Those of us who have lost loved ones since the pandemic have mostly been denied rituals of grieving and the comfort of visits with friends and family.

It has been excruciatingly painful to mourn alone, or mostly alone, and to try to move forward without important rites of passage such as memorial services, sitting shiva, opening the house to visitors, and gathering for commitals where we could freely embrace each other.

Please leave a comment below if you would like to attend a Zoom Gathering on All Souls Sunday just for us, for those who are part of this sad collective of those who understand. This will be a spiritual offering not in any particular tradition, affirming of our shared humanity and need for compassion.

I will email you with the Zoom invite. Please leave the name of the beloved person you would like to remember so I can include them in the Litany of Remembrance.

For the ritual, please prepare a candle that you can light and a glass of your favorite libation.

Peace.

A word from a mourner in sequester:

I spent a life-giving two weeks in the desert outside of Tucson studying to become a certified spiritual director at the Hesychia School For Spiritual Direction at the Redemptorist Renewal Center. Spiritual Direction is an ancient practice of companioning another person in their spiritual search and practice. One of the questions we ask a lot in spiritual direction is, “Where is God in all of this?”

Spiritual Direction is a different modality from therapy, which presumes a problem, issue, pathology or struggle to work through. SD is also different from pastoral counseling, which often involves advice-giving and religious guidance. Spiritual Direction is a practice of active listening where the director essentially holds a space for the directee to explore how the spirit is moving in their lives (or maybe not moving — and the directee wants to dedicate time to wonder about that, to question it, or to investigate their beliefs with a supportive person).  A spiritual director will not think you are having a nervous breakdown or psychotic break if you have a mystical experience. They might wind up referring you to a psychiatrist, but they will not react negatively or suspiciously at the outset of a report of hearing voices or seeing a vision or having a prophetic dream or other such phenomena that can trouble the modern soul and society.

For me, the beauty in Spiritual Direction is its foundational claim that God/Spirit/Higher Consciousness is real, that it can be trusted, and that dedicating a portion of our lives to pursuing time with it is a worthy and important endeavor. God is real. There is another dimension to our reality than what we can see and touch, and there’s a lot of meaning to be found there.

There were about twenty-five of us in the program, from all over the country and a wide selection of religious traditions, and we became a tight team. It was the most joyous imaginable thing to spend all day with a group of people who speak fluent Spirit! We were Catholic priests, Protestant pastors and ministers, Jewish chant musicians, lay people, Southern Baptist consultants, Unitarian Universalists, nuns, etc. — and what we shared in common was a belief that creation is holy, that people’s stories are sacred, that those in religious leadership must  protect the community’s spiritual mission from the the capitalist cult of production and busy-ness, and a passionate desire to connect to the divine on a regular basis.

Got a little rainbow for you.

There are lots of different methods of spiritual direction (many directors use the Ignatian Exercises, for example), but  I am being trained in the non-directive, or evocative method.  We started doing practicums in the second week of our intensive, and I found that I loved sitting in silence with my practice directee. I loved the silence so much that I was gently critiqued for leaving the directee feeling a bit vulnerable or emotionally abandoned after they had shared something deep. It’s a hard practice! Where I am tempted to jump in and actively enter into conversation, I know that is not my role. When I settle comfortably into the more contemplative listening mode, I can settle in there too deeply! Earth to Vicki.

But I loved it. The desert filled my well. I hate to be corny with the desert metaphors but having read a lot of the desert mothers and fathers, I was excited about studying spiritual direction in the environment they lived in all those centuries ago when they withdrew from Christian life in the city. I think it’s hilarious that as far back as the 4th century people were already like, “Ech, the Church is so corrupt.”

I mostly expressed my sense of reverence and awe in response to the desert landscape by walking around and saying things like, “Oh my God, what ARE you?” and “Holy s*%$, what even IS this?”

ouch! but yet …flowers

These darlings will literally attack you if you brush up against them. I saw hikers in Joshua Tree National Park yanking the spikes out of their arms and heels with pliers. Blood everywhere. The desert does not mess around!

We stayed in little rooms on a beautiful campus and ate breakfast at 8AM, started sessions at 9:30, worked until noon when we broke for lunch, went back for afternoon session at 1:30, worked until 4:30, and had dinner at 6PM.

We walked to breakfast in this kind of situation…

And did things on our breaks like hike, read or walk the labyrinth:

It’s like something out of Dr. Seuss

Loretta is a wonderful pastor from Wisconsin.

I am not really a group person. I’m a strong extrovert in some ways, but more than one day of structured programs with the same group of people usually chafes at me. The only time I remember loving a residential learning and retreat experience was when I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1993 and spent three weeks studying Emerson, Thoreau and the New England Transcendentalists at Oregon State University with Professor David Robinson.

Usually though, I skip a lot of retreat programming and flee into solitude for my mental health. I find group process to be laborious and over-earnest and then I beat up on myself for being cranky and critical.  My own UUMA (the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association — a professional, dues-paying clergy organization and yes, UUs are the only denomination that has such an organization) has been in a horrific meltdown for a couple of years, culminating in a past 12 months of divisive, vicious, grace-denying, Spirit-ignoring, accusatory, vengeful, schismatic actions and reactions. We are ostensibly a covenantal organization but the covenant has been blown to smithereens and I doubt that there will be genuine collegial trust in my lifetime. I feel exceedingly grateful to have well-established friendships and decades of close working relationships and fellowship with many colleagues, so that I retain affection and loyalty even to those with whom I am in disagreement over the latest contretemps. I also serve a congregation that is stable, has strong and healthy leadership, in a beautiful location within a vibrant wider multifaith community of mutual care, concern and social justice effort.  I have a very good and fulfilling life in ministry.

But there is that thing we do, that rational, smart-sophisticated people thing religious liberals and New Englanders do. And I am GenX, which adds a layer of sardonic detachment to the rational smart reasonable people thing. We don’t go around talking about God. Even with my best friends, even with my parishioners, even with my closest colleagues, we keep our mystical experiences and promptings of the Spirit pretty private. We touch on the subject carefully, most often (I find) out of respect for other people’s time and tolerance for such religiosity.  We are careful not to assume that our ways of expressing how God/Spirit/Deeper Reality/Soul presents itself in our experience will be comprehended or accepted by others, and even those with whom we are in spiritual community.

That’s our way. I remember in Div School people would walk around asking each other about their prayer practice and say things in the hall to each other like “How is your walk with Jesus?” and I would flinch.  It felt so forced, and also invasive, and also like bragging. I wanted to yell out, “Be careful you don’t step on Jesus’ robe and trip him on your walk!” just to let the air out of the piety.

But at Hesychia, we sat in a lot of silence and heard from one another about how confusing, demanding, inspiring, frightening, exciting, upsetting, healing and disruptive the movement of the Spirit is in our lives today, right now, and in our pasts. We told stories about how, when we really attended to our souls, we felt guided, loved, led and supported through the most harrowing of times. We shared tears over recollections of suffering, times where we felt empty or abandoned, when our spiritual practices bore no fruit at all.

We listened to each other without interruption and without judgment. We brought insensitivities or mistakes to each other’s attention with care and respect. We trained and disciplined ourselves not to fix, not to project, not to say “I know just how you feel” or “You know, that reminds me of something…” or “there’s a book you should read.” We waited in silence for more truth to emerge. We protected each other’s privacy and honored each other’s feelings. We showed non-verbally that we cared, that we were paying close attention to every word in our practicum sessions, that we were intensely committed to being a companion in the work of going deeper.

I get to go back for the last two weeks at the end of April. I will write more later about some life insights I recorded while in the desert. They’re not radical or new, but they led me to make some interior shifts that have brought me more peace and equilibrium, and who doesn’t need that?

With love.

This was the February full moon. I was walking to the dining hall for dinner when I saw a group of my sister Hesychasts looking out to the mountains and I gasped. Almost missed it. 

I was up on Montserrat today visiting the beautiful monastery nestled in the crazy mountains of Catalunya about an hour outside of Barcelona.

