There's a false idea left over from the Enlightenment which dogs our society in several ways; this week, it's in law.  That's the notion that pure rationality is possible and that, for instance, a good judge brings no bias into the courtroom and is capable of pure justice.    

That Skinner House Press has released the book I've been working on for several years with Alicia Hawkins. It's a book of resources and session plans for small groups that want deep conversations about important issues.

We wrote it for UU congregations' Small Group Ministry programs, hoping especially that very small congregations would find this approach easy to manage. But we also imagined that families, women's groups, and book groups might benefit from these conversations.

The book's Website has more information, and you can order the book from the UUA bookstore. Every person in a group should have a book of their own, and there is a quantity discount.

David comments below that he feels much safer in places where people carry guns and is therefore against any kind of gun control. Also, he comments that since guns are so ubiquitous there would be no way to get all the guns out the hands of the "bad guys."

My thoughts, in no particular order:

It is certainly true that there are a lot of guns around, and that getting them out of circulation would be a massive, probably multi-generational problem. However, all that means is that if we want to end gun violence, we ought to get crackin'

I think it is worth noting that a pistol-packing public is of small use against these mass shooters; they are almost all suicidal and take out their victims too quickly for anybody to respond before damage is done. Many victims are children; surely we were not expecting them to have guns?

Also, although this has not yet happened, even in pistol-packing parts of the country, it's easy to imagine that would-be heroes firing at a mass-shooter could kill bystanders in the fray (there's a reason police practice through their whole careers) and further the carnage.

While it will no doubt be true for a long time, even if we do get crackin', that bad guys will be able to obtain guns, it is also true that (1) at least some of these mass shooters, like the last one, seem to have "cracked" and done their violence without the kind of planning that it takes to get contraband, and (2) the fewer guns there are, and the more illegal they are, the more likely that the authorities will be alearted to a here-t0-fore law-abiding citizen bumbling around in the underworld trying to get a gun.

It seems that these mass shooters have a sense, not only of rage but of entitlement; they seem to think that using guns is a natural and reasonible thing for an angry person to do. That sense of entitlement would also be reduced. If only criminals had guns, people who considered themselves ordinary, law abiding citizens would be less likely to resort to them.

Finally, I certainly agree with Robin, that this epidemic of angry, violent men must be tackled with understanding and social interventions besides gun control if we are to al live well together in this increasingly small world.

Today a man whose wife had told him she was leaving him up and shot his five kids, then himself. That'll teach her..and her sisters with uppity ideas.

The map of deaths caused by men who control "their" women by killing them would be, I imagine, without any green space, such is the rampant nature of this drearily familiar story. It happened in my very neighborhood, and, no doubt it has happened in yours. And it seems possible that at at least many of those deaths could have happened without guns, given the fact that few women can beat off an enraged man. But the idea of a man killing five of his children by, say, stabbing or strangling and then somehow doing away with himself without resort to guns...that staggers the imagination.

My map has a sub text. How many more will have to die because we can't find a way to control handguns in our nation? So I've added Mass Domestic Violence to my map. It's the red markers.

Three more "mass" gun deaths today...yet another man taking his disappointments out on the world. Yesterday it was 15 dead.

I've been thinking about making a memorial list of these kinds of deaths and I did it this afternoon on Google Maps. It's here. Because I'm especially interested in churches, I added the incidents from churches, even though "only" one or two persons died. Yellow Flags are incidents that happened in schools, red flags, religious institutions (there was one synagogue murder a few years back...it took place on Rosh Hashana)

It doesn't add up to many people; more died in traffic accidents every day than have died in these kinds of multiple, innocent death gun incidents. Many more died in war. And many, many, many more people have died in the routine, one-at-a time shootings which are the background noise of our lives. A jealous man, a robbery, an anger, an accident, and somebody is dead.

There is so much sadness and violence in our world. Widely available guns make it worse. How many markers on the map will it take, I wonder, before we decide to do something about it?

What might we do to make our UU Congregations more multi-cultural?

1. It is crucial to remove dissatisfaction factors as much as possible. I believe we have two major areas of dissatisfaction in the multi-cultural area. The first is the irritation to persons of color of clueless white privilege. That's an ongoing issue. The good news about it is that the school, corporate and governmental world has huge resources that are deployed here, and many of our folks get much better multi-cultural training at work and school than we will ever be able to provide.

2. Because of this, all attempts to be a multi-cultural congregation should be matched by attempts to be a younger congregation. With all due respect to the over 60 generation who got us started with integration in this nation, the future in this matter, as in so many, is with the young who have lived their lives in a multi-cultural world. My own experience in churches is that a concerted focus on bringing in young people will go a long way, all by itself, to bringing in persons of diverse ethnicity and race.

3. If there are incidents and issues, they need to be addressed, of course. People being people, there will always be issues and incidents. Discussion is necessary. Does the congregation want to put on "South Pacific?" Are there parts of that lovely show which are racist? Is there a difficult person whose conversation about social subjects like population or imigration boarders on racisit? How will we address that? Etc.

4. The second issue of baseline social comfort for those persons whose presence would signify multi-culturalism is that they need to see others like them. This is the critical mass problem, and it's a real catch 22. The only way for a church to be attractive to diverse persons is to already be a diverse congregation. But how to start? You start with signals. The UUA has done this part of multi-cultural development much better, in my opinion, than it has done the anti-racism training, but, oddly, it's never talked about. Still, go to the website of this denomination which sports a population of persons of color in the range of 5%, and you'll see a vastly disproportinate set of photos of persons of color. That's one way to help new persons of color feel legitimized and welcomed. The respectful, inclusive use of multi-cultural music and authors sends that same welcome message. Leadership of color is even more powerful. We have to give ourselves considerable credit here.

All of these strategies can be overdone, can even be a form of false advertising. But subtle use helps us to substitute for our critical mass of multi-culturalism, until we have it.

All that work, remember, only creates a baseline of lack of dissatisfaction. Now, on to Satisfaction. There enlies the transformative work.

Kim's comment (here) sparks a couple of thoughts about this issue. Firstly, I think that Kim is correct, that, like almost all of the rest of American society, especially in persons under age 60, who grew up and have worked their whole lives with this consciousness, we have mostly gotten beyond the easy-to-spot, easy-to-agree-upon racism and xenophobia of, say, 50 years ago. No small achievement, either. Yeah, us!

There is a fair amount of lingering subtle white privilege, however, and it's important to stay aware of it. White privilege is that assumption that "our way is the only way and others are different, odd, and ought to change." There is no necessary problem in the kind of human diversity of which Kim speaks...how close we stand, whether we interrupt, who looks whom in the eye, how much space is left between speakers, what time is "on time", and so on, the problems happen when some people (white people) don't realize that they need recognize those differences as legitimate and work around them when they are in mixed company.

Which brings us to church and what would motivate persons of color or other difference, to come to church and have to continue, even there, their dreary daily battle with the irritating obliviousness of white privilege, when they have every reason to prefer to go to church and relax with a community of people with whom they don't have to struggle. That is, what is the answer to the question, "Why don't UU churches, whose people think of themselves as open and welcoming, have more persons of color, and what would help us be more multi-cultural?

We have attacked this problem as a denomination from one direction; the direction of trying to educate white people to be less oblivious and irritating to persons of color. A lot of that education, unfortunately, has been ham handed, but we've done it. Has it helped? No doubt it has helped some, but not enough. And why? Because that kind of openness does not create satisfaction, it only relieves dissatisfaction.

This is a huge and important distinction in the "customer satisfaction" business, and it applies to many areas in church life, so let me digress.

There are factors in church life which create satisfaction; great sermons, exciting RE programs, warm community, opportunities for spiritual deepening. The more you have of these satisfaction factors, the greater satisfaction people will have, and they sky is the limit with how happy and enthusiastic they can be. But only if they are not dissatisfied.

Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction are two very different things, caused by completely different factors. A happy church-goer is both satisfied and not dissatisfied.

Dissatisfaction factors are basic things like enough parking, clean restrooms, safe children's programs and basic social comfort. (the sort a person of color might find in a diverse congregation not flaunting it's white privelege)

You gotta have enough parking, dirty restrooms a huge turn-off, and if parents think their kids are not safe, they're outta here. If a person of color encounters the assumptions of white privelege every time they turn around, they'll be dissatisfied. It is crucial to improve dissatisfaction factors, but...here's the key....an improvement of dissatisfaction factors doesn't make people satisfied, it only makes it possible for people to be satisfied. One too few parking spaces? That's a problem. Twice as many as you need? Ho Hum. Dirty bathrooms? disgusting. Palatial, sparkling bathrooms? I'm happy for you...but it's no more likely that I'll return to your church. Social comfort? It's vital, but if that's all you've got here, I could stay home.

May I repeat? "Social comfort? It's vital, but if that's all you've got here, I could stay home."


Given the fact that people come to church for more than baseline satisfaction, all our anti-racism/white privelege trainings, even if they were excellent, would only bring us up to baseline. And about that, it can only be said, "I don't get no satisfaction."

What should we do to become multi-cultural UU congregations? More Tomorrow.

Kim left this perceptive comment buried in a past post that I thought I'd bring forward here. Thanks, Kim!

I am working on an idea I have about "diversity". My idea is that, having gotten beyond the most obvious outer layers of racism and other prejudices, we are working on the more subtle parts. And, of course,the subtle parts are difficult to pin down because of their subtlety. My impression is that where we are stuck is that the real things that keep people of different back grounds from being comfortable with each other are the unconscious cultural differences in how we speak to each other and our world view. Those unthinking things like how far apart we stand when we talk to each other, how long we pause when we want to communicate that the other person can speak now, Whether we communicate directly or indirectly, whether we negotiate from specific to general or vice versa, how often we touch the other person while speaking. All these things are unconscious, "self-evident", and really annoying when someone does them differently because we interpret difference in custom as intended rudeness, or just strangeness. We get along with people who are more like us, we have communication problems with people who are less like us.
I think this level is where a lot of UU problems with diversity resides now. when I talk to people about this, many of them say things like, "I thought we were all the same." Or they don't say that and just imply it, if they are more indirect. It seems it's a hard concept to "get". That would seem to validate it being a problem.
I think we could work on this level of "diversity" to our advantage. Maybe it would help us achieve some more diversity in our congregations.

They're starting to get feathers and are about double their 1 week size....takes two hands to catch them, now!

Twenty or so years ago, the Rev. Max Coots, whose passion was gardening wrote this beloved and much used meditation. Max died last week at the age of 81. We remember and give thanks!

LET US GIVE THANKS

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:
For children who are our second planting, and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgve us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are.

Let us give thanks:
For generous friends with hearts as big as hubbards
and smiles as bright as their blossoms;
For feisty friends as tart as apples;
For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we've had them;
For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;
For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants
and as elegant as a row of corn, and the
others, as plain as potatoes and so good for you;
For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts
and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes, and serious friends,
as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;
For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash,
as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter;
For old friends nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;
For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;
And, finally, for those friends now gone, who like gardens past that have been harvested, but who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter;
For all these we give thanks.

Let Us Give Thanks
from View from a Tree
--Max Coots

Rest in Peace, Max. You fed us well...

Web Kitchell's memorial service was this afternoon, at the Santa Fe church which he served as settled minister for 17 years and as Emeritus minister for another 10. The church did itself proud. Stephen Furrer, the current minister, told us that Web had left a list of the music and hymns, didn't want any god-talk, and did want "droll stories" shared. So, that's what we heard. In lieu of god talk, I read these quotations from Camus.

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

My colleague Jim Zacharias got to read from one of Web's coyote books, and there were, indeed, several droll stories. The best of them? The church administrator said that before Web arrived, the church had signed up for call waiting, but Web hated hearing the little beep of an incoming call while he was on the phone. He called it "telephonicus interruptus". They got rid of it.

The second best story? The Santa Fe church was a Fellowship when Web arrived, and they didn't like it when Web, still the New Englander, wore his robe. So it was suggested to his wife that she suggest to him that he might preach in a suit. (That's how things were done in those days) Web obliged, but in his own quirky way. Turns out that old New Englander didn't know how to put an outfit together. So there was the Sunday...judging by the laughter, some people remembered it...when he wore a green suit with a blue checkered shirt. The members suggested to his wife that she take him shopping. This she declined to do. "I married him as he is," she said. Web went back to wearing a robe and the congregation accepted it.


It was a lovely service. Rest in Peace, Web...good colleague, good minister, good man.

P.S. Was Coyote there? Well, I didn't exactly see him. But after the service, on the table of photographs Web's family had arranged, some thoughtless person had left a bag from Dunkin Donuts...

It surely is great fun to have a big article in the UU World! (Imagineering Soul, in this month's issue) I've had emails and letters from members of my internship church, my first church, people at whose weddings I officiated, former members of this church, seminary buddies and even someone who thought he remembered me from Methodist Youth Group. (mistakenly...iMinister grew up UU and was way too shy for youth groups of any kind.)

Also a bunch of emails and even a phone call from people who liked the article and felt we were kindred spirits. Also, it goes without saying, a couple of people who hated it and needed me to know. One even went so far as to express the opinion that the real reason that the denomination is declining is that there are too many women ministers and women ministers just don't think or preach powerfully. It's been a long time since I heard that sort of thing. A professor from and Episcopalian seminary wrote to ask permission to reprint it for her students, someone wrote to remind me of another author's ideas about faith and shame, and her own, and someone sent me excepts from his book which he felt were relevant.

Great Fun!

You can find the notes which others took at this event, here. (If you're new to this discussion, scroll back to late November to begin the conversation. iMinister was the official blogger for this conference.) They also promise more news and presumably the report which will be made to the June UUA Board Meeting, so check back.

With this, iMinister respectfully resigns from her first and most educational experience as a journalist. It's an almost pole-opposite experience from her usual role as a preacher; comprehensive rather than focused and attempting to be fair rather than subjective. She has renewed appreciation for the journalists in her life. She thanks the Pannel who asked her and who have been kind in their feedback and is appreciative of all the work and thought that has gone into this project and will continue, she hopes, in spite of economic constraints.

She's discovered that her general and career-long interest in ministerial well-being has developed into something of a passion about the process of credentialing ministers, and she intends to continue to follow that discussion as a private citizen, so to speak. To that end she wants to hold up again, a fascinating article from last Fall's New Yorker, which deals with the credentialing of teachers. It can be found here.

