round her* burn, [“it” in SLT]
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball;
What though nor real voice nor sound
Amidst their radiant orbs be found?
In Reason’s* ear they all rejoice, [not capitalized in SLT]
And utter forth a glorious voice;
For ever singing as they shine,
“The Hand that made us is divine.”

Here, by contrast, is Isaac Watts’ metrical paraphrase of the same passage from Psalm 19:

Psalm 19:4.
The book of nature and scripture.

1 Great God, the heaven’s well-order’d frame
Declares the glories of thy name;
There thy rich works of wonder shine:
A thousand starry beauties there,
A thousand radiant marks appear
Of boundless power and skill divine.

2 From night to day, from day to night,
The dawning and the dying light
Lectures of heavenly wisdom read;
With silent eloquence they raise
Our thoughts to our Creator’s praise,
And neither sound nor language need.

3 Yet their divine instructions run
Far as the journies of the sun,
And every nation knows their voice;
The sun, like some young bridegroom drest,
Breaks from the chambers of the east,
Rolls round, and makes the earth rejoice.

4 Where’er he spreads his beams abroad,
He smiles and speaks his maker God;
All nature joins to shew thy praise:
Thus God, in every creature shines;
Fair is the book of nature’s lines,
But fairer is thy book of grace.

And here is how the opening of Psalm 19 reads in the King James Version of the Bible:

To the leader. A Psalm of David.
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
   and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
   and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
   their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
   and their words to the end of the world.

In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
   and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
   and its circuit to the end of them;
   and nothing is hidden from its heat.

Update: Here’s the metrical paraphrase from the Scottish Psalter for the sake of comparison.

1 The heav’ns God’s glory do declare,
the skies his hand-works preach :
2 Day utters speech to day, and night
to night doth knowledge teach.
3 There is no speech nor tongue to which
their voice doth not extend:
4 Their line is gone through all the earth,
their words to the world’s end.

This paragraph, from an essay about 18th century American church song, reminded me why I have a visceral dislike of certain kinds of music prevalent in liberal religious congregations today:

“When it was composed, this music [American 18th century four-part church song] was experienced rather than heard because it was not written for an audience’s appreciation or to tickle an ear — it was written to be experienced in performance by performers. How it ‘sounded’ to a non-participant was of very little importance. This is no novel concept; it is one of the essential pre-conditions of genuine church song. Clearly, a basic function of congregational music within the service should be to participate actively in worship through music. This active participation in worship is, of course, one of the foundation-stones of Protestantism, a democratization of religion that was one of the great achievements of the Reformation. If congregational song is to fulfill this function, it is obvious that no performer-audience relationship is possible; all members of the congregation must participate actively in the process of making music. Thus, congregation music must make its impact felt not through the hearing experience, as with choir music, but through the performing experience. …” [“The American Tradition of Church Song,” in Music and Musicians in Early America: Aspects of the History of Music in Early America and the History of Early American Music, Irving Lowens (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 283.]

The paradigmatic composer of this American music was William Billings (link to some sound files of Billing’s music performed both by professional choirs and amateurs). Billings wrote songs that can be sung by average people with average voices, yet they are musically interesting enough to hold the attention of sophisticated musicians. The songs are written in four-part harmony where each part has enough melodic interest to keep all singers interested and involved. The songs are unaccompanied, and are in that sense truly democratic — there is no paid accompanist, no soloist who is more important than the other singers; just as in political democracy, everyone has to participate in this music to make it work. And as is true of a robust democracy, education is an integral part of the process; Billings was one many New England singing-school masters who taught young people how to sing in four-part harmony. We’re talking about truly democratic music.

This is why I have a visceral dislike of praise bands: the sole reason for the existence of praise bands is to drown us out so that we don’t really have to participate, or so other can ignore us if we sound bad; that is profoundly anti-democratic. This is why I don’t care for song leaders who use a microphone in church to make sure their solo harmony part is heard above the unwashed masses who sing in unison; their purpose is not to get everyone singing together, their purpose is to have the masses singing so they can perform a solo over it; again, this is not democratic in the sense Lowens uses the word in the paragraph above.

I wish I had an easy solution to the problem, but I don’t. The solution to the problem simple, but not easy — the solution is to take the time to teach people how to sing, just like the solution to the problem of not enough volunteers in our congregations is to teach people how to do lay leadership. In a culture that values consumption over self-cultivation, education is a tough sell, unless it is education that directly improves your earning potential so that you can increase your consumption. As long as we have people coming into our congregations expecting to consume religion (rather than co-create it), I guess we’re going to have problems with congregational singing.

Diaspora, the much-publicized coding project to create an open-source, encrypted social networking platform that will integrate with existing social networks (e.g., Facebook), has been available in a developer’s version for a week now. Today on the Diaspora blog, the developers write:

The [developer] community’s response to our release has been amazing. Within the first week of releasing code to developers, Diaspora is the 10th most popular project on Github with over 2500+ watchers. We’ve had 412 forks of Diaspora to date, and about a half a million views of the code as well.

In other words, developers are excited by this project, and are actively working on it. Looking at their roadmap, there’s still a lot of work to be done — but they’ve also made an amazing amount of progress.

Alpha version due in October. I hope beta is not far behind. I’m really getting sick of fighting with Facebook.

At about 11:15, five children and two teachers left the worship service in the Main Hall and gathered in Room 4/5 here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto to begin a new Sunday school year together. Two of the children were returning from last year’s 11:00 Sunday school class for grades 1-6. The other three children were in class for the first time: two of them were new to our church, and all three had older siblings attending the meeting of the senior high youth group which meets at 11:00.

As soon as we sat down around the table, I took attendance. My friends Dorit and Lisa were back, both looking older and taller. The newcomers were the twins Ian and Edie, both of whom just moved here from Rhode Island, and Bert, who used to come at 9:30. [All names and identifying details are disguised to protect the privacy of the children.] Lucy, my co-teacher, who teaches high school for a profession, sat directly across from me. I lit the flaming chalice, and read some opening words. The class is open to any child in grades 1 through 6, and in case there were older children, I had chosen somewhat challenging opening words, and put them on a handout (PDF file of the handout). Here are the opening words:

Zi gong [one of Confucius’ students] asked: {Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?”
The Master said: “Is not RECIPROCITY such a word: what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others?”

As it happened, the children in the class were all in second through fourth grades, so I wanted to make sure they understood something of what the words on the handout meant. They had never heard the word “reciprocity” before, so we practiced trying to say it together. I told them that in Chinese it was a short word, “shu,” and they could all say that (though I explained that we probably weren’t pronouncing it quite right). And I said that what the word means is “what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”

“The Golden Rule,” said Edie. I asked her to tell us the Golden Rule, and she said, “Do to other people what you want them to do to you.” This led to a discussion about the Golden Rule.

During the opening sharing circle, we went around the circle twice. The first time, you could say the best thing that happened to you over the summer, or you could pass. The second time around, you could say one good thing and one bad thing that happened to you in the past week, or you could pass. The first time around, Ian and Lisa both passed, and Bert had little to say. By the second time around, the children were feeling more comfortable, and four of the five had something to share.

I had another handout for the children: a sheet of paper with the phrase “Under the sky all people are one family” written in English and also translated into fifteen other languages. We tried to figure out what all the languages were. “I don’t know any of them,” I said. “I do,” said Bert, “this one is in English.” We all laughed, and realized we all did know at least one of the languages. After we had made some guesses, I showed everyone the answer key, and we saw that the phrase was written in Aramaic, Italian, German, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Hebrew, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Czech, Burmese, Baganda, Tamil, and Arabic.

“Now I’d like to read you a story,” I said. Lucy and I got markers and paper so the children could draw while I was reading. I read “The Picture on the Kitchen Wall” from the book From Long Ago and Many Lands, an old Unitarian Universalist curriculum book by Sophia L. Fahs (Boston: Beacon, 1948, 1st ed., p. 3; you can preview the 2nd ed. online at Google Books). The story centers on Chang Kung, who lived in China in ancient times, Chang Kung’s very large household was a very happy household in which no one ever quarreled or scolded. The point of the story is that any household that has kindness as its governing principle will be a happy household, with very little quarreling or scolding.

The story led to a good discussion. All the children said that there was quarreling at their house, particularly with their siblings. Lisa is an only child, so I asked if the children had ever been scolded by their parents, and they all said that they had (Ian said he got in trouble “lots”). They were interested to think of a household in which there was no quarreling, a household in which not even the dogs fought each other over bones. Edie thought that “kindness,” as it was meant in this story, was like the Golden Rule.

“Do you think this is a really true story, or a fairy tale story?” I said. There were mixed opinions, so I asked those who thought it was a really true story to raise their hands. Three of the children raised their hands. Then I asked who thought it was a fairy tale story, and Lucy and one of the children raised their hands. Bert muttered, “Maybe…” so I quickly said, “Who thinks it’s maybe true?” Lucy said that when she heard Bert say “Maybe,” she changed her mind, and now voted for maybe, and some of the other children changed their votes, too. I pointed out that the book said that Chang Kung was a real person, but we all agreed that the story took place so long ago that no one could be sure if it had all happened quite the way it was in the story. “Maybe they quarreled once in a while,” said Dorit, “but not very often,” and everyone seemed to agree with that.

I told the children that we are going to be together in Sunday school class for the rest of the year, and I said we might want to think about how we are going to treat each other. If Chang Kung’s household was run on kindness, could we do the same? Would one word be enough?

Edie brought up the Golden Rule again, and we spent some time talking about the Golden Rule. We thought about different ways of saying it, and finally Edie summed it up best: Treat other people the way you would like to be treated. I asked who had good handwriting, and Lisa and a couple of other children raised their hands. I thought Lisa’s hand went up first, so I asked her to write down our version of the Golden Rule, and she did. We all watched as she wrote. Then we all went over to our class’ bulletin board, and put up our version of the Golden Rule. Some of the children also were willing to have the drawings they had done put up on the bulletin board.

I had hoped to spend some time doing meditation with the children, but we were running out of time. So I suggested that maybe they could show their parents the sheet with all the languages on it, and see if their parents knew any of the languaes besides English. That meant they had to copy down the answer key, and Bert and Ian, both eager to stump their parents with such a difficult puzzle, did so.

We had our closing circle. I asked the children what we had done today. We were a little rushed, and I ended it quickly. “It was good to see you all,” I said. “See you next week!”

Comment

(a) Traditionally, Confucius’ birthday is celebrated on September 28. However, I decided I was trying to pack enough into this lesson as it was, so I did not bring this up with the children.

Question for reflection

(a) I tried to plan this lesson so it could be adapted to a wide range of ages (grades 1-6, or ages 6-11). Assuming a sixth grader had showed up, would there have been enough in this lesson to keep him or her engaged? What other activities could I have planned to keep older children engaged?

The sky above, its sun and stars,
declares the order of the world.
The sun pours down its words by day;
the stars at night their knowledge show.
Though neither sun nor stars can speak,
yet still their voices loudly sound
unto the very ends of earth.

Paraphrase of Psalm 19:1-4

A—— showed up for our meeting, and by way of greeting he whispered, “I can only whisper, I’ve got seasonal laryngitis.”

“Seasonal laryngitis?” I said.

“Happens about once a year,” he said. “My allergies get so bad I can’t talk.”

“My allergies have been bad this week, but not that bad,” I said. “My sinuses are constantly draining down the back of my throat. It feels like my brains have liquified and are draining out of my head.”

That made A—— laugh, which started him choking and wheezing, and I started choking and wheezing too, and when we finally managed to breathe normally again we started our meeting.

The Bay area is a great place to live if you don’t need to breathe.

Recently, I’ve been having some great conversations about education with Joe Chee. Joe is a teacher educator (he teaches teachers how to teach) at Foothills College, and he’s also doing doctoral study in education. When you have a conversation with Joe, the conversation often turns into interesting conversational byways such as cognition and meta-cognition, the uses of social media in education, learning styles, and more. Conversations with him are always interesting, stimulating, challenging, and fun.

If you don’t live here in Palo Alto, you can’t have a face-to-face conversation with Joe. But now you can read his blog, Thinking, learning, and teaching. The blog is almost as good as having a face-to-face conversation with Joe — one of his posts has already got me thinking.

This past Sunday, September 19, was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. And I forgot about it. What an opportunity I missed! I was teaching Sunday school, and I told the story about how Theodore Parker didn’t kill the turtle, and learned to listen to his Conscience. But I could have told the same story in pirate talk:

Arr, ye scurvy little swabs, listen to what I have t’ tell ye….

Once upon a time thar lived a little lad named Theodore Parker. He was born a landlubber who lived on a farm in Lexin’ton, Massachusetts. His granddaddy had been one o’ th’ rebels who started the Revolutionary War, by shootin’ at the Redcoats (the scurvy dogs) on Lexin’ton Green. Ev’ry mornin’ when he was drinkin’ his grog, he could look up at his grandaddy’s musket hangin’ over the fireplace.

One fine day, Theodore’s father took ‘im to a distant place on th’ farm, then sent ‘im back alone. The little lad saw a turtle sunnin’ itself, and like the good little pirate he was, he raised up his stick. “Ah me beauty,” says he, “you’re dead meat.” But then he heard a voice, sayin’ to him, “Avast there, ye little bilge rat! Belay that! Shiver me timbers! ‘Tis wrong to strike that turtle!”

“Aye aye, sir!” says Theodore, an’ put down his stick, an’ ran smartly home to his mother to tell her the story. “Mother,” says he, “a voice told me not to strike the little turtle. What was that voice?”

“Sink me!” she ejaculated. “”Tis a dangerous voice, that. Some call it th’ Conscience, and some call it th’ Voice of God in th’ Soul. ‘Twill try t’ hornswoggle ye out of bein’ a pirate. Next time ye hear that voice, heave to, come about, an’ run as fast as ye can down wind. Set yer topgallants if ye can, for if that voice gets alongside ye, ’twill fire a broadside that’ll clear your decks. Nay, my lad, if ’tis a pirate you’d like to be, if ’tis the booty ye’d like to take, if ye want to feel the doubloons and pieces o’ eight running through yer fingers some day, IGNORE THAT VOICE!”

“So if it comes agin,” said little Theodore, “I’m t’ give it th’ black spot?”

“Aye, me bucko,” said she, roarin’ with laughter, “that’s the spirit! Next time yer Conscience comes, send it t’ Davey Jones’ locker! Put it in a hempen halter an’ hang it from the yardarm!” Mrs. Pirate Parker gave her little lad a tankard o’ grog to buck him up, and then she gave him a stout belayin’ pin an’ sent him back to kill that turtle.

An’ that’s the story of how little Theodore learned t’ ignore his Conscience. When Theodore became a grown man, he had long since stopped listenin’ to his Conscience,an’ he became one o’ th’ Transcendentalist scallywags, scourge o’ th’ respectable Unitarians, terror of th’ liberal theologians. Ah, he was a fine one he was, you may lay to that!

An’ that’s me story, my little hearties. Be ye like Theodore Parker. Ignore yer Conscience, so ye can grow up t’ be a theological Pirate like him. Arrr!

I’m bored with contemporary liberal religious hymnody. (Remember, hymns are the words that we sing, not the music itself.) We have a bunch of 19th century hymns which are pretty good, but which tend to carry the 19th century curses of sentimentality and niceness. We have some singer-songwriter hymns, and some praise-band songs, all of which I find vapid and overly individualistic, and sometimes cloyingly sweet, as if you’re drinking a glass of molasses. I like some of the old African American spirituals, but we religious liberals tend to remove some of the best imagery and the most striking word choices.

Recently, I’ve been reading Isaac Watts’s hymns. I find that I like many of his translations of the psalms in his Psalms of David: his verse is solid and sometimes poetic, his rhymes are fun to sing, and his imagery is often striking. But I don’t like his limitarian, non-Universalist theology one bit, and I don’t like the way he plays fast and loose with the Psalms — e.g., there is absolutely no mention of Jesus in the Psalms, yet Watts is constantly dragging Jesus into his hymns which are supposedly based on the psalms.

Before Watts, there was The Bay Psalm Book, another metrical translation of psalms from the Hebrew Bible, used by many of the 17th and 18th century New England churches that later became Unitarian congregations. In the first edition of this psalter, the translators tried to make as literal a translation as possible. This can make for awkward singing. Yet awkward though it may be, it has a directness and an immediacy that I find refreshing; and it retains all the vivid imagery of the Hebrew Bible psalms.

Scott Wells of the blog Boy in the Bands recently pointed me to Elhanan Winchester’s The Psalms of David. Winchester was a Universalist, so I’m much more comfortable with his theology. His verse is pretty good, too. He has his problems — like Watts he plunks Jesus down in the middle of old Jewish psalms that really have nothing to do with Jesus — but he’s a nice example of what good traditional Universalist hymnody could look like.

On the Unitarian side, there’s the 1865 Hymns of the Spirit by Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson. Some of these hymns are quite good, certainly better than anything written by later Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist hymnodists — we still sing some of these hymns today. These are definitely 19th century hymns, which means a little too sentimental and nice at times, but the verse is pretty good, and some of the images are also pretty good.

I don’t want to resurrect these old hymnals; I’ve been reading them to help me understand what I want in a new hymnody. I have no talent for writing hymns myself, but I know what I wish for in a new liberal religion hymnody. I wish we had hymns that addressed big religious issues like death, grief, illness and healing, ultimate reality, and religious ecstasy. I wish our hymns were in vigorous metrical verse with interesting rhymes and vivid imagery. I wish our hymnodists knew at least some basic theology so they could give us some real intellectual content (Watts was a Doctor of Divinity, and his knowledge of theology made a difference).

Most of the contemporary debate in this area has centered on musical styles. Maybe we should let go of the music for a bit, and focus instead on hymnody — on the words that we sing. Instead of encouraging musicians, maybe it’s time to encourage our poets and hymn writers. Once we have a body of good hymns, then we can work on finding the best composers to set the new hymns to music.