I girded my loins and took the little cable car/funicular thingy, reasoning that five minutes of potential terror would be easier to endure than twenty minutes  white-knuckling on a train sliding around hairpin turns with a death-drop view. I am known to be a bit dramatic when I get terrified, as in I have actually flattened myself on the floor of vans, trains and airplanes (“Ma’am, PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEAT”) when animal fear overcomes me on dangerous or tubulent trips. Don’t ask me about my drive down coastal highway 101 in Oregon – I was the passenger on the floor hugging the front seat.

Montserrat is truly beautiful and has a museum, a basilica, a hotel, a monastery, a cafeteria and some lodgings for those who live there full time. It is best known as the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat, or The Black Madonna, the patron saint of Catalonia. Many people had obviously come to the shrine for healing, and I lit a candle and prayed for the many people and animals in my life who need healing and compassion.

While I was there moving in and out of crowds of tourists, I heard an English-speaking woman hollering for her daughter. The girl wasn’t very young and she wasn’t lost — this was just someone being loud. I have noticed that Americans are often the loudest in tourist spaces. They are inevitably talking about how many steps they’ve taken that day, what other sights they’ve “done” ( not seen; done, as in “we did Madrid and then we did the Dali museum in Figueros), how irritated they are by the spotty wi-fi connection, or how much things cost. It is always shocking to me when I am in an international setting to realize how aggressive and competitive Americans are by nature.  We take up so much space and air in the room.

So this woman was hollering and another woman in her party kind of shushed her with an embarrassed laugh, and I heard them murmuring and then the loud lady said in an earnest way, “I’m not religious. I didn’t know!”

This is so interesting to me. I’m going to be thinking about this for awhile. My parents raised me to be considerate in all public environments and to keep my voice down (I was frequently admonished to “turn it down, Vicki,” which I actually regard  just as much an attempt to diminish and feminize a naturally strong little girl as it was to instill appropriate social conditioning and good manners), and it must have been my grandparents who taught us church etiquette – hushed voices, standing and kneeling on command, opening and holding a hymnal or prayerbook even if you can’t read from it. We did not make the sign of the cross or genuflect; we drew the line at such expressions of faith, and we did not receive the Eucharist. But we learned how to be a good guest in someone else’s religious home.

So I got to thinking about howtraditional religious spaces contribute to what we might call “cultural literacy” or, flipping the framework around, how they contribute to patriarchal control and/or white supremacy culture.

I conclude that I am grateful for all the spaces that contribute to a shared human experience of REVERENCE. General reverence transcends nation, race, religion, political party, gender and class.  What I would hope for the shouting women is not that she move through the world fearful and embarrassed that she will do the wrong thing at the wrong volume in a sacred space and insult “the faithful,” but that she will develop a happy attentiveness to her environment (especially while traveling) that leads her to naturally adopt a gentler presence when she is in houses of worship or their environs.

When hundreds of us from many lands and many or no faiths gathered at 1PM this afternoon to hear the famous Escolania de Montserrat Boy’s Choir, the monk leading the service was very clear in his gestures, inviting in his words and inclusive in his language. It was clear to me that he knew that it was not just Catholics who were there, and not even a variety of Christians, but a wide variety of human beings who wanted to hear angelic voices in a glorious setting. To me, that is a religious instinct. It isn’t adherence to a doctrine that makes someone religious, it is a hunger to be in relationship with God (by whatever name) and those who also seek to live deeply from the soul.

If I could, I would draw the loud lady aside and say, “Did you make an effort to get up this mountain and visit this lovely place out of respect, interest and perhaps a longing to be touched by something deeper than the daily news and the quotidian concerns of your life? Then you are religious. You are a legitimate part of this community of pilgrims. If you turn down the volume on the voices in your head telling you how religious you aren’t, you may be able to hear your spirit better.”

Ultimately that is what I devoutly wish for us all.

Those little boys sure could sing.

I rode the Eurostar from London to Paris, which I have never done before.  I dragged my suitcases from the Airbnb flat in Kensington to the Gloucester Road Tube station, got on the Piccadily line and thought vicous things about the cows who were sitting right near the door when they could have moved over three seats to the empty ones and let me sit with my big suitcases.

I use “cow” as an insult for all humans who lumber along in life without any awareness of those around them. I am hyper-aware of those around me and apologize profusely when I am selfish or inconsiderate when I should have realized that a simple action could have provided some relief to someone else. It’s not a sacrifice to scoot down a few seats. I hadn’t had any tea or coffee or food and I was cranky. Still, I judge. I most definitely do.  A bit of attentiveness costs nothing.

I got to St. Pancras and stood in line for security and passport control and I found my seat and stowed my luggage and got all settled on the train (window seat) and sat happily contemplating the next leg of my journey. I had a tremendously delicious latte at a stall called Source at St. Pancras, where I also asked for “some bread and cheese” and was sent on my way with an enormous container full of huge slabs of delicious cheddar and something soft and runny and a third kind of slightly tangy frommage and some toasts. A feast! I brought it to my hosts in Paris and we will be eating it all week.

As I sat in comfortable tranquility and watched the landscape whiz by I remembered traveling as a very young woman and becoming aware that my interior monologue was relentlessly frightened and self-critical. These were my first adventures in solitude and I became attuned to myself for the first time in a way that I suppose some adults never actually do. Solitude eventually emerged as my lifestyle, perhaps vocation? — and my internal monologue at this age is mostly concerned with things on the ministerial to-do list, thoughts about life, death and God, a bit of worrying and thinking about friends and loved ones (still a category of more insecurity than most others in my life), dog details and housekeeping. I am not rattled by insecure or self-critical thoughts although I have very little skill in dismantling them, whereas I have developed a fairly high level of skill in interrogating and untangling insecure and other-critical thoughts; particularly in catching myself catastrophizing or projecting.

I am grateful for that. Now, perhaps, I can learn some effective ways to disarm the monster who lives in my head who takes up arms against myself. That monster is so deeply hidden, I only hear rumblings when she is active. She tends not to speak in complete sentences, she just shrieks and throws things and is as irrational as my parents were when they were in their fits of rage or addiction.

But today on the train there was no monster and no anxiety or fear. I am an experienced enough traveler to think a few steps ahead and get where I am going — and by the way, I am not going to Venice as I had planned, because I trust my instincts by now — and I like myself as a traveling companion.

I recognize now that the extreme anxiety I experienced when traveling in my youth actually caused me to dissociate, as happened on the beach in Antigua when I was 18 years old and on a senior trip with three of my girlfriends. The three of them went horseback riding one afternoon and I decided to go to the beach by myself. When I settled myself in the sand, I experienced a jolting sensation of the world rocking and went blind for a few seconds, after which I saw shooting stars everywhere and felt that I no longer existed. It was one of the earliest memories I have of literally losing my mind and it scared me badly. I decided to patiently wait where I was until my senses returned, so there I sat on a beautiful tropical beach, a young, pretty teenager trying to stay sane.

I was probably dehydrated and God knows if we had been eating enough food. We were drinking like fishes, far away from home and on our own. I remember the trip very fondly in general but I have not forgotten the tilting earth and my momentary blindness. Stress, anxiety, a fragile psyche, I was a kid whose father had recently died and who was living alone at home with an actively alcoholic living parent and a kid brother, sitting thousands of miles away under a too-hot sun with only three peers to rely on if my brain didn’t start functioning right again. We got through it. I am still close friends with two of those three peers and I feel protected by their good cheer, their confidence in and love for me now as I did then.

This morning: navigate the Tube. Use the Oyster Card. Find the platform. Get the coffee, bread and cheese. Load the luggage. Take the journey.  Disembark, find the toilet. Learn the toilet cost .70 Euros. Locate the bank machine, obtain the euros. Return to the toilet with the help of a friendly nun. Protect the bags, the passport, the phone from pickpockets. Call an Uber.  Find the Uber, who is parked a block away. Find the apartment code. Load the self and the luggage into the tiny lift. Be received in warm, welcoming arms of friends. Eat dinner, have some wine, load the laundry. Plan tomorrow.

Write. Remember. Thank God for the sound mind and body, for the accumulation of experiences, of years, of journeys.