This month's UU World features my article, Imagineers of Soul, which is a version of last year's Berry St. Essay. I was so pleased that they published it; after spending a year's worth of creative energy on that Essay, it's awfully nice that it's getting a second life!

On my trip to Santa Fe, I thought about dropping by the Dunkin Donuts, purchasing a couple of dozen heart busters, and seeing if Web's Kitchell's friend Coyote would show up to converse with me. That's how Web did it, and he got three books of sermons out of the conversations he had. He called his books God's Dog, forever changing my view of these smart, adaptable animals. Web died last week after having a fairly miserable time with Parkinson's disease.

Well, no fairly about it.

Coyote would insist on the truth.

So, this is the truth. Damn, but that was a hard end for a good man and a good minister, and I've been missing him and his furry friend for a while now. No amount of donuts will get either of them back, and I'm sad. He was very supportive to the young minister with the unexpectedly hard job to the south of him, and oh, did my congregation love to hear him come and talk about his conversations with Coyote!

Happy Trails to you both!

I offered a prayer to our State House of Representatives this morning.
I have strong feelings about public prayer. I was asked to lead the Representatives in prayer, and that's what I did; reminding them of their gratitude for our beautiful state, our democracy, our connections, giving them a moment to call to mind those they wished to pray for and asking a blessing on their work. No big deal.

But expressions of gratitude and appreciation I got suggested to me what my Santa Fe colleague confirmed, which is that too many persons of the cloth preach rather than pray, or pray only with and for persons of their own faith tradition.

I was glad to have offered something of value to hard working legislators!
And glad to see that the Domestic Partnership bill has had a sudden resurrection for this year's session.

....went on last year, when a list of core competencies for large church ministry was put together in anticipation of the "Thinking Big" program which is giving a small group of ministers advance training in Large Church ministry. Their work was published in the Alban Institute's "Congregations" last month and can be found here.

This list of competencies was formed with Large Churches in mind, but there's not much in it that doesn't apply to good ministry in every size of church.

One of the interesting turns my career has taken in the past few years is exposure to seminarians, interns, new ministers, and lay persons who are taking on ministry roles. It's given me a new lens to look at my own ministry and has been a very enriching experience.

Among the things that it has made me wonder is whether it is a good idea to expect persons to have developed a sense of ministerial authority before they are ordained.

This is one of the things the Ministerial Fellowship Committee looks for, and when they don't find it their diagnosis often utterly baffles candidates who don't know what to do with this feedback. It's such a "I know it when I see it but can't explain it" item...which is to say, it is extremely subjective, that I've been uneasy with its increasing cachet among students who are, naturally enough, anxious to develop this mysterious ministerial quality.

I've reached a few conclusions about this.

One conclusion is that this quality does exist. It is related to feeling secure in the knowledge that you, in your ministerial role, have something of value to deliver and you know the conditions of delivering it. So you march right up to the boss nurse in the ICU and request the room number for the patient who, she says, won't even know you are there. You know that you and the patient and the patient's family need you to be there and you stand in front of her until she lets you be there. Since you know that your listening ear and someone else's ability to speak freely really has a healing effect, you help someone you know needs to talk to move with you to a private corner. Since you know that this fractious group needs to take a break and a deep breath, or that this scattered group about to eat together needs to be recalled to their gratitude before they eat, you take the risk of suggesting a break for a moment recollection of our deep values or grace and a recollection of our deep thanksgiving. That's ministerial authority.

A second conclusion I've reached is that while ministerial authority is a good and important thing, no ministerial authority is better...far better... than fake ministerial authority. Fake ministerial authority comes from a person acting the way they think they are supposed to act, rather than out of a deep knowledge of the value of their action. At worst, it comes from a person who is so in love with their role that they're over-eager to exercise it. They come across as self-important and give ministry a bad name. In its more common form, fake ministerial authority is an honest attempt to do what one understands one is supposed to do, but since it lacks the inner authority that makes the risk-taking work, it...doesn't work.

A third conclusion I've reached is that I started my career deficient in ministerial authority and I've developed it over many, many years. I started way young in this business, and I'm downright bashful by nature, and in the UU circles I grew up in, "ministerial authority" was not a valued quality...quite the opposite. I was fortunate to have the guidence of a lay leader who came from a long line of Baptist preachers in my early years in ministry, and who several times found ways to instruct me. ("Christine, Lisa (whose husband had died while they were vacationing) is coming home in a private airplane with Joe's coffin. You'll be meeting the plane, won't you? (significant pause) It will be in at 11pm. And then I've invited you both to drop by the house and visit a bit while my husband goes to her home and gets the lights and the furnace on. " Well...no, actually, it hadn't occurred to me that I should meet that plane. I'd been planning to call the next day, after the widow had had a good night's sleep. Clueless, clueless me! But when Frances spoke, I paid attention, learned, and through those experiences came naturally to believe that there are powers of healing and renewal that sometimes focus themselves in the relationship between a person and their minister, and that it's the minister's job to take the risk of reaching out to them and creating the conditions in which they can appear. I hasten to say that in spite of that developmental need of mine, the congregation thrived even with their very young, very green minister.

Therefore....

I'm coming to the conclusion that you don't learn much about this until you are a settled minister in a community. Internship and CPE might give some ministers a taste of ministerial authority, but then again, they might not.

Also.....

I think that one might have a general clue about ministerial authority...enough, at least, to navigate around a congregation, and not be able to come close to dredging this up in what is, for most candidates, the single most nerve-wracking hour of their career, their interview with the MFC. My guess is that very best that most candidates can do is fake it. That requires knowledge of a sort, but I don't think we want people to learn to fake it, or feel that they must fake it.


All of the above and other reflections are leading me to think that we have our whole certification process backward. It's the entry into Final Fellowship that ought to be the nerve-wraking one, where one demonstrates that one has figured out what ministerial authority is all about, can produce references and stories that demonstrate one's ministry as one has actually done it, where one has successes and failures to discuss and reflect on. The entry into preliminary Fellowship should be a much broader gate, perhaps a matter of UUA staff checking off the Candidate's To-Do list. Internship with generally positive feedback, CPE with generally positive Feedback, Degree, UU Experience (we should pay more attention to this than we do.) Reading List. Comprehensive Exam (we really need this!), Background check. References checked at least as well as a new employer would check them (including checking with persons not on the candidate's list.) If major questions came out of this check list process, perhaps an interview, but for most people, the interview would be at the time of entry into Final Fellowship, when one's success in ministry and development of ministerial authority could be more realistically judged.

iMinister came out in support of Peter Morales for president of the UUA months and months ago. She agrees with him that the UUA needs to see, not just a little change, but transformational change if we are to be healthy in this new era. She's sure that our dialogue about diversity has been woefully lacking in Hispanic voices, which Peter would bring, and she loves the energy and commitment to our shared enterprize which he brings to the campaign.

Here's what I mean.

In a candidate's forum, this question was asked.

Imagine five years have passed and imagine that your vision for UUism is fully alive and thriving. What three to five goals have been realized?

Here are their written responses.

Peter Morales ...
The goals that will have been accomplished in five years are intimately interrelated. The guiding vision behind them all is a revitalized Unitarian Universalist movement that transforms lives and that helps to heal the world. In five years we will have a new sense of urgency and excitement across our movement. The following accomplishments are manifestations of living out our mission:

1. We are growing at a rate of three percent per year. Growth is not the goal, it is the measure by which we determine whether we are meeting the fundamental human need for religious community. We are growing because we are doing a better job of welcoming the seeker, retaining our youth, and engaging our existing members. As we grow we are becoming more diverse in terms of race, class and culture. Our growth rate has tripled and is accelerating.

2. We are more engaged in the great moral issues of our time. As a natural outgrowth of a deeper sense of compassion and connection, we are a more powerful force for justice, understanding and environmental stewardship. At the local level, it means that more members of our congregations are involved in social action and public witness. At the Association level, it means that we are building on our tradition of public witness and that we have forged a new partnership with the UUSC on social action.

3. We have developed a strategic vision for ministry and are beginning its implementation. Our strategy for ministry has been developed through consultation with stakeholders. Our strategy is a comprehensive approach that includes recruitment, training, placement, mentoring and development of professional ministry.

4. The UUA staff has a culture of transparency, accountability and effectiveness. As a matter of course we evaluate our programs and our people. We learn from our mistakes. Our staff is more involved in being the means for sharing best practices and innovative ideas across congregations.

5. We are forming strong relationships with groups that share our values. This includes international Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist movements, public policy advocacy groups, the UUSC, and others.

---

Laurel Hallman's written response:

1. Our children and youth will participate in UU congregations as adults.

2. Our UUA endowment will grow to a sustainable level, and our dependence on its income for operating expenses will diminish.

3. We will wed our religious and theological future to our historical past, and will experience the power of that synergy.

4. The Free Spirit will become a source of inspiration, activism, humility and strength in our association.

5. Our alliances will enlarge our effectiveness in the world.

The Rev. Sarah Lammert who attended the Excellence in Ministry conference as a delegate from the UU Minister's Association, posted her reflection on the conference on the UUMA Website.

Other blogs are discussing the content of Lay Theological Education programs...the questions we'd like to have answers to. I want to think more about process; what kinds of programs might one fund to help people answer their questions?

I have three thoughts. Firstly, a set of Chautauqua-type programs that could travel to districts, clusters, camps and conferences. The ministers have their CENTER programs which do this; a different set of ministers offer to teach their specialty several times over a year to colleague groups. A similar program could be set up for Lay theological education, which might result in a blossoming variety of "Seminary for a day" programs all over the nation.

A second thought is to help ministers and others put together good distance education courses. iMinister has tried to explore this and found it beyond her geek-level. Universities, however, have developed platforms and taught less geeky (and more resistant) persons than herself how to offer knowledge in this new way. It just takes money.

Once there was a Seminary-on-line, experts of all sorts could offer on-line courses and study materials for anyone who wanted to partake, and for follow-up to those one-day Chautauqua programs suggested above.

Thirdly, I believe that the longing is not just for theological education but for ministerial education. That is, my guess is that people don't just want to learn theology, they want to learn ministry in order to be of service to their congregations. They don't just want lay theological education, the want lay ministry. And frankly, we need them.

Not all ministers agree with this, and there's not doubt that there are some really tricky pieces to the whole thing. But I think we ought to be thinking about this and looking the models other denominations have used.

I'm at this conference on New Mexico new media conference. I'll soon be on a panel about building virtual communities, from which I expect to learn far more than I contribute. The keynote speaker is making the point that video games give a platform that teaches the skills of dealing with a complex world. Today's kids don't just go to theme parks, they manage them in their gaming world. This fellow is working with news organizations to quickly develop games that would teach people about the complexities of World Events. I can see it now... Mid-East Tycoon. Sim Global Warming. Very interesting...

I hope to have an opportunity to insert the idea that we need games for moral and religious education. We'll see.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

You can find the excellent keynote speech from the Excellence in Ministry Summit here. It's well worth reading and very amusing, too! In it we may see ourselves as others see us...

Doug Muder, at Free and Responsible has asked his fellow bloggers to give some help to the Task Force on Lay Theological Education.

That's the group looking into the gaping chasm between what most people can get at most of their UU churches by way of deepening their UU'sim, and going to theological school.

They've got a chunk of money to come to some conclusions and actually do something.

iMinister has a bunch of ideas about how that money could be used but that's not what he's asking for. He's asking for comments about what that cliff edge looks like. That's the place where people have come to understand Unitarian Universalism through sermons and a few classes, have grown in spirit through participation in worship, have served their church and want, well...more. But they are not ready or able or willing and might never be, to jump over the cliff and go to theological school. Or maybe they're unlucky as a young mom I just spoke to this week, to live in a state the size of New England which has not one theological school to its name.

iMinister can't speak to that condition personally. When she got that "deeper" urge she was a footloose and fancy free young adult she cheerfully jumped the chasm and landed in New England, and started Theological School. Worked for her, then. She totally gets it that it would be harder now, even for that same young adult, and that it would be impossible now, for the mom of a college-bound 18 year old and wife of the just-career-changed husband. iMinister was raised by Depression Babies, and unlike the rest of her generation, she has never shaken their teaching to be prudent about things like loans, bank accounts, and retirement savings.

Anyway, lots of people who want opportunities to grow in mind and heart in their faith don't want to be ministers. They just want more than their local church can provide.

Doug and the Task Force want to hear from you, dear readers. You can post comments on this Blog or you can go directly to his blog. The question, "What would help you go deeper? What do you want to learn, to do, to experience? What skills would you like to develop? What certification would you like to have?

There are some fights you can't win. Even if you had all the fire power you needed (however you define fire power in your particular fight), if you used it, you'd destroy something too precious to you to make it worth it. So even though you might have every right to fight, you don't fight. Even though you really need what you might win in a fight, you don't fight. If you're angry and feel threatened, you master yourself and you don't fight.

This is a very hard lesson. But most people have to figure out how to learn it. Most nations have to figure it out, too. There are some fights in which no amount of force will get you what you want, need, or have a right to. You have to get those things in a slow, roundabout way. Sometimes the other party has to come to exactly the same conclusion.

It is usually perfectly obvious to bystanders when someone has started to destroy themselves in their quest to get what they need. It is rarely as obvious to the involved parties. And because the calculus of when, exactly the use of power becomes detrimental to the powerful is a very personal calculus, only the involved parties can actually know where the line is.

It's hard to watch.

A colleague is planning a book on long term ministry and is interviewing me. Interviews are one thing I don't do very excellently, so I asked for questions in advance. As I look them over, it suddenly comes to me that one thing that has allowed me to stay in ministry and stay in ministry in one place is a high degree of personal tolerance for bumbling....just the opposite of all this excellence-talk that we've been doing for the past two months on this blog.

Yep. Even after 30 years in this business, I feel pretty inept at many things I do, day after day. Leadership development? All I can say is that I try to let people do what they really want to do and fill in the gaps (and patch up the problems) that come. Stewardship? It's definitely not something we do excellently here and I'm not sure how to fix it. We specialize...perhaps even excellently, in chearful frugality. Building Planning? This is my third time around and I still find it messy and confusing and I've been very little help to our committee. Governance? See "leadership development." Staff management? Don't get me started. Pastoral Care? Never my speciality. I do the best I can. It's an important part of the job. Contemporary worship? Small Group Worship? As we start trying to do these thing I realize how very narrow is my realm of excellence. I can do really good worship in a sanctuary, with a hymnal, a pianist, a choir. The rest is bumbling. Now that four of our six weekly services are in the these non-traditional categories, I feel downright inadequate to the need.