UU World magazine recently published “Do All Religions Share a Common Thread?”, a book review column I wrote in which I discuss God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter by Stephen Prothero, Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together by the Dalai Lama, and A Religion for One World: Art and Symbols for a Universal Religion by Kenneth Patton. You can read it online here.

You can comment over on that site, but realistically I am less likely to respond to your comment there. Therefore, if you want to engage me in conversation about that column, feel free to comment here.

In an article titled “Where’s Your Church’s Money? : Banking for the Common Good,” in the September 21 issue of Christian Century magazine, Scott Bader-Sayre quotes John Calvin as saying that “Usury [i.e., lending at interest] almost always travels with two inseparable companions: tyrannical cruelty and the art of deception.” Calvin was willing to allow lending at interest, however, as long as such lending adhered to moral principles; thus, Calvin said that if you lend money to the poor, you should not get interest.

Calvin’s words seem prophetic in light of the recent banking crisis, which exposed the immoral and predatory practices of the banking industry. Bader-Sayre then asks, What can we do about this? He believes that part of the answer is that local congregations should place their money in places where it will do good, e.g., in banks that invest locally:

Few … have any lingering questions or qualms about usury. Perhaps we should still worry that interest as such fails to serve a good human economy. But given that there are faithful precedents for brokering just loans in service of real need and given our practically inescapable participation in an interest-based economy, the relevant question may not be “Should Christians* loan at interest?” but “What would it look like today to participate in lending and borrowing in such a way that it served human good and benefited all parties involved?’ Such a question might, in fact, lead us to more radical proposals for social change than would come from simply rejecting capitalism from the sidelines.

* Obviously, this statement also applies to religious liberals who are not necessarily Christians.

Bader-Sayre points us to an organization called Move Your Money, which is encouraging people to move their money out of the six biggest banks into local banks. Here’s a video from Move Your Money, featuring George Bailey and Mr. Potter:

The problem with local congregations moving their money into locally owned banks is that many congregations have become overly dependent on receiving high rates of interest in order to fund their operating budget. If our congregations are going to use their money responsibly, maybe we’ll all have to start giving 5% of our gross income to our congregations to support our moral goals.

About nine months ago, a men’s group in the congregation here in Palo Alto made a decision to expand their membership. They already had a solid program in place, so when they came to me for advice I gave them the standard ideas for growing small groups: share your enthusiasm and extend personal invitations to others to join the group; assume you’re going to have newcomers at every meeting and plan how you’re going to integrate them; plan from the beginning to split into two groups when you get to ten members; constantly train new leaders; start the new groups at different times from the old group (different day of the week, different time of day) to accommodate different schedules. They asked me if I cared whether all the participants were members of the congregation. Heck no, I said, this is an important ministry we offer to the community, why would we shut people out?

Within a few months, their attendance had grown enough that they had to split that first group. Since the first group met in the evening, they added a second group for those who preferred to meet during the daytime. Both groups have continued to grow, and the leaders of the two groups are already talking about splitting the evening group. They’re expecting that they’ll be ready to split the morning group within six months.

The evening group invited me to attend a recent meeting, which I did with pleasure — and I was frankly curious about this group that had become so popular that they’re ready to split yet again. After the meeting (about which I’ll tell you nothing, since they have a confidentiality agreement for their group), the leaders asked me for feedback. I told them they did everything right: The first few minutes when someone walks in are crucial, and their non-verbal communication was open and welcoming — they greeted people, walked towards them, met their eyes, shook hands with them. The program topic was really rich, and the group leaders managed to keep a good balance between an open discussion, while at the same time urging men to talk about their feelings for this difficult topic. We did a little bit of problem-solving around specific situations that came up during the meeting — during which, I kept reminding them that leading a small groups is a balancing act where you’re always adjusting; therefore the time to worry is when you don’t feel a little off balance.

They’re proceeding with plans for continued growth. Nothing is definite yet, although there is talk about having a couple of meetings a year when all the men’s groups that came from that original men’s group get together on a Saturday and socialize.

Now, since this is a case study, here are some questions for reflection:

1. The Palo Alto congregation has about 275 members. How many men’s groups would you plan for? In other words, what do you think is the upper limit for growth?
2. If men from other nearby Unitarian Universalist congregations started attending men’s groups at the Palo Alto congregation, do you see that as a problem? Why or why not?
3. What percentage of non-Unitarian Universalist men do you think is allowable?
4. What could be done to keep the men’s groups connected with the congregation?
5. What can be done to maintain “quality control,” that is, to make sure the men’s groups that split off maintain the same high quality program as the original one?
6. Is it a problem that these are men’s groups? What about women’s groups? What about mixed gender, or non-specific gender groups?

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the person who was arguably the most famous Universalist ever: the great showman and promoter, P. T. Barnum, who was born on July 5, 1810. His name still lives on in the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus; and his reputation lives on in a remark he supposedly made, that there’s a sucker born every minute (actually, there is no record that he ever said that).

It is less often remembered that Barnum was a great supporter of many reform causes. Most notably, he supported the temperance movement, and felt that his shows and entertainments helped provide recreational options that could keep people from drinking.

Barnum was also a tireless supporter of Universalism, and a supporter of Olympia Brown, the first woman ordained in the United States by a denominational body. He helped endow Tufts, originally a Universalist college, and for many decades Tufts displayed a stuffed elephant from Barnum’s circus. He even spent time with Quillen Hamilton Shinn, the great Universalist missionary of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and supposedly admired Shinn’s showmanship.

Not long before he died, Barnum wrote a moving statement of his religious identity, titled “Why I am a Universalist.” Some years ago, I adapted a portion of it so it could be used as a responsive reading in contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations:

I base my hopes for humanity on the Word of God speaking in the best heart and conscience of the race,
The Word heard in the best poems and songs, the best prayers and hopes of humanity.
It is rather absurd to suppose a heaven filled with saints and sinners shut up all together within four jeweled walls and playing on harps, whether they like it or not.
I have faint hopes that after another hundred years or so, it will begin to dawn on the minds of those to whom this idea is such a weight, that nobody with any sense holds this idea or ever did hold it.
To the Universalist, heaven in its essential nature is not a locality, but a moral and spiritual status, and salvation is not securing one place and avoiding another, but salvation is finding eternal life.
Eternal life has primarily no reference to time or place, but to a quality. Eternal life is right life, here, there, everywhere.
Conduct is three-fourths of life.
This present life is the great pressing concern.

I continue to be moved by the idea that eternal life is a quality, it is right living that can happen in the here and now. Though I am not a theist in the sense Barnum was, this basic concept remains a central part of my own Universalist faith today: this present life is the great pressing concern.

So happy birthday, Phineas Taylor Barnum!

More about Barnum and his Universalism here.

The email message from the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) was concise: “Your membership is going to expire in 60 days.” The question that now confronts me is whether I’m going pay their new, greatly increased fee in order to renew my membership. And therein hangs a tale.

A couple of years ago, the leadership of the UUMA made what seems on the face of it to be a logical decision: they decided that they were going to hire an executive director to oversee the activities of the association. There had long been a paid administrator of the UUMA, but the volunteer board saw great possibilities in adding another employee, someone who was more than an administrator, someone who could provide leadership to move the organization in exciting new directions. So far, so good.

Since the rest of this post will be of primary interest to a small number of my readers, I’ll continue it after the jump…

The board brought this idea to the UUMA membership at several annual meetings; these meetings take place during the professional days for ministers, a few days just before General Assembly. They got some good feedback from the UUMA members who were there, lowered the membership dues from the higher initial proposal, and decided to proceed. I was not at these meetings due to the cost of staying in an expensive convention hotel another couple of nights. I chose to spend my limited professional expenses budget on attending General Assembly, choosing to attend to the business of the denomination than to attend to the business of a professional association. So right from the start, I removed myself from the decision-making process — you gotta pay to play, and I didn’t pay.

As part of this change, the UUMA revamped its mission, and decided to focus its efforts on providing continuing education opportunities, and opportunities for collegiality. UUMA volunteers and staff have set up a major new continuing education program: this February, the UUMA will offer a week of workshops at Asilomar conference center in California over a several-day period. I looked at the offerings, and there was nothing there that I found particularly interesting — or, to be more precise, given that this conference is going to cost the equivalent of a graduate-level course, there are many graduate-level courses in ministry that I would take before I spent the same money on a week-long set of workshops.

Of course the conference at Asilomar is also intended to provide collegiality, that is, time to hang out with other ministers and talk about subjects of mutual concern. But I already hang out with other Unitarian Universalist ministers and talk about subjects of mutual concern twice a year at retreats of our district UUMA chapter. And I meet regularly with two other ministers for mutual support and accountability. I decided I don’t need another, very expensive, conference at Asilomar to meet my needs for collegiality.

Gradually, I have come to the realization that the UUMA is restructuring itself to meet the needs of a certain subset of Unitarian Universalist ministers. That subset includes senior ministers of larger congregations who are relatively well-compensated; second-career ministers who have financial assets from their previous career that give them some additional financial stability; and ministers whose primary financial support comes from their spouse’s job. These ministers prefer to get their continuing education in an attractive setting like Asilomar, rather than schlepping to a grungy classroom in a nearby theological school, or taking an online class, or attending a low-budget workshop in a nearby church. This subset of ministers also prefers to get their needs for collegiality met in a group that draws other ministers like them from across the United States, with meetings that take place in hotel function rooms and high-end conference centers; they are not satisfied with meeting with neighboring ministers in the cramped, stale-smelling office of a nearby small church. The UUMA is restructuring to meet the legitimate needs and desires of this subset of ministers. I am not in that subset.

The UUMA is now using a sliding scale of fees for membership; you can view that scale here. They will allow me a one hundred dollar discount because of my membership in the Liberal Religious Educators Association; they allow no discount for membership in the (non-UU) Religious Education Association. Now, in my new position here in Palo Alto, I am a lot more financially stable than I have been in the past, and I have a much bigger professional expenses budget than I have had ever before. I could pay the money. But do I want to pay a little over four hundred dollars a year on UUMA dues, when I used to pay two thirds of that?

If I thought the UUMA was restructuring to meet my needs, I would swallow hard and pay up. But I don’t feel that way. I get my collegiality through my local chapter of the UUMA, to whom I pay additional dues, and I get so much from the collegiality of my local chapter that I would gladly pay two or three times as much to them. As for continuing education, I have never been impressed with the continuing education offered by the UUMA, and I continue to be unimpressed. I’d like it if the UUMA to act more like a union: I’d be willing to pay more dues if, instead of an executive director, we got financial support when a congregation dismissed us unjustly (the equivalent of strike pay), advocacy for fair salary and benefits with local congregations (I mean someone who will go in with you to fight for fair salary, and sanctions against churches who don’t pay up), etc. In short, I don’t want expensive conferences and an executive director, I want financial support in an emergency and a tough-minded negotiator who will go to the mat for me if I need it.

I have sixty days to decide whether or not to renew my membership to the UUMA. Yes, I’ll probably pay up. Peer pressure will drive me to it. This year, anyway.

I would love to hear from you if you’re a minister who is not going to pony up the cash. Leave a comment below (anonymously if you think it’s best), and tell me why you’re not going to pay up. (Oh, and if you’re a big supporter of the UUMA, you should know that when I’ve criticized the UUMA in the past I’ve been the target of some really self-righteous and unattractive invective, so my gastritis would appreciate it if you could aim for non-defensive politeness.)

With all the attention that’s being paid to the two hundredth anniversary of Theodore Parker’s birth, I somehow missed two other two hundredth birthdays — one of a Unitarian and one of a Universalist.

The Unitarian first: James Freeman Clarke was born on April 4, 1810. Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and Harvard professor, Clarke also published the Western Messenger, which historian David Robinson has called the first Transcendentalist periodical; some of Margaret Fuller’s earliest work was published in the Western Messenger. Robinson adds, “Few Unitarians of his day or after have made a larger contribution to Unitarianism.”

In 1886, Clarke printed a revision of the Five Points of Calvinism into “Five Points of the New Theology,” an optimistic statement of Unitarian faith, in which he said he believed in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards forever. This affirmation of faith became widely popular in Unitarian circles, and remained popular for decades — I remember hearing it in the Unitarian church of my childhood in the late 1960s.

You can read more about Clarke in the article at the UU Historical Society’s Dictionary of UU Biography. And tomorrow I’ll tell you about the Universalist who was born two hundred years ago this year — possibly the most famous Universalist that ever lived.

Mr. Crankypants loooves Ms. Peacebang, who writes the blog Beauty Tips for Ministers — she is smart, snarky, funny, and calls people out for wearing those clunky hippy Birkenstock sandals in the pulpit. Anyone who can rid the world of even a few public displays of Birkenstocks gets Mr. Crankypants’ undying devotion.

However, Mr. Crankypants notes with sorrow that Beauty Tips for Ministers is basically a femme-blog. Those of us on the more masculine end of the gender spectrum worry about things like Windsor vs. four-in-hand, wingtips and Oxfords, three vs. two buttons, trouser breaks and cuffs, etc. Search Beauty Tips for Minister for any reference to “Windsor” and you will come up blank. Yet even slobs like Dan, Mr. C.’s stupid alter-ego, are forced to think about such matters when they go to get a new suit (which has happened twice in Dan’s whole life) and the tailor asks, “Cuffs or no cuffs?” Alas: there is no blog to which slobs like Dan can turn for answers to such questions.

The well-dressed gentleman actually does spend quite a bit of time thinking about such things, and he will make judgements about other men based on things like whether they have French cuffs or not. And the well-dressed gentleman sitting in the pews (a rare bird indeed in these dark days when so few men bother to dress well on Sunday morning) will look up at a male minister and say to himself, “Humph, a Windsor knot with a button-down collar. Good grief, cuffs on plain-front trousers! What’s up with this guy?!” By the end of the service, this well-dressed gentleman in the pews will have been so distracted by by the sad state of the minister’s attire, he will have heard not a word of the sermon.

Mr. Crankypants wishes that Peacebang would find a male collaborator to address such knotty problems as the perfectly-tied bow tie (and yes, the pun was deliberate, deal with it). The world desperately needs a blogger who can help those male ministers who grew up in the sad days of “business casual,” teach them whether the tie should touch the bottom or the top of the belt buckle, and let them know what to answer when the tailor asks, “Dress right or left?”

Story for water communion service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto:

Each year we do this water communion service. When we share our water in the common bowl, it symbolizes that while we are separate people, we are also part of an interdependent community.

You probably know about the water cycle. When it rains, water falls from clouds onto the ground, and eventually it flows into a river, and all rivers flow down to the ocean. Water evaporates from the ocean and forms clouds, the clouds drift over the land, it rains, and the cycle begins again. You’re in the middle of this cycle because you drink about 2 liters of water every day, and then you sweat or urinate and put water back into the water cycle. So water is constantly on the move.

You probably know that water is made up of molecules, and that each water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Water molecules are incredibly tiny, so tiny you cannot see them. If you had 18 grams of water, or a little more than half an ounce, that would be about 6 x 10^23 molecules. The molecular weight of water is approximately 18, and therefore 18 grams of water should have a number of molecules equal to Avogadro’s number, or 6.02 x 10^23.

This is a fairly large number:
602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules —
which is the same as 6.02 x 10^23 molecules, or we can also say 602 sextillion molecules.

If you’re a child who weighs about 77 pounds, or 35 kilograms, then you have about 20 liters of water in your body (adults, you can multiply up to figure it out for yourselves). That’s approximately 20,000 grams of water, or 6.02 x 10^26, or 602 septillion, molecules of water in your body if you’re a child. And if you drink 2 liters of water a day, you’re replacing about ten percent of that, or 6 x 10^25 molecules, each day. So if you are 3,650 days old (that’s ten years old), about 2.2 x 10^28 water molecules have already passed through your body. And here’s what that number looks like:

22,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules have passed through your body in ten years.

Because water is constantly cycling around, and because every human being has such large numbers of molecules of water cycling through them, there’s a very good chance that each one of us has at least a few molecules of water that were formerly in the body of Socrates, the great philosopher. We each probably have some molecules of water that were once in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the Buddha, and any number of great and wise people who lived in the past.

Thus when we say that we are all interconnected, that statement is quite literally true — we are all interconnected through the water cycle, not only with each other, but with all living beings past and present. Jesus, Confucius, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eliza Tupper Wilkes who was the first Unitarian minister in Palo Alto — you might be literally connected with each of these good and wise people.

Tip of the hat to Steve Hersey for saying something much like this in the Watertown, Mass., UU congregation many years ago.

I’ve been reading through Isaac Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs. He uses clear, vigorous language to present vivid and compelling imagery. I often disagree with his theology, but I think his hymns have rarely been surpassed in the English language. And sometimes I do I agree with his theology. Take, for example, this hymn:

Hymn 1:24.
The rich sinner dying, Psalm 49:6-9. Eccl. 8:8. Job 3:14-15.

1 In vain the wealthy mortals toil,
And heap their shining dust in vain,
Look down and scorn the humble poor,
And boast their lofty hills of gain.

2 Their golden cordials cannot ease
Their pained hearts or aching heads,
Nor fright nor bribe approaching death
From glittering roofs and downy beds.

3 The lingering, the unwilling soul
The dismal summons must obey,
And bid a long a sad farewell
To the pale lump of lifeless clay.

4 Thence they are huddled to the grave,
Where kings and slaves have equal thrones;
Their bones without distinction lie
Amongst the heap of meaner bones.

Now that’s what I call vivid imagery. Wouldn’t you enjoy singing that hymn? Wouldn’t it help keep you focused on what’s really important in life?