A thing that I most despise in modern American culture is the total separation of madness and “sanity,” with so-called sanity as the norm and the goal of all mental health modalities. Sanity, like gender, is a construct. What passes for “sanity” in my context seems like half-life to me. That is not to romanticize states of mental distress that cause suffering  – but there’s much more territory to be accepted and explored.

This may be why I continue to defend non-violent religious enthusiasms even while I deplore their ridiculous and harmful theologies: I appreciate a bit of madness! Last night as I walked through Leicester Square I heard an evangelical idiot with a megaphone blathering on and on about Jesus and salvation and I felt the oppression of words, words, words, thank you very much Martin Luther, thank you John Calvin, for this obnoxious verbosity. I would rather the man put down his megaphone and dance his Christian message for us, act out the threat of Hell, become Jesus on the cross dying for our sins — I’d respect him more. It would be more impressive an expression of faith than his loud lecturing and exorting.

(I’m working it out — writing without inner editor and critic that is so tightly uniformed and On The Job in my usual work and especially my sermons.  Don’t expect these sabbatical posts to be terribly linear, consistent or coherent)

More opera tonight! “Orphee” by Philip Glass. “The Mask of Orpheus” the other night was, in the words of one patron I overheard in the lobby, “TOTALLY mental” and it went on for four hours of avante garde bizarrity that I loved and found irritating for the usual reasons of sexism and cliched design. Make it new! Make it new!

Here now at the Wellcome Collection Library, a wonderful resource of medical history that is one of my favorite cultural centers in London. I’ve joined the library and am happily nestled among the stacks of loads of books on the plague. Just now taking notes on Death, Reburial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity by Jon Davies and Ritual Texts For The Afterlife : Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston.

There is so much water imagery in the Orpheus art I’m seeing, I want to know what is in the original Greek material. I always thought Orpheus was a poet, musician, lyre-playing guy. I associate his story with the earth, and perhaps the element of air (Apollo, stringed instrument, etc). Whence all this water?

Off to find some dinner and then to the theatre. I need to figure out how to upload photos to this little Chromebook.

Cheers.

I posted this earlier today on my Facebook page:

Hi, friends. Today is the first day of my sabbatical. I am tying up loose ends and packing for my flight to London this evening. I am going to jump into Europe in full soul mode, holding nothing back from myself that might interfere with my ability to be in the right faithful place as a minister, as is my usual discipline. This means that I can go down, down, down into the places that are too intense, bloody, disturbing to share from the pulpit but that my psyche and my God beckon me to explore. I have always been an Underworld Girl – that’s why I did my master’s thesis on Persephone. I love my resurrected Jesus but I don’t live in the resurrection so much as I live in the laughing underbelly of irreverence, dirt and honesty. I need to be able to express both utter contempt and worshipful devotion and I intend to seek out beauty all the way. Most of all, I have to shake American flat-earth self-improvement, achievement and happiness off of me like the cheap garments they are. I’m going forth in some kind of pelt loaned to me by a creature that lived fully alive and often frightened, that ran wild and mated and ate and killed and then was killed by another animal, or the weather, or some other great force that it knew in its bones and respected.

I’m leaving America for a bit. Going to Europe, where the reality of war and genocide and battles and displacement and blood feuds and cultural theft and slavery and racial hatred is integrated with the general understanding of history. Going places where depravity, immorality and corruption is recognized as part of the story of the city, the town, the opera house, the art work. Free from the tyranny of American denial, American smiley faces, American avoidance, American “I don’t see color” and “that was a long time ago” and “have you tried essential oils” and “happiness is a CHOICE.”

I removed my stole at the end of the church service on Sunday, folded it carefully and placed it on the altar table.

I am so grateful to be relieved of the burden and the honor of having to have something to say to the congregation for six months. What I have to say in the meantime is for me, because I have to get it out, and perhaps for you, if it speaks also to your soul.

And I'd add for myself that it isn't just the sermon - it's the entire worship service (in the Unitarian Universalist tradition we use readings from a variety of sources + have neither prayerbook nor lectionary, so a LOT of the elements are crafted fresh each week)

My Congressman @sethmoulton at our packed local #Lights4Liberty vigil at First Church Unitarian Universalist in Salem, MA. #UUApic.twitter.com/L9LJlF0uaC

Every Unitarian Universalist minister who follows you is laughing right now. We’ve done it all (but got paid, so...)

It’s 4 o’clock in the morning and the birds sound beautiful but I feel wretched. I am writing through the pain and waiting for the Icy-Hot and the Topricin and the ibuprofen to kick in. The CBD oil that I have been using to manage this muscle pain for the past several weeks has ceased to be effective.

I send some writing out into the internet most days on Facebook but this post is going to be too long for that format because, as I said, I’m writing through the pain and I’ll be at this keyboard until it lets up and I can sleep.

What I think I have is simple muscular pain. I know my body pretty well at the age of 53, and what I know about it is that I localize tension in one section of it (lower back! feet! now my jaw!) for a season and then pain in that location resolves and moves somewhere else. Since June, and in conjunction with playing a very bizarre character in Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Assassins,” I have had deep aching in my legs and thighs. That’s where Sara Jane Moore lived in me, I suppose, and it’s where I stored all of the new stage fright that has plagued me throughout this production. I’ve been performing since I was six years old and I never imagined that I would be standing in the wings of a theatre at this level of experience psyching myself up for my entrance while a jittery part of my mind just one level below keenest consciousness relentlessly murmurs (but not unkindly), “You’re going to fuck this up.  Just think about all the ways you could fuck this up!”

(If you have played Sara Jane, can we have a drink and vent about the RIDICULOUS number of complicated props she has to handle with split-second timing? The gun, the fried chicken, the joint, the lipstick, the dog, the bullets, the insane complexity of props in her verse of “The Gun Song?”)

While I was playing Ruth in “The Pirates of Penzance,” I got headaches so bad that pressure applied to a certain spot in my neck made me vomit (that wasn’t good for my voice but it did relieve the headache pain). When I played Emma Goldman, my ankles and feet froze into knots so debilitating I had to vist the chiropractor weekly so I could continue to perform.  During one cold Minnesota winter when I was in my mid-20’s, my feet cramped up so badly I couldn’t walk down a short flight of stairs until I had been awake for at least a half an hour. Since the only bathroom in the house was on the ground floor, this made for humiliating predicaments.

My body often acts out at the conclusion or during the aftermath of a big creative project or especially demanding and intense season of ministry. When I much more actively and perilously battled anxiety and panic disorder around ten years ago (I consider myself to be recovered, or perhaps recovering), my panic attacks would come in the days after I thought I was in the clear for breaking down from stress.

It was much the same when I was growing up: I inevitably caught a cold, or the flu or once a serious case of mononucleosis (leading to hepatitis) after closing one of the many musicals I performed in in addition to schoolwork and after-school jobs. I understand and accept by now that I am not a marathoner in this life but a sprinter, putting out intense bursts of energy and focus and then collapsing at the finish line while others keep trotting along in enormous, companionable phalanxes, waking early, setting out and staying hydrated throughout the day as they maintain a steady pace and retire at a reasonable hour when the sun sets.

It seems to me lately that social media and the 24-hour news cycle have thrown the sprinters and marathoners into a big ramshackle farmhouse together where we can keep each other up far too late into the night and wake each other up far too early in the morning conversing, reacting, agitating and goading.  I think sprinters may adjust to the relentlessnes  a bit more easily given our natural rhythms of intense engagement and withdrawal, but the farmhouse is just as often the set of a horror movie as it is a party.

So I’m returning to a longer-form communique at 4:51 this morning to slow things down a bit, to avoid being the wee hour *ping* on someone’s phone who follows my Facebook page, and to see how I feel about engaging in this slightly less ephemeral fashion than what is possible in Mark ZuckerbergLand. There are no ads here. The eye isn’t drawn to a thousand side comments. Maybe it’s a little more boring and a bit more peaceful.