Anti-Racism and Multi-Culturalism, the current darlings of ministerial competency? Well....I know a bit of the theory. I'm told we have a pretty multi-cultural congregation by UU standards, but it's mostly because we've been successful in drawing young adults who come by this trait more easily than their elders. How did we do that? I don't have a clue. I noticed it was happening, smiled at them, and dispatched our intern to see how we could help them organize themselves. Now they fill a section of the sanctuary, week after week. Teaching? I did a lot of it as a solo minister and assumed that people just didn't much want courses, these days. Now I have a colleague whose classes draw throngs. I can only assume that that's something he does much better than I ever did. I'm told I'm an excellent preacher, but I know, week after week, how flawed my contributions are. There's only so much time.

Now lest you think that this recital shows that my mental health is in jeopardy in this post-holiday season, please be assured that I have come to regard all of these non-excellencies as just the way things are and I am not deeply bothered by them. Obviously there's a gestalt of ministry around here that is working about as excellently as anyone could expect. We grew by 10% last year, both in membership and in contributions, yet another year on a growth spurt that has outpaced the growth of our city and has now topped 50% in the past 8 years. And in this hard time, the congregation almost doubled it's Fall contributions to the UU Service Committee and to our local Food Bank over last year, which I consider a sign of spiritual maturity that warms my heart. We've just had to add another service (The contemporary one I feel inadequate about) because we're bursting at the seams (and because I couldn't figure out how to initiate a building process 5 years ago when we should of...).

Which brings us back to tolerance for bumbling.

I think, especially in this generalist business of ministry, you have to be downright chearful about all the things you don't do very well, lest you sink under the weight of depression. It's probably important to have a speciality you cherish as your area of excellence. But in the long run, it might be even more important to give oneself a wide latitude for bumbling and trust in the Great Powers of Healing and Renewal to fill in the gaps and patch up the problems.

Check out this link for a very interesting article from Internetmonk on the contemporary pastorate. (Thanks Chutney, for pointing it out!)

The author is an Evangelical Christian, but the first half of the article raises interesting general points about how ministry has changed in the past 50 years. The second half is much more specific to the Evangelical community but does make some interesting points about what he calls the pragmatic philosophy of Youth Ministry. Although it takes some major religious translation, I think that UU's were not immune from the downsides of this philosophy, which, crudely stated is, "if it brings kids and keeps kids it must be good." His objection is that it's not Biblical, our UU objection might be that it doesn't help kids on their spiritual journey and when they outgrow it, they depart from us, never to return. Of course, in our case, only between 10 and 30% of our kids even partake in our youth programing.

His claim is that Pragmatic Youth Programing has led to Pragmatic Adult Programing, and he's again' it all. An interesting point that's probably off the topic of ministry.

There's been ministerial interest in Freedom of the Pulpit again, so I've brought this post forward from July of 06, and added a bit to it.


iMinister defines Freedom of the Pulpit as freedom from advance censorship. This important doctrine exists to protect a minister from a demand that s/he "never speak of that issue" or "don't tell anyone what you believe about that." It exists because we cherish the integrity of the minister and because it is sometimes good for a congregation to hear things they don't want to hear.

Freedom of the pulpit doesn't belong to the pulpit, and you don't get it by virture of standing behind the thing. It is a trust bestowed on persons who are in covenant with the congregation to speak the truth in love, to honor the congregation's mission, to be fair, balanced, and wise etc. All called ministers, many hired ministers, and, if the congregational covenant is strong enough, members of the congregation can be said to be a part of this covenant.

Guest ministers are often granted Freedom of the pulpit by courtesy (If we didn't trust them, we wouldn't have invited them.) In my congregation, everybody else is asked to speak on a particular topic and, if there's any question about what they are going to say or how they plan to say it, we ask for a manuscript.

We do this more for reasons of quality and length control, than to censor their ideas, but neither I nor our worship committee would hesitate to disinvite a speaker who was not being truthful, loving, or productive about what they had to say. In practice, we mostly help people get their point across more effectively, rather than censor content, but I have done it once. (The speaker was a mile over the "no partisan politics in a non-profit organization" line. It made it easier that I could invoke the IRS on the matter and I managed to salvage the relationship.) We came to this policy after some difficult experiences.

A congregation will entrust its desire to hear many sides of the truth, spoken in many loving, careful ways, to its minister, worship committee or both. Those so entrusted must have and use some discression, because "Freedom of the Pulpit" is a principle meant to serve the needs of the people, not the egos of the mouthy.

"Freedom of the Pulpit", even for a called minister, does not mean that "you can't be fired for what you say, "

A minister who gets obsessed with one issue and preaches about it out of proportion to its importance to the members, who uses the pulpit to scold those who disagree, who preaches in a way that causes damage to the church's reputation in the community, and who does not speak responsibly about the pros and cons of the issues s/he talks about will probably be judged out of bounds of the covenant and can very appropriately be asked to make changes in their preaching subject, manner, and priorities. If the covenant stayed broken for long, the congregation would probably dismiss the minister by it's democratic procedures.

Certainly the blogging highlight of my year was blogging the Excellence in Ministry conference. Sometime this blogging business seems like an exercise in journaling; quite solitary. I go weeks on this blog with no comments and only by studying my hit counter do I realize that anybody reads this blog at all. So it was a pleasure to be asked to blog the conference, and it was an even greater pleasure to be there. And, what fun...that hit counter went wild, with 4-5 times more hits than average for that week and my highest ever daily count, 350 readers on December 12. (average daily count is about 35...I love you all!)


The most popular single post by far, far, far and away, however, was the first post of the year, "How To Find Your Daemon", a meditation for the intergenerational worship service the week before, which focused on the movie, "The Golden Compass", and which, according to my afore-mentioned hit counter (which also tells me what google searches brought people to my blog) brought people to my blog week after week, all year long. Most of those folks were probably not UU's...hope they got an eye-full of liberal religion!.

February brought a post on gun violence, tragically refered-to in August after one of our churches saw yet another incident, which I discussed here.

There were a number of posts on what turned out to be the biggest tempest in a teapot of the year, checking of ID at GA.

And my single favorite story of the year, Our Pentacost Visitor.


But the biggest story of this year for our our world was the election, summed up, finally, in the post called, "Tears" If 2009 brings us even a fraction of the hopes of that night, it will be a wondrous year, indeed.

And may your year, dear readers, be also blessed and your lives and work be a blessing to you and those around you!

Two interesting additions to the conversation in the blogsphere about ministry, ministry preparation, certification and other areas of interest.

Politywonk has an important post about updating the overall ministerial ideal which comes to us from the Renaissance/Enlightenment.

And, there's a whole new blog devoted to the question of things to think about as we consider our ministerial certification processes. Calling Ministers is authored by a new minister who came to us with experience in Human Resources.

As I read his early entries, I reflected that this is a very difficult area to talk about. It's hard for the folks with left-over anger and pain to talk about without seeming bitter, it's really hard for the folks who failed to talk about, (and they usually leave us completely anyway) and it's hard for the folks who sailed through to talk about without seeming to brag. I think it's no accident that only a few people came to the conversation on certification at the EIM conference, and most of them came to listen rather than to talk, and yet the topic got a large number of votes in the non-conversational voting process. I'm glad we're talking.

I invite you all to check out The Naked Theologian, a new blog devoted to "stripped down theology" by UU Ph.D candidate Myriam Renaud. (U.Chicago) Myriam is a deep thinker and a good writer, and she came out of the Albuquerque church, so we're right proud of her!

What a heady idea!

Here are a few things I've been thinking.

I've been thinking that our current model of: go away to theological school-go away to internship-leave internship for a fresh start as a new minister just has to go. It's a model that only works for the young, unattached persons for whom it was created. It worked great for me but doesn't work for persons whose spouses have careers, it doesn't work for people with school-aged children. This pattern means that many interns leave their spouses and even their children for nine months of internship, a situation that, I submit, is contrary to our values and to our best interests. Developing what amounts to three different support systems in the span of 4-6 years is extremely stressful even for footloose and fancy free seminarians. All this moving adds hugely to the expense of an already expensive education.

We're already starting to develop things like Modified residence and distance-learning experiences for Seminary, and this is helpful to many students. I think we should also start to develop some training-in-place options such as doing an internship in one's home church and allowing interns to remain on the staff of the churches they intern in.

There are two crucial and difficult keys to success at these innovations. The first is that we have to find ways to help people grow into ministry among people who know them as lay persons or as interns. Our current theory is that if a congregation has known you as a lay person, they'll never really treat you like a minister, and, if the congregation suffered through your internship clumsiness, they'll never really respect you. You have to move away to leave your old role behind.

Well...I've recently had experience with helping an intern move into a staff position (with all requisite special permissions etc.) and....it had its tricky moments. (Also tricky; I've been an internship supervisor who became, with a break of only a few weeks, the colleague of my old intern. There's no doubt about it...it was a transition.) But 15 months later, I think I can say with confidence that that's done. The transition has been made. I think others could figure out how to do this. And I think that it is even more likely that a person could transition from lay leader to seminary student to intern within one congregation. (I know...one issue is getting more models of church in one's experience. But many seminarians already have that in their life experience and anyway you could get that experience with well-planned trips and short residencies, and most of all from listening to colleagues and fellow students.)

The other, probably more difficult issue of allowing "in-place" transitions into ministry is the issue of boundaries. Can the home church be real with the seminarian's weaknesses? Evaluate their "favorite son" accurately? (I gather that most internship supervisors and committees don't do that well already, so perhaps this is a difference that makes no difference.) Will churches which have enjoyed their interns and need a new staff person be honest with themselves about what they really need for that new position and do the painful work of saying "no" to an intern who wants to stay? Our experience as UU's with these kinds of issues is not that good. But we already make so many exceptions to these rules that "granting waivers" is a significant part of the MFC workload. Perhaps we could simply develop some new policy that would aim to reduce the moves a student was required to make from 3 or 4 to 2 or 3.

I posted this document from the folks at Harvard Div School
a couple of weeks ago. It is a self-study from Harvard about their own efforts to educate fine UU ministers. Someone left a comment noting that all the research was on sole/senior pastors, leaving out an increasingly important category of ministers, those who serve on staffs (Assistant, Associate, Co-, MRE, etc.) The commenter noted that ministers are not well socialized to serve well on colleague teams, and I would certainly second that comment, note that our larger congregations require that skill set from all the ministers who serve them, and that our lone ranger ministerial culture permiates our lives deeply and not just in theological schools. Serving with colleagues is to be a square peg in a round hole every way you turn.

I re-read the document to make sure that the commenter was correct (s/he was) and found something else that needs comment.

For part of their study, the good folks at Harvard wanted to interview some "excellent" ministers to ascertain what parts of their education experience had been most valuable to them. How to figure out whom to interview? Here's what they did. "David Pettee surveyed several long-time Unitarian Universalist officials and asked them to give us a list of the ministers within the movement whom they would characterize as excellent."

They then compiled a list, apparently only by choosing all the names that appreared more than once. Although they note that they got a good sampling of ministerial tenure (grads from the 60's-90's,) and type of ministry (7 parish, two community, presumably the two UUA staff who made the cut) they don't comment about the fact that they interviewed 7 men and 2 women.

Now, the last I heard, our ministerial pool is more than 50% female and has been that way for a good long time. (10 years? 20?) So any research sample of ministers which is almost 80% male has to be questioned. Hello! Research 101! Sample demographics should match real demographics!

The fact that this was the sample used and that it was used with no comment is disappointing on three scores. First, one can intuit from the text that "longtime UU Officials" have a decided bias (STILL!!!!) towards a masculine norm in their, probably, off-the-cuff assessment of who is an excellent minister. This is not a big surprise, but it is the sort of dreary disappointment that confirms what one never wanted to bring to consciousness. You wouldn't necessarily expect them to review their lists to see if they had anything like a proportional representation of women and ask themselves if they were being real in what was probably a very informal process. Still it's a sad comment on the state of feminism amongst us, isn't it?

(Don't even think it might actually be the case that only 2 persons in a pool of 9 actually excellent ministers would be women. More than 1/3 of minsiters serving large churches are women, 1/2 of the "listening to experience" group of 12 ministers who had grown their churches significantly were women, there are plenty of women serving "Breakthrough congregations..." just to name three kinds of excellence that are easily quantified. The Excellence in Ministry conference participants were close to half and half male and female. Frankly, I can't remember the last time I was in a minority of 20% in any ministerial gathering that wasn't mostly Evangelical in 20 years.)

Anyway, I WOULD expect this kind of review of bias from a group of people doing RESEARCH at HARVARD, because, if this is not a huge sampling error, it sure LOOKS like a huge sampling error, and it needs explanation, if not remediation.

Is it a difference that makes no difference? Hardly. I'm only an informal expert on this subject, but every study I've ever seen suggests that there are profound differences in how men and women receive their education and go about developing in their careers and in what they most value from their experience. So, thirdly, this is a disappointment because I think a better sample would have given them better information for the current, real world, in which, last I heard, considerably more than 50% of persons in ministerial formation are, in fact, women.

Temporarly Wallowing in Exasperation and Disappointment,

Your (Female) Excellence in Ministry Blogger

I've been reading lots of commentary about Obama's choice of Rick Warren to pray at his inauguration this weekend.

I'm inclined to assume that this master political mind has good reasons for his choice...which might even be that, ministerless as he is right now, he'd be comforted on his big day with a prayer from a man he knows personally.

There are a lot of people who feel something between disappointed and victimized by the choice, though, and I wonder what the church can do for them. The solution we're working on at the moment:

Our local Inaugural prayer service. Being two hours west of Washington, we can schedule a noon service, record Obama's speech to play for whomever comes, bookended by our prayers for liberty and justice for all people. (and for peace, for good health and effective leadership for our new president, and whatever else anyone wants to pray for.) We think we'll then serve a quick lunch for those who need to go back to work.

It would be great fun if a whole network of local prayer services sprung up around the nation.

A preliminary report from the Panel on Theological Education, which put on the Excellence in Ministry conference, is that they had a major post-conference epiphany. With the help of their facilitator, they realized that the UUA's funding of theological schools and theological students was a broken and dysfunctional system and had been so for long enough that people were starting to withdraw from the conversation. In such a mess, it's not possible or useful to play the blame game, the only functional approach is to go back to the drawing board with fresh minds and hearts (and faces, it sounds like.)