If you’re part of any liberal religious community, your congregation is no longer a part of established power structure of the United States. We religious liberals are so far out of the establishment that the majority of U.S. residents don’t even know who we are. This is why so many people in the U.S. believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim — he’s actually a religious liberal (of the mainline Protestant variety), but more U.S. residents know what Islam is than know what liberal religion is, so since Obama is not a born-again Christian they assume he’s a Muslim. As for you, they probably think you belong to a cult.

Your liberal congregation has already been disestablished in pragmatic terms, so now it’s time to disestablish your congregation in terms of self-perception, and in terms of the way you organize. Here’s a handy checklist to help you accomplish this goal:

(1) Re-focus your energy on the core mission of liberal religious congregations: holding common worship services where we focus on that which is larger than our individual selves; raising our children in religious community; holding appropriate rites of passage when people are born, when they marry, and when they die.

(2) Recognize that what we stand for as religious liberals is extremely countercultural in today’s society: we distrust consumerism because it weakens and shrivels our best selves; we distrust the current economic system (which is supported by both liberals and conservatives) both because it is founded on consumerism, and because at present it is increasing the number of poor people in the U.S.; we reject the idea that born-again Christianity is the norm against which all other religion is judged; etc. These countercultural stands mean that we will never be fully accepted in the halls of established power.

(3) Remember to avoid both protest politics, and the cause-of-the-month syndrome. Protest politics only works if the people in power cannot safely ignore you. Taking on a new cause each month only works if a substantial portion of the population is paying attention to you, and will follow up after you bring a new cause to their attention. But religious liberals can be safely ignored by people in power, and the wider populace doesn’t even know we exist.

(4) Realize that the most radical political act that we can engage in — a political act that has the greatest hope of actually changing the world — is making sure our local congregations are institutionally and organizationally robust. It is in local voluntary associations (like congregations) where people learn the skills to participate in democracy. When people learn the skills of democracy in a congregation, those skills are coupled with moral and ethical values. Local congregations should be places that produce highly ethical people equipped to participate in democracy. This means that we have to promote leadership development, and we all have to volunteer.

(5) Finally, on an individual level, remember that your congregation receives no money from the government, and that it is up to the members of the local congregation to fund it fully. More to the point these days, once your congregation starts selling something (e.g., selling rental space), you are suddenly more beholden to the free market, and less focused on your core religious values. Accepting full financial responsibility for your congregation means maintaining the independence to fully live out your values. So to remain free, you got to pony up — about 5% of your gross income for middle class households; more for those with substantial wealth. (Obviously, if you can’t afford dental care, are on full disability, live in Section 8 housing, and/or sometimes have to miss meals because you don’t have money, give only when you can really afford it.)

I would suggest that when you manage to finally disestablish your local congregation — or, more to the point, realize that you are already disestablished, and start acting that way — you will experience a sense of relief, renewed energy, and a stronger sense of your mission in the world.

Two letters from Unitarian Universalist ministers in today’s San Francisco Chronicle speak out against anti-Muslim acts, including the tiny-but-nasty Florida church which plans to burn copies of the Qu’ran on Saturday. Barbara and Bill Hamilton-Holway, ministers of the UU Church of Berkeley, call on non-Muslim congregations to include readings from the Qu’ran in their worship services this week. Amy Zucker Morgenstern, senior minister here in Palo Alto and writing for the Palo Alto Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice, calls for tolerance and invites people to participate in an Interfaith Witness for Peace in Palo Alto on Sept. 19.

I’ll include the full text of both letters below, or read them at the Chronicle’s Web site.

Seeking tolerance, peace

Sept. 11 was a tragedy that struck Americans of all religions. On that terrible day nine years ago, we were united by grief, and our losses have made the day solemn and even sacred. Now a Florida pastor named Terry Jones has desecrated that memory by planning to burn Qurans on Saturday, seeking to turn grief into intolerance.

We deplore the distortion of Christianity from a message of love to hate. We know that Islam’s very name comes from the root “peace” and that it is as unjust to judge all Muslims by the terrible acts of a few as it would be to judge all Christians by Jones’ ignorance.

We honor the dead on Sept. 11 by working for a world where the beautiful variety of human religions no longer divides us but brings us peace and joy, and we urge everyone to do the same through service, justice and education. We hope that all who share our vision will join us for a day of Interfaith Witness for Peace in Palo Alto on Sept. 19.

The Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern, Unitarian Universalist Church
Palo Alto Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice

Join us and read from the Quran

A church in Gainesville, Florida, plans to burn Qu’rans on Saturday. Other hate crimes against Muslims have been in the news. The proposed mosque and Islamic Community Center in Manhattan has been met with fear and anger.

This weekend, our congregation will join with many religious communities in Gainesville and across the country in reading our services from the Quran. May quieter voices of religious tolerance, acceptance, and understanding prevail. Peace will come to the world only when people can see and affirm the insights of neighboring religions.

The Revs. Bill and Barbara Hamilton-Holway Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley

When we were out walking in the city on Sunday, Carol and I saw two crows fighting over something. As we got closer, one crow won and rose up triumphantly, a long strip of furry gray squirrel pelt hanging from its bill. “Ew,” we both said together; I had been expecting the crows to be fighting over a scrap of food that some human had dropped at the side of the road. As for the crows, they didn’t care what we thought one way or the other.

If you’re an anti-Christian Unitarian Universalist, hold on for a bit, because this post applies to you, too. In an essay in the most recent Christian Century magazine, the Christian theologian Douglas John Hall writes:

“I remember a conversation early in the 1970s in which a small group of clergy in the city where I lived were discussing the question, “On the pattern of Revelation chapters 2 and 3, what do you think ought to be the ‘message of the Spirit’ to the churches of this city?” I found myself answering this question almost without knowing what I said: ‘The Spirit writes to the churches of North America: Disestablish yourselves!’

“I’m afraid my words fell on the ears of my hearers as though I had been speaking in tongues. But I continued to pursue that theme in many lectures and a whole series of books on the future I envisaged, with the help of many others, for a Christian movement that had seriously tried to disentangle itself from the ethos and assumptions of the imperial peoples of the West, with their explicit or implicit racism, ethnocentrisms, militarism, and ideologies of power….”

So says Donald Hall. And the same thing applies to the Unitarian Universalist movement: we need to disentangle ourselves from the ethos and assumptions of the ruling powers of the United States, to disestablish ourselves (actually, in our case, part of the task is finally to understand how little political influence we actually have, and to re-conceptualize ourselves on that basis).

Discuss.

We started walking at about eleven, after buying some nectarines at the North Beach Farmer’s Market. It was a perfectly sunny day, and not too chilly. We climbed up Taylor Street to enjoy the views from Nob Hill (elev. 341 ft.) — we could see Alcatraz Island, the waterfront, and sailboats on the bay, but haze kept us from seeing across the bay. We passed Grace Cathedral where a man in a black cassock was showing off the Ghiberti doors to a knot of three or four people, down the hill, and over to Alamo Square. In the Alamo Square park, a young woman held out a camera asked us to take a picture of her and her two friends in front of the famous row of “Painted Ladies.” As we walked away, Carol said, “I didn’t even notice them until I turned to take the picture.” They were behind us as we were walking. “Neither did I,” I admitted.

There were swarms of people at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. We decided not to go in, so we went across the way to the DeYoung Museum. There were swarms of people there, too. Why pay all that money for admission fees (thirty dollars at the Academy of Science!) if you’re not going to be able to see anything because of all the people? We walked over to Haight Ashbury. I wanted to visit Forever After Books, but it was gone. I had never been to Haight Street before.

Except for the half a dozen stores selling drug paraphernalia, Haight Street would be just another upscale shopping district, thronged with upper middle class young people. A scruffy-looking white kid with a beard and a knapsack walked by us; from his knapsack hung a bright metal coffee cup and a red teflon-coated frying pan. He looked kind of dirty and a little bewildered. He had a cane, and he decided to hold it in front of himself, balancing it on his outstretched hand as he walked through the crowds. It tottered, he moved his hand to keep it balanced, and it almost hit the face of a girl with perfect hair and a fashionable tank-top. She gave him a look, part sneer, part scorn, part anger that he would intrude on her physical space. I didn’t blame her one bit. This poor neo-hippie kid was trying to go back to a mythical time when Flower Power ruled Haight Street, when guys could balance canes on their hand and girls would think it was cool. Today, being a hippie is just another consumer lifestyle choice that involves buying stuff at head shops.

On a quiet side street of Haight, a young woman was having a garage sale — really a sidewalk sale since her apartment didn’t have a garage. For months, Carol has been looking for a basic sewing machine that she can use to make some basic skirts — and there was a sewing machine, barely used, and still in its original box. For months, Carol has been looking for a duffle bag with wheels, so when she’s going to promote her books or work on composting toilets she has a big piece of luggage to carry what she needs — and there was the perfect duffle. She bought both for twenty-two dollars, put the sewing machine in the rolling duffle bag, and with the sewing machine rolling behind us we went over to Duboce Avenue to catch the trolley back to North Beach. It was the perfect ending to a ten-mile urban hike.

For dinner, I had boiled lettuce with oyster sauce. From where I sat, I could watch the cook make it: drop half a head of iceberg lettuce into a big vat of simmering sauce, leave it for a moment, fish it out with a big strainer, put it on a plate, put some oyster sauce on it. I also had a big bowl of fish congee (rice porridge), with toothpick-sized slivers of ginger and a few chopped chives thrown on top. It was perfect food for a New Englander, not too flavorful and even bland, but very comforting. We were the only roundeyes in the place, so they gave us forks, just in case.

After dinner, we heard music, and followed the sound to the Chinatown Night Market. There were two ensembles playing: I’m not sure, but maybe this was Cantonese guangdong music. The singers seemed to know the people who stood around in the chilly night air to listen. One of the singers, a woman of indeterminate middle age, had a voice that wasn’t particularly sweet, but she was musical and expressive. She sang one song that everyone else seemed to know; people were nodding their heads and singing along. In the ensemble behind her, a man playing a lute-like instrument brought his little boy along, and the boy tried to feed him a lollipop while he was playing. Someone wandered in and started talking to a man playing a two-stronged bowed instrument (an erhu?); the musician smiled, and shook him off so he could concentrate on his playing. The woman finished the song, and the man selling old coins at a nearby booth cheered and clapped his hands over his head for her.

We stopped to look at an installation done under the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art in Storefronts project. Artist Cynthia Toms created an installation in a building that had served as a boarding house, nightclub, and restaurant. We looked at all the objects that were designed to evoke memories of Chinatown, but what really stood out for me was the the slide presentation off in one corner of the store window, housed in something that looked like an old television set: a 1970s photograph of a Chinatown streetscape, a snapshot of a birthday party, a vintage photograph of Chinatown showing some people freeing a woman who had been enslaved in a brothel, a picture of that very building as a restaurant, and so on. We watched for five or ten minutes, then Carol stood out in the middle of the street to take a photograph of the store front.

Today’s San Mateo County Times reports that employees are now paying more of health care costs: “The average employer-provided health plan now costs workers nearly $4,000 a year, up 14 percent from last year…. At the same time, workers also saw average co-payments for routine office visits rise 10 percent and deductibles continue their surge upwards.”

From my own experience, here are two other things to wonder about: (1) My last two employers could no longer afford to pay for health care for spouses of workers — in many couples, both spouses need to work, not for the additional paycheck, but in order to be able to afford health care. (2) Twice in the past three years, my health insurance provider refused to pay $1,000 of a health care bill, once for a doctor’s office visit, and once for a visit to the emergency room — even if you have health insurance, you can no longer be sure that your insurer will actually pay your health costs.

And here’s something else to wonder about: Both the liberals and the conservatives have been completely unable to address the problem of how to pay for health care. The conservatives offer free-market solutions, when it’s quite clear that the health care industry is not a free market. The liberals offer government health plans, when it’s quite clear that the U.S. government is not presently able to fund additional health care. So what’s going to happen? No one knows. At this point, the only thing you can do is stay perfectly healthy. And that’s when fear creeps in: what will happen if I develop some serious illness? How much of my care will I have to provide? Will I become another health care bankruptcy case?

We were talking about some matter of church politics today, doesn’t matter what, when the subject of fear came up. Some sense of fear seems to be driving some people, we decided. But why? We thought about it for a moment, and I said, There’s always the lousy state of the economy; I know that’s injected a fair amount of fear into my life.

In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt is famous for saying that the only the we have to fear is fear itself. As we struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, there’s a different quality to the fear — it’s mingled in with fears of terrorists, fears of foreigners living among us, fears of losing our honor in Iraq and Afghanistan, fears of looming environmental disasters — but I still would like to have some catchy phrase that helped bring my economic fears out into the light of day where I could look at them clearly.

Joe Volk of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) just sent out an email message encouraging all Quakers to “state publicly that you stand with our brothers and sisters in the American Muslim community” in the days leading up to September 11.

I heard about this from my friend E, a Quaker and a yoga teacher, who writes on her blog: “It has been heart-rending for me to read about the growing rancor and bigotry about religion and race…. My great grandparents fled the pogroms, and my parents felt free to become members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)….”

We’re not quite at the level of pogroms yet, but Rev. Meredith Garmon, minister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville, Florida, writes in a blog post today that anti-Muslim hate crimes are increasing; in addition, “Here in my home of Gainesville, Fla., a local fringe church known for its anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT rhetoric has been getting national media attention for their planned ‘Burn a Qu’ran Day’ on Sept. 11th.”

Whatever you may think of the proposed Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan, I know you’re not going to burn a copy of the Qu’ran, or pee on a mosque, or stab a Muslim taxi driver. Whichever side of the issue you’re on, I know you’re not going to spout increasingly inflammatory rhetoric in the days leading up to 9/11 (which this year are the final days of Ramadan). Nope, we’re all going to show the best of religious liberalism, and spend the next two weeks thinking peace and publicly supporting the principle of religious tolerance.

Below is the text of the FCNL email message.

At FCNL, we’ve been sick at heart and concerned at the hate speech, confusion, and misinformation about American Muslims that has spread across the country in the last month. Many of you have told us that you share our concern.

The controversy is not over yet. Between today and the September 11 anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, we at FCNL expect another outpouring of bigotry and misplaced anger at the proposal to build an Islamic cultural center in downtown New York City.

In the first eleven days of September, please state publicly that you stand with our brothers and sisters in the American Muslim community. We support their proposal to exercise their religious freedom by building an Islamic Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan, where they have lived and worshiped for years.

Our country needs this cultural center and the public discussion that it is generating. The proposal for this Islamic cultural center can be transformed from an ugly controversy into perhaps the most important public opportunity in this decade to celebrate and exercise the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion.

Many of you are taking this opportunity. From New York to North Carolina and from Maryland to Illinois, we have heard about local community groups using the public focus on the cultural center to organize opportunities for Christians and Muslims to find out what they have in common. To counter the distrust and misinformation, more people need to state publicly that they support the freedom of American Muslims to worship and to gather together.

Please start by signing this petition supporting American Muslims and the proposal to exercise their religious freedom to build an Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan. Ask 5 friends to sign it as well. We’ll add the names of those who sign to the bottom of the petition to show the support that’s out there.

That’s the first step, but we encourage you to do more if you can. Here are some suggestions….

— Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper supporting the Islamic Cultural Center….

— On Friday, September 10, many local American Muslim communities around our country organize public celebrations of Eid ul-Fitr — the end of the holy period of Ramadan. Find out if Muslims in your area might welcome the participation of people of other faiths. [Actually, I think it’s kind of late to do this unless you already have a strong relationship with your local Muslim community.]

— Write your senators to ask them to speak out in support of the Islamic Cultural Center.

When we last left them, Batman, Robin, and Batgirl were about to be burned to death by the evil King Manasseh [cue dramatic music]….

Batman somehow gets one hand free,
Reaches his utility belt, presses
The Assyrian army activation device.
Soldiers appear on the streets of Jerusalem,
Commandoes cut Batman and the others free.
It’s another fighting free-for-all!
Crash! Ka-blam! Manasseh goes down!

Batman swoops over and jumps on Manasseh;
Batgirl and Robin put Bat-manacles on him.
“Time for Plan B,” Manasseh says to himself.
The Assyrians and Batman take Manasseh to Babylon.
Manasseh looks up, and calls on Elohim.
“Elohim,” he says, “I repent! I’ll be good!”
So Elohim lets him go back to Jerusalem.

The Assyrians groan, “Not again! Every time
We think we’ve won, the Judeans repent.
Then the guys writing the Bible badmouth us again!”
Batman just grinned : he’s got Batgirl and Robin.
Manasseh grinned too : the idols are gone;
Elohim gets bribed with burnt sacrifices;
And Manasseh still sits on the throne of David.

2 Chron 33.10-20

Manasseh became the king of Judah
When he was at the awkward age
Of twelve: neither child nor man.
He reared up altars to Asheroth,
And to Baal, and other idols.
What was worse was when he burned
His son. Old Elohim was pissed.

Gotham City, capital of Judah,
Is now corrupt. The Caped Crusader
Suddenly appears, out from his cave,
prowling the streets in his Bat-chariot,
Robin at his side, Batgirl offstage.
Manasseh doesn’t know what to make
Of Batman’s tights and weird mask.

So he hauls off and hits him. Pow!
Robin fights Manasseh’s wizards.
Wham! Batgirl swoops in next.
Bash! Ka-zam! Fists are flying!
But wait! Batman is tied to a stake!
So are Robin and Batgirl! They struggle.
Manasseh lights a fire around them….

2 Chron 33.1-9, with thanks to Erp and Jean.

Part II

Another in a series of stories I’m writing for liberal religious kids. As always, your comments and criticisms are welcome.

Once upon a time, the immortal god Prometheus stole fire from the other immortal gods and goddesses, and gave it to mortal human beings.