I have heard that 3AM is the Mystic’s Hour, when the veil between the realms is most gossamer and those who are prone to commune with the gods are most likely to do so. I have very dear friends who are in the Iona Community in Scotland right now and I enjoy imagining them starting their day with a late breakfast at this hour.  Bangers and mash? Haggis? I just hope the coffee is good. I look forward to hearing whether the veil between the worlds at Iona is as permeable as reported.

Mystical union aside, three and four o’clock in the morning are also existential crisis hours when many who keep vigil over sick bodies, agitated minds, crumbling relationships and frightening life circumstances feel most alone and desperate.  I hope it comforts you, as it comforts me, to know that monastic communities all over the globe are keeping vigil with you and praying for your well-being and spiritual safety. You aren’t the only one awake.

I have now been writing to you for an hour, during which I have also tended to the dog and cat who awakened to prowl and sniff around me in concern. I have had  a blueberry smoothie. The neighborhood is waking up and the ibuprofen has kicked in. I no longer entertain myself with dire imaginings about what terminal disease might be causing my muscle pain (I am certain that it’s the terminal disease called life). My day ahead involves attending a legal hearing as an advocate, having a conversation with my outgoing board chair, attending a Zoom call about local immigrant advocacy and doing some funeral preparation.  A demanding day, so I am going back to bed.

Here’s a little beauty from the Universalist Book of Prayer, 1895:

O Thou from whose fatherly hand sleep falleth nightly on the eyelids of man, whereby his body forgetteth its toil and his soul its sorrow; Teach us ever to receive it with grateful hearts, and grant that lying down this night with our souls at peace, and fearing no harm which man can do unto us, we may sleep secure in the guardianship of thy love. Amen. 

Maybe you're feeling like you have the capacity to help #immigrants at the border or where you are. If so, check out this really great resource from the #UnitarianUniversalist College of Social Justice: https://uucsj.org/volunteer/ 

Unitarian Universalist triumphalism is particularly appalling right now because our own house is a disaster. “Please abandon one painful religious home for one that will refuse to feed you spiritually because it’s full of wounded former Christians” is a big huge YIKES #UMCGC

Yes, but also #UnitarianUniversalist as we share the same Puritan ancestry in New England.

I mean, I'm a Unitarian Universalist and this is not part of our culture but my first several Bibles had those ultra thin pages and I was so scared I'd rip one with my pencil! It felt like it would be sacreligious.

Here is a piece I wrote abou the poetry of Mary Oliver in Unitarian Universalist liturgy: http://www.peacebang.com/2019/01/26/the-poetry-of-mary-oliver-in-unitarian-universalist-liturgy/ … #UU #MaryOliver #worship

Sounds like we've got a Unitarian Universalist on this thread! #FirstPrinciple

I can't believe I haven't been following Unitarian Universalist Massachusetts Action Network on Twitter before now. That is a BIG oops. @UUMassAction is great and please don't feel like you have to be a UU to be part of their activism.

I was raised in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. The difference between the UU adults and my own Orthodox grandparents, whose theology was very informed by the threat of hell, was profound. I wanted to have the open, can-do, dignified manner of the UUs.

So thanks for following me! You'll get equal measures ranting, cute animal videos, awards shows, theatre stuff, RTs of interesting tidbits (doesn't always imply endorsement) and beagles. I am a Witchy Christian, denominational affiliation Unitarian Universalist.

YAY let’s play!!

What happened is that when you RT instead of creating a fresh game you perpetuate an endless scroll of random mentions for everyone in my roster— and it’s super irritating to them. It’s bad Twitter practice. I’m going to delete mine and I hope you will too.

Oh Peter, now the wonderful women I follow are going to have endless mentions from UUs doing this. Duuuuuuude.

I seem to have had my first semi-viral Tweet with a response to the wonderful funny lady Leslie Jones, who is one of my Twitter (s)heroes after dealing with a universe of unbelievable hatred and abuse for daring to be a black woman starring in a remake of “Ghostbusters.” The spewing to which she was subjected was incredibly disturbing, and she left Twitter for a time. She’s back — she didn’t owe anyone that, but I’m glad she returned — and recently posted  a gym selfie with the caption,

‘Tis the season for search! And since I am not in search, haven’t been for five years and do not intend to be for the forseeable future, let me spill some tea for those of you dedicated laypeople who are serving on your congregation’s search committees.

I am going to be blunt because that’s my style and because we are in a religious tradition that practices WASP emotional culture, which means that we often communicate in vague or excessively “nice” terms unless we’re outright arguing about something.  It is a communication style that privileges the highly emotionally controlled  and poker faced, and creates subtle power jousting in place of open and forthright conversation. I have always hated it (see Waking Up White By Debby Irving for an engaging personal analysis of white New England emotional culture).

If you don’t know what your team or your congregation’s emotional culture is or how it is informed by your congregation’s ethnic, racial, economic, geographic and historical context, I highly recommend working with Essential Partners, whose Executive Director, the Rev. Parisa Parsa is a UU minister and fantastic facilitator.

When it comes to ministerial search, UUs are pretty thoroughly grounded in 19th century mentality and archetypal consciousness. I know this because I have been studying the evolution of American liberal religious clergy archetype for decades (with particular focus on New England Congregationalist traditions, of which we are part) and I can confidently say that while UUs are catching up to the 21st century in some ways, we are very far behind that in terms of ministerial search and call: both the process and the way we evaluate ministers. We know intellectually that ministers have a very different job now than they did at the end of the 19th century, but our hearts and imaginations are still attached to the expectations of yesteryear.

We want a scholar who can wax eloquent on literature, the Bible, theology, and the latest Bill McKibbon piece. We want a warm pastor who knows everyone and makes a lot of personal visits (even though people are not home these days and if they are, an unscheduled guest is an unwelcome intrusion). We want our minister to attend all leadership meetings, all programs, all social justice actions, community interfaith organizations, and local events we’d like to see them at. We want a fabulous preacher and a creative liturgist. We want a whizbang financial expert and fundraiser. We want someone who is strong but not so strong that they can’t be controlled or managed by disapproval, we want someone visionary but not so much that they move us beyond our comfort zone, someone challenging but not too demanding, and someone spiritual but not too religious.

We want someone who is available 24/7 to respond to “my” e-mails but who faithfully observes their day off to model healthy self-care. Winking face emoji here.

The question, “How many evenings a week do you feel it is wise and fair to expect a minister to be out doing church business, and what do you consider church business” should be at the top of your interview questions. It will generate a crucial conversation, I promise you. I also promise you that this question will not have been part of the congregation’s survey, which asks the congregation what they want, and says not a word about what they intend to do to manage their own expectations or to contribute to the next minister’s effectiveness. Here’s a fun fact: when I was ordained in 1997, we got in touch with people in person and on the phone. Very occasionally, paper note or letter. Today, I respond to messages by phone on three phone lines and voice mail accounts, by e-mail, text message and Facebook messenger. Sometimes by letter. The resulting stress around keeping communications organized is profound and unprecedented in history.

Search Committees and church leaders need to know that ministry has changed radically since Ferguson for most Unitarian Universalist ministers. Please make room to have that conversation. Many of us have been engaged in anti-racism and social justice work and learning for a long time, but community organizing and engagement has become exponentially more intense and demanding since the election of Trump.

If I may make a side rant (and I am going to) I would opine that the Congregational Survey that accompanies the great Ministerial Search is actually a fairly appalling document, as it encourage individualistic, consumeristic notions about what a ministerial search really is and what it should accomplish. It leads each individual person who fills out the survey into a spirit of entitlement: “What would YOU like? What do YOU want to see?” and should be jettisoned in favor of congregational discernment led by leaders or facilitators over a series of community meetings so as to determine the congregation’s vision of ministry, mission and priorities. The outcomes and consensus from these meetings should be shared with the candidates, who then have a far more accurate sense of the job they’d be signing on to do than is provided by a collection of personal, individual opinions.

All that said, my love and respect and gratitude go out to you, Search Committee members! I am of the opinion that you are working way too hard and for far too long on finding your next minister, and that upsets me for you. You are sacrificing endless nights and weekends to a ridiculously overwrought and prolonged process that was designed during an era when ministerial tenures were far longer than they are today, when the church enjoyed a place of prominence in society that it no longer has, and when reasonable expectations for volunteer engagement were completely different than they are now.