With that they saddled their horses and fled home in front of the storm.

They meet again mid-January, and it's that meeting that next tasks in the eight selected areas will be assigned and a report crafted for the UUA board, which will follow the next weekend.

One of the interesting things about this conference was that it was as if it was two conferences being held at the same time; one about theological school funding and another about all the other topics; lay theological education, spirituality and ministry, certification of ministers, ministerial culture, anti-racism, and all the rest. It was the crisis in Theological School funding which engendered the conference, and I imagine that all of us who were spending most or all of our time staying away from that conversation knew that. (And I guess that epiphany was spot on; I stayed away because I didn't think I had anything to add to the impossible tangle it had become.)

I'm glad we're not going to try to fix what is apparently not fixable. I pray that we will have the creativity and courage, flexibility and independence to find and take a new road through this very high mountain called Theological Education.

I also hope that those other seven areas find good homes and innovative leaders, and that a conversation continues among all these layers and centers which create and nurture the leadership of our precious faith.

It seems to be, suddenly, the busiest season of the minister's year. So no more Excellence in Ministry for a while. But for those with an insatiable appetite and an interest in the problem of predicting excellence (or even competence) as persons enter ministry, check out this very engaging article from the New Yorker on the problems of predicting excellence in entry-level quarterbacks, financial professionals, and teachers!

Money concerns ranged from a concern that new ministers take on huge debt which impacts their careers, choices, and ability to serve congregations, to generosity building in our movement in general and the equitable distribution of the resources we do have. The point was made that in spite of that huge debt load, no theological student pays more than 40% of the real costs of theological education. Theological schools give hugely to denominations!

There was concern that "theological education" is larger than M.Div, but includes lay education and ministerial continuing education.

The point was made that two of the greatest weaknesses in faith communities are poor theology of stewardship and poor theology of institutions. (in that case, no wonder our theological school are suffering!)

Congregations are generally disconnected from theological schools; often don't know what schools their ministers attended and usually making no contribution to schools.

There was considerable discussion about the fact (apparently seen across denominations) of persons entering theological school without deep connections to congregational life. (just as many new members of churches don't have deep connections to a denomination) How should that fact be handled and remediated?

There was concern expressed that as a whole UU community we do not have a shared vision for theological education and that it's not clear who would appropriately articulate such a vision. Such a compelling vision would assist in fund-raising.

This second conversation recommended that this vision be created.

Also that other paths for support of theological education be developed and supported.

And that the UU theological schools and the theological schools educating the largest groups of UU students put time into their relationships.

Scattered through the notes like little chimes of warning were comments about the failed attempt to merge the two schools about 18 months ago. That was the subject of the next conversation and will be the subject of tomorrow's notes on this blog.

Readers might be interested in this document, from Harvard Divinity School, of a small research project related to Excellence in Ministry at that school
Report to the Panel on Theological Education

Our instructions at the Summit were clear and repeated: Go to the conversations where you have energy, not where you think you are "supposed" to go.

Therefore, I didn't attend any conversations about the Theological Schools' relationships to the UUA. However, they were the largest and longest conversations and they apparently bore considerable fruit. I want to share with you my sense of what happened there, mostly from the notes taken, but also from conversations at breaks.

The first conversation began, I gather, with an appreciative inquiry approach...what's right between the schools and the UUA? Among the comments:

There is good partnership between UUA staff and schools in curriculum development, there is some financial sponsorship of schools through the Pannel on Theological Education, there is coordination between Fund raisers at UUA and the schools in approaching large donors, and there is a good relationship between the UUA and at least some non-UU theological schools.

Perceived problems have been, among others,

There's a lot of painful history to get over.

1. The realtionships between schools, UUA, and funding sources don't seem "natural".
2. UU students are aware that their denomination is not supporting them at the same level that other denominations support their students.
3. The schools feel that the UUA has mandated that they be very engaged in Anti-Racism etc. work but they have not always felt supported when they had resistance to doing that.
4. There's a gap between the schools (uu and non uu) and the needs and understanding of congregations.

Goals:

1. The assembled group wanted to be partners, not competetors in the process, to create
2. more UU scholars (Ph.D students),
3. to have a bigger "pie" of financial support to divide up,
   
4. and to have more exciting and creative conversations about ministerial preparation.

Three areas for continuing work were Accountability, leadership needs, and "the pie."

Prioritizing done, we met for preliminary conversations and a chance to sign up to continue to work on the areas that interest us in the 8 chosen areas. Some of the "near miss" areas were noted and incorporated into the chosen areas. The group shared a few thoughts about the whole process, and then we had another of the very excellent worship services which punctuated our work together.

All the information we generated was turned over to the Panel who continue to meet today. All the participants have been invited to continue this conversation by adding their reflections and I hope some will.

Some final thoughts from the group conversation

Every conversation that happened was important. Every connection made was important, and we won't know all the benefits and outcomes of this meeting for some years. The "winners" were the conversations which seemed to need focus and attention to carry them forward at this time.

What surprised people about the final list

The focus on spiritual grounding was a nice surprise. The depth of discussion and willingness to take spiritual risks was an unexpected and wonderful part of the two days.

The non-focus on anti-racism by the white people at the summit was an unpleasant surprise to those persons who did focus on this area, who were surprised that this was one of the subjects that made the final cut. There was more doubt expressed about our denominational readiness to continue to work in this area than in other areas, and this sadness and disappointment cast a shadow on the last discussion.

There is some interest in discussion of our theme speaker's comment that anxiety about excellence tends to arise when there is some other problem that is being avoided, but we were out of time before that was vocalized.

There was disappointment that children and youth issues didn't make it into the final cut of next steps. There was hope that the needs of children and youth (and adult needs for the voices of children and youth) would be folded into each of the projects that are undertaken.

In informal conversations I head the same thing expressed about mentoring, internships, and recruiting for ministry. Since those fit into the areas I'm most interested in myself (depth and maturity in ministry, ministerial culture, and the certification process, I intend to keep that in mind.

As I wandered around looking at the comments in all 8 chosen areas, I thought I saw that most groups had taken the conversation to heart and had noted places where their subject intersected with children and youth affairs, and our multi-cultural work.

There was a final discussion about how to keep this work transparent and available to everyone who wanted to see it but final details on that are being worked out today. Stay posted!

With thanks to the able facilitator, the staff of University Unitarian who kept us comfortable and
printed mountains of paper, the cooks who fed us extraordinarily well and the worship leaders who nourished our spirits, I fly home to sunshine and to Christmas.

Wow, that was fast. These are the clear areas of excitement in the interest/importance voting the group just completed. The winners are:

1. Lay Theological Education (diaconiate internet resources)

2. Fostering emotional maturity and spiritual depth in ministry

3. Right relationship between UUA and Theological Schools.

4. Collaborating for collegiality and continuing education

5. Anti-racism, Anti Oppression, Multiculturalism and Resistance

6. Ministerial Culture, Credentialing Process, and Growth

7. Whose are We? (deep conversation about spiritual experience)

8. What is the nature of the church we are planning for?

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Now we are at the part of the process where we are reading you don't want to know how many pages of notes from the discussion groups. Each group was also supposed to produce some recommendations. We are going to vote on which discussions we think are the important ones to follow up on.

Here's a list of the recommendations that caught my eye. They have not been voted on, and not even I think that these are the most important things to follow up on. They just caught my eye.
Be not attached...things will no doubt change as radically and quickly as the Seattle weather is about to change....

We need to create a space for testifying to the spirit of our faith in our personal lives.

We need to add suffering and failure to our theological understanding

We need to support multi racial and multi-racial adoptive families. There are resources for retreat programs on DRUUUMM website.

Enrich our ministries by having conversations about holy experience/transcendence with colleagues. Allow ourselves to be more vulnerable.

Talk about our holy experiences/sense of God in our congregations and with our congregations. Model this so they can do it too.

Review the Fellowshipping Process top to bottom. Look for unintended consequences of the Fellowshipping process.

Look at Asistant/associate ministers situation. Produce a best practices document. Do more training of ministry teams in teams.

look at the culture among ministers which discourages entreprenurial ministries.

Allow ministerial internships at camps and conference centers.

create more spirituality-based education for youth beyond youth group.

About three dozen recommendations from the three or four groups which discussed the relationship between the theological schools and the UUA. To summarize boldly: Let the past go and get going on the future.

The Enlightenment is over. We don't quite know what is coming next, and it is heartbreaking to watch it die. But if we want to be relevant, we have to move, too.

It's not enough to be a learned ministery, we need to be a learning ministry.


Enough for now! By the next post, we'll have started focusing in.

Notes from the president of the American Theological School Association, Dan Aylshire

(notes mean...please don't expect complete sentences or criticize my spelling!)

He works with schools diverse on every end of a dozen continua. What they all have in common is that they talk about excellence! What, then, could this word possibly mean?

Excellence might be one of those terms that everyone uses because nobody knows what it means.

The word "excellence" can be a proxy for the way things used to be done. The word most often hurts minorities, women, and newcomers. It can be a word that is really used to exclude rather than to increase quality.

But what's the alternative? How could we mount a campaign for, say, mediocre theological education?

two questions:

1. Why are so many people asking about excellence right now? He's speaking next Fall on this same topic to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and The Lutheran's Missouri Synnod.
We don't ask this question when things are going well. We only ask when things are falling apart around us and have to be re-built. He suspects that concern about excellence is a way to get at some unspoken issue. He wonders what our "real" issue is.

2. He comments that we most often calls ourseves a "movement," rather than a denomination. He remarks that we share this sensitivity with the Assemblies of God and wonders what we have in common with them? His suspicion is that we're both anti-institutional.

Excellence has to have a definition that transcends the individual and serves the community.

(This man groks us....)

His perceptions about excellence in ministry

He is professionaly committed to excellence in ministry. He's a church man. He knows the pain that less than excellent ministers can bring to churches, and the pain that toxic churches can cause even the most excellent ministers.

His guide for thinking about excellence in ministry comes from his Association of Theological School guidelines.

the goal of theological studies should be deepening the aptitude for theolgical reflection that results in responsible life and faith. (paraphrase)

Ministerial work requires skills and abilities, but must be undergirded with wisdom.

Ministry is not a group of skills, it is who a person is as a human being.

Seminary grads do not come spiritually and morally mature; that's a lifelong journey. The journey is necessary to ministry.

They need a certain body of knowledge about religious topics, not just as information, but as useful, integrated wisdom.

They need to know how to do some things that are a part of ministerial practice...public speaking, counseling, working with volunteers etc. These things can't be taught in isolation. They are integrated with each other and with the above integrated wisdom and journey.

Ministers with great spiritual sensitivity can lack theological sophistication
Ministers with great intellectual ability can lack person skills
Ministers with great skill and ability can fail for lack of humility.

Excellence is not, therefore a matter of piling up certain kinds of skills and knowledge, it is the integrated whole of it all.

If that's a good definition of excellence, how do we do theological school?

Theological education is deeply dependent on two kinds of learning

1. classroom teaching. (the classroom is a nearly universal learning envrionment...ordered, safe, transformative, attached to a learning plan called a curriculum)
2. contextual learning. (challenging, disordered, chaotic, blurring of categories. This is, after all...life.) (Just the sort of damned learning experienced that civilized, ordered learning experiences try to spare people.)

Both of these are necessary and they require schools to multi-task, to get both kinds of learning integrated which is the goal of theological education.

The place of Theological Schools in Theological Education

(besides the training of religious leaders)
We need teachers and centers of study.
We need a place where the overall story of a movement can be looked over and critiqued
We need a place of research to help us continue to reinvent ourselves.

The education of leaders is a function which any theological school can provide

(He comments that as he moves around the theological school world he notes that any school that wants to brag to him about their open-mindedness makes a point of telling him that they have UU students.)

The second function of a theological school is to provide connection shared culture. It is more difficult for a school to provide this to any one movement. To have connection and shared culture, there has to have a critical mass of students.

He tells of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (the liberal splinter of the Southern Baptist wars of the 1980's) The designate some schools are educational partners, serving by educating some pastors.
Some of their schools were "identity partners" . Some theological schools need to think of their mission as contributing to the denomination as a whole, to worry in the middle in the night about the health of the denomination. (Here's a transformative idea!)


He quoted from a review of a book either by or about Unitarian Ted Sorrenson, speechwriter for John Kennedy. (this will be a paraphrase)

Once, Kenedy asked Sorrenson if any of his Catholicism was rubbing off on Sorenson. "No," said Sorenson, "but I think my Unitarianism is rubbing off on you." Sorrenson believed that he was bringing his own faith into the drafts of speeches he wrote for Kennedy and more and more, Kennedy was being swayed by his thinking.

Alshier concluded:

Somewhere along the way, Ted Sorenson was influenced by some ministers, by Unitarian Universalism.

Maybe excellent ministry, extended by an excellent mind, made our nation more human, at least for a time."


Questions:

Please comment about the pros and cons of having a majority of ministers coming from multi-faith schools vs. denominational schools?

All faith groups are experiencing this. The phenomena of second career ministers means that most people must attend the closest seminary. We're not alone in our problem.

One need of a religious leader is to be deeply imbeded in their community of faith. (roots). One way to get roots, especially for a person who didn't grow up in the faith or have more than one congregation, is to go to a UU theological school.

Another need is the ability to relate to the whole world. Some people need that experience, especially those too embedded in the UU tradition. (wings)


Question: What would be the effect on the UUA if one or more of our historically related schools closed up shop?

Answer: Theological schools are massively stressed by current economic issues. Some may not make it. This tiny movement has two schools that reflect different parts of the movement, in different parts of the country. He believes we are not over-supplied with theological schools and we would lose more than we would gain by losing one of them. Those two schools don't just educate leaders. They hold identity.

Questions: Can you give us good models of healthy denomination/theological school relationship?

Answer: I've got more bad examples than good ones. One good one is this: Historically Black Theological schools, for instance, just did a big research project on the Religion and the Black prison experience. No predominately White school could have done that research and it was needed. He also spoke of Quaker and Mennonite seminaries as well connected. The model: a story of mutual support and worry. It's all in the family. Appreciation of that connectedness.



A joke to end: (Garrison Keillor just remarked that he identified as an Episcopal, but he's "more piss than capol")

A new morning dawns (really late up here in the north country!)