Zeus, who had just become the new ruler over all the other gods and goddesses, was very angry. To punish Prometheus, Zeus commanded him to be nailed to a cliff in Scythia, a distant place at the end of the world. Zeus told two of his henchmen, a demon named Might and another demon named Violence, to take Prometheus to Scythia. Prometheus had taken the fire from Hephaestus, who was the god who made things out of metal for the other gods and goddesses at his forge, so Hephaestus had to go along to make shackles of bronze to hold Prometheus tightly against the rocks.

After traveling many miles, at last they came at last to a high and lonely cliff. Hephaestus began working while Might and Violence watched to make sure Prometheus didn’t get away.

“I don’t have the heart to bind another god in this desolate place,” said Hephaestus to Prometheus, as he hammered bronze nails into the cliff face. “Yet I have to do it because it’s dangerous to ignore the commands of Zeus. Prometheus, I don’t want to do this to you. The sun will scorch you during the day, and the cold will freeze you at night. This is what has happened because you opposed the will of Zeus. This is what you get for giving fire to the human beings.” Hephaestus paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Zeus is a new ruler, and new rulers are harsh.”

“Why are you delaying?” said the demon named Might. “Why do you pity this god who has betrayed all other gods and goddesses by giving such power to mortal beings?”

“I pity him because we are friends and relations,” Hephaestus started to say. But Might scared him — and Violence, who never said anything at all, scared him more. Hephaestus began working faster. He quickly bound Prometheus’s wrists and ankles with bronze shackles, and bound his body with a strong bronze chain that he nailed to the cliff. Soon Prometheus could not move at all.

“Let me see you hammer with your full force,” said Might. “The power of Zeus is great, and the anger of of Zeus is severe, so you better do a good job.”

“I’m doing what I have to do,” said Hephaestus. “There’s no need to tell me what to do.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you what to do,” said Might, mockingly. “Now get his legs secure.”

“Your words are as ugly as your looks,” muttered Hephaestus under his breath.

“You can soft-hearted if you want,” said Might, sounding dangerous, “but don’t cross me.”

Hephaestus gave one last blow with his hammer. “There, it’s done,” he said. “Now let’s go.” He left, and Violence followed him.

Might stayed behind for a moment. “That’s what you get for insulting the gods and goddesses by giving fire to beings who live for such a short time,” he said to Prometheus. “And are the mortals able to help you now? Your name means ‘Far-seeing,’ but it doesn’t look to me like you could see very far at all.” With that, he turned and left Prometheus alone, bound to the face of the desolate cliff.

When they all had gone, Prometheus groaned in misery. He did have the power of foresight, the ability to see ahead into the future. He had known that he would be chained on that cliff for what he had done, chained for many long years, wracked by pain, burned by the sun, frozen with the cold. He had stolen the fire anyway. Now here he was, groaning in pain, punished by Zeus for helping the human beings.

At last he stopped. “Why am I groaning?” he said to himself. “I foresaw this, and I must bear this punishment as well as I can. Yes, I gave the gift of fire to mortals. Yes, I took a small coal from the forge of Hephaestus, and hid it in a stalk of fennel so I could smuggle it down to the human beings. Giving that fire to mortals was the right thing to do. Fire has helped them learn new arts and sciences; fire has helped them become far more powerful. Zeus is afraid of human beings, afraid they will rival the gods and goddesses with their new knowledge. That is why I am bound here, riveted in bronze fetters beneath the wide sky. I did the right thing, and I’m not afraid to be punished for it.”

The immortal daughters of the god Oceanus flew to Scythia to talk with Prometheus and comfort him. Prometheus poured out his troubles to them, complaining about his fate, while they listened sympathetically. Then Oceanus himself, god of the ocean stream, came too, flying there on his winged horse.

Oceanus asked if there was anything he could do for Prometheus.

“What can you do except look at my suffering?” said Prometheus bitterly. “I was one of the friends of Zeus, and look at me now. I was one of the ones who helped him overthrow Cronus, helped him become the new ruler of the gods and goddesses. Yet here I am, punished cruelly by the one I helped to win power.”

“I see, Prometheus, and I’m sympathetic to you,” said Oceanus. “I want to give you some advice, because even though you are more clever than I, I am an older god than you. When there’s a new ruler of the gods and goddesses, you have to adapt to their rule. You’re going to have to adapt to the new rule of Zeus. Remember that if Zeus hears your bitter angry words, he can make things even worse for you. So take my advice and speak calmly. Our new ruler is a harsh god, and he doesn’t have to listen to anyone’s advice. Now if you will speak calmly, I will go and see if I can get Zeus to free you.”

“No, don’t go to Zeus,” said Prometheus. “Thank you for your loyalty, but you shouldn’t do that. You’ll just get in trouble, too. Go back home. Don’t let him become angry with you.”

Oceanus tried to argue with him, but Prometheus insisted that Oceanus should not go to Zeus. At last, Oceanus leapt back on his winged horse and flew away to his home.

The daughters of Oceanus burst into tears. Prometheus had dared to help human beings by stealing fire for them. Because of that — because he had dared to rebel against the will of Zeus — he was sentenced to be chained to this desolate rocky cliff forever. No one could help him.

But was there no one who could help him? Would he have to stay there forever? Stay tuned for the dramatic conclusion of our story … same bat time, same bat channel….

———

How to pronounce the Greek names:

Prometheus [pro mee’ the us]
Zeus [zoos]
Hephaestus [heh fay’ stuss]
Oceanus [oh keh ah’ nuss]
Cronus [kro’ nus]

Source: This version of the story of Prometheus comes from the play Prometheus Bound by the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus. I used two translations of Aeschylus’s play, by David Grene (University of Chicago Press, 1942); and by Herbert Weir Smyth (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard Universrity Press, 1926). I also referred to the exegesis offered by William R. Jones in his essay “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows” (The Christian Century magazine, May 21, 1975).

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Ninety years is a relatively short period of time: within memory of people I know, women did not have the right to vote in federal elections.

Unfortunately, by the time that women were gaining the right to vote, women ministers were finding it nearly impossible to find settlements in Unitarian or Universalist churches. There had been a period of a few decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when a few dozen women would get settlements in our churches. But by 1920, that period was over. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Unitarian Universalists began ordaining — and settling — women in significant numbers once again.

Maybe we’ve done better in politics than we’ve done in religion. In politics, the fact that we have powerful female politicians on both the left — Nancy Pelosi is a liberal powerhouse — and on the far right — Sarah Palin is a central figure of the Tea Party — is remarkable. In religion, however, most religious groups do not have gender equality among their clergy or equivalent leaders; many religious groups do not allow women to even serve as clergy at all. Sure, Unitarian Universalists have more women ministers than male ministers, but we constitute a tiny fraction of the U.S. population.

In her preface to a 1992 reprinting of Sexism and God-Talk, Rosemary Radford Reuther wrote: “The starting point for feminist theology, perhaps all theology, is ‘cognitive dissidence.’ What is is not what ought to be. Not only that, but what we have been told ought to be is not always what ought to be” [SCM Press: London, p. xix].

The feminist revolution is not even complete within Unitarian Universalism: men still dominate the highest-paying ministry jobs. In many other religious traditions, the feminist revolution has barely begun. Sure, I’m ready to celebrate the 19th Amendment: break out the cake and cookies! And while we’re celebrating that political achievement, let’s figure out how we can do a little cognitive dissidence in religion. Maybe we can figure out how to reach out to feminists in other religious traditions, to offer support if they need it, to learn from them so we can keep moving forward in our own feminist revolution, and perhaps to make progress towards a world where all religions recognize the equality of women and men.

…get well soon!

Back in 1976, I read Inferno, a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which tells the story of an atheistic science fiction author named Allen Carpenter who, much to his surprise, finds himself in a place that very much resembles Dante’s vision of hell in the first book of The Divine Comedy. Carpentier tries to find a rational explanation for what he experiences in his tour through hell, and spends much of the book convinced that he’s in a sort of bizarre amusement park (call it “Infernoland”) created by sadistic aliens with a very high technology. But by the end of the book, Carpenter is finally convinced that he is indeed in hell.

I read Inferno when I was a senior in high school, and I loved the book; I didn’t pay any attention to the theology, I was captured by thinking about what a twentieth century person would do upon finding himself in Dante’s version of hell. Allen Carpenter builds a glider to try to fly over some of the circles of hell, and this is not unlike the heroes of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island using their nineteenth century technology to address the problem of being stranded on a desert island. In my freshman year of college, I went out and bought a bilingual edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (trans. by John D. Sinclair), and started to read the Inferno; I got about three quarters of the way through, but got tired of Dante getting revenge on people he didn’t like by placing them into his vision of hell.

Last year, Niven and Pournelle came out with a sequel to their Inferno, another science fiction novel titled Escape from Hell. At the end of the earlier book, Allen Carpenter learned that you can get out of hell, so he goes back to try to help lots more people escape from eternal damnation. Niven and Pournelle come up with enough new ideas to make this second book worth reading — their depiction of Hell’s bureaucracy is funny and entertaining — but there are major problems with the book. One big problem is that Sylvia Plath is a major character in this book, but Niven and Pournelle’s characterization doesn’t convince me: their character named Sylvia Plath is just another interchangeable female character, and you simply don’t believe that character is capable of writing great poetry. A second big problem is that rather than actually resolving their plot, they end the book with the ridiculous plot device of having a hydrogen bomb explode in hell.

But the biggest problem I had with Escape from Hell is the theology behind the book. Allen Carpenter discovers that anyone can escape from hell, as long as they’re willing to go through a process of confronting the bad things they did in life — there’s a sort of pseudo-psychotherapeutic element in this process. Even though Niven and Pournelle don’t use the psychobabble jargon of “denial” and “acceptance” and so on, it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from mediocre self-help books.

Niven and Pournelle’s understanding of God is about as interesting as their theological psychology. Their God is probably pleasant rather than definitely good, distant and unimaginable rather than immanent and present, and vague rather than awe-inspiring. Their God-concept feels like it’s straight out of the mid-twentieth century when people presented God as either nice or dead, but when God was rarely presented as something compelling enough to believe in. From a literary point of view, if a writer is going to talk about hell as a reality, I’d take the stern yet interesting God of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” — or, for that matter, the God of Dante who invents such creative tortures for damned souls — over the the namby-pamby, wishy-washy, exceedingly boring God imagined by Niven and Pournelle. They make hell seem much more interesting and even attractive than God.

Then there’s the purpose of hell, as the authors understand it. When I think of Dante’s conception of hell, I think of a place of eternal torment; if you’re talking about punishment for sins over a limited time, then you’re talking about the subject of Dante’s second book, Purgatorio, purgatory. Niven and Pournelle borrow Dante’s hell, and turn it into purgatory. So then what’s the purpose of purgatory? I admit my bias: I’m a Universalist, and I know hell is a mistaken concept to begin with; nevertheless, within the limits of their theological logic, their conception of hell simply doesn’t make sense.

So I find Niven and Pournelle’s theology problematic. But that was actually part of the fun of the book: I not only enjoyed the adventure, I argued with their problematic theology the whole way through, and enjoyed every minute of the argument. Unlike the liberal Christian apologists who dodge the whole issue, Niven and Pournelle confront hell head on. In the end Allen Carpenter admits that he can’t really make complete sense out of hell; it’s beyond human understanding; but this didn’t feel like a cop-out to me so much as a literary excuse for a pretty good adventure story.

The heat broke today: it only got up to 90 degrees in Palo Alto before the cool air started to move in from the Pacific, and now it’s already down to 69 degrees. It’s supposed to go down into the fifties tonight in San Mateo. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that school has started again, and family vacations have ended. All summer long, the traffic on the freeways was merely miserable; now it’s back to being completely insane.

Today is the two hundredth anniversary of Theodore Parker’s birth. I’ll leave it to others to talk about his contributions to Transcendentalism; his scholarship, and the way he brought the insights of German philosophy and theology to New England; how he drew some two thousand people to his sermons at his church in Boston. Others can tell you about his intellectual and professional accomplishments; I’d rather think about his home life. Here, then, is a sketch of Theodore Parker’s Boston house, from Theodore Parker: a biography, Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1880, pp. 241-242, 244):

“In January, 1847, Mr. Parker removed from West Roxbury, where he had been living till now, to Boston. A house in Exeter Place — a little court, so near to Essex Street that his yard was adjacent to that of his friend Wendell Phillips — was provided for him. The upper floor was thrown into one room for a library. In this house he lived till his last sickness took him away: there his widow resides still, though the quiet of the spot is invaded by business. The household consisted of himself and his wife, whose domestic name is Bear, or Bearsie, and who, as usual, is nearly the opposite of her husband, except in the matter of philanthropy; a young man by the name of Cabot, one and twenty years old, an orphan, brought up by Mr. and Mrs. Parker from childhood, and treated by them as a sort of nephew; and Miss Stevenson, “a woman of fine talents and culture, interested in all the literatures and humanities.” The entire house was given to hospitality. The table always looked as if it expected guests. The parlors had the air of talking-places, well arranged and habitually used for the purpose. The spare bed was always ready for an occupant, and often had a friendless wanderer from a foreign shore. The library was a confessional as well as a study: this room, airy, light, and pleasant, was lined with books in plain cases, unprotected by obtrusive glass. Books occupied capacious stands in the centre of the apartment; books were piled on the desk and floor. There was but one table, — a writing-table, with drawers and extension-leaves, of the common office pattern. A Parian head of the Christ, and a bronze statue of Spartacus, ornamented the ledge: sundry emblematical bears, in fanciful shapes of wood or metal, assisted in its decoration. The writer sat in a cane chair: a sofa close by was for visitors. A vase of flowers usually stood near the bust of Jesus. Flowers were in the southern windows, placed there by gentle hands, and faithfully tended by himself. Two ivy-plants, representative of two sisters, intwined their arms and mingled their leaves at the window-frames. Every morning he watered them, and trained their growing tendrils. … In the winters of heavy snow he kept a little corn-crib in his library, and regularly fed at the window-sill the city pigeons deprived of their street-food. They soon found where breakfast was to be had, and flocked daily to the window; while he, with delight, watched them as they cooed and quarrelled, and hustled each other, and sidewise nodded through the pane at him.”

It feels like summer has finally hit the Bay area. There’s apparently a high-pressure system sitting over the desert southwest pumping hot air up into our area. Temperatures got up into the mid-nineties today, with little or no wind.

Summer heat in the Bay area means smog and ground-level ozone. Driving down Route 101 to work today, the mountains on the other side of San Francisco Bay, usually clearly visible, were hard to see through the light blue haze. Smog and ground-level ozone mean that I feel lousy.

The short-term bad news is that tomorrow it’s supposed to hit one hundred degrees in Palo Alto. The short-term good news is that the forecast says cool air from Alaska will move into our area by the weekend. The long-term bad news is that University of California scientists are now predicting that climate change in our area is going to cause more hot days, which means more days of high ground-level ozone levels. The long-term good news is… um, what is the long-term good news?

Back in 2005, I became aware of bed bugs when a friend successfully fought off a bed bug invasion. That same year, I became more aware of bed bugs when I successfully fought off my own mini-invasion, when a few of the little buggers hitch-hiked back with me from the cheap hotel I stayed in at General Assembly. By 2007, when we were living in New Bedford, Mass., a doctor in the city told me that bed bugs were back in that city. More recently, various news media are reporting that as many as one in ten housing units in New York City may be infested with bed bugs, including expensive apartments in the Upper East Side. And it’s not just New York — there’s a nationwide epidemic of bed bugs.

In short, bed bugs have become a major public health concern. I suspect a significant part of the problem is that we no longer know how to deal with bed bugs, because they haven’t been a problem for the past half century. Ministers have often been involved in public health initiatives, and since education plays a big role in improving public health, I thought I’d pass on some of what I’ve learned about bed bugs.

First of all, we need to get over the social stigma involved with having bed bug infestations. These bugs don’t care whether you’re rich or poor, or whether you live in a shack or a palace. What the social stigma has been doing for us is preventing people from talking openly about having bed bugs, which is A Really Bad Thing. If you live in an apartment or condo, believe me, you want to know if one of your neighbors has a bed bug infestation so you can be on the alert, because they can migrate from one unit to another. If one of your co-workers finds bed bugs at work — and yes, bed bugs can infest workplaces from lawyer’s offices to movie theatres to libraries — again, you want to know so you don’t carry bed bugs home with you. Let’s get rid of the social stigma, because if the bed bug pandemic keeps growing at the rate it’s now growing, there’s a good chance that all of us will have to deal with the little buggers sooner or later, and sharing information will help us kill ’em.

Second, remember all those things your mother or your grandmother told you about keeping clean? — many of them will help keep you from bed bugs. So yes, wash your sheets in hot water — bed bugs are killed by very hot water. So yes: don’t ever take used mattresses; when you’re in public places don’t put your purse down on the floor or on a chair; don’t pick up used furniture from the curb — bed bugs are determined little hitchhikers, and can follow you home. So yes, reduce clutter throughout your house — bed bugs like to hide in clutter, and clutter makes it hard to get rid of them if you have an infestation.

Third, learn how to recognize bed bugs, and start paying attention. From all I’ve been reading, and from my own experience, the sooner you recognize that you have an infestation, and the sooner you start working to get rid of them, the less difficulty you will have in getting rid of them.

This is all pretty straight-forward stuff. We already deal with lice and fleas using this kind of approach: sharing information, following basic cleanliness practices, and paying attention. And now take the first step: take the time to learn more about bed bugs now. Look over the material on the EPA Web site to learn how to identify the little buggers, and find out about best practices for controlling them. Check out the Bedbugger blog, which is witty and has generally good information, as well as a forum section where you can share your war stories.

So ends this Public Service Announcement about public health. We will now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

P.S. Please don’t bore me by saying we can end this epidemic by making DDT legal again. Dr. James W. Austin, entomologist and Texas A&M research scientist, said in an interview with Bedbugger: “While screening multiple populations of bed bugs against various insecticides we have found virtually all populations were 100% resistant to DDT. This is not a surprise given that the first observances of DDT resistance [in bed bugs] were noted almost 50 years ago [i.e., c. 1960].”