I am not sure what the average tenure is for Unitarian Universalist parish ministry but I believe it’s around six to eight years. This means that congregations are responsible around every five or so years for recruiting a Search Committee that will labor for one to two years to settle a minister who serves for only three or four times that long. Something’s gotta give, and I am looking forward to seeing what UUA Settlement Director, the Rev. Keith Kron, and others, figure out.

Dear Search Committees, the internet has changed everything about the way we do search. Much of it is positive development, allowing ministers and lay people to know more about each other, to explore the wider communities each one comes from, and to share materials extremely easily. I think this is a wonderful thing, and I remember with gratitude and fondness how often the Search Committee Chair of my current congregation and I checked in about small details relating to pre-candidating and also larger questions about each other. I was able to ask her questions for the entire committee that she was able to respond to within 24 hours. This rapidity was a help in our discernment process.

And yet the internet has also opened the door to many legitimate questions regarding public ministry, use of social media and published materials on websites. Please leave room in your interview process to explore these topics. Some questions you might consider are:

How do you use social media in your ministry, if at all?

Is there anything about you or by you floating around the internet that you think we should know about?

How do you use the various social media platforms differently (e-mail, blogging, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.), and how do you anticipate using them in your role as the minister of our congregation? How will that be different from your personal use or independent on-line ministry?

Search Committee, you should ask your prospects about their administrative skills and expectations. Will they be expected to keep posted office hours in the church building? Why? Will they be chief of staff or a “kind of” supervisor without the authority to hire and fire employees? Who is currently on the staff, how long have they been there, and are they regularly evaluated? By whom and using what tools?

Staff administration is one of the areas that Search Committees tend not to think about much at all, as it is one of the least known and understood aspects of professional ministry. Congregational surveys generally do not address it, but it is one of the areas of church life that can blow up the fastest and lead to protracted conflict, congregational fracturing and resignation. Ministerial candidates should ask about the staff: who are they, are they members of the church, do they have fan clubs or fiefdoms, are there conflicts with the minister in the past that the candidate should know about.

Dear Search Committee, please do not obsess or experience undue anxiety about the theological orientation of your candidate. If they are grounded in Unitarian Universalist religious life and have served successfully as parish ministers, they know how to minister to a theologically pluralistic congregation. Focus not so much on theology but on talent, excellence of communication skills, strength in writing and delivery, and relationality. Look for depth. Look for someone who is able to speak in passionate, coherent, theologically grounded terms about our movement, the purpose of the church in society at this moment in history and in your local context. Ministers are living beings just as we serve a living tradition. If you parse their old sermons for evidence that they’re “too Christian” or “too humanist” or “too mystical” for your congregation (which probably means for you, personally, be honest), you are doing your search process a disservice. Preachers preach to a specific congregation, not for the general public.  The minister’s former congregation is not yours; the people and the pastoral relationships will be different in every UU setting. It is a general feature of good Unitarian Universalist ministers to find language that ministers to a variety of communities without sacrificing their own integrity.

Dear Search Committee, a minister cannot “grow your congregation.” Only the congregation can do that. If you pose that question to your candidate, I hope the candidate asks you the same question: what is the congregation doing to share its ministry outside its walls, what is the congregation doing within the church to promote fellowship, meeting new people, integrating them into the life of the congregation, creating meaningful relationships, sharing spiritual growth? Some of this happens through programming and through the work of professionals: if I was in search I would want to hear about how, but mostly I would want to hear an honest assessment of the lay people’s ethos of hospitality and evangelism. If it’s lacking, that’s okay. It’s important to know. It’s not unusual and it’s not a crime. But it’s essential that all who love the Church to know that its health and vibrancy and growth is the work of ALL who minister — and that’s everyone, not just the ordained. A new minister should be someone you feel can articulate this in a life-giving and inspirational way, not do it for the church.

Now, I can say this because I serve a blessedly well-endowed congregation and am very well compensated: Unitarian Universalists are notoriously cheap. Despite the Rev. Ralph Mero’s and other concerned advocates for clergy financial stability hard work for many years to address the issue of fair compensation for religious professionals in our Assocation (and that includes religious educators, church staff and musicians), Unitarian Universalists are still too often trying to save a buck to keep their churches open.

This is misguided and unethical. Let me speak some truth to you about the work of ministry: there is no such thing as “2/3” or “3/4 time” ministry. It is a mythical beast, somewhat akin to the Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster. Ministry means being available when people need you, and it is therefore impossible to carve out a week with clearly delineated time off and time on.

For example, Fridays are my day off. Is this to mean that I am to ignore all of the responses to phone calls or emails that I sent out on Wednesday that arrive in my inbox on Friday? Of course it can’t mean that, unless I am to expect our church staff and everyone else to cool their heels while I ignore everything for a day. What about the person who is in pain and reaches out? I respond. What about the ministry team that meets on Fridays and needs the minister to attend and support them? Because I am employed full time, with full benefits, vacation time, and an extremely supportive and talented staff, I can swap days off to meet the needs of the congregation and my own schedule. A part time minister has a much harder time accomplishing this, and winds up giving many extra hours of unpaid labor.

I came out of seminary with $70,000 of debt (and that was just for my M.Div.). This is not unusual. The Unitarian Universalist ministerial formation process is extremely expensive and the subsequent paychecks generally not stupendous. Please work faithfully with your candidates to find a fair wage and clear expectations for their work week and year.

If your congregation cannot afford full-time ministry, that is nothing to be ashamed of. It merely means that the laity must be engaged and clear about the scope of their own and the minister’s roles and responsibilites. It means that you must set aside a little bit of extra time on a regular basis to check in with your part time minister about whether or not the “part time” status is real and true, or if they are finding that the work of the church is seeping into their every day in ways that seem to demand response and involvement.

I think that is enough for now, dear Search Committee member and ministers in search. There is much more to say but this will do for a part one of what may become a longer series.

Good luck! Blessings on your work and your discernment!

“The Demanding Tree” by the Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein, revised Earth Day 2016

Once there was a tree.  And she loved a little boy.

And every day the boy would come, and he would gather her leaves

and make them into crowns and play king of the forest.

And the tree loved the little boy, but the tree was a bit irritated.  “King of the forest, my trunk,” she thought. “Wherever did those human beings get such an attitude problem?”

Time went by, and the boy grew older, and the tree was often alone, which was nice and quiet, but she missed the boy.

Then one day the boy came to the tree and the tree called out to him, “Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat my apples and play in my shade and be happy.”

“I am too big to climb and play,” said the boy.  I want to buy things and have fun.  I want some money.  Can you give me some money?”

 “No chance,” said the tree.  “I have only leaves and apples.  Why don’t you go get a job if money’s so important to you? I hear that the Nature Conservancy is looking for clerical staff.  Why don’t you apply?”

And so the boy applied for the job and sent many e-mails and processed many donations to the Nature Conservancy, and the tree was happy.

But the boy stayed away for a long time, and the tree was sad.

And then one day the boy came back and the tree shook with joy and she said, “What took you so long? You don’t call, you don’t write, how’s the job? And tell me, who do you think would really be better for the environment, Bernie or Jill?”

“I am too busy to talk politics with you, Tree” said the boy.  “I want a house to keep me warm. I want a wife and I want children, so I need a house.  Can you give me a house?”

“Of course I can’t give you a house,” replied the tree.  “The forest is my house.  But you’re certainly welcome to pitch a tent on the ground here, and we’ll have a great time.”

“Thanks but no thanks, Tree,” said the boy.  “Maybe I’ll start an intentional community with some of my friends.”

“That’s the ticket,” cheered the tree.  “You Americans already have far too many houses. Why build another?”

So the boy went off to start a co-op with a group of spiritually -centered progressive vegans who embraced voluntary simplicity.

And the tree was happy.

But the boy stayed away a very long time, and when he came back the tree was so happy she waved her branches excitedly.  “Well would you look what the cat dragged in!! Look at you, Boy! Good Lord, you look awful.  You humans just don’t age as well as we trees do, do you, Boy?”