I have been thinking about the really compelling parts of the conversations I was in

(And I repeat my invitation for other participants to email me their thoughts for posting, because I could only be in three of the 20 conversations that went on!)

I have been remembering the sheer excitement of talking with others about how to serve lay people who want more depth and learning than Sunday morning or adult ed can provide. I got back in touch with my enthusiasm about retreats and conferences. I loved someone's idea about "Seminary for a Day" cluster programing. I suggested that one good use of a little pot of money would be for someone to investigate distance learning (internet, mostly.) Colleges do a lot of this. So could our best ministerial and lay teachers but I know from experience that you have to have the right platform and you have to know more than I know about how to use it. If the UUA could help us figure this out, the courses we provide could be available to everyone. We also tossed around pros and cons of having some kind of UUA-certified para-ministry/deacon/elder/wise lay person program...something to challenge and then certify persons who have already been the president of their congregation, advised the youth group, and been to leadership school and feels a real yearning towards ministry of some kind but not a call (or ability) to enter seminary with its debt, uncertainty, and moving away, eventually, from their home. There are some very exciting possibilities, as well as shoals, to navagate there.

I have been remembering the conversation about fostering spiritual depth and emotional maturity in ministers. You can't force that river. depth and maturity are moving targets; they involve the ability to suffer, reflect on, survive and celebrate what is happening in your life, and these experiences happen as they will. One thing I learned was that the program of offering therapy grants to ministers to help them with the above has returned.

And I have been remembering a conversation about our certification process; that terrible connundrum; you have to have standards. Are our current standards the right standards? Are we able to discern what we have set ourselves to discern with the processes we use? How do we get recommendation-writers to be truthful and, well, discerning? Is it possible to have an effective threshold that does not leave those who have to cross it feeling angry, hazed, or misunderstood? Big questions.

We had four 90 minute small group conversations around the topics below, and after dinner, we got together to share impressions.

One of the largest conversations was the Right relationship between UUA and theological schools, which went on for two sessions and is schedueled for another one tomorrow. There's a lot of energy around this presenting problem.

Some other comments from people about "ahah moments"


"Uneasiness there we don't all know the back story between the PTE and theological schools"

Not "Excellence in ministry" but "soul-satisfying ministry."

There's a core base of UU knowledge and identity that we want our ministers to have.and ..lots of ideas about how to impart it.

An individual's pride in being an excellent minister can be an obstacle to relationship.

Surprise (from a lay person) at lack of accountability structures/support/supervision for ministers in final fellowship.

Our language conflates the act of ministry with the title minister

Frequency and passion with which people talk about the need to deepen spiritual practice.

Importance of transformation

We have a ways to go before we can authentically raise the issue of diversity and pluralism in our congregations.

There's a difference between welcoming (persons of diverse race, ethnicity, etc.) and acting on their presence.

Low expectation for spiritual leadership to come from anywhere but ordained leadership.



As to my impressions, I have to say, I have rarely spent such a pleasurable day. Deep, respectful conversations with people who care about things I care about...how could you go wrong. Even defending my perceptions of our certification practices (MFC) to a skeptical audience, while not fun, seemed important and fruitful.

I was a part of a conversation on ministerial culture, including the culture we create with the ways we evaluate candidates, a conversation about fostering emotional maturity and spiritual depth in ministry, and a third which was called "Lay Theological Education," but which was really about the resource gap for persons who have taken all their congregation's adult ed, but don't want to go to theological school. That was an exciting conversation. But they were all good.

But speaking of skepticism, it's hard for me to imagine that these free-floating conversations are going to produce outcomes that will increase excellence in ministry. Oh, me of little faith. I'm suspending my disbelief, as I've seen this facilitator bring an even more confusing conversation to a fruitful end once

Tomorrow will tell the tale

1. Right relationship between theological schools and the association

2. Role of mentoring...with accountability...not limited to interns and persons in preliminary fellowship.

3. How we might serve the need of lay theological education, beyond sunday morning but less than theological school

4. What effect we want UU faith to have in people's lives.

5. Technologies and structures that support transformation, personal and societal.

6. Non-duelistic thinking and leadership.

7. Theological development for church staffs (non-ordaned)

8. Excellence, the need for it, and its shadow.

9. Non-congregational ministry such as conferences and camps.

10. How we train UU ministers (not protestant ministers with a difference)

11. UU ministerial culture and how it impacts growth

12. How we can best support seminary students in UU identity

13. How do we work together excellently across lay/ordained

14. How to foster depth.

15. How do we foster scholarship

16. What are appropriate models of formation for 20-something seminarians

17. The role of youth...what do we have to learn

18. Respect for clergy in our congregations.

19. How our values around anti-oppression and multi-culturalism are integrated into formation.

20. Balance between ministerial authority and comgregational polity. "My job, your job, and the ministry we share."

21. Anti-racism etc. How do we make sure it really sinks in, and how do we support people in congregation which resist making this a centerpiece of our faith.

22. Are lay ministers really ministers?

23. Money and other assets which will enable us to underwrite whatever we think we need to do. (Show me...)

24. V alue of UU theological schools in training UU ministers and developing UU theology and culture.

25. Structures to connect and support colleagues.

26. Governance and authority

27. Moving from competence to excellence in religious leadership formation.

28. Whose Are We?

29. Challenges and opportunities of theological education in. A diverse world.

30. Certification processes

31. Internships--re-invisioning

32. How to keep UU youth .

33. What we do when ministry goes bad getting back into right relationship with each other

34. What model of church underlies our discussion

35. Formation beyond internship

36. Teaching Elders?

37. Collaborative training opportunities for lay and clergy together

38. Internship sites...the need for.

39. Spiritual practices and the role that has in our ministry.

40. Teaching and learning generosity.

41. What UU'ism would look like if we really put our children at the center of our life together.

42. What excellence means in the pluralistic current reality.

43. Sexuality and religious teaching

Some of these topics will be combined or modified, an more may be added this evening.

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Notes from each discussion (Susan is expecting that we'll have about 25 conversations) will be created, compiled, and given to each participant. Notes will include the who participated in each discussion, but not who said each statement. They will also be posted on the UUA's website after this meeting. So those who have a desire to read the detail of these conversations to do so.

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Open Space is a group facilitation method which allows agendas to bubble up from the group itself. It's a way to let everyone be heard. It assumes that the people who come, come with passion for some parts of the theme and it assumes that people will take responsibility for leading and following up on the conversations they suggest.

Open Space works best with topics which are complex, where there is diversity, passion, and potential for conflict.

This is just the sort of topic we're all here to discuss.

Susan, our facilitate laid out her goals for our two days.

1. Every issue of relevance to this theme which people want to raise will get raised.
2. All those topics get as thoroughly discussed as discussants want to discuss them.
3. A full report of all discussions will be created for each participant. (and presumably disseminated beyond. I will check on this point.) All conversations are open to anyone who wants to join them. There are to be no confidential conversations.
4. A fourth objective of this conference is to create new networks across what have been old lines.
5. There will be a final discussion of priorities and first steps to implementation.
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A cold coming we had of it
Just the worst time of year for a journey,
and what a journey!
The ways deep and the weather dark; the very depth of winter. (T. S. Elliot)

yep...

A story: One colleague spoke of a colleague of his, a catholic priest, beloved of all in his city, by all accounts, one is to gather, an excellent minister. When asked how he sustains his ministry, he responds, "I pray.".

This minister knows whose he is. He knows his excellence is not the result of his personal talents or hard work but is, at least in part, a gift from the Divine.

amen...

Come, come, whoever you are/though you've broken your vows a thousand times...


Other words...I didn't catch whether they were written by the person who read them or not...

We struggle with competition. The "shadow" comes out every time we talk about excellence, standards, raising the bar, continuing eduction....In all talk of the "best" there is fear that we are worst.
...

I struggle daily with the gulf between the deeply gratifying ministry I experience daily, and the sometimes flat, gray, reactive amalgam of life in the "larger movement."
...
How can I ever appreciate the full variety of effective ministerial styles?
...
I struggle with helping all the players not to duplicate efforts...I struggle with lack of trust between possible partners. I struggle with limited resources! Infighting! And recession-driven congregation! I wonder. What is the best way to help ministers become better ministers?
...
"It is provided in the essence of things that from the fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make greater struggle necessary."
...
(That must mean that all this struggle is the necessary aftermath of success!)

yep and amen!

(The Sanctuary at University Unitarian, Seattle)

They say that the first question anybody asks at a new conference is, "Who is here?" Which is why it is wise for conference planners to give people time, not only to greet old friends, but to get more comfortable with folks they don't know. This is going to be a well-planned conference. 55 jet-lagged participants gathered at University Unitarian Church for worship and a massive "get to know you". (10 got caught in a storm and we hope to see them in the morning.)

Who is here?

parish, re, community, and music ministers, other church staff, UUA staff (lots of those), seminary students and staff from at least 5 schools, two of which are UU. At least three non-UU persons, one of whom warned the others that it is possible to serve on a UUA committee in spite of not being a UU. (I wonder if anything could motivate me to serve on a Methodist committee?)

There were also youth, persons from the Panel on Theological Education, lay leaders, persons speaking for cultural and racial diversity, folks who have served or are serving on the MFC, and folks from the UUA Board. Many people, perhaps most, have multiple roles or areas of interest. Looks to be an exciting group.

I know lots of people here, at least by reputation, and had the delight of being in a small group with three I didn't know; UU's of multi-generational heritage, one of whom was a teen for whom this very densely scheduled conference constitutes a restful interlude from his usual life of full time school, nearly full time work, two bands and church activities.

The question we are to focus on for the next two days is:
What is the future of ministerial and lay leadership formation in the UU movement?

Looks like it will be an open space discussion technology. First thing tomorrow the group will generate the discussion topics related to this large question. Should be a very interesting day!

The last Harry Potter book has been named, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's due to be out on July 21, and it should be another all-nighter at the bookstores.

Unlike any other series I know of, this series has grown up with it's heroes and heroines, and, more or less, with its reading audience. My own son, now 16, was introduced to HP at the very beginning, 9 long years ago. We read the first book to him, liberally skipping the parts too complex for his understanding. But after that, he devoured every book after that on his own, often beginning on the night of the release. (Harry Potter books are released at midnight at bookstore events featuring costume parties and themed refreshments and long check-out lines.) A couple of the middle books were the objects of read-all-night "slumber" parties.

The last book came out when the boy was 14, and he opined that he was now too old for it. so we skipped the midnight trip to the bookstore. We were off on a cross-country trip the next day,and the airport bookstore had a good price, so I bought the book there. On a "mother's intuition" hunch, I casually left it on top of my carry-on while I visited the rest room. You can guess the rest: he was finished with the first chapter before we left the ground, and I didn't get my reading in until the second day of vacation! Parents of children of a certain age so cherish these last moments of childhood!

For the record, I think that the resolution to this series is going to revolve around the fact that two boys fit the criteria of the savior of the magical world, Harry and Neville. I hope they both survive, but whatever happens, I'm sure it will be a good subject for my annual sermon to the kids (always on a subject of their culture, books, movies, etc.)

I'm not up for a midnight trip to the bookstore, but I am going to pre-order the book and casually leave it around the house. (after I read it, this time!) Amazon's worked it out so that if you pre-order, you get it on release day. If you want to pre-order, here's a link!

Hartford Seminary has been researching church growth, and it has discovered that they stereotype most of us carry that all church growth is happening in very conservative, very big, very suburban churches isn't accurate.

Many downtown churches grow, especially if they find themselves in re-developing areas of the city.

Growing churches have found ways to attract more men, (another hot topic in religious journalism these days) they have a website, they use percussion in worship services, have a recruiting plan, and offer support groups and wellness programs. Theologically liberal churches grew more than conservative, and "somewhat conservative" churches grew more than "predominately conservative."

A major finding: Growing churches tend to be multi-cultural and nothing kills growth as effectively as a church conflict.

Why are growing churches multi-cultural? Aside from the longing many religious people have to live out their values in a multi-cultural church, insofar as growing churches attract persons under 50, persons under 50 are far more multi-cultural and far more comfortable with diversity than their elders.

The two strategies which seem to have brought growth (and diversity) in this congregation have been helping the Young Adults get organized and starting a specialized "extended family" (yep, we still have them from the 1970's...they are long term social/support groups) for multi-racial/multi cultural families.

You can see the whole report here

At yesterday's service, we passed out little green paper leaves and invited all present to consider something that was "leafing out" in their lives(a new skill, new way of looking a life, a resolution, etc.) As they were ready, they trooped up and attached their leaves to bare branches, then we blessed the branches and the growth and creativity they represented. This morning, I went over to have a look at what the congregation wrote and finish the process of blessing all those individual intentions before the janitor swept them away.

It was an intergenerational congregation, so many leaves involved youthful handwriting and resolutions involving musical instruments, getting along better with siblings, and sports skills. The adult-written leaves mentioned things like family relationships, new skills, taking better care of their health, dealing with anger, and various aspects of spiritual growth. I found four different languages in my wandering through the 500 leaves, and three times the words, new to me, "Kosen Rufu"

A Google Search (how did we ever manage our ministries before the internet?) reveals that this is a fundamental concept from Nichiren's Buddhism which involves how the quest for personal peace and happiness becomes a contribution to world peace. That's worth some study, so, since I wasn't organized enough yesterday to participate in the morning's ritual, I'll name my intention here; to learn more about Kosen Rufu and incorporate what I learn into my life.

May all that is budding out in your life be blessed!

When April Fools Day comes on a Sunday, it's time to haul out the UU jokes. I'm not a big fan of the classic UU jokes (UU's honor the 10 Suggestions, pray "to whom it may concern", and the only time Jesus' name is heard is when the Janitor falls down the stairs, etc.) Those jokes all play off on the notion that this strange outfit that calls itself a religious organization is really a bunch of spiritual idiots. Ha ha. Ho Hum. Old hat.

Here are several of the new style UU jokes we told in church today. Like all jokes, they get their punch line from our foibles. I don't mind us having foibles. I'm just tired of the spiritual idiot foible. So here's a different batch.

Leader: How can you tell a Unitarian Universalist?

CR: I don’t know. How DO you tell a Unitarian Universalist

L: You can’t. They already know it all.

CR: Ok….Have you heard the latest UU miracle?

L: No. What’s the latest UU Miracle?

CR. Somebody saw the face of Ralph Waldo Emerson on a Tortilla.

L: That reminds me. Why wouldn’t Mr. Emerson ever let his dentist give him Novocain?