We’ve been having a cold summer here in the Bay area, with night time temperatures frequently in the low fifties. Tomato plants do not like it to be that cool, and while our tomato plants set a lot of fruit, the little green tomatoes just hang on the vine and stay both little and green.

We had one tomato plant covered with little green tomatoes, growing in a big pot that sat in a sunny place in the yard. A few days ago I carried it up to our second-floor deck, huddled up against the house where I thought it might be a little bit warmer. Sure enough, after just a few days the plant looks happier, and most of the tomatoes are turning red; while the tomato plants down in the yard are still covered in green tomatoes.

September tends to be the warmest month in the Bay area. Perhaps this cool weather will finally end, and suddenly we’ll find ourselves inundated with more tomatoes than we can eat.

I finally reconnected my blog with my Facebook account. I had done this a couple of years ago, but decided the two formats didn’t mix particularly well: Facebook is really a micro-blogging format, while I write long blog posts. But what the hell — it doesn’t cost me anything to put my blog’s RSS feed on Facebook, and someone might actually read it once in a blue moon.

But who really cares about my personal blog. I’m going to try to get my church to put together a good RSS feed from the church Web site, so I can place that on the church’s Facebook page.

Later note — This post was supposed to carry a link to a related article on Peter Bowden’s blog: Here’s the link.

Rev. Dr. Charles Howe D.D., Ph.D., a Unitarian Universalist minister who wrote about denominational history, died last week, on Tuesday, August 10. Obituary from the Raleigh, N.C., News-Observer. Biographical summary at the UUHS Web site. Howe was originally trained as a chemist, and received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He left academia to become a Unitarian Universalist minister, and after a long career in the parish, turned to writing about Unitarian Universalist history. He was awarded the honorary Doctor of Divinity by Meadville Lombard Theological School.

Howe wrote two clear, concise one volume syntheses of topics in Unitarian and Universalist history. His The Larger Faith is a lucid, accurate, and concise introduction to North American Universalism; even though I own Russell Miller’s massive two-volume history of Universalism, I often find it’s quicker to look something up in Howe’s book. Howe’s For Faith and Freedom is another excellent one-volume summary, this time of European Unitarianism; although in this case, there is no other work that covers everything that Howe covers in this one volume. Howe was also an editor and complier, and in third major book, Clarence Skinner: Prophet of a New Universalism, he gave us a solid one-volume introduction to perhaps the major figure of Universalism in the 20th century, with excerpts from Skinner’s work, and essays on Skinner’s life and theology.

Finally, Roger Clemens has been indicted for perjury. When testifying before Congress on steroid use in professional baseball, Clemens said, “I couldn’t tell you the first thing about it. I never used steroids. Never performance-enhancing steroids.” His trainer, however, told a different story, saying that he had injected Clemens with steroids more than a dozen times. Clemens’s friend and teammate on the New York Yankees, Andy Pettite, said that Clemens had admitted to using steroids — to which Clemens artfully responded that Petitte must have misheard him.

What makes this all the more delicious is that when Clemens testified before Congress, he was not under subpoena — he volunteered to testify. Tom Davis, a former Republican member of the House of Representatives, said, “[Clemens] wanted to come to the committee and clear his name. And I sat there in the office with Henry Waxman and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t lie.’ … He could have just let it go, but he denied it vociferously before Congress. Several times, we gave him the opportunity to back down, and he didn’t.”

In a statement issued after his indictment, Clemens asked the public not to rush to judgment. But because of his hubris — υβρις, that form of extreme pride that leads to arrogance, insolence, and haughtiness — I sure find myself rushing to judgment. Clemens was considered by many to be one of the best pitchers who ever played baseball, but he always exuded arrogance, and it always seemed that he thought himself to be better than anyone else. If he really is guilty of using steroids, I can’t believe he could ever admit it, not even to himself. And if he really is innocent, I will never completely believe his innocence precisely because of his extreme arrogance.

Clemens has offended the gods of baseball — not by using steroids, but by making himself seem more powerful than the game itself. For this act of hubris, he is being publicly humiliated.

And I want Aeschylus to come back to life, and write a play about it.

I’ve been trying to write up the story of Demeter and Persephone for a Sunday school class. It has a very dark side to it, as do so many religious stories; the dark side is one of the things children like best about these stories. They are like Grimm’s fairy tales, filled with all the horrible things that children know exist in the real world but can’t talk about: Hansel and Gretel’s parents deliberately lose them in the woods; Siddartha Gautama abandons his wife and young child; Lot throws his daughters out to the crowd to be ravaged; Jesus is sentenced to a bloody death on trumped-up political charges; Persephone is abducted by the god of death, and in retribution her mother makes innocent human beings die in a massive famine. Sometimes I think that even though we adults try to put some kind of moral gloss on them, what children learn from these stories is that life is essentially amoral.

In any case, as I sat here today sorting through the details of the Persephone story, as presented in the Homeric hymns and in Ovid’s Metapmorphoses, I realized that many of the main characters in the story are closely related. Persephone is the child of Zeus and Demeter; Hades, Demeter, and Zeus are all children of Cronos and Rhea, and grandchildren of Gaia, mother earth. Not only that, but the Homeric hymn makes it clear that Zeus and Gaia (Persephone’s father and grandmother) set up the situation where Hades can abduct Persephone. Talk about a dysfunctional family!

I don’t want to emphasize this aspect of the story in the version for children, and the only way I can get it out of my head is to inflict it on you. So below you will find the dysfunctional family version of the Persephone story….

A Family Story

 Persephone was growing up.
 Grain goddess Demeter, her mother,
 Wouldn’t let her go.
 Farseeing Zeus, Thunder God,
 Conspired with Mother Earth
 To give the daughter away.

 Persephone was with her friends,
 The buxom daughters of Ocean,
 Picking sweet flowers in the fields.
 Persephone was drawn to one,
 The Narcissus, lured by beauty.
 She went to it, and stooped,–

 Below the earth, Hades,
 Brother of Zeus, grandson
 Of Earth, brother of Demeter,
 Toured his underworld realm.
 The dead fluttered past him.
 He looked up, saw Persephone stoop;–

 Hades rushed up and grabbed
 Persephone, who screamed, and called
 To Zeus, her father. Zeus, it seems,
 Heard nothing. Hades took her down
 To Tartaros, his dark dreary realm.
 And there she sat, his bride;
 Bored, with nothing to do.

 Demeter was distraught.
 Her daughter, gone! At last,
 She learned that Hades had her.
 Helios, the sun, said to her,
“And why not Hades? He’s rich.
 She has to get married sometime.”

 Demeter in her anger prevented
 Anything at all from growing.
 Famine came. The dead went to Hades.
 Zeus grew alarmed. This
 He had not foreseen. He offered
 To promote her to Olympos.

“No,” said Demeter. “I want
 My daughter.” And Hades smiled.
 Persephone went back to her mother,
 Carrying a seed inside her:
 Bored, she’d been curious, and eaten
 A bit of underworld pomegranate.

 Persephone still lives with her mother
 Eight months of the year. For four months,
 She lives in Tartaros with Hades.
 They had a baby together,
 Plutos, god of wealth,
 His mother’s favored child.

This afternoon, while I was waiting to meet someone in Berkeley, I walked up the hills behind the Graduate Theological Union, up past the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, up further to where I got a view of the bay. Fog covered most of San Francisco, except for the tall buildings downtown, and a little bit of the waterfront; fog poured around the south side of San Bruno Mountain; fog filled the Golden Gate, so all you could see of the bridge was the very top of the north tower; fog rolled around the Marin headlands and streamed up inland towards the Delta. South of San Bruno down the Peninsula, the higher mountains held the fog back; I could see that San Mateo had no fog. And there was no fog in Berkeley; the city stretched out below me, and I could see little specks that were cars moving along University Ave., west towards the freeway. It was about three hours from sunset, and the way the sun lit of the fog from behind, and the way it shone on the silvery waters of the bay, was enough to make my heart ache from the beauty of it all.

I just revised and updated the “Annotated Bibliography on Human and Faith Development” that has been on my web site since 2003. In particular, I completely revised the section on James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, clarifying my criticisms of this book.

What key books have I left out? Am I right to be so critical of Fowler? Your comments, suggestions, and criticisms of this page will be much appreciated.

There are places in Silicon Valley where you can stand along the edge of San Francisco Bay and look back at the Coastal Range, and during the summer you can watch as the fog from the Pacific Ocean spills over the low points in the ridge line. On the other side of the Coastal Range, an ocean current hits the shore line, and deep cold water comes to the surface where it meets warmer air, and condenses into fog. The fog will build up until it’s five hundred or a thousand feet high, high enough to spill over the low points in the ridge. You can watch the fog working its way down through the distant woodlands some miles away and hundreds of feet higher than where you stand, down at sea level, in the warm bright sunshine of Silicon Valley.

Isaac Bonewits died yesterday. He was not only an influential Neopagan thinker and organizer, and a key figure in the North American Druid community, but was also affiliated with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS). At The Wild Hunt blog, Jason Pitzl-Waters has links to tributes and obituaries, and his commenters have added other links.

To me, Bonewits was most important as a thinker. Back in the 1970s, he coined the term “thealogy” as an alternative to the term “theology,” which latter term may imply certain beliefs and biases; most importantly, linguistically speaking “theology” has a definite masculine gender (from its root “theos”), and forming a complementary word of feminine gender was a brilliant move in the ongoing feminist critique of religion. His writing and thinking deserves wider consideration, beyond the Neopagan circles to which it seems to have been largely restricted.

According to an article on the Los Angeles Times Web site posted about an hour ago, Judge Walker did not remove the stay on his ruling on Proposition 8, and there can be no immediate same-sex marriages in California until he does so:

Reporting from San Francisco — A federal judge Thursday refused to permanently stay his ruling overturning Proposition 8 but extended a temporary hold to give supporters time to appeal the historic ruling.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who overturned the measure on Aug. 4, agreed to give its sponsors until Aug. 18 to appeal his ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. No new marriages can take place until then.

Walker said the sponsors of Proposition 8 do not have legal standing to appeal his order because they were not directly affected by it.

That last paragraph mentions an important point. The fact that the State of California, in the persons of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown, refused to defend Prop. 8 puts the opponents of Prop 8 in a legal position that may not allow for an appeal. Having said that, given the current membership of the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s hard to believe they would let that stand in the way of their hearing such an appeal. Politics: endlessly fascinating, not entirely rational.

Carol has a book about managing large volumes of email, titled Hamster Revolution. In order to manage email, the authors of the book (Michael Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Burress) recommend using the same filing system for email that you use for all other files. To make filing easier, they further suggest using four broad filing categories: clients, output, team, and admin.

I liked the idea of using the same categories for email that I use for my other files. Of course, that raised another issue: I need to use the same filing categories throughout my computer that I use in my physical files in my filing cabinets. I also liked the idea of using just a few broad filing categories. And that raised another issue: those of us who work in congregations don’t really have clients, so that won’t work as a filing category. After a good bit of thought, I decided to use the following four big filing categories: 1 People including people in the congregation, and other stakeholders; 2. Output, including programs and ministries; 3. Team, including paid staff, volunteer staff, and lay leaders; and 4. Administration.

But which of my existing file headings should go into which of the four big categories? For example, do I put my files on rites of passage under Output, since they are a ministry of the congregation, or do I file them under People, since rites of passage are for specific people? In the book, Song, Halsey, and Burress point out that the first three categories can be arranged in order of importance, with the most important category at the beginning of the list:

People and Stakeholders
Output (programs, ministries, etc.)
Team (staff, volunteers, lay leaders, etc.)
Administrative

— where Team creates Output which serves and guides People and Stakeholders (with Administration as a necessary foundation to everything else). Now, when trying to decide between two filing categories, use the one highest up in the list. Thus, my files on rites of passage could go in Output, but I’m going to put them into People because that’s higher on the list.

I hope I’m making this clear, although I’m trying to explain this concept in a short blog post, while in the book this takes up an entire chapter. My most important point is this: although the filing categories proposed in Hamster Revolution are designed for the for-profit business world, I think they can be readily adapted to the world of congregations, using the modifications I suggest above. Of course, if you want, you can go read the book, or ask me questions via a comment. And for further clarification, I’ll give my complete filing hierarchy below as an example.

Example:

I work as a Minister of Religious Education at a mid-sized congregation (225 ave. attendance, 300 members). As a staff person, I have primary responsibility for religious education for all ages, as well as some responsibility for leading worship, doing administration, and providing pastoral care. A draft version of my revised filing categories looks like this:

1 People & Stakeholders [note 1]
    Community groups
        Stevenson House
    Pastoral care
    Rites of passage
        Memorial services
        Weddings
    Social justice
        Guest at your table

2 Output
    1 Children’s RE
        Children’s choir
        Curriculum and lessons
        Our Whole Lives K-6
        Plays and pageants
        Special events
        Summer Sunday school
        Sunday school
    2 Youth RE & programs
        Coming of Age
        Middle school programs
        Our Whole Lives 7-9
        PCD youth programs [2]
        Senior high youth group
        Service trips
    3 Campus ministry
        Stanford
    4 Adult RE & programs
        Curriculum and lessons
        Small groups
        Classes
        Young adult programs
    Bass Lake [3]
    Newsletter
    Prospectus & brochures
    Sermons & services

3 Team
    Adult RE Committee
    Board
    Children and Youth RE Committee
    Committee on Ministry
    Library Committee
    Personnel
        MRE
        Child care workers
        RE Assistant
        Staff, other
    Planning
    Volunteer management
        1 Support
        2 Recognize
        3 Recruit
        4 Train

4 Admin
    Attendance
    Budget & finances
    Buildings & grounds
    Canvass & fundraising
    District denomination
    Forms
    History
    Letters
    Photos and images
    Publicity
    Reports
    Supplies

NOTES:

[1] Some filing categories have numbers in front of them. This is because most computers automatically place filing categories in alphabetical order; yet in some cases, I have a specific order in which I want the categories to appear (e.g., I want People, Output, Team, Admin — not Admin, Output, People, Team). By putting a number in front of the categories, it forces the computer to order them in the way I want.

[2] PCD = Pacific Central District of Unitarian Universalist Congregations.

[2] An annual family retreat at our congregation.

Back at the end of May, the music duo Garfunkel and Oates posted a music video on Youtube titled “Sex with Ducks.” See, Pat Robertson apparently once said that if you legalize same-sex marriage, pretty soon people would be having sex with ducks. When I heard that, I immediately wanted to know: which ducks? I mean, it’s hard imagining anyone being attracted to Anas clypeata, but maybe that’s what turns Pat Robertson on. Who knows?

Anyway, the music video by Garfunkel and Oates is very silly, and the song, with its bright bubblegum melody and oh-so-sweet harmonies, is a hoot:

Thank you, Jean, for pointing this song out! And UU Jester, I want to know how this applies to duckies! And, for everyone’s reference, here are some of the lyrics of the song, taken from the MySpace page of Garfunkel and Oates:

Pat Robertson once said,
“It’s a long downward slide,”
That will lead to legalizing sex with ducks
If two men can stand side by side.

God, I hope he’s right,
‘Cause if gay marriage becomes lawful
Gonna find myself a duck
And legally do something awful.

    Ducks! Sex with ducks!
    We’ll do it in the rain.
    Ducks! Yeah, ducks!
    Got those webbed feet on my brain.

We’ll find a pond, we’ll find a puddle,
Put your beak in mine, and we’ll cuddle.
It’s a feeling I can’t name,
When sex with ducks and gay marriage are one and the same.

Our church rents space to a private elementary school, and this summer they are running a summer school. I know a couple of the children in this summer program because also go to our Sunday school. One of them, a boy who’s about ten years old, is surprisingly good with words. He’s also, in his very talkative way, quite shy. He is one of the last children left at summer school today, and because the playground is four feet from my office window, I’ve been listening to him talk to one of the teachers:

“My eyes burn.”

The teacher laughs, so it can’t be that he got something in his eyes. So what happened? I can’t figure out what they’re talking about.

“They burrrrn! No, please delete that picture of me. Delete it!”

Ah, now I get it.

Ever wonder what Barbie dreams about? Photographer Danny Sanchez, a veteran of the Altered Barbie art show in San Francisco, has been asking just that question in a new series of Polaroid photographs titled “Vinyl Day Dreams.”

So here’s what Barbie dreams about…. Fashion accessories, of course. And sex. And awards. Oh, and true love.

Once upon a time, Perry Mason was in the hospital, and another lawyer had to step in…. and who was that lawyer? None other than Bette Davis. She plays Mrs. Doyle, the smart, tough-talking lawyer who helps out Cal Leonard, the handsome young juvenile delinquent who’s in jail for assault. Cal steals her car and next thing Mrs. Doyle knows, she’s in the middle of a murder case — and taking on the male establishment to boot.