“You’ve got that right, dear Tree,” replied the boy.  “I wish I could stay and shoot the breeze with you, but I am too old and sad.  I want a boat that will take me far away from here.  Can you give me a boat?”

“Whoa,” said the tree. “I don’t like the way you’re looking at my trunk there, pal.  You want to get far away from here? You’ve got legs.  Walk.   And on the way, why don’t you take some of these seeds and plant some more trees? Make like Johnny Appleseed.  It’ll do us all good.”

So the boy embraced the tree, took the seeds and started on his journey.

And the tree was happy.  Really.

After a long, long time, the boy came back again.

“I’m sorry, Boy,” said the tree.  “You have no more teeth to sink into my apples.

You’re too fragile to swing in my branches.

Your friends and your intentional community are long gone,

and your old legs can’t take you around as they used to.

We both know that you are at the end of your story, and that I will long outlast you.

I just wish that I could give you something to comfort you. . . .”

“I don’t need very much,” said the boy.  “Just a quiet place to swing and rest.”

“Well,” said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could. “Well, this old tree is good for swinging and resting!Come, Boy, tie your hammock on this branch over here …and on this branch way over here.  Come, Boy, swing from my arms, and rest.”

And the boy did.

And the tree was very happy.

[This piece began as a FaceBook post the day of the Santa Barbara rampage. I received so much encouragement by family, friends and colleagues to share it with a wider readership , I decided to do so.  – VW]

Another day, another rape, kidnapping, murder, harassment, abuse of women. Today it’s a raging, rejected 22-year old privileged boy named Elliot Rodger who killed his roommates then drove around shooting sorority women before he killed himself with legally purchased guns registered to his name.

As I expected, women’s attempts to frame this as misogynist extremism have been resisted: comment threads on the internet show that Americans prefer to file this crime under mental illness with a side order of gun control. Whatever any one of us personally decides it is, Rodger’s attack has revealed the PUA and MRA subculture and generated an outpouring of women speaking their truth about the misogynist culture we live in now. I have long privately thought of it as “the new misogyny,” a violent, public, technologically sophisticated, internet- facilitated, desperate patriarchal reinforcement that women are nothing greater than the sum of our body parts. As a scholar of the medieval witch craze in Europe, I see many parallels between the late medieval period and ours in terms of training women, through public shaming, torture and violence, to comply with male expectations and desires.

The term “rape culture,” which has been in use for some time among younger feminists – particularly in the context of the sexual entitlement and sexual violence-soaked climate of American college campuses — makes many people uncomfortable. But it is a term that I want to use here in order to stand in solidarity with the younger and more outspoken generation that coined it, and in order to support the work of confronting the sick sexual culture in which Elliot Rodger’s mental illness progressed. Rodger left a manifesto that makes it absolutely clear that his actions were developed, pre-meditated and carried out because women he lusted after did not respond to him. For this “crime,” he murdered them.

This murder triggered me and millions of other women who live daily with same kind of violence-tinged sexual entitlement Elliot Rodger took to a horrific extreme by turning a gun on young women who represented all those who denied him their bodies. I have decided to speak some of my truth about how I experience rape culture in my own life as a single, middle-aged woman.

I have been on hundreds of dates over the decades, had profiles on multiple dating sites over the years, had short romances and long term relationships, been engaged once, lived with male partners twice.  I have many loving and wonderful men of diverse sexual orientations in my life as best friends and beloved mentors. I am a minister and have preached, taught and lived out the integration of sexuality and spirituality. I work full-time in a church setting: an environment populated by good men who are self-aware, respectful, intelligent and dismayed by sexism and misogyny, in a denomination that has worked very hard to address sexual misconduct, sexism and homophobia within its own communities and in society.

I am a strong feminist who loves men and cares deeply about boys. But I notice that my respect and trust in men in what we might call “the dating scene” has plummeted over the past five to ten years as I have been constantly subject to the simmering rage of male frustration in an age of unprecedented female independence and choice.

It used to be only the men my friends and I referred to as “creeps and psychos” who revealed how much they hate independent, self-confident women who aren’t interested in them. Now it’s almost normative male behavior. In writing this, I am stepping out from my location as a religious leader and speaking as a woman. Before I am anything else in life, I am a woman. To paraphrase a popular Twitter meme, I am someone‘s daughter, niece, sister, best friend, teacher, minister.   The Twitter conversation under #YesAllWomen has been another factor in my decision to publish this post.

I attended college in the 1980’s in a sexist environment where I sensed I was being trained for social submission to men. Boys dominated every class and expected girls to stand back academically. Professors silently tolerated or enabled this dynamic (except for women’s studies classes which were new and homophobically derided as “angry lesbian class”).  Out of the classroom, the Greek system prevailed and if you weren’t in one of the “hot” sororities, you were invisible. I had a boyfriend in college and for a long time afterward, but chose not to marry.  I do not regret not marrying, but always imagined that dating, establishing relationships and concluding them in a mutually caring, mature and amicable way with grown men would be a reasonable expectation for my adult life.

For a time that seemed to be possible. But I noticed a disturbing cultural shift about a decade ago that made me wonder if it was just me who felt like the whole world had become a meat market for single heterosexuals. Now I know it wasn’t just me.

The meat market metaphor works like this: if a man thinks a woman (meat) is juicy and delectable, he thinks he should be able to have it. If a man thinks the meat isn’t “choice,” he thinks it should be tossed in the garbage, discarded as useless and even offensive. The meat that does not whet his appetite is named as disgusting and reduced to its anatomical parts.

This combination of entitlement and hostility is what I see, observe and experience on a regular basis, despite the fact that I’m 48 (“hey, wow, you don’t look that old!”), not seeking male approval, accomplished, socially adept and considerate.  It’s the weirdest sensation, getting caught in the meat market display case so often even though I disengaged from the “will he like me?” dance years ago and hardly ever date anymore. I feel that in the absence of dance partners for the Waltz of Male Approval, heterosexual men are doing a bizarre frug around me and many other straight women who, although they might like to be in a happy relationship, are just as happy and complete without one.

Living in rape culture today means that when I meet a heterosexual man, sexual come-ons and innuendo happen immediately: not neutral witty banter or intellectual exchange, as used to happen.  Earlier in my dating life, my casual flirting was not assumed to be a serious sexual overture. Men with decent social skills were able to engage in friendly exchanges without veering immediately into crass objectification and sexual presumption.  Today, sex leads. If it isn’t mentioned almost right away, it is present in the conversation like a fog. This isn’t the same fog that I maneuvered as an attractive teenager in an era where boys begged and girls set the boundaries and it all seemed in good, (mostly) mutually respectful fun. This fog is angry and wears an impatient smile.

I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable to read this. I hate having to constantly experience it. Rape culture means that before I can make a friend, before I can enjoy companionship for itself, before I can be known or know someone, I am expected to enter into negotiations about sex. If I register my disapproval or irritation, I am dismissed, rejected or insulted. I must be frigid or a prude. I am accused of “wearing my vestments.” I am told that I have body issues and need to be liberated (I may have mentioned that I’m fat, which comes with its own special subset of misogyny and assumptions that I’m desperate and self-hating).

That’s nonsense. I know who I am. And I’m too mature and experienced to buy into that kind of manipulation. I worry a lot about younger, less confident women’s ability to do the same. The level of entitlement and rage and emotional violence out there is intense. Something has shifted, and it’s awful.

Rape culture says that the assumption that the primary function of heterosexual women is to crave sexual attention and approval from  men, and to be shamed, insulted or assaulted when they reject that function. I have been called a “fat b—-” so many times for politely refusing sexual advances, I couldn’t begin to estimate the actual number.

Sexual entitlement, the foundation of rape culture, takes many non-physical forms: for instance, a man dominating conversation on a first date, bombarding me with unwelcome information about himself — including detailed sexual fantasies — and then quickly becoming hostile and intimidating when I excuse myself from the date or try to end the phone call or e-mail exchanges. After years of being willing to tolerate narcissistic monologues that substitute for conversation, I now wait for a reasonable opportunity to excuse myself and say goodbye.  I worry these days that a guy is going to follow me to the parking lot and gun me down.