CR. Why not?

L. Emerson wouldn’t let his dentist give him Novocain because he wanted to transcend dental medication.

CR: Ouch. Humm… Ok: What did the UU who was studying Zen ask the Hotdog vendor?

L: I don’t know. What?

CR: Make me one with everything.

L: Ok…so, there were once two old guys talking to each other in a California Diner. One says to the other, “Have you ever delved into the mysteries of Eastern religion? And the other one says “Yes. I was once a Unitarian in Philadelphia.

CR. Have you ever heard UU’s compared to Jalapeno Peppers?

L: no.

CR. One or two gives real spice to a dish, but a whole bunch together will bring tears to your eyes.

Judging by the laughter, they liked Transcending Dental Medication the best. But the biggest laughs went to the last joke, which isn't really a UU joke at all but is apropos of our iMinistry initiatives which involved recording sermons.

It seems that there was a Rabbi who was an extremely good preacher and his people loved to hear him preach on Friday evenings. They wanted him to also preach on Saturday morning. But he wanted to spend Saturday morning at home, in his jammies, with his family. So he got an idea. He would pre-record the sermon, and, since it is not permitted for Jews to turn switches on the sabbath, he would hire a Gentile to push the "on" button at the time of the sermon.

So he did that for several weeks. And that got the folks of his congregation to start thinking that they, too, would prefer to spend Saturday at home in their jammies with their families. And that if they sent tape recorders to the synagogue, they could listen to the rabbi’s sermon at their leisure.

And so the inevitable happened: the day came when the only people in the synagogue were Gentiles with tape recorders.

And that is the first known instance of artificial in-sermonation


Happy April!

Actually, it's not very new. In fact, it's getting so old that even us old people are starting to use it.

I refer to "It Sucks."

So, there's a need for vivid language to express the epitome of badness.
And there's always a need for the younger generation (boy do I sound like an old fogy tonight!) to invent expressions which dismay their elders.
And the meaning of words changes over years.

and so on and so on.

But "It Sucks" is a homophobic expression suggesting that the epitome of badness is how gay men have sex.

And I'm not planning to get used to it.

Once upon a time, Spam was a sort of canned meat of uncertain origin, the sort of thing that some people tucked in the cupboard for emergencies or took camping.

There's still a website for the salty stuff, but they have lost their name to the forces of unbridaled capitalism and out and out evil.

As I posted a eulogy on our church's Eulogy Blog, I realized that it's the first post to any of my blogs in days and days. One reason for this is that all of my blogging energy is going to closing down comments in the church blogs (post by post...big sigh) becasue they have attracted so much Spam, and all too much of that is, let's just say, not on topics one wants on one's church website.

No comments....kinda takes the fun out of blogging. Poor Spam (the meat product) Poor Me.

Blogger does have good anti-Spam tools, which I've now turned on, so I have no excuse not to attend to this blog more frequently. I'd love your comments!

The UU World on-line edition has a story about the UU's of Second Life. My Avatar's picture is featured, and a few words from me as well. Find it Here While you're at it, check out this interesting on-line liberal magazine!

What Does It Mean To Be A Church? - Click here for more blooper videos


Two minutes...well worth your time. (In the current version, yours truly is the person staring at her toes while the others are dancing. The dancing is programmed into the pillows, and mine wasn't working.)

All of my blogs have counters on them which tell me how many people have visited, where their ip server is, and what key words they used to find the site. I watched all this obsessively for the first few months after I started blogging, but it had been a while.

When I left my statistics, iMinister was getting between 10 and 30 hits a day, depending mostly on whether I had posted and, I think, whether Blogger had put it in the queue for the browsing public that day. More than half of the hits came from Albuquerque, and most were repeat visitors. My Psalm Blog, on the other hand, was getting three to ten hits a day, with occasional spikes, and a world wide audience.

So you can imagine my shock to discover that in the past few months, my Psalm blog, to which I've not posted since September, has slowly been gaining market share and now gets nearly twice the hits as iMinister. Most of those seem to be coming from Google searches for specific Psalms, words, or modern translations. Since most UU's don't Google Psalms, I'm assuming that most of my visitors are not UU's. Hopefully, they leave with a good impression.

The key words people use to find this site range from "Mary Oliver" to (I kid you not) "punched Arius in the nose."

That was St. Nicholas who did that, and I did, indeed write about this most unfortunate incident, which happened at the Council of Nicea, on the good Bishop's feast day in December.

In response to my astonishment that someone would look for information about St. Nicholas by Googling "punched Arius in the nose," my son informed me that this was a very sophisticated way to avoid the million Christmas pages that include St. Nicholas, and that this search technique is called "google-fu", like Kung fu, the art of getting what you want by subtle and indirect combat.

Learn something every day!

The amazingly creative guru of the UU church of second Life has made a two minute video of the church in action, making the point that "church" changes through the ages, the religious impulse remains and can be fulfilled in cyber church as well. Here's the link.

I really am still researching Second Life. But only every other day, to prevent addiction.
It's very addictive. It's one of those things, for me, where I come home from work, sit down to play in SL for a little while, and the next thing I know it's midnight. It is good, I think, to have such a powerful pastime on one's life, as long as it doesn't take over.

The UU Church of Second Life is getting a lot of publicity, too. Apparently there will soon be an article in USA Today, and in a week or so in the on-line UU world. I was interviewed for the latter, and will make a link here when the story appears.

I volunteered to lead an in-world (second life world, that is) covenant group on Monday evening, instantly had 6 participants, and we had a discussion that left me with some insights. Hopefully the same for others. At the end, there were several attempts to get the Avitars to hug or hold hands, and it really felt good when we managed it. It was a very real connection we made in that hour, and they wanted to symbolize it with real movement. (they also wanted to go on talking, which presumably they did. I had to go.)

I was asked today what the spirituality of Second Life was, and what occurred to me is that there is a spirituality of good conversation and real connection with people, and that spirituality is not in the least dependent on whether the connection happens in person, by letter, or by playing with avitars in virtual reality. That real connection means that things like group moments of silence have all the extra power they do at church. Secondly there's a kind of analogy between Sl and Rl and Sl and spiritual reality that gives SL religious activities special power.

The entry into Second Life has a steep learning curve; moving, talking, creating, seeing...you have to learn to do it all. You are forever getting completely lost, your camera focused into nothingness, you can't tell the black sky from your black shoe, and on it goes. You're not often quite sure where you are or what you are supposed to be doing.

Learning to pray was a lot like that for me, actually. The Spiritual life is about as "virtual" as a world can come, and I'm mostly lost there, wondering what I am supposed to be doing, as well. Camera always out of focus. Steep learning curve. But in the end, a sense that, despite all appearances, it is really real.

"There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief," she said, and she clearly thought that this was one of those times. She was one of the truth-tellers, and we need her, and she's gone.

Her last column, only two weeks ago, extolled us to remember that this is a democracy, that the people decide, that we voted against this war already. She wanted us to go to Washington for last weekend's march.

Dear God, we're going to miss her!

And, my condolences to her sister Sara Maley, a member of my congregation.

If you have not seen the new Kleenex commercial, grab your box of tissues, and have a look, here .

Are you back, all watery eyed? I am too.

Why so touching? Because, tissues aside, we're hard-wired, we humans, for community, for relationship, for love. And in the end there is nothing that heals the hurts of life or helps us to truly feel our celebrations as effectively as being in a relationship in which we feel heard.

All that guy did was invite people to sit on his couch, listen to them, and show, by his facial expressions, that he cared, that he sympathized, that he heard.

(of course, he probably sat their all day before the camera people felt they had enough perfect shots of grief and joy, relief, and celebration, not to mention the whosk of kleenex being pulled from boxes to make the the 62 second film, but that's movies.)

Real life is only a little broader. It takes a little longer, sometimes, there are real skills involved in helping people remember and share what they need to share, but in the end, we all recognized the expressions on those people's faces because they've been on our faces, and we've seen them around us.

So here's a thank you to all who listen, for a profession or in a family, all day long, or once to a stranger in the seat beside you.

And here's another thank you to all who care about churches, which are our society's major institution devoted to community, listening, and caring.

Now, go blow your nose.


P.S. and don't forget about those blogging awards. You can vote here and look at results so far here

The UU Blog Awards Voting is going on here. Not only is it fun to vote for your favorites, it's a great way to be introduced to the best writing in a bunch of very different UU blogs, as all of the candidates have links. Both this Blog and Psalms for a New World, my improvizations on the book of Psalms, were nominated, so thanks so someone out there!

Have Fun!

I've been researching rather than writing for the past three weeks, spending my spare iMinister moments in Second Life, a massive, multi-player virtual reality which includes, among many things, a UU Church. I've enjoyed this so thoroughly that I fear I will soon need de-tox and a 12-step program, and my research is not done, but here are some interim thoughts.

First of all, like most new pursuits, this one has a learning curve. I didn't start enjoying Second Life until I'd been struggling along for a couple of weeks. Now that I've learned to see, to move, to communicate, and to play in this life, things are better.

I have met not one but two people I know in RL in this venue; a person I grew up with and another who grew up in my current church. I've also made enough new virtual friends that I'm hoping that there will be a GA gathering for the 130 members of the UU Church of Second Life.

(I've also learned to create objects and use them, fly a dragon, translate dialogue into a variety of languages, exchange money, and I've had some interesting experiences in some of the educational exhibits which are set up for visitors. The best one was a simulation of schizophrenia, complete with visual and auditory hallucinations. )

My questions in hanging around the UU church of second life have been, "Is there a way that a venue like this can meet the real religious needs of the people behind the avatars who come here?" and, "Is there a way that a venue like this can show Second Lifers the values of UU'ism and steer them towards a "real" church?"

At the moment I'm inclined to think that both answers are "yes."

About 130 people have joined this virtual church since its inception in August. Joining is pretty free at the moment, but about 30 show up for services each week, which would suggest (in Real life, at least) a core membership of about 60 people. Not bad for 6 months! (but a low ratio of the 3 million "residents" of SL) I've talked to a fair number of them, as well as folks who drop by during the rest of the weeks. By my count, about half are UU's in RL (real life). About half of the rest know about Unitarian Universalism but don't belong to a church. A quarter don't know anything about us and got to the church by accident or came to see a recreation of cave art which is also on the property. Many come because it is a peaceful place to sit...there is a waterfall or a campfire to watch and bird noises to listen to. I've given out a lot of information, in English and (haltingly, until I acquired a translator) in Spanish and French about Unitarian Universalism.

SL is not necessarily a "nice" environment. Many people come here to play with their shadow side, and spend a lot of money buying weapons, being aggressively sexual, or just foul-mouthed. The contrast of the church's values of authenticity, respect, and playful play is even more stark than in RL. And even where people are being nice, it's a kind of chaotic, frontier environment...exciting and exhausting. UU'ism comes off here as and organized, serious, peaceful, welcoming version of ourselves. It's a good thing.

The folks I've talked to really want to discuss their religious values, and they seem to really value the support they get in this on-line, visual chat. In the Joys and Concerns section of the worship service, one gets the impression that real prayer is going on. It is, as someone remarked to me after last week's (Thursday evening) service, strangely moving. There are a lot of possibilities here.

Some of my blogging colleagues are making New Year's Lists of their favorite posts, not only for nostalgia's sake, but so that people can vote in the UU Blogger Awards. (if you want to participate, go here)

My favorite post on this blog is an early one, stemming from the first comment that was left on it, "Singed by God"

My favorite comment on current affairs is The Calming Effect of Religious Tolerance

I think that my most valuable contribution to the UU world was with three posts on "Freedom of the Pulpit" and how that concept applies to the common ministerial request to have a right of first refusal on non-member weddings. That series starts here.

My biggest blogging suprise was discovering the interest people have taken in my improvisations around the book of Psalms,
which gets a dozen or so hits a day, mostly from people Googling for a modern version of a particular Psalm. My hit map for that blog is impressively international.

And for me, the greatest kick of Blogging was making new friends and hearing from old ones.

Happy New Year to you all!

Someone from the Outlaws Bridge Universalist Church emailed me this morning. Outlaws Bridge is one of our few remaining "for real" Universalist churches. Isolated in rural North Carolina, they were able to keep their authentic Universalism through the post-decade "let's merge and all be Unitarians" era.

At any rate, in browsing the UUA's website, she came on this graphic, which is from our church, and prominently features the Universalist's Off Center Cross. She wanted permission (thanks for asking!) to use this art piece.

Of course I gave her permission..also offered to send her posters to sell as we have many. (available from Uni Uniques or at GA if you are so interested).

Here's more information about this piece of art.

It’s a pastel drawing, done in the mid 1980’s by then church member and Albuquerque artist Bob Hooton. It’s his take on the central figure of our mural, the two circles of Unitarianism and Universalism coming together. The mural was created right after the merger of the Unitarians and Universalists, and this figure, in one form or another, has been our church’s unofficial logo ever since.

The Universalist’s off-center cross and the Unitarian’s chalice, both in circles symbolizing completeness, come together. Bob Hooton’s piece is a little different from the mural piece; his cross is larger, and he emphasizes the chalice’s flame, rather than the chalice as a whole. Also, the intersection of the two circles was very important to him; he made it distinctively leaf shaped and the colors blend (in the original…this has faded in the above) to make the center green. To him that added the element of nature to the human created symbols of cross, chalice, and circle.
Hooton called his work, “Freedom to Believe.” His gift was very important to the congregation in the 1980’s.

The Unitarian Church of Second Life (membership in the UUA applied for) has gotten its first request to do a wedding and it's fearless leader, Bizarre Barry, has put out a call to the 80 some person membership to see if anyone is a Lay Minister. (apparently it didn't occur to him that one of his members might be a "real" minister.) He wants someone to do the wedding, the better to raise money with which to buy the Church a private island. Two Second Life UU's who know that I'm a member of the Unitarian Church of Second Life emailed me to urge me to volunteer.

But I'm trying really hard to have a Second Life that is NOT identical to my "real" life, so it was very easy to say No.

I probably would have done so anyway. As one who actually takes weddings and marriage seriously, I'd need to know a little more about what a "virtual" marriage is and what it means to the "real" people involved. Is this harmless playacting with elaborate paper dolls or is this something more? If it is something more, then what is the responsibility of the minister and the UU Church to encourage loving, responsible behavior and honest relationships? Is there any downside in "real" life to a virtual marriage? ("I promise to love, honor, and cherish you for no more than 5 hours a week"?)