I’m a big fan of Perry Mason. But Constant Doyle, as played by Davis, is way better than Perry Mason as played by Raymond Burr. Check it out yourself:

The headline from today’s San Francisco Chronicle says it all: “Unconstitutional: Same-sex marriage backers rejoice as federal judge strikes down Prop. 8”. I’ve been reading over parts of the judge’s ruling, available as a PDF file on the Web site of the San Jose Mercury News. I was particularly struck by the judge’s reasoning that by outlawing same-sex marriage, Prop. 8 discriminates, not only on the basis of sexual orientation, but also on the basis of gender:

Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 as violating the Equal Protection Clause [of the 14th amendment] because Proposition 8 discriminates both on the basis of sex and on the basis of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation discrimination can take the form of sex discrimination. Here, for example, Perry is prohibited from marrying Stier, a woman, because Perry is a woman. If Perry were a man, Proposition 8 would not prohibit the marriage. Thus, Proposition 8 operates to restrict Perry’s choice of marital partner because of her sex. But Proposition 8 also operates to restrict Perry’s choice of marital partner because of her sexual orientation; her desire to marry another woman arises only because she is a lesbian. [p. 119]

The judge also pointed out that, in the past, marriage had been a “male-dominated institution.” Then as gender equality became the law of the land, marriage had to change such that both partners became equals:

The marital bargain in California (along with other states) traditionally required that a woman’s legal and economic identity be subsumed by her husband’s upon marriage under the doctrine of coverture; this once-unquestioned aspect of marriage now is regarded as antithetical to the notion of marriage as a union of equals. FF 26-27, 32. As states moved to recognize the equality of the sexes, they eliminated laws and practices like coverture that had made gender a proxy for a spouse’s role within a marriage. FF 26-27, 32. Marriage was thus transformed from a male-dominated institution into an institution recognizing men and women as equals. Id. Yet, individuals retained the right to marry; that right did not become different simply because the institution of marriage became compatible with gender equality. [p. 112]

In short, from a legal point of view, the feminist revolution helped pave the way for same-sex marriage, by doing away with the notion that marriage required women to be subservient to men. (Remember that as late as the 1960s, a woman could not have a credit card in her own name; it had to be in the name of her husband.) This also implies that we should be wary of what opponents of same-sex marriage call “traditional marriage”; in fact, earlier in the ruling, the judge writes, “Proposition 8 amends the California Constitution to codify distinct and unique roles for men and women in marriage.” [p. 87]

Thus the judge states forcefully what many of us knew already: that opposition to same-sex marriage can be based in part on old-fashioned notions of requiring gender inequality within marriage. He drives this home towards the end of the ruling:

California has eliminated all legally mandated gender roles except the requirement that a marriage consist of one man and one woman. FF 32. Proposition 8 thus enshrines in the California Constitution a gender restriction that the evidence shows to be nothing more than an artifact of a foregone notion that men and women fulfill different roles in civic life.

The tradition of restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples does not further any state interest. Rather, the evidence shows that Proposition 8 harms the state’s interest in equality, because it mandates that men and women be treated differently based only on antiquated and discredited notions of gender. See FF 32, 57. [p. 124]

In short, after reading this ruling I would say that anyone who supports gender equality under law must also support same-sex marriage.

This afternoon, federal judge Vaughan Walker of the Northern California District Court released his decision: Prop 8 is unconstitutional.

This evening, the mood at the rally outside San Francisco City Hall was ebullient.

Sign at tonight’s rally at San Francisco City Hall

There was also a serious undercurrent. Everyone present knew that Walker’s decision would be appealed by the supporters of Prop 8. Everyone knew the odds are that this legal battle will be fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Everyone present knew that there is a good chance that supporters of marriage equality won’t wait for a Supreme Court decision, and that we’ll try to have an initiative on the ballot in 2012.

The rally ended fairly quickly (and it would have ended earlier but for some long-winded clergypersons; boy, people in my profession do like to hear themselves talk). I was just as happy it ended fairly quickly; it was a typical San Francisco summer evening, cloudy, with a chilly damp wind. My favorite quote from the evening: “There is nothing more delicious than being a love warrior today.”

From a U.S. District Court announcement dated today:

3:09-cv-02292
Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger et al
Challenge to “Proposition 8”
Chief Judge Vaughn R Walker
United States District Court for the Northern District of California

On August 4, 2010, the court will issue its written order containing findings of fact and conclusions of law following the court trial held in January and June of this year. The order will be e-filed in the court’s Electronic Case Filing system, and will be immediately available thereafter through ECF and PACER. There will be no court proceeding associated with the publication of the order.

Read the full announcement here. The decision is supposed to be released between 1 and 3 p.m. Pacific time.

In my area (Bay area, the Peninsula), I know there will be a rally of celebration or recommitment here in San Mateo tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. Pacific time, corner of Fifth Ave. and El Camino Real. There’s also one being planned for Mountain View, 6:00 p.m., City Hall and Caltrain station. And of course, San Francisco: march stepping off from the Castro 5:00-6:00 p.m., rally at City Hall at 6:45.

Gayapolis lists some nineteen rallies in California, and a few others across the country, including several places in Texas, as well as Denver, and Rochester, New York..

There’s another, longer, listing of rallies on the Prop 8 Decision Ning site. Note that there will be a Prop 8 rally in Phoenix!

For my friends back in Massachusetts, Join the Impact is going to have a rally at Copley Square, Boston, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, and you can find details on their Facebook page.

If you attend one of these other rallies, I’d love to hear about it. I’ll be at the rally in San Francisco, and will report back in a couple of days.

A lead story today from the New York Times reminds us that “members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension, and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen.”

And how can we stop this downward trend? No definitive answer yet, but: “a growing number of health care experts and religious leaders have settled on one simple remedy that has long been a touchy subject with many clerics: taking more time off.”

Sounds about right to me. That’s the way many ministers are trained. I have minister friends whose internship supervisors insisted they work far more than 40 hours a week during their internships; one supervisor told her intern that the intern must work at least one 80 hour week “to know what it feels like”; that supervisor routinely worked 60+ hours a week.

And then there are the minister who rarely take Sundays off, who never use all their vacation time, and rarely take more than one day off in any given week. And now of course cell phones mean that clergy feel they should always be available, at any time of the day or night (there goes your sex life, I guess) — even though we all got along just fine in the days when there weren’t even any answering machines.

OK, so my bias is obvious (and I do take my vacations, and keep my hours below 50 hours a week). So what do you think?

One of the ways I sometimes amuse myself on Sunday afternoons is to open the “Sunday Styles” section of the New York Times, and turn to the wedding announcements. I look at the photographs of the wedding couples, and try to figure out who officiated at their wedding.

Because it’s the New York Times, most of the officiants are Epsicopalian priests, Conservative Jewish rabbis or cantors, Catholic priests, or Presbyterian ministers — you know, from the religious groups that are a little higher up, socially speaking. These are the boring couples, because I usually can’t figure out who officiated at their weddings; whether an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian or a Jew or a Catholic officiated, the couples all look pretty much the same. Sometimes you get fooled, though: although there aren’t many Lutherans in the New York Times, when they’re there, they look a lot like Presbyterians.

Then sometimes you get couple who was married by a justice of the peace, or by a friend of the couple who got a one-day license from the state, or by someone who picked up an ordination through the Universal Life Church. I can usually separate these couples out from the previous group; this second group might look a little scruffier (as far as any New York Times wedding couple ever looks scruffy), or a little less conventionally good looking, or their photograph might be unconventional (this week, look for the couple on the bicycles — they had a Universal Life minister).

Once in a blue moon you get a couple who had a Unitarian Universalist minister officiate. I always miss them, because I’m just not expecting them. So imagine my astonishment when I look to see who officiated at the wedding of the nice-looking middle-aged couple. I was expecting a justice of the peace (not many middle-aged couples in the Times, plus he has facial hair) — but not only did a Unitarian Universalist minister officiate, it was someone I know.

Congratulations, Michelle, for finally making into the New York Times. Now you have really arrived.

IWhen I went off to college, I immediately got involved with the movement to do away with nuclear weapons; I was a religious pacifist, I was attending a Quaker college, it was a natural thing to do. Some of the other students were planning to engage in civil disobedience, and I began to consider doing so myself. I wrote to Pat Green and asked his advice. Pat had been the assistant minister and the youth advisor at my church, and I remembered that he had talked about being arrested for engaging in civil disobedience while protesting the Vietnam War. “Somewhere in the FBI files,” Pat had said, “there’s mug shots of me wearing one of those conical Vietnamese hats.”

By then, Pat was the minister of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Birmingham, Alabama. He wrote back quickly, and said he would not advise me to engage in civil disobedience. He felt his arrest had not had any effect on United States war policy; the only thing it had done was to give him a criminal record; the price paid was not worth the end result. Maybe he thought that he had to say that to a seventeen year old kid, but I doubt it: Pat was terribly sincere, and I think he really meant what he said.

Two and a half years later, I saw some friends of mine getting arrested trying to blockade the entrance to Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. That same weekend, I also saw that the greatest effect of our protest at Seabrook was to polarize opposition, and reduce the possibility of meaningful dialogue about nuclear power plants. I was at Seabrook, partly for the adventure of it, but also because of a dawning systems-level understanding that the nuclear power industry was intimately connected with the nuclear weaponry, not least because of the possibility of weapons-grade materials getting stolen by terrorist groups. That kind of understanding had no place in the rough-and-tumble world of protest politics, where often the most that happens is that people yell at each other and get ten second interviews with the news media.

I just went and re-read Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” I had forgotten how deeply personal it is. I had also forgotten how deeply spiritual the essay is:

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

Not flesh and blood and bones, but something more than that. Thoreau paid no poll tax because he did not want his money funding the Mexican-American War, an unjust war that was, as he saw all too clearly, nothing more than a pretext for the United States to make a land grab, a way to open up more land to become future slave states. At the end of the war, the United States was able to force Mexico to cede all claims to territory covering parts of present-day Wyoming, Kansas, and Colorado, and all or most of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

When faced with vast, reeking political injustice like that, anyone would go to jail rather than pay a poll tax — that is, anyone would do so if they could go beyond the usual simplistic viewpoint of politics and propaganda, and get to a point where they could see what was really going on in that war. Thoreau goes well beyond even that point of view, and as is his wont speaks in extremes — for like so many New England Yankees, he was well-schooled in the art of the tall tale — saying that he owes no allegiance to anyone. He owed no allegiance to anyone, but he lived for most of his life in his mother’s house, eating the food she cooked. He owed no allegiance to anyone, but he worked for years in his father’s pencil factory, the fine graphite dust aggravating the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. Thoreau owed allegiance only to a higher power:

Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?

Sometimes I wish I had engaged in civil disobedience when I was seventeen. One student at that same college, another pacifist who was a couple of years older than I, got arrested for throwing blood on the steps of the Pentagon. I was jealous. He went on to become a mainline Protestant minister, so his arrest record was something to put on his resume. Maybe that act of civil disobedience continues to have an effect: I hope he uses it to teach his congregants that Christians can and should have a greater allegiance to the ethical precepts of Jesus than to a government that spends half its budget on “defense,” that is, on war.

But I didn’t engage in civil disobedience when I was seventeen. I think what I got out of Pat Green’s advice was a criticism of protest politics. Protest politics sees the Constitution and the law and the courts and the American government from a fairly low point of view, while Pat looked at things from a higher point of view. Hhe tried to get me to see things from his somewhat higher point of view. He made me ask myself: What am I really trying to accomplish? Can I stick to it over the long term?Will an act of civil disobedience really accomplish what I am trying to accomplish?

Pat spent a good part of his adult life quietly working on prison reform. Eventually he left Unitarian Universalism. He once said to me that the thing that most frustrated him about Unitarian Universalists was that they flitted from one cause to another — “cause-of-the-month club” was the phrase I remember him using — often abandoning one cause, and moving on to another cause, before any real progress had been made on the first cause. I always wondered if he left Unitarian Universalism because he got tired of the cause-of-the-month-club phenomenon.

Pat Green wound up dying of a heart attack when he was about my age; someone said it was due to overwork; his marriage had dissolved by then, and he was living alone, so it was a day or so before anyone found him. As for Thoreau, after someone paid his poll tax for him and he was released from jail, he obeyed a higher law once again, and went with a bunch of friends to pick huckleberries. By the time he was my present age, he had been dead of tuberculosis for five years. Not to belabor the point, but there is little time to waste on unimportant matters.

In the middle of the afternoon, I took a break and slipped off the Baylands Nature Preserve. A light breeze, gusting to a moderate breeze, came from a little west of north, and brought the smell of salt water of the bay with it. I felt a little cold, and thought about going back to the car to get my fleece vest, but decided to keep walking. The tide was just beginning to come in, and there were so many shore birds all over the mudflats — American Avocets, Marbled Godwits, Willets, Western Sandpipers — that I spent most of my time looking down at the mud, not up at the sky.

Then a huge something flew overhead. I looked up in time to see a big white bird with black wing tips gliding low over the salt marsh. I didn’t even need to look at its head to know that it was an American White Pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos). I’ve seen plenty of Brown Pelicans, but somehow I had never seen a White Pelican before today. And I didn’t just see the one; as I got farther out the dike trail, I saw half a dozen more gliding overhead, and after I had walked about a mile I saw more than twenty more sitting in the marsh about two tenths of a mile away from the dike.

The American White Pelican was the three hundredth species of bird that I’ve positively identified. I’m not a very good birder, and the main reason that I’ve managed to see that many species of birds is that I’ve lived on the east coast, on the west coast, and in the midwest. And I have to admit that it has taken me more than forty years to see that many species — I can positively remember seeing a Rufous-sided Towhee for the first time in July, 1967, when I was six years old, so I can date the beginning of my birding career no later than then. Nevertheless, I certainly felt a little thrill go through me this afternoon when I realized that I was indeed seeing an American White Pelican, a bird I had never seen before.

I spent a good ten minutes watching one White Pelican feeding at the edge of one of the sloughs in the Baylands Preserve: sticking out its neck as it floated along and running its long peach-colored bill through the water, then putting its head back so I could see its somewhat distended throat sac. And I spent a fair amount of time watching three or four of them flying together: these huge birds with a wingspan of up to 120 inches in close formation, gliding along and barely flapping their wings. It was certainly a dramatic way to reach the three hundred species milestone.

…I wanna hang out with Bombshell Boom Boom, which is an “anti-venue marching sound collective, stemming out of the little known grassroots marching band movement happening world wide.” I met Sean, the director of Bombshell Boom Boom, while singing in San Diego this past Sunday. Sean explained that first the participants make their own instruments, and then they go play at the San Diego Museum of Art, or, as in the video below, at Mardi Gras:

Can you imagine doing this in your Unitarian Universalist congregation? No? I guess you’re right. Our congregations are not exactly open to sound art, even when it’s fun and light-hearted like this. Yet sound art could fit in very nicely with an alt.worship service, or in emergent-type services that deliberately incorporate everything from spoken word performances, to installation art, to conceptual art.

You’d think that Unitarian Universalists, with their leftward-leaning theology, would embrace leftward-leaning art forms like jazz, new music, or sound art. Instead, the highest ambition of many Unitarian Universalist congregations seems to be to get a praise band, which to my mind is pretty far on the conservative side of the liturgical spectrum. The difference, I guess, is whether you want liturgical music that transcends your day-to-day world, or whether you want liturgical music that sounds just like what you hear when you shop at Trader Joe’s.

P.S. Did you notice that in the video the average age of the people in Bombshell Boom Boom is maybe a third of the average age of your typical Unitarian Universalist congregation?

More from sound artist Sean.

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix has some photos up of a civil disobedience action in Phoenix to protest Arizona SB 1070. Here’s to the brave Unitarian Universalists who are taking on the evil of Arizona SB 1070 — many of us are thinking of you, and sending you moral support from afar.

And at the same time, I have to admit that all the energy that Unitarian Universalists are pouring into the protest of Arizona SB 1070 makes me feel a little lonely. As a religious pacifist, I view the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq and Pakistan) as being of far greater moral importance than immigration reform. Yet I’m afraid my view is not shared by the majority of Unitarian Universalists; our denomination has made it clear that immigration reform is of far greater importance to us than antiwar efforts. I think maybe I need to hang out with some Quakers in the near future, and get a big dose of religious pacifism to tide me over for a while.

This afternoon, I took a break from not writing the things I’m supposed to be writing, and went out to the Baylands nature preserve for a walk.

We’re now fully into the summer-dry season. The plants all look drab: The grasses are crispy and dry; they have faded beyond golden-brown to pale golden-brown. The leaves of the trees have become dull green. Even the cattails, with their feet sunk into damp soil in the marshes, are not as green as they are in the spring.

Away from the bay, I didn’t see many animals: I saw one gopher, heard and insect or two, saw one small brown bird flitting from one bit of cover to another bit of cover. But there was plenty of activity out on the waters and mudflats of the bay. Forster’s Terns were everywhere, diving into the water and sometimes coming up with fish in their bills. Barn Swallows swooped along the edges of the salt marshes, while egrets hunted in the shallow waters near by. Hundreds of shore birds plunged their bills into the mud left behind by low tide.

This is my study leave, and I’m supposed to be working on two writing projects. But I made no progress today.

The big project I’m supposed to be working on is a series of stories for children about religion. I know the approach I want to use — an approach where I don’t try to reduce the other traditions to platitudes that fit into our own religious schema, but instead retain something of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of other religious traditions. I have primary and secondary source materials lined up. I even have something of a general outline. But I just didn’t get started today.

I’m also supposed to be revising a collection of children’s stories that I put together last year for the religious education program here at the Palo Alto church. I’m supposed to be correcting typographical errors, fixing a few factual errors, and adding a couple of stories that got left out by mistake. But I just didn’t get started today.

What I did do is this: I finished reading a book. I responded to an editor who had some questions about a short essay I wrote. I read a science fiction magazine. I worried about another article that seems to have been swallowed by another editor’s desk. I read the newspaper. I made extensive notes on proposed writing project that, although it is on the topic of a religious or spiritual practice, has only a tangential connection to my church job. I read a professional journal. I did laundry. I sat and thought. I sat and didn’t think.

A month ago, I made a beautiful schedule of how I was going to organize my study leave so I could finish both writing projects in two short weeks. I’m usually pretty good at sticking to writing schedules. When I’m not good at sticking to a schedule, it usually means there’s something missing in the overall plan for the project, and I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on right now. I even think I now know what the problem is. But in the mean time, I have made no progress, and I’ve already lost two days of work.

I love my job. I love the the staff and lay leaders and everyone else at our church. I love being a minister, and hope I never have to retire.