How is this still happening in a country like America, where women comprise the majority of college students and make up half the work force? To what might we credit or blame this degradation of basic manners and social skills among a fairly wide demographic of heterosexual men? Blame the internet? I don’t know, but even educated, cultured men seem to have lost the art of conversation.  This goes far beyond mere social ineptitude, as I have noticed that the monologues and recitations I have been subjected to on dates began, around ten years ago, to function among single men as a kind of warm-up to sexual aggression. In rape culture, heterosexual men interpret polite listening as a sign of interest and sexual attraction. I used to extend invitations to men to spend time together, but I rarely do so any longer, as such invitations are inevitably assumed to be sexual in nature. My single male friends these days are gay, or are ministerial colleagues (or both). I am trying to think of the last time I made a new single, heterosexual male friend. Not one comes to mind.

Rape culture plays out for me the bitter accusations that I’m puritanical, a closeted lesbian, or a “judgmental b—-” (often expressed in more crass language) for objecting to married or partnered men pursuing me. The invitation to join a man in lying and adultery does not just happen on-line. It happens at conferences, parties, waiting outside for tables at a restaurant, at Fenway Park, or anywhere else I have interacted in a friendly way with heterosexual men who identify me as someone they think it would be fun to have recreational sex with. The squealing 180 degree male spin-out from smiling and flirtatious to vicious and threatening has trained me and many other women not to stand up for ourselves, lest we risk violent attacks or stalking on-line or in person.

Rape culture plays out in the form of dozens of text messages single men have sent me after one pleasant and polite conversation that concluded with them asking for my number. The text messages are not considerate or even coherent — they often arrive in the wee hours of the morning, and only include generic phrases like “How r u?” or “You around?” even though I have never given any indication that I would welcome such inane intrusions. Some might chalk this text-pestering up to social awkwardness, but it isn’t just that. Because the texts inevitably degenerate into crass objectification or come-ons, they are ultimately expressions of misogyny. Techno-lechery is a form of micro-aggression millions of women have to contend with daily: it’s not just the cute young gals who suffer it.

By the way, as any woman will tell you, the advice about cyber-stalking is this: “Ignore him. Don’t mention his name or respond to him, as it will only provoke him.” This is the same advice we are given about being harassed on the street. Don’t provoke men. Don’t make eye contact. Pretend you don’t hear the vile remarks about your body, your personhood. Parishioners and friends with teenaged and adult daughters have asked my advice on how to do better by our next generation. I have a few thoughts: we all need to stop telling enraged women that their anger is inappropriate and unattractive.  We must make room for it, and for truth. We must stop telling girls to behave themselves and to protect and excuse men.  We have to stop romanticizing abusive relationships in music and film (“Twilight,” anyone?) and encourage and equip our daughters to question the message of the books, films and TV shows they consume.

What is to blame for the rise in hostility against women, the “new misogyny” that we call rape culture? I don’t know. But Anthony Wiener, Bill Clinton, hip hop and rap artists, reality TV, slut-shaming, blaming the victim, “boys will be boys,” bitches and hos, wilding, the United States military’s treatment of women in the armed forces, sexting, Snapchat, all the “CSI: Murdered Prostitute/Rape Du Jour” episodes that pass for entertainment… women doing fine on their own and not needing to partner with men for economic security, child-rearing or social acceptance? It all factors in to rage and disrespect and male self-hatred that gets projected onto women.

And of course there’s pornography.

No one wants to talk about the fact that many educated, accomplished, socially adept American men now consume a huge amount of pornography casually and constantly as an accepted daily leisure activity. I do not protest pornography in and of itself, but am waiting patiently for the day when a woman can acknowledge that a steady diet of pornography desensitizes and negatively influences many of its consumers without being accused of being Andrea Dworkin.

Aside from porn, men in our culture are constantly being fed images and messages that women’s bodies exist to please and accommodate or entertain them, and that the human beings who live inside these bodies are a boring afterthought to the consideration of whether or not she will fulfill his fantasy for a relationship, or sex, or both. I was shocked to hear the celebrated movie “Her” (directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johannsson) described as a poignant parable of love and loneliness. I thought it was a wickedly funny and sad satire on male fantasy: if man can design a sexy operating system that wants to have sex him, what use will he have for messy, frizzy-haired, ordinary human women?

Likewise, the manic pixie dreamgirl fantasy, “Ruby Sparks” fancied itself a kind of Pygmalian tale with the Eliza character earning her independence from her creator at the end, except for the horrifying conclusion, which showed Ruby “meeting cute” with her author/creator and starting the romance again, ostensibly on her terms. No one who critiqued the film thought to consider that for Ruby, there could be no free will, as she was literally created by the man she “happened” to fall in love with at the movie’s end. I thought the message was chilling; not at all a feminist retrieval of the Pygmalion story. The fact that every detail of Ruby Spark’s mind and imagination were created and therefore colonized by the protagonist of the story (played by Paul Dano) seems to me an expression of the young, female screenwriter, Zoe Kazan’s, internalized misogyny.

A few days ago in Southern California, another group of young women were killed for the crime of being out of the sexual reach and social control of a frustrated man. I believe that this murderer’s obsession and mental illness flourished in our culture for legitimate and obvious reasons, and it is time for a confrontation of those reasons by all of us. I am tired of the open season on women. It’s not some other culture’s problem. It is not just a problem for young women. It’s a moral sickness in our culture and we need to fix it.

When I have tried to talk about the development of rape culture in our society as I have observed it get worse over the past decades, men and women try to turn the conversation personal. I’m just not doing the right things to meet “nice guys.” I should get off Match.com or OKCupid, because that’s where the creeps are (as if on-line dating wasn’t thoroughly mainstream by now).  If I have a profile on a dating site, maybe I said something that gave men the “wrong idea” and need to re-word my profile (let me tell you, no one actually reads the profile!).  I should specify at all times that I am interested in “friends first,” which no one seems to understand is equivalent to telling attractive young women to wear longer skirts or women to cover their heads in church: female modesty to mollify male aggression.

This isn’t a personal issue. This isn’t about your awesome, fun, smart, funny, gainfully employed, talented female friends dropping out of the dating game because they just aren’t having any luck or any fun meeting guys. This is a societal problem, a social ill that is getting worse and needs to be addressed politically and publicly. This isn’t about what those in denial like to call “a random psycho” who creeps out your friend on a date or stalks your co-worker. Rape culture permeates our society and is a powerful ideology that continues to attract new generations of men who feel fundamentally entitled to women’s attention, admiration, support and bodies. To continue to react to posts like mine with the (now widely mocked) cliche, “Not All Men Are Like That” is no longer acceptable. It never has been. Please help me move our communities beyond the silencing of women implied by “Not All Men Are Like That,” beyond the discomfort of hearing women’s truth, beyond the fantasy that this is a news story that doesn’t apply to ordinary lives, and out into our community conversations.

Massachusetts Convention of Congregational Ministers

Spring Meeting

Who Drives Our Covenant?

God, Neighbor, Other?

Our speakers will be

The Rev. Ian Holland

Senior Minister of The First Church in Swampscott, Congregational

and

The Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein

Senior Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn

in Swampscott

The Rev. Jim Chase Will Preach

Federated Church of Charlton

Wednesday, May 14^th 2014

10 am to 1 pm

At the First Church and Parish in Dedham

670 High Street, Dedham, MA 02026

http://dedhamuu.org/mccm

Cost $25 per person

includes breakfast and lunch and snacks.

Reservations to Rev. Rali Weaver

 raliweaver@dedhamuu.org or 617.459.5979

Today is Maundy Thursday, or Holy Thursday. Maundy is an old English word or maybe an old French or Latin word that is derived from “mandate,” which Jesus gave during his last dinner party with his best friends and followers.  Actually, he very intentionally called them friends (as opposed to followers, or fanboys and fangirls) but I don’t really know that they were his friends the way you and I think of the word. The sad thing about being Jesus is that you’re really alone in your game, and no one can really *get* you in that way that best, best friends get each other.