One of my correspondents asked, "If the Second Life" Church affiliates for real with the UUA, what then is the meaning of the marriages solemnized by its "clergy"?

Good Questions! I hope some Second Lifers are thinking about them. As for me, once I figure out how to manage my Second Life, I'm going into business as a dog walker. But I have to figure out how to manage my first life, first.

My "official" blog has comments today on one Unitarian Universalist's theology of Christmas. It's here.

There was no conversation in all of Albuquerque yesterday except about the coming snow, the snow, and then the astounding snow. With all that talk about snow, I suppose it should be no surprise that one conversation went like this. me: "I have not seen this much snow for 26 years, since I lived in Boston." "You lived in Boston in the 70's? Do you remember the blizzard of '78?"

It happens every time I talk about snow. Several million people lived thorough that blizzard, and I've talked to an awful lot of them over the years. The Blizzard of '77 was a huge storm on top of a big storm the week before. It shut down the city of Boston for three days and only public transportation was permitted for another week. We city dwellers walked through shoulder-high tunnels of sidewalks for the next three months, and the city public works department spent the rest of the winter scooping piles of snow into dump trucks and dumping them in the river. It was an amazing tribute to the New Englander's creed that business will go on no matter what the weather. This southerner was very glad to escape New England, to live in places where winter storms drive everyone to hearth and home (and, these days, to telecommuting) to enjoy the day and wait out the thaw.

P.S. We're at 10 inches at my house, and not only is it still snowing, there's another storm coming! Too Cool

It's the last day of school, and no sooner had school let out than the heavens opened in snow. There's about 6 inches on the ground at the moment, with more forecast; we've lived here for 18 years and think that this is the most snow we've seen. And, miracle of miracles, it's wet snow! (Most of the snow that falls on Albuquerque is so dry it doesn't melt, it evaporates. It doesn't pack, it squeeks. No good for snow balls.)

My 16 year old son had brought buddies home with him to play Dungeons and Dragons, but at some magical point, they dragged on all the household mittens (they'd gone to school in sweatshirts; that 's how fast this weather changed) and went outside to throw snowballs. It was the snowball fight of a lifetime for the boy, who could never get his parents to struggle with the dry snow as long as he wanted them to. To have 5 eager snowballers was heaven on earth. Watching them made my snow day.

Last Sunday, CNN ran this clip about All Souls Church in Washington DC. You can watch it yourself by clicking the link. Very exciting publicity for us!

I'm not playing computer games for Advent (at least, not too much), but I have received such fascinating news from the UU Church of Second life, that I must at least blog about computer games.

Second Life is one of several exceedingly popular MMO-RPG's. (Massive, Multiplayer, Online Role Playing games. Remember that.) where players create a character with a persona and engage with other online players in a variety of virtual activities. I signed up a month or so back, and the only thing I managed to do besides dress my character was find the Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life and sign up. There was a vast silence from them until today. Apparently, I signed up to get messages by email from the group and that feature was broken and is now fixed. (I once was lost, and now I'm found...)

Anyway, it appears that they meet (on line) pretty regularly on Thursday nights and their (virtual) membership has shot up to 80 in the past few months. So....get this...

They want to affilliate with the UUA. They've got the numbers. They are thinking about forking over US$ for UUA dues (most transactions in Second Life are accomplished with SL$). They are considering the possibility of officers and bylaws to make themselves "Kosher" in the eyes of the UUA so that they can apply to be a real (virtual) church.

Oh, what I would give to be a fly on the wall in the offices of the UUA (nice people, but it's a seriously stuffy place) when they get this proposal. I can hardly wrap my mind around it, myself.

We Albuquerquians think we're starting a pretty way-out experiment in reaching UU's in small communities with our iMinistry program; here's a truly far out experiment in reaching the next generation. No doubt the lawyers will say that the UUA Bylaws don't permit virtual members. but I do hope that someone can be found at the UUA to deal gently and knowledgeably with the Second Lifers and their UU Church.

I wish them well and am looking forward to finding them after Christmas.

We use the blogs on the website to make it easy for volunteers to easily post the audio and video recordings of sermons, and so our publications person can post the written sermons. Much easier than going in to change the website.

One of the days the website developer said wistfully that she wished we ministers would blog more was I day after I'd spent all day on a memorial service for a beloved member, so I posted the Eulogy. Bingo. A Good Move. While I've always given a copy of the Eulogy to the family, and occationally responded to requests for copies, posting it to the website makes it available to anyone without my intervention. A couple of months later, we had a memorial service for a young adult who had spent 25 years making friends all over the world, and we got hits on our blogs from all over the world as her friends heard the news. Her family members and friends who had spoken at the service asked for their tributes to be posted, which I did. The family Christmas Card will carry the sad news farther, but it will also have the address of "Emily's Service" on the web. When I heard about that, I added my comments in the rest of the service. Memorial Services are something that UU's do really well. I believe. Discovering how useful this feature could be, I created a new blog just for the posting of Eulogies. It's here, If you vist, you'll get to read about this splendid young woman, a product of our church school and faith, as well as her wonderful family.

Occationally people send me written responses to services, sermons, or life, and they are often quite good. I got one the other day and asked the author for permission to post it, which she gave with delight. I can imagine that this feature could become quite popular, in which case, we'd probably add a "members" blog.

Our Library/Bookshop has its own blog, the better to pitch books to the congregation. The iMinistry/Branch Ministry team has a blog, which we imagine will be of interest to persons in churches which are thinking about attempting this new strategy for growth.

That's just a start...

We've been working on a new website for the church for months and months, and it finally went on line a few weeks back. This website has blogs attached to it, and even before we went on line, I've been thinking about blogging as a church activity.

I have to admit that my first reaction to hearing that I was going to have a blog on the website was not positive. While I've never made a secret of my "day job" , and I've never imagined that I could post just anything to my blog, writing for the blog has been removed from my work, and refreshingly so. I discovered early on that only about half of its readers even live in Albuquerque, and at least some of those folks don't belong to the church.

So I have a church website blog (you can find it here, and while we're linking, the church website is here) Our volunteer website developer is very eager that I post to it, and it took me a while to sort out what to use it for, how to differentiate from this blog, and so on. I'm still figuring that out, but in the meantime have discovered some interesting uses for a blog on a church website.

A woman at church yesterday said that when she was a kid, she thought that the three Kings brought the baby Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth. I've been smiling ever since.

Those three universal beings (in the folk tradition from which manger scenes are made, they are an elderly European, a middle aged Oriental, and a young African) on their strange journey to bow down before a baby and bring gifts, were supposed to have brought three items of financial worth, gold, a precious incense used in religious ritual and worship, and a precious spice used in, of all things, embalming. Some make something of the latter; a gift for a person whose life was destined to be short.

I'd rather universalize these gifts, making them symbolic of what we need for a good life; a modicum of financial resources, the spiritual resources symbolized by Frankincense, and the emotional and relational resources symbolized by mirth.

Food and fire, hope and spirit, love and community. May your Holiday season be blessed with Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth.

When my husband and I contemplated having a child in our home, we naturally contemplated having a little copy of ourselves. Studious, quiet, intuitive, caring, introverted. Therefore, we did not ever imagine a weekly dungeons and dragon game in our dining room, with its raucous mix of personalities, gluttony, dice, and fantasy. But because nobody is a copy of anybody, our studious, quiet, intuitive, caring, introverted son is also a dedicated Game Master. His game has been going on for five years now with more or less the same crew, and shows every likelihood of going on until three of its four permanent players go off to college in (gulp!) two and a half years. His first game lead to a second; A couple of times a month, he and his girlfriend play with a group of adults from church, and what a gift that has been! Their affectionate guidance has mentored his adolescence in ways that parents just can't do.

D&D taught our introverted child to make phone calls, to organize activities, to be a leader, to deal with different personalities. The young people in his group have squabbled like the siblings that none of them have, but the game (almost always, especially in the last couple of years) goes on. We no longer hover in expectation of tears or tyranny; they've all matured nicely, and their game has smoothed out accordingly. I credit D&D with a lot of growth for my kid...it's been worth every spilled coke and every plate of cookies.

As a matter of fact, he was so much NOT a Unitarian that he punched our guy Bishop Arius in the nose during the council of Nicea. Oops.

Nice guy other than that; into helping the poor and all.

During my ministerial internship I lived with a family who celebrated St. Nicholas Day as the start of the Christmas festivities. I was given a pound bag of pecans with which to make Christmas cookies, and was charmed by the tradition. The next year I set up housekeeping for myself and began the tradition of celebrating St. Nicholas Day. I didn't know about his altercation with Bishop Arius, who championed Unitarian theology in the early church. A Husband and then a child later, we got into a Major Family Tradition. December 6th was the day for decorating the house, the kind of nice family dinner that we don't get on Christmas Eve, and it always happened that late in the evening, someone would hear the clop of St. Nicholas' horse and we'd pour out of the house. He always managed to get out of our subdivision sight unseen, but he did always leave a few presents to help us decorate and wait for Christmas.

My disappointment in discovering my holiday hero's indiscretion is keen, and my 16 year old is only affectionately tolerant of the holiday these days. His school's art show (mandatory for students in art classes) and a chess meet claimed his attention, and ours, so we were not home when the white horse clopped through and left his heretic fans a few presents to help us wait for Christmas.

A conversation erupted in my exercise class this morning, about "Happy Holidays," a controversy I heard about but didn't actually encounter last year. And frankly, I'm not absolutely sure that any of the others in the class were speaking from personal experience, either. The moment passed before I could get my two cents in, which is that the notion that wishing someone "Happy Holidays" is somehow denigrating of Christians and Christmas is flat out ignorant.

There are a multitude of Holy Days (that's what a holiday is...or was...a holy day) in December's Christian Calendar. Advent, St. Nicholas Day, the feast day of Guadalupe, Christmas Eve, the Feast of Stephen, the 12 days of Christmas (arguably secular), and Epiphany.

For this reason I intend to wish every Christian I meet this month "Happy Holidays".

The season of Advent begins today, the fourth Sunday before Christmas. In the Christian calendar, this is a season of preparation for the major holiday, and while popular culture celebrates it mostly with one-a-day treats for kids, grownup Christians sometimes honor this season in the same way that Lent is honored; by giving something up for the duration.

A very counter-cultural move, this is. No doubt about that. But I've found it useful in my life, and this year, it's computer games. It will be a great pleasure to return to my favorites on December 26; I'm looking forward to it already.

Why do I do this? There's the practical matter that during this busy time I can't afford the time I've been spending on games, and there's the spiritual matter that I want to focus on nature's beauty and family''s love in this season. But the major usefulness of this discipline is that it breaks habituations.

Habituations, the polite name for all the light-duty addictions that march through our lives, can be a problem. Although heroin or Alcohol or out of control sex can actually kill us, most of our hibituations merely lock us into be behaviors and bodily states which need some freedom.

A good cup of coffee in the morning is a wonderful treat, and relaxing with a few computer games is the same. But if I have trained my mind and body to ONLY wake up with a shot of caffeine, and ONLY relax with some mind-numbing computer games, I've lost a certain flexibility and freedom in my approach to life, and that's NOT such a good thing.

I aim to stay on my toes in the game of life, and that means not getting too set in my ways. Whether it's coffee or computer games, it's good to take a break and develop new strategies with regularity.

Crazy chess has been my game addiction of choice for a couple of weeks now. The basic point of it is to capture the army of relentlessly advancing pawns before your castle burns down. It's possible to get further in this game than in most such games by dint of intelligence rather than simply by click speed, so I, whose coordination computer runs slow, like this game.

It's the relentless part that fascinates me. Capture the last pawn and you've got to get in position for the next pawn. Capture a power up that temporarily slows or stops the onslaught, and you'd better clean up the board and keep capturing the coins which appear. Make a fantastic four-in-a-row pawn capture and you've got to just keep going.

Life is like this. Get your kid potty trained and you go right on to please and thank you, reading, driving, human relations. Get the new church building built and there's no pause before some new crisis has your attention. Figure out how to use DOS and they change to Windows and then to networks (which is where my castle burned to the ground and put me out of the game.)

The trick, I've found, to Crazy Chess, is to actually rest between levels. My natural inclination, when I've won a level, is to rush into the next challenge, but this is a mistake, because once you click the go on button, your launched to "relentless" again.

It's why I take some quiet time every morning. It's my pause before I click, "go on", and hit the relentless decks. It's also why I'm going to take a break from computer games. More on that, tomorrow.

My son left his D&D magazine open for me to an article on the Oversoul, the name of one of the many deities in the D&D world. The article contained the distinctive D&D art, and references to many things I only vaguely understand. ("Humans comprise the largest group of Oversoul followers, by a huge margin, but...Githzeari make up the second largest racial group among worshipers, followed by half giants, elan," etc.) However the purely theological parts of the article were remarkable, fleshing out, so to speak, a Process Theology deity, complete with creation story and comments about worship. The Oversoul has both developed with and guided creation and evolution, a process which is not completed. With each expression of the fragment of itself which is an infidels life, it learns.

The Oversoul looks like serenity. It's symbol is a set of concentric circles. Students of the Oversoul learn first the art of Meditation, then learn to seek the truth beyond the obvious and to question everything, especially himself (sic). Oversoul temples tend toward elegant simplicity, vary often incorporating natural surroundings. Birth and Death are marked by ritual, as they are believed to be the times when individual souls leave and return to the oversoul. The ritual at death involves the telling of the stories of the deceased, especially the sharing of stories by persons who knew the deceased in different parts of life.

It all sounds so eerily like the beliefs of many Unitarian Universalists that I wonder if the author (one Matthew J. Hanson) is one of us.

And it reminds me that I really do believe that our entire RE problem of what to do with our boys aged 12-19 in Sunday school could be solved by using the D&D world to teach philosophy, religion, our values, moral decision making. If someone did this, I think we could have very popular RE programs that kept kids engaged literally for hours and would teach them far more than they are learning now.

Someone?

My son tells me that I'd enjoy Second Life, a virtual reality game, a lot more if I had a fancier computer. A member of my congregation tells me that I'd enjoy it more if I was willing to collect and spend the small allowance that any user can have just for the giving up of one's credit card numbers. There's also the possibility of spending one's REAL money in second life, a proposition to which I'm opposed.

I 'd pretty much signed off of second life, much as I loved my animated paper doll who looked just like I fancy I look. But the, wonder of wonders, the UU Church of Second Life met for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, I was fully engaged in my first life that day and didn't know about the meeting until after it happened.