Nevertheless, the first day back from vacation is the worst day of the year.

I was at a singing event yesterday and today, and one of the other singers told me a church choir joke:

Q: How many church choir directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: No one knows, because no one was paying attention.

In response, I inflicted this stupid choir joke on the other fellow:

Q: If you throw the accompanist and a church choir member off the top of a tall building at the same time, which one hits the ground first?
A: The accompanist, of course. The choir member has to stop on the way down and ask the choir director which way to go.

Please accept my apologies for repeating these jokes here.

And here’s a joke about bass guitarists I heard today, included here for the benefit of Jim-the-bassist:

Q: Why did the bass guitarist’s kindergarten child flunk math at school?
A: When asked to count to ten, the child replied, “One, five, one, five, one, five, one, five, one, five!”

I left Needles, that “miserable place,” early in the morning. It was hot already. I drove south on U.S. 95, through the hot, dry, bleak Colorado desert. This is a two-lane paved road that I would not want to drive during a rain storm; there are no culverts (not that I saw, anyway) and the road dips down to meet every dry wash.

Bleak as it was, the desert scenery was spectacular: stark, forbidding mountains rising up out of the sand plains studded with creosote bushes. After more than an hour of driving, I began to pass side streets, and I began to see small houses here and there in the desert. A sign told me when I reached the city limits of Twentynine Palms, population nearly thirty thousand.

I stopped at the visitor’s center for Joshua Tree National Park, and walked around the Oasis of Mara. It was disappointing: no open water (the water table subsided some years ago after seismic action in the nearby Pinto Mountains), and fewer than twenty nine palm trees. But there were Gambrel’s Quail hiding under the low mesquites, and a pair of Prairie Falcons perched in one of the palms.

From Twentynine Palms, I headed south through the park. The Joshua Trees that give the park its name made me smile. They almost look as if they might start talking to you.

The cholla cactus seem to have personalities, too. Even though you know the lightest touch would be enormously painful, they look almost as if they wanted you to cuddle them.

The tall, twisted octillo with its tiny leaves, the mesquite trees, the fan palms: all these amazing plants growing in a very unpromising environment. The birds are amazing too. I stopped at Cottonwood Springs, and even though it was the hottest part of the day, the birds were cheerful because of the seeping water. But the sun was too hot for me; I wanted to stay longer, but I was getting a heat headache, and drove on.

The rest of the drive merely took me deeper and deeper in the urban and suburban sprawl that stretches along the Pacific rim of California. I’m not really ready to stop, but here I am in El Cajon, just outside of San Diego, at the end of my 3,200 mile journey.

This morning I took a side trip to El Malpais National Monument, which lies just to the south of Grants, New Mexico. I didn’t really go to see the lava flows which give El Malpais (“the badlands”) its name; I went to walk in the high desert, take some photographs, and maybe see some birds. I managed to do all three. You’ll have to take my word for the walking, but here’s a photograph of the lava flows (they’re the dark areas down in the valley), as seen from the top of Sandstone Bluffs:

And I saw some birds, too: Black-Chinned Hummingbirds, Scott’s Orioles, Pinyon Jays, Cassin’s Kingbirds, and several other desert-dwelling birds that I had never seen before.

While I sat at the ranger station admiring the hummingbirds and orioles coming to the hummingbird feeder, I heard thunder in the distance. Not long after I started driving, it started raining. I drove through rain from Grants to Gallup. I stopped in Gallup to get lunch and gas, and while I was eating lunch there was a real downpour. I ran out to the car when the rain let up a little, and drove through streets that were several inches deep in muddy brown water. This is insane, I thought, but I was on a tight schedule, so I got on the freeway and drove slowly through the rain. Pretty soon it let up, but I drove through occasional light showers for most of the rest of the day.

I decided I didn’t want to spend any money in Arizona, because of the ridiculous immigration law that the state legislature passed. While I’m sure Arizona will never notice the loss of my paltry travel dollars, I felt better knowing that I had not bought any gas or food in the state. Unfortunately, Arizona is in such tough financial shape that they have closed all the highway rest areas, so somewhere around Flagstaff where there are trees, I found a place by the side of the road where I could pee.

I arrived in Needles, California, at about 7:30. When I opened the door of the car, the air was unbelievably hot. It was so hot and dry that my eyeballs kind of hurt; and every once in a while, a gust of hot wind coming off the desert would make it feel even hotter. According to the National Weather Service, at 6:56 p.m. it was 105 degrees; and last night, the low temperature was 90 degrees.

In spite of the heat, I walked the few blocks from the motel to downtown Needles. The air was so dry, I could feel the moisture being sucked out of my mouth and nose. Not much was happening in downtown Needles; the main activity seemed to be around the BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) railroad yards, where dozens of cars and pickup trucks were parked. A few people were out walking around, a few cars passed by, but mostly the town was empty. The cartoonist Charles Schulz, who drew the “Peanuts” cartoon, lived here for a few years when he was a child, and his biographer David Michaelis writes:

By day, the sun broiled the vast playa above the town — 120 degrees in the shade of a cottonwood tree was normal for Needles in summer. Most winter nights, the translucent air turned the dry gullies into such iceboxes that he [Schulz] could hear rocks cracking in the cold. In May and September the old wooden tinderbox of a schoolhouse was frequently shut to protect the children from heatstroke. Such little rain as fell came briefly and violently, blasting flash floods out of nowhere.

Needles, [Schulz] decided, was a “miserable place.”

I bought a copy of the Needles Desert Star, “Established in 1888, serving the community of Needles for more than a century.” I learned that the city attorney has been holding training sessions on Robert’s Rules of Order for the members of the city council and various boards; this seems a good plan, and I can think of several communities that should try this sort of thing. Tribal elders gave blessings in the Mohave language to a new park project being built with America Recovery and Reinvestment Act money. And city council members held a meeting to address the sale of the local hospital. In 1983, Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” was syndicated in its two thousandth newspaper, in Needles, California (Michaelis, p. 531), but I did not find any comic strips at all today’s edition of the Needles Desert Star.

Soon after I left Elk City, Oklahoma, I saw my first sagebrush by the side of the highway. Agricultural fields increasingly gave way to grazing lands. I’m now in the West.

For the past three days, I’ve eaten at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet each night for dinner. Each of these buffets featured some kind of melding of Chinese and American cuisine. The large buffet in Elk City featured french fries, “fried green beans” (a sort of tempura), and “hot buttered potatoes,” alongside the stir-fried vegetables and the fried spring rolls. Here in Grants, New Mexico, at the “Asian Buffet,” I could have had “jalapeno chicken (spicy)” had I wished. None of these buffets offered any kind of tofu dish.

The best meal in roadside restaurants in the middle of America is always breakfast. This morning, I ate at the Elk City Cafe. The waitresses wore t-shirts, jeans, and heavy make-up, and called me “sweetheart” — waitresses have called me “hon” before, but being called “sweetheart” was new to me. The over-easy eggs were perfectly cooked, the bacon was think and tasty, the oatmeal was not watery as it had been in Connecticut nor chunky as it had been in Pennsylvania but exactly the right consistency. The home fries were a little too greasy, but the toast was warm and buttery.

I wanted to take a long walk, to work off some of the grease I’ve eaten today, but it started raining during dinner — with thunder and flashes of lightning — and hasn’t really let up since, and now it’s getting dark. Instead of walking, I drove down the historic route of the famous Route 66 in Grants and looked at the strip:

Grants, New Mexico, looking from an abandoned gas station towards Lotaburger, during a rain storm.

It was hot and humid yesterday when I arrived in Marshfield, Missouri. I went to bed early so I could get up early when it was cool enough to take a long walk.

I was out the door of the bed and breakfast at a quarter to seven. It was already in the high seventies, and the dew point couldn’t have been much lower than that. I walked up Clay street, across the one line railroad over which I’d seen three BNSF locomotives pull a mixed freight last night, up a block to the courthouse square. The Webster County courthouse, a gray Depression-era Art Deco building, is undistinguished. The courthouse square is neither pretty nor bustling; there are no trees to speak of; empty store fronts alternate with offices for lawyers and bail bondsmen, a small restaurant promising “Chinese Fast Food,” the Webster County Historical Society, and one attractive little grocery store in a far corner. It is far from the tourist stereotype of a Southern courthouse square.

I kept walking, and in another block I was on a tree-lined street. There was one big Victorian house, beautifully renovated and brightly painted, and then lots of small anonymous houses on big lots. I walked around the Webster County Fairgrounds. A damp sign lying in the grass told me that the county fair took place July 14-17; and a few pieces of carnival equipment were still parked on the fairgrounds. That was the only cheerful thing I saw on my walk, and it was really melancholy, for the fair was over for another year. Maybe it was just the heat, but I found the atmosphere of the town oppressive. I walked back to the courthouse square, and then, with some relief, walked back into the green and well-kept grounds of the bed and breakfast.

Today’s drive took me out of the rolling hills of southern Missouri into the flatness of western Oklahoma. I’m staying in Elk City tonight, and after dinner I walked around the center of the town. Downtown Elk City has no old buildings — it was founded in 1901 — and it is fairly flat and treeless. But it is an attractive town, with wide streets and the open feeling of the West. There is a pretty little Carnegie Library, and a couple of century-old brick buildings that are well-maintained. I got the impression of a lively mix of businesses: lawyers and accountants, a department store, several clothing stores, a boutique, a hair salon, the Elk City Cafe, buildings for two newspapers (looking at their buildings, I’d guess that the Elk City Daily News is considered more respectable than the Elk Citian), a large and bland but not unattractive post office, a small pharmacy and a big chain pharmacy, a hospice, a sewing machine and vacuum repair shop, a dollar store and a thrift store, a couple of medical supply stores, and various storefronts that had to do with farming and the oil business. One business had something to do with the oil business (the name was something-or-other oilrigging), and a sign on the door proclaimed, “Please take off work boots before entering office.”

Most everything was closed by the time I got there. It was still very hot, but I kept walking around the downtown, impressed by the sheer variety of the businesses. This was a downtown that had not yet been killed off by the malls; I’ll bet you can buy everything from hardwear to underwear to a ten gallon hat, and sell your oil well to boot. On my way back to the motel, I took some back roads. While there aren’t many trees, the countryside around Elk City is green and rolling, and pleasant to look at. It felt like a place that might be nice to live in.

Two photographs from today’s drive:

(1) Bus parked in gravel lot next to the Motel 6 Parking lot, Cloverdale, Indiana, 19 July 2010 at approximately 9 a.m.:

The text on the side of the bus reads: “Feeding the world so you don’t have to.” The designs on the light blue stripe on the side of the bus are footprints; above that in the purple strip are handprints. I could not make out what kind of equipment was tied to the roof of the bus; perhaps it was gardening equipment. Through the windows of the bus, I could see additional equipment. Unfortunately, there was no one around the bus whom I could ask.

(2) Signs at the junction of Interstate 44 and Missouri Route UU:

I took three short trips off the interstate today, trying to find something other than rest areas and the usual fast food joints you find near interstates. The first two side trips were unsuccessful. The first led to malls and suburbia, and the second led to a place that wasn’t worth the trip.

But the third side trip led to the barn where my older sister is taking care of three horses. It led me past the Village Smorgasbord in the middle block of downtown Hagerstown. It wound down past a small creek bed, through woodlands, around a bend where a white clapboard church, Nettle Creek Friends Meeting, stands next to a little cemetery, then in between eight foot high walls of corn, and at last to a house where my sister fed me dinner, and then to the barn where her horse is stabled.

Jean and I and the two dogs, Tracer and Parker, walked from the house down to the barn. Already in the barn were several pairs of barn swallows, three horses, and a cat named Pumpkin who ate baby Barn Swallows when he could get them. Jean showed me how the timbers of the barn had been hand hewn, and pegged together with oak pegs. Tracer lay down on the barn floor and kept an eye on things:

All too soon, it was time for me to get on the road again, and I forgot to wish my sister a happy birthday. Happy birthday, Jean!

The price of the motel included a full breakfast. I brought yesterday’s New York Times to read. A man with glasses and carefully combed silver hair sat at a nearby table. He was wearing a dark polo shirt and neatly pressed white shorts. He eyed my paper. “You got that at the front desk?” he said. There was just a hint of a sharp tone in his voice; he was in obvious newspaper withdrawal. “No, I got it from my car,” I said. His face fell. The only newspaper available at the motel was USA Today.

As I drove over the high point of the Taconic Hills, over the border from Connecticut into New York, a sign gave the elevation as 970 feet. Near the Pennsylvania border, we reached a high point of about 1250 feet. Then halfway across Pennsylvania, a sign told me that I had reached the highest point on Interstate 80 between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, at about 2250 feet. Some of the scenery was spectacular, the road winding in among wooded hills and mountains that had clearly been shaped by glaciation. In many places, the road had to be cut through bedrock:

In the middle of the afternoon, I started getting fatigued. I had gone through several road construction projects where the road went to one lane, and at one point traffic had come to a complete stop due to an accident; when I passed the accident scene, they were trying to right an overturned car. I pulled into a rest area. Down behind the picnic area, a small stream wound through some woods. I walked along looking at the plants: big eastern hemlocks with young beeches pushing up around them, sassafras in the understory, and on the forest floor wintergreen, ground pine, jewel weed, trillium, all the familiar plants of the eastern woodlands. I picked a wintergreen leaf and smelled it. This would be the last of the eastern woodlands that I’ll see this year.

Towards evening, I decided to pull off the road to see if I could find a place to eat. I chose Reynoldsville, because I liked the look of countryside. It was seven miles away from the interstate, along a two-lane highway that was straight at first, then began to wind down an increasingly steep hillside, until suddenly I was on the main street of Reynoldsville. I parked the car and went for a walk. There were three or four restaurants, but they all seemed to feature pizza, except for one restaurant which promised “home cooking.” A woman was getting into her car in front of the Episcopal church. “Going for a walk?” she called out to me. “Yup, stretching my legs,” I said and smiled. Several of the houses had anti-abotion signs on their small front lawns: “Abortion stops a beating heart”; “Respect Life”; “Choose Life.” Reynoldsville did not seem like the kind of place where a middle-aged man with a pony tail would exactly fit in. I got in my car and drove back to the interstate.

Next I tried Brookville, because of a sign which mentioned the “Brookville Historic District.” When I got to Brookville, there were some impressive houses, most of which were carefully maintained. Right across from the big red courthouse with the brillian white trim, there was a little restaurant called “The Courthouse.” I would have been the youngest person there by a good twenty years. I decided that as pretty as the town was, I would not try to eat dinner there. I walked around a little bit, and came across a small manufacturing plant with a sign that said “Brookville Locomotive / Diesel Locomotives / Personnel Carriers.” This could not have been their main plant, though, for there were no railroad tracks anywhere nearby.

Hot and humid at midafternoon, with a sky that threatened thunderstorms later. I drove out of the Ferry Beach Conference Center campground and headed towards Biddeford and Interstate 95. Slow going through Saco and Biddeford, moderately heavy traffic on the interstate. After I turned on to 495, I could see that the northbound side had very heavy traffic, which came to an almost complete stop at the approaches to 95 north, 93 north, and 3 north; presumably vacationers heading north. It was hazy, hot, and humid, and the thick hot air made distant hills look bluish. I made a quick stop in Stow to eat dinner with Carol and her dad, and then got back on the road. Lots of traffic through Worcester, then a little less through the eastern hills of Connecticut, then more traffic around Hartford, along with heavy rain and lightning. The rain ended leaving a faintly pink sky in the dying light, then light traffic through the steep hills of western Connecticut. A maddening construction delay, then at last I made it to the motel feeling frazzled. This morning I was awakened in my tent by the sound of a Wood Thrush singing.

Ferry Beach, Saco, Maine

Sometime after first light this morning, I came partially awake when a Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) started singing not far from the campground: three or four or five flute-like notes followed by a sort of trill. Birds don’t have larynxes; instead they have syrinxes, which in some species can produce more than one note at a time. Wood Thrushes have an amazingly rich and complex song; the first flute-like notes change in pitch and duration and sometimes seem to include more than one note, and the final trill might incorporate a buzzy sound and flute-like tones and more. The basic structure of the song is always the same, but each iteration of the song is slightly different; I can listen to a Wood Thrush without boredom for a very long time.

I drifted off to sleep, but while sleeping kept listening to the song, which went on and on and on. I had a dream in which I was listening to a Wood Thrush. I kept coming partly awake and marveling at the song, and then telling myself that I had to get some sleep. At last I fell sound asleep, and the alarm awakened me right at 7:00. The Wood Thrush was still singing. I listened as I pulled on my socks and shoes. I kept listening as I walked over to the wash house. I took a quick shower, walked back to my tent, listening to the Wood Thrush, trying to figure out where it was. I thought I might walk over and try to see it. But by the time I got back to my tent, at about 7:15, it stopped singing.

Here at Ferry Beach Conference Center, there’s always singing after dinner, led by the musician of the week. Although I usually duck out before the singing starts because it gets way too loud, tonight the decibel level promised to be bearable so I stayed.

The song leaders had us sing “The Garden Song” by David Mallet. Now, this is Heidi’s favorite song, and Heidi, who has been coming to Religious Education Week for decades, was unable to come this year. So when we started singing, Joyce called Heidi, got her voice mail, and held up her cell phone so we could all sing into it. We all knew Heidi would actually appreciate this gesture.

I started thinking: Do we have a similar sense of attachment to our regular congregations? –would you ever call someone who couldn’t come on Sunday morning, and hold up your phone so that person could hear the congregation singing a favorite hymn? What if we sent notes to a person who couldn’t come some Sunday morning — would that person appreciate those notes?

Today in the New DRE (Director of Religious Education) workshop, one of the topics we addressed was volunteer management, and we focused on volunteer teachers. I said that the way I think about volunteer management is that it is a cycle that begins with supporting your current volunteers, then moves to recognizing volunteers at the end of a semester or year (or for volunteers completing service), then moves to recruiting new volunteers (or recruiting current volunteers to volunteer for another semester or year), then moves to training volunteers beginning service.

I asked workshop participants to brainstorm ideas for ways that we can support, recognize, recruit, and train religious education volunteers (especially volunteer teachers). Below is the list of ideas they generated:

Supporting current religious education volunteers

(N.B.: We start with support, because in real life we always have at least some volunteers in place whom we have to support.)

making sure needed materials are available
sending reminder emails
check in with them
be available for questions or problem solving
ongoing recognition, “stroking”
have children do something for them, e.g., write notes or draw pictures
give teachers input in ongoing curriculum development
empowering teachers to change curriculum
in-service trainings
coaching
mentoring
safe dialogue with the DRE
clean and safe classrooms
communicating with volunteers in a timely manner
clear chain of accountability
chocolate
feed them special food
coffee, tea
monthly teacher meetings

———

Recognizing religious education volunteers

mention in newsletter
recognize during religious education worship service
recognize during during regular service
teacher appreciation breakfast
massages
special hats they get to keep
ribbon, pin, other identifier on name tags
pictures of RE teachers on bulletin board
general check-in
saying: “You’re doing a great job!”
sending thank you notes
having the kids thank them
have non-teaching parents talk about impact teachers have on their kids
ask volunteers how they want to be recognized

———

Recruiting religious education volunteers

recruit existing volunteers
ask prospective volunteers face-to-face, tell them why you think they would be good
announcement in newsletter
announcement in service
put another announcement in newsletter
post signs
big sign-up sheet
get RE Committee to help recruit
assign someone to recruit
build a culture of high expectations, everyone will engage in a ministry
asking people what they need to become a teacher
having options other than just teaching
volunteer surveys
make teaching so satisfying, people want to volunteer

———

Training religious education volunteers (before their service begins)

(N.B.: I subscribe to the theory that adult volunteers tend to learn best when confronting immediate problems. Therefore, in-service training and coaching (which I have included under support) work better than a big chunk of up-front training, and I would devote much less time to an elaborate formal training programs before volunteer service begins. See Carl George’sThe Coming Church Revolution: Prepare Your Leaders for the Future for more on this concept.

provide beginning of the year orientation/training
provide mandatory safety training (universal health precautions, child protection, emergencies)
provide classroom management training

Here at Ferry Beach Conference Center, the Ferry Beach Ecology School has established an organic garden that also serves as a place to teach children. I’ve uploaded photos of this outdoor classroom to Flickr, with lots of explanatory captions. It’s both attractive, and well-designed for teaching.

Seeing this has really gotten me excited. Now I want to establish something like this for my own congregation!

We’re sitting on the porch of the Quillen building at Ferry Beach, with a cool sea breeze coming off the Atlantic. Helen Zidowecki is explaining the religious education credentialing process for Unitarian Universalist religious education professionals. We found a great summary of the program here.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be leading a workshop for new Directors of Religious Education (DREs). With the thought that this workshop might be useful to others, I’m going to post summaries of what we cover each day. To start off, I’ll post the three key handouts which I’ll hand out at the beginning of the workshop. These three handouts attempt to provide a broad overview of what the DRE job can encompass.

Handout One: Outline of the Many Things a DRE Might Do

• No religious educator can possibly do everything the job encompasses!

• In order to stay sane, you must accept the constraints on your job, e.g., how many hours a week, your written job description, implicit expectations of congregation, mission of congregation, your level of training, the complications of the rest of your life, your present KSA (knowledge, skills, and abilities), etc.

• Sometimes the expectations (yours and the congregation’s) for the DRE position exceed the realities of the situation. When expectations exceed reality, DRE burn-out and congregational disappointment may ensue.

We can break down the DRE job into four basic areas of responsibility, listed in the usual order of priority:

— Administration (non-profit leadership and management)
— Education
— Religion and theology
— Pastoral concerns

If you are quarter-time or less, expect to have the time to do some administration and education. If you are half-time or more, expect to deal with administration and some education (unless your congregation has other priorities). If you are full time, expect to cover three areas of responsibility. If you have been working as a religious educator for ten or more years with appropriate training, expect to get involved in all four areas of responsibility. Exception: large programs may require more administrative responsibilities.

I/ Administration (non-profit leadership and management)
  A. Safety
    1. Ensure safety policies and procedures are in place
      a. Child/youth protection
      b. Emergency evacuations
      c. Local problems (earthquake, tornado, etc.)
    2. Train volunteers in safety
      a. Conduct annual safety training for all
      b. Conduct specialized safety training as needed
    3. Supervise staff and volunteers in safety
      a. Conduct fire drills
      b. In-classroom observation
  B. Volunteer management
    1. Support volunteers: in-service support
      a. Mid-year workshop
      b. Monthly teacher meeting/training
      c. Consulting with individual teachers
    2. Support volunteers: supplies and resources
      a. Classroom notebooks
      b. Organized supply closets
      c. Classroom supply boxes
    3. Recognize volunteers: public recognition
      a. Mention in newsletter, annual report
      b. Commission teachers, advisors in worship
    4. Recognize volunteers: personal and group events
      a. Handwritten notes for exceptional service
      b. Volunteer breakfast or other celebration
    5. Recruit volunteers
      a. Invite existing volunteers to re-up
      b. Personally invite key experienced volunteers
      c. Mass recruitment efforts
    6. Train volunteers before service begins
      a. Conduct annual training
      b. Distribute teacher manual, volunteer manuals
    7. Written description for all volunteer jobs
      a. Document what volunteers are doing now
      b. Create written job descriptions
  C. Coordinating annual calendar
    1. Track all annual events
      a. Document what is happening currently
      b. Write down annual calendar
    2. Coordinate annual or bi-annual planning sessions
      a. Within RE Committee
      b. With congregation’s Council or Board
  D. Project management and scheduling
    1. Track all major projects (plays, trips, etc.)
    2. Serve as project manager
    3. Schedule special events
  E. Systems theory and conflict management
    1. Recognize and identify conflict
    2. Use de-triangulation skills
    3. Recognize systems-level issues
  F. Evaluation
    1. Conduct participant program evaluations
      a. Distribute forms (paper and online)
      b. Analyze results
    2. Conduct teacher/leader program evaluation
      a. Distribute forms (paper and online)
      b. Analyze results
    3. Conduct other stakeholder program evaluation
     (parents/guardians, ministers/staff, lay leaders,
     whole congregation, etc.)
      a. Distribute forms (paper and online)
      b. Analyze results
  G. Facilities management
    1. Classroom maintenance and improvements
    2. Storage maintenance and improvements
    3. Offices maintenance and improvements
    4. Facility safety, throughout entire plant
    5. Resource person: child/youth-friendly plant
  H. Publicity and growth
    1. Maintain brochures
      a. Prospectus for your program
      b. Supplement with UUA brochures as needed
    2. Encourage word of mouth
      a. Give parents talking points for word of mouth
    3. Regularly update RE material on Web site
      a. Review entire site annually
      b. Submit new material as needed
    4. Read literature on church growth
      a. Anything by Lyle Schaller
      b. Alban Institute books specific to size
    5. Prepare for growth
      a. Plan for doubled enrollment
      b. Plan for adding a worship service
  I. Staff supervision (child care workers, RE Assistant)
    1. Regular supervision and/or staff meetings
    2. Annual or semi-annual reviews
    3. Hiring and firing
  J. Work with RE Committee
    1. Monthly reports
    2. Leadership development
    3. Monthly meetings
  K. Etc.

II/ Education
  A. Curriculum
    1. Lesson plans
    2. Curriculum units
    3. Semester-long and year-long programs
    4. Curriculum sequences for ages 0-18
    5. Adult curriculum
  B. Supervision of teachers and advisors
    1. Providing teacher self-evaluation tools
    2. Facilitating teacher support groups
    3. Observation and feedback of teachers
    4. Providing in-service teacher-training
    5. Providing access to in-depth teacher training
  C. DRE as “master teacher”
    1. Teaching alongside other teachers
    2. Mentoring other teachers
    3. Teaching in large-group settings
  D. Assessment
    1. Pre-assessment
    2. Setting learning goals, learning objectives
    3. Assessing individual and group learning
    4. Communicating assessment results to congregation
  E. Classroom management
    1. Environments that minimize behavior problems
    2. Tools and training for classroom management
    3. Being the ultimate disciplinarian
  F. Etc.

III/ Religion and theology
  A. Resource person: worship with young people
    1. Sounding board for primary worship leaders(s)
    2. Provide resources for including young people
  B. Resource person: religious studies, comparative religion
    1. Maintain bibliography and/or library of resources
    2. Be an expert (if you have college-level study)
  C. Resource person: Unitarian Universalist theologies
    1. Maintain bibliography and/or library of resources
    2. Be an expert (if you have college-level study)
  D. Worship leader
    1. Participate/assist in leading worship
    2. Primary worship leader (intergenerational, adult)
    3. Children’s chapel leader
  E. Etc.

IV/ Pastoral concerns
  A. Referrals to minister(s), other professionals
    1. Refer to minister(s)
    2. Maintain referral list
  B. A listening ear
    1. Listen without providing advice
    2. Provide pastoral counseling (if trained)
  C. Basic knowledge of family systems theory
    1. Maintain bibliography/library of self-help resource
    2. Provide pastoral counseling (if trained)
  D. Etc.

Handout Two: Sample weekly and monthly DRE tasks

Weekly tasks for DRE:

Administrative:
a. Check classrooms for readiness — Sunday morning
b. Supervise child care employees as needed — Sunday morning
c. Plan for coming week, coming month — Sunday afternoon
d. Check in with office administrator, sexton — Monday
e. Attend staff meeting — Tuesday
f. Meet one-on-one with parish minister — Tuesday
g. Check newsletter, Web site, submit new info — Tuesday
h. Respond to email, mail, voice mail — ongoing
i. Routine administrative maintenance tasks as needed — ongoing

Volunteer training/support:
a. Look in on all classrooms during classes — Sunday morning
b. Read weekly evaluations from teachers in class notebooks, respond to any concerns — Sunday afternoon or Monday
b. Check in with key volunteers as needed — ongoing

Pastoral:
a. Greet people as they come into services — Sunday morning
b. Attend social hour — Sunday morning
c. Communicate any possible pastoral concerns to parish minister — Monday morning

Monthly tasks for DRE:

Administrative duties and meetings:
a. Write and submit monthly reports to Board
b. Write and submit monthly report to RE Committee
c. Review, sign, and submit payroll sheets from child care staff
d. Write class notes (and perhaps a column) for newsletter
e. Attend committee meetings as directed by supervisor
f. Coordinate with chair facilities committee

District/denominational, and professional development:
a. Attend district gatherings of religious educators
b. Carry out a district or denominational commitment (as schedule allows)
c. Carry out program of professional development (planned for the year, and based on evaluations of the previous year)

Handout three: Annual RE calendar for committee and DRE

Annual Calendar for First Universalist on the Beach (FUB)

This is a completely hypothetical annual religious education calendar. Obviously, every congregation will have a somewhat different annual rhythm, and different special events and annual events.

August
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program’s mission statement and goals
Sunday school start up tasks
Last minute recruiting
Arrange for committee member to greet new families

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Revise and print Sunday school prospectus
Last-minute recruitment of teachers and advisors as needed
Buy any needed books and curriculums
Chase down curriculum books not returned
Generate final attendance lists for each age group
Clean up supply closet
Check supplies in each classroom
Finalize room assignments for Sunday mornings
Planning teacher training
Begin weekly meetings with parish minister

September
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Plans for following up with new families
Go over progress of start-up & recruitment
Looking ahead: Hallowe’en Party

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Conduct fall teacher orientation and safety training
Get to know new families
Ongoing start-up tasks (see August list)

  District events:
Quarterly religious educator’s meeting

October
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Last minute planning: Hallowe’en Party
Looking ahead: Holiday craft fair
Looking ahead: Winter OWL (gr. K-2, gr. 4-6 in alternate years)

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Sunday school fire drill
Ongoing start-up tasks
Review church school attendance and registration

  District events:
District fall meeting

November
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Review RE program spending for previous year
Approve budget requests for next year
Last minute planning: Holiday Crafts Party

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Plan for Holiday Crafts Fair

December
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Plan to send out mid-year Sunday school evals in early January
Advance planning for Coming of Age program or OWL grades 7-8
  (alternate years)
Last minute planning: Winter OWL (gr. K-2, gr. 4-6 in alternate
  years)

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Arrange for Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s
Send out evaluation forms to fall teachers
Revise (if necessary) and reprint Sunday school prospectus
Plan January teacher workshop
Conduct mid-year staff evaluations, submit staff budget requests

  District events:
Quarterly religious educator’s meeting

January
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Send out mid-year evals
Begin planning curriculum for following church year
Looking ahead: Easter egg hunt in March or April
Looking ahead: Sunday school Open House in March
Looking ahead: Spring project and RE Sunday in May

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Check supplies, reorder as necessary
Research any new published curriculums for next year
Plan for spring project
Recruit leadership for spring project

February
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Review mid-year evals
Visioning and long-range planning for next church year
Finalize curriculum, and determine age groupings for next year
Finalize special events calendar for next year
Last-minute planning: Easter egg hunt [if Easter in March]
Last minute planning: Sunday school Open House

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Make curriculum recommendations to RE Committee

  District events:
LREDA chapter retreat

March
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Check in with youth advisors and youth leaders, and engage in
  visioning for next year
Set specific objectives for the program for next year
Begin collecting data for annual report
Last minute planning: Spring project

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Finalize planning for spring project
Finalize recruitment for spring project
Orientation for spring project volunteers

  District events:
Quarterly religious educator’s meeting

April
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Yearly evaluation (of Sunday morning program, of youth
  ministries, of objectives and goals, of committee)
Write Annual report for May meeting
Review performance of DRE, and share findings with parish
  minister (DRE’s immediate supervisor)
Looking ahead: summer Sunday school planning

  DRE tasks:
Begin recruiting key volunteers for next year
Registration for following year begins
Work on spring project

May
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Set final calendar for next year (special events, teacher trainings, etc.)
Recruit teachers and advisors for next year
Check references for teachers/advisors
Review of responsibilities and portfolios of committee members
RE Committee membership for next year
RE Committee chair for next year
Last-minute planning: Summer Sunday school

  DRE tasks:
Review DRE annual goals
Work on spring project

  District events:
District annual meeting

June
  RE Committee meeting:
Review RE program mission statement and goals
Begin summer Sunday school

  DRE tasks:
Review existing DRE annual goals
Get annual review, set new goals
Review RE staff (child care worker, RE asst.)
Tie up loose ends before summer
Begin study leave

  Denominational event:
General Assembly

July
  RE Committee:
No meeting
Continue with summer Sunday school

  DRE tasks:
Study leave, vacation
Attend summer RE conference

Dumpling restaurant in Little Seoul in Manhattan. The cooks stand in the front window making noodles and dumplings, and E—— decided to photograph them.

Carol and E—— on a moving walkway beneath the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

At midday, my old friend W—— and I packed sandwiches and water, got into his canoe and paddled up the Concord River, and paddled upstream. It wasn’t as hot as yesterday, but it still was in the 90s. Sometimes we’d catch a light breeze, depending on where we were along the bends of the river. The hot sun was straight above us, and there was no shade except over water too shallow for us to paddle in. We saw Daniel Chester French’s statue of the Minuteman, passed under the Old North Bridge, passed the replica of the boat house where Nathaniel Hawthorne had tied up the rowboat he bought from Henry Thoreau,^* and at last got to the confluence of the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers, which is the beginning of the Concord River.

“Which way do you want to go?” I asked Will. He didn’t have an opinion, so I suggested we got up the Assabet River because it was likely to be shadier. We passed some people fishing, and I asked them if they were catching anything. “Nothing,” they said, “just a few little sunfish. It’s too hot.” They were standing waist-deep in the water to keep cool.

The Assabet River is narrow, and just a little way up it we were in the shade. We went up stream just a short way before it got too shallow to go any further. We drifted downstream until we found a bend in the river that was in the shade, and which also caught the desultory breeze. Fish swam under us, and a Spotted Sandpiper bobbed on the opposite bank. It was the perfect place to beat the heat, and we talked about our families for a good hour until it was time to drift back downstream to where we put in.

* For my Unitarian Universalist readers, French, Hawthorne, and Thoreau were all raised as Unitarians, although Thoreau resigned from his church in his early twenties.

At about five o’clock, it had cooled off enough that I was willing to go out for a long walk. I walked out of my sister’s air-conditioned house in Acton, Mass., into the heat. At least it wasn’t unbearably humid; it was merely mildly humid and oppressively hot. When I got off the main road onto a side street, away from car exhaust fumes, I could smell the warm earth, the roadside plants and weeds, the occasional tang of pollen. I passed a hay field that had just been mowed, with all the cut hay raked into rows so the baler could scoop them up, and the sweet smell of fresh-cut hay overwhelmed all the other smells. Then I got back onto a main road again, and once again the hot summer smells were lost under the exhaust fumes. That evening, Dad said his digital thermometer had recorded a high temperature of 99.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

My younger sister, my father, and I all went down to the island of Martha’s Vineyard to visit family today. While there, I saw these Ospreys on their nest at Katama Point in Edgartown. You can see one of the chicks to the right, and the two adults to the left.

This morning, I got to preach in First Parish of Concord, Massachusetts, the church of the Minutemen. Imagine preaching to that historic congregation on Independence Day! It was great fun, and I feel lucky to be invited to preach there on July 4th.

I wrote a kind of historical sermon on evolving notions of liberty, and since it’s Independence Day, I thought I’d share it with you — the sermon’s posted over on my sermon blog.