How's this for a post-modern blurring of the reality/fantasy distinction? Last Summer, in another one of these multi-player world games, but one where fighting gangs are more the normal activity (sex and shopping seem to be the normal activity of Second Life), one of the key players died. In real life. Her Virtual Reality friends were bereaved in reality, however, and decided to have an "in game" memorial service. (Some day, my minister friends, you might be asked to officiate at such a thing...will you be ready?) Since this popular player had friends in several gangs, a neutral territory was selected for the gathering and all players had to leave their weapons at the entrance. Then they were proceeding to have a real virtual memorial service, with the various (virtual) characters extolling the (actual) deceased's character when...you guessed it, one gang attacked and slaughtered the assembled (weaponless) crowd.

This (actually) happened last Summer, and some players have devoted their (virtual) energy ever since to exterminating the offending gang for continuing to play a game when an important piece of real life was going on. (This story courtesy of my son, who always knows what will pique my interest.)

Someday I'll get up early and try Second Life on his computer.

One of the best free flash games I've found is Crazy Chess, which you can have for your very own by clicking here .

Enrique has posted a sermon (here, in English) on the spirituality of computer games, and he got me to thinking about how the trick of winning lots of computer games is to figure out what is important at any moment.

In Crazy Chess, for instance, you've got to capture all the relentlessly progressing pawns (using the Knight's L-move) before they get to the bottom of the board and burn down your castle. That's enough of a trick, but in the end, you just can't move fast enough if you just capture pawns. You have to also be focusing on capturing various "power up" pieces which will slow down or freeze the pawns, blow them up, repair your castle, and give you an extra life.

In my first few days of addiction to this game, I focused on the pawns and on getting good at moving that pesky knight around. Eventually, I realized that this was a loosing proposition; I'd have to also work on capturing power ups before they disappeared. This is easy early in the game; later, when the pawns just keep coming, it is surprisingly hard to change one's focus to slowing the onslaught rather than capturing pawns.

In my calm weeks of ministry, I enjoy some quiet time each day, I do a little reading unrelated to the immediate demands of preaching, I have friends, craft projects and -yes- computer games which are a relaxing part of my day, and I therefore pride myself on taking care of myself. But then comes the onslaught; the sermon that takes twice as long to write as I had hoped it would, the memorial service, the computer crash, the staff crisis; then it is surprisingly hard to shift my focus from the immediate tasks and do something that would slow down the onslaught, repair the hurt places, or clear the deck.

That's what, in particular, my daily quiet time does for me, and I've learned over the years not to bow to the false economy of pawn-fighting and skip it. It powers me up.

This game started as a pencil and paper game, but it's wonderful for computers because the challenging levels of the game require a good deal of erasing. I've been playing GameHouse's version, here. It's the nicest interface; unfortunately the highest level is no longer particularly difficult for me, so I guess I'll have to go hunting again.

I suppose that everyone knows that Suduku requires that you put numbers on a grid such that each row, column, and square have the digits 1-9 in them with no repeats. With a variety of kinds of deductive logic, you can complete almost every grid without guessing.

As long as you don't make a single mistake. Suduku is one strike and you're out. Put the wrong number in a box and continue the puzzle and you'll never figure it out. Nor is it usually possible to figure out where that mistake was without starting over. Suduku teaches a person to be careful. The pencil and paper game teaches a person to be neat with tiny little trial numbers. My son taught me to use one of the nifty new mechanical pencils now on the market; they stay very sharp and come with the most amazing erasers. My, how times do change.

Being a Universalist, I object to "one strike and you're out." The thing that has most puzzled me over the years about Christian orthodoxy is how Christians can talk about God, the loving father in one sentence and "If you don't believe (not to mention, if you commit any number of sins) you're doomed to everlasting punishment." Everlasting! Everlasting is longer than any loving parent I know would punish their child.

But I do like Suduku, which is, after all, just a game.

After reading that there's a UU Church in "Second Life" a virtual reality video game which has hundreds of thousands of users who create objects and social relationships in a more or less unfettered way, I decided to give it a try.

I'm clearly not smart enough to play this game, and judging by the folks who appear in the welcome and orientation areas, neither are most other people. However I did manage to make myself an avitar(personal character who moves around and interacts with other virtual users) I could live with and I found the UU church of Second Life. I joined it immediately; it has fifty members. But then I couldn't find any of them, or any indication of what this virtual church does or where it meets.

After trying my hand at creating an object to sell and failing miserably, I returned to the UU church. Still no one there and no indiciation of what this virtual church does or where it meets.

It's totally clear that they need a minister to help them get organized.

Then some little angel whispered in my ear that I hardly needed a second life just like my first one. Right! Got it!

But in this confusing and complex game, I keep drifting back to the only thing I really understand, which is how to do church. It is such a comfort to know that in this strange society where mostly people won't talk to you because they've not yet figured out how, there's a UU church.

The coolest thing about Second Life so far is that it is remarkably easy to make an avitar who looks like you want her to look. The second coolest things is the set of rules of civil behavior in this virtual world. Live and Let Live, keep your hands to yourself, don't harass those who are enjoying their (virtual) lives. Very UU.

Continuing my theological reflections on the computer games I 'm addicted to, there's Arcade Lines, which you can preview here

Puzzle games like this one relentlessly load up the board with colored balls, and you have to move them into lines, after which they disappear. The nice thing about these games is that you play at your own pace, so you can play them while, say, while on hold waiting for tech support.

Learning to succeed at these games is a matter of learning to see patterns. Although it is easy at first to see where one can move balls to get four in a row, as the board fills up, it gets much harder.

You have to play this game with a certain flexibility of mind, being ready to change one's strategy as new balls appear. The "right" line of balls to complete on this turn keeps changing.

The spiritual quest is like this. Since that Mystery we call God never "appears", all findings of God are a matter of noticing the patterns of Grace that appear suddenly in one's life and following up on them. No strategy has ever worked for long for me. I found Zen style meditation to be very fruitful for about three years, fought with it another year, and finally gave up after another year. I'm a more flexible player of Arcade Lines than I am a spiritual seeker.

You can play this game for yourself, for free, here.

The basic deal is that you are presented with colored symbols which have to be placed on a board such that each one is touched only by others which are the same shape or color. It's a cinch at first, and it gets harder. The higher the level, the more symbols, colors, and the fewer erasers and wild cards you get.

Which is so like real life.

1. We're all given the same board, but some seem, from the beginning, to have a much harder time of it. (Skill is important in life, luck is crucial in life, but in many important ways, the game is easier for some than others. This is why compassion for self and others is a part of every spiritual outlook.)

2. "Winning" this game is a matter of thinking ahead and being careful. If you put symbols anywhere they happen to fit, you'll be stuck in the end. (It's hard work to be careful, to think ahead, and to see what needs to be seen. Slow down, reflect, watch the whole board.)

3. Unlike most puzzle games, you don't get to look ahead to see what's coming. You have to play blind. (We're blind to the future in our lives and must simply do the best we can.)

4. One key to managing the end game is to use the erase and wild cards to forgive yourself the plays that either were poor to begin with or turned out to be poor later on. (grace abides. Appreciate and give thanks.)

5. In the end, you have to wait to get the one symbol you need. While you are waiting, you have to manage what comes.

6. The symbols you can get off the board are as important as the ones you have on the board, but if you erase too much, you won't be able to play. (Simplicity is good. Poverty is problematic.)

This is too much fun. I can see that I'm going to soon be addicted to both computer games and reflections on computer games.

Work to do and miles to go....

I confess. I'm a bit of a computer game addict. No, actualy...

My Name is Christine and I'm addicted to computer games.

I use them to relax after difficult meetings or just hard days. I use them to forget my troubles when I'm troubled, to justify my agressions, and to indulge in the false sense that if I am clever enough I can control my world.

I play computer games when I should be going to the gym, cleaning the iguana cage, working in my yard, or even conversing with my family. ouch!

I hurry to my defense. If I watch a dozen hours of TV in a year, it's unusual. Shopping as a pastime has no appeal to me. My son and I trade games back and forth and talk about them.

I'm a hard core case. I'm such a hard core case that I'm going to shamelessly justify my addiction by reflecting on the theology of a variety of computer games which I enjoy. So there.

A reader has asked what books of poetry or other readings I would recommend to her as she renews her spiritual life. It's a hard question, as I don't know her, and all of this is so very individual. But I so applaud the impulse! It really is good to have texts at hand to mull over, memorize, and work with so that they can work in us.

I'm the sort of reader who has favorite poems more than favorite books of poetry, although I notice that my personal collection has a lot of Mary Oliver, Hafiz, and Wendell Berry. At one point in my life, I had a dozen poems by Edna St. Vincent Milley memorized; they were a lifeline through my late adolescence. I only remember that because as I walked yesterday, dissolved in sadness over the death of a 25 year old from my congregation, the words leaped on to my lips, "I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground." It's the first line of a poem by Millay, which I memorized, I think, when Robert Kennedy was murdered. I've rarely thought of it since, and there it was, ready for me when I needed it. Amazing. (you can find it and other poems by Millay, here)

Now as to sharing my favorite poems, I feel squeamish about copywrite, just enough that I don't want to copy my texts into this blog, but not so squeamish that I won't point my readers to people less squeamish than I who have. So here are 7 of my cherished poems which I found on line:


Phillip Booth's "First Lessons", which you can find here
Carl Sandburg's "Elephants" which you can find here
The Weighing by Jane Hirshfield, here
e.e.Cumming's i thank you god, here
Alistar Reid's Curiosity, here
martha Courtot's Crossing a Creek, here
and a poem about change and transition by Wendell Berry, here

It seems extremely odd to me, but many of these poems are found on UU sermon websites. Are we all thinking alike, we UU ministers? Probably. But is Google noticing my searches and tailoring it's results to me, or does everyone who searches for poetry keep getting UU ministers' sermons?

Enough for now! Prose tomorrow

The American people, born in opposition to absolute power used foolishly, repudiated absolute power used foolishly, in yesterday's election. We're back to a balance of power between the various branches of government, within governing chambers and even within the executive branch, as Republicans make more moderate demands on their president. Our nation has learned in the most embarrassing ways lately that absolute power has a corrupting effect and a detrimental effect on intelligent government. I'm glad that era is over.

Once the majority in the House was established, the world quit paying attention to little New Mexico, which has a hotly contested (less than 1,000 vote margin) race which now, they way, won't be decided for days. But I'm content either way. Our current Rebublican, Heather Wilson, is one of the better Republicans around; honest, helpful, and an independent thinker, something she stressed in her campaign. If she stays in Congress it will be ok.

And I was heartened that the voters of South Dakota, in the privacy of the voting booth, showed that they do understand something of the horror of unwanted pregnancy and moderated their leaders' absolute ban on abortion.

As for those who fought hard against bans on same gender marriage and lost, I salute your work as a foundation laid for the end game of a battle for LGBT rights which is being won in the smoky corners of people's hearts and minds. It takes a long time for the smoke to clear, but clear it finally does.

In my opinion, our nation and our world got a reprieve from unmitigated poor governance. We have an opportunity now to re-direct the nation's energy towards preventing the end of civil life on the planet. The hard work has just begun.

Last Sunday, we did a Loving Kindness meditation from the Buddhist tradition, first spoken and then sung. Several folks have asked about this; especially, if there is a recorded version of the sung meditation.

We did the Meditation from then new blue hymnal, and I don't know that that's been recorded anywhere, but Robert Gass's wonderful chant choir has recorded the Loving Kindness meditation with a different tune on this CD:


While you're exploring, there are several other wonderful CD's several of which are hour long chants from various religious traditions. It's wonderful music to exercise, meditate, or work to.

"I don't know exactly what a prayer is," Mary Oliver wrote, in her poem, "A Summer's Day." It's the one about the grasshopper that ends, "And what do you plan to do with your/one wild and precious life?" UU's like that poem; we like her reminder to appreciate nature, her affimation of our choices, and, frankly, lots of UU's like the fact that Mary didn't, at that time, know exactly what a prayer is. We like to think that our appreciative attentiveness to nature is a kind of prayer...which, of course, it is.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention...

Mary Oliver has moved on in her spiritual journey. Her latest book, 'Thirst', written after the death of her life partner, is a set of poems about grief and grieving, and about finding God. She says this in one poem:

Pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
Into thanks, and a silence in which
Another voice may speak.

If prayer is communication with mystery, then there's a level on which not a one of us "knows" what a prayer is; it's all hints and guesses and an experience so interior that we can't bring it out of ourselves without changing it profoundly. But some folks make more guesses and take more hints than others, and it is clear that Mary Oliver has had a new kind of experience in prayer. I hope she will someday write more directly about it, in the meantime, we've these new, much more specifically theological poems to read.

We UU's have great difficulty with the transition from wordy appreciation into silent listening for a divine voice, still and small or any other way. It's not that UU's don't pray, it's that the default theology around here precludes "another voice" and the folks who are comfortable with that default too often tend to be derisive. And it takes almost no derisiveness to end most UU's willingness to risk attempting to bring their interior spirituality into words. And so the default remains.

We like Mary Oliver, I've heard her claimed as one of us, which she might have once been, but she's clearly now been drawn into a liturgical Christian denomination. May she be blessed in her journey. My thanksgiving this evening for her exquisite and continuing poetics of prayer.

Working this weekend on a sewing project and listening to downloaded radio shows from NPR, particularly Krista Tippet's Speaking of Faith. (you can access these shows here)

The mind-body connection discussed in an interview with a paraplegic yoga teacher, an interview with Karen Armstrong, the topic of Gay Marriage discussed by a liberal and a conservative Christian, and this last; an interview with a Chinese author who survived the cultural revolution and what she calls "The Religion of Mao", on Chinese culture and religion (which has been basically atheist for millennia) in general. It's been a rich morning.

From foot binding to the forced labor camps of the 1970's, this atheistic Chinese culture has certainly had it's terrible moments, I thought, and then it occurred to me that of all the people who have shaken their heads sadly over the harm traditional theism has done in the world in my hearing, I've never once heard anyone shake their head over the harm atheism has done in the world.

So I hereby do it. So sad, all the harm atheism has done in the world. Of course, some of my good friends are Atheists, so not all atheists are prone to misguided activity. But one does have to shake one's head over Communism, doesn't one? I wonder if Communism killed more people than the Crusades?