I am so very grateful for my best, best friends who totally get me. Boy, am I grateful. They are my lifeblood.

I am confident that Jesus’ lifeblood was God, but when you’re a human being and God is a transcendent and invisible reality, it’s just not the same as being with another human. Especially if you’re telling jokes. You can never be sure if God gets your punchline. There are a lot of silences and uncertainties with having God as your most intimate life companion. Jesus managed that (with some difficulty), but many of us ordinary folk can’t. That’s why we get to have each other, thanks be to God.

The mandate that may or may not be the origin of the word “Maundy” (even the Wikipedia people don’t really know) is this beautiful thing that Jesus said. He said, “You shall love one another as I have loved you.”

This makes my eyes sting just typing it, and now I have a big, ploppy tear coming down my face, because this is the essence of Jesus Christ for me. This is very personal. This is a God-man sitting at a table with his community — and they’re absolutely at unspoken cross purposes (forgive the pun), as I wrote about in my last post about Palm Sunday. The disciples are all like, “Yea, whoo, we’re going to show the Romans who’s king NOW!” And Jesus is like, “I have this opportunity to speak to these beloved dingbats one last time before the sh– hits the fan and they go into shock and chaos. They have been worshiping me but they have not been hearing me.”

You know how Jesus would always say, “He that has an ear, let him hear?” It is so easy to think we’re listening when we’re really all about the conversation we’re having in our own heads about what we wish the other person was saying, which gets all confused with what they’re trying to communicate. Jesus’ disciples were pros at this. They were like the 12 stooges of not at all getting Jesus’ point.

People who think of Jesus as, in the words of my old boyfriend David, “a lamb-petting wuss,” don’t read the Bible, I guess, or they would see all the times that Jesus gets irritated and snarky with the disciples. If you’re into the Snarky Side of Jesus, please go read the Gospel of Mark, which is the best version for this very human aspect of Mr. J.

Anyway, Jesus and his posse are in the Upper Room having a meal and it’s Passover (but please note that the seder as we know it today was not yet a tradition. Thanks to Mary Luti for this excellent article about “Christian seders” and why you shouldn’t have one) –and they’re going to rock and roll soon with the authorities, or so the disciples think. I am not sure exactly what they think Jesus is going to do, or what they themselves plan to do, exactly.  It would be very interesting to know that. Do they think there’s going to be some kind of magical showdown as there was between Aaron and the Pharaoh (“YEA, BAM, that’s a snake!”)? Could be. That would make sense. Do they think God is going to do some miracle deliverance thing, as was told in the book of Exodus? Given that they thought Jesus was the promised messiah, this is a reasonable assumption.

But Jesus has a different plan, and the tension is building to a terrible pitch. Judas is going to go drop a dime on his pal any minute now, and things are going to get absolutely horrible, in events we commemorate as (go figure) GOOD Friday.

In this moment, though, things aren’t horrible yet. Jesus has precious little time with his community of followers and he urgently wants to imprint his message and his mission into their hearts. So he does what any wise person does in such an instance: he doesn’t write a book or deliver a lecture. He SHOWS THEM. He creates rituals out of ordinary activities, and in doing so invests them with sacred meaning.

The first memorable thing he does it that he washes their feet. Remember that these people walked around on dusty land wearing sandals, so they had dirty feet to deal with every night. What better way to demonstrate hospitality and humility than to kneel before those who regard you as teacher, rabbi, guru, saviour and master, and wash their tootsies? Simon Peter is like, “NO WAY! I will not let you do this for me! That’s what we have slaves for!” And Jesus is like, “YES, WAY, Peter. This is what leadership looks like in the Kingdom of God, and you need to listen to me now, because I’m not going to be around forever.” Which is a very Jewish mother thing to say, but in Jesus’ case it wasn’t just a guilt trip – it was literal truth.

Then, giving us the most lasting and important ritual of the Christian spiritual tradition, Jesus made the dinner into a sacrament. He took the bread, and blessed it and broke it, and he said to everyone at the table, “This is my body, broken for you. When you gather together in this community, you need to do this in remembrance of me.”

I can’t imagine the feeling around the table at that time. I bet there were some major stricken faces. I bet some of them were wicked wide-eyed, like, “WHAT?” And some of them may have exchanged looks, like, “Holy cow, it’s getting intense up in here. I’m not sure I can even handle this.”

Then Jesus picked up the wine and said that it was his blood.

WHOA. That is about as heavy-duty mystical intense as it gets, and to this day everyone is freaking out about it. My Christian friends and I even have a joke about “The Cult Of The Zombie Jesus,” but we do love our Communion gatherings. They get us into such a deep place of connection with each other. If you’re Catholic, or were raised such, you know about the doctrine of transubstantiation and how the wine and bread are literally supposed to become blood and flesh. I can’t even begin to follow that but I’m a Protestant, so I don’t have to.

I don’t have any problem with a Spirit Person announcing to those who love him that he promises to be with them beyond the limitations of space and time.  That makes perfect non-logical sense to me, and I believe it. I also unequivocally embrace the idea of Jesus committing his life force and essence into bread and wine. I read what he did as, “If you do this in remembrance of me, you will partake of my very essence, which I willingly and whole-heartedly and eternally bequeath to you as my love and my blessing and my desire for you.” That’s how I would say it, but of course one doesn’t speak for Jesus. In my experience, he doesn’t even speak for himself very much because whenever I ask him stuff, he responds to me with a question.

When I take Communion in any community in the world, I feel gathered up in the love of Jesus. I am reminded that solidarity and mutuality are not so much created or enforced by activism, but by fellowship.

I love thinking about my friend Kristen, who was singing, “Let Us Break Bread Together On Our Knees” as a church soloist during Communion (also called the Eucharist*, which is Greek for “thanksgiving,” but don’t be disappointed when you don’t get turkey and dressing). The song goes,

“When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun, O Lord, have mercy on me.”

By accident, Kristen sang, “When I fall on my face with my knees to the rising sun, O Lord have mercy on me.” This created a distinctly irreverent mental image for everyone, and they totally cracked up.

That’s all the time we have today, friends! I have a budget draft to look at and Orders of Service to proofread and I have an appointment at the hair salon later this afternoon. This is clearly no time to be mooning around about Jesus! People have THINGS TO DO!

I will be in church at 7pm with a local Methodist church getting my Jesus on. I will be thinking of you, wherever and whoever you are. I am grateful to share this on-line fellowship with you.

Blessings, PB

A Little Tiny Bit Of Suggested Reading:

This is a lovely translation about the washing of the feet thing that you might be wondering about. Read 1-17. Don’t worry if you think it’s weird — it’s very weird and it’s okay if you don’t really understand it. Just let the basic ideas and feelings come through to you as they will. This stuff is over TWO THOUSAND YEARS OLD! It takes years and years of reading and re-reading these stories before they start to feel real and comprehensible. It also helps a lot if you read them with other people and talk about them. We call this “Bible study” and it’s actually really fun and won’t turn you into a fundamentalist, I promise.

* My colleague, the Rev. Beverly Boke, breaks it down for me like this: “eu=good Charis=gift or grace :: Eucharist= good gift.” It’s a good gift to have smart friends.

This image of the Last Supper is missing a few women.

So you want to know about Palm Sunday and why it matters to anyone, and particularly why Unitarian Universalists who are not “Christian-flavored UUs” would care about it.

Tomorrow marks Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem! And it is a total comedy/tragedy of errors. Of course, if your theology is that God planned everything to work out that way from the beginning, you don’t believe that, but I do. I think Palm Sunday is the numero uno day of the liturgical year when we can all regard with both horror and a sense of sad affection how vast the chasm between our own worldly hopes and expectations and the way God (the Holy) works in the world.

Jesus has been preaching, teaching, healing, doing miracles. Mostly, he’s been doing the miracle of making disowned, unloved, untouchable human beings feel like they matter. He has been telling a community of occupied Jews that they’re part of God’s plan for a world of shalom/wholeness/peace/righteousness.

He has gotten really popular, and this is kind of a problem with the Roman authorities. They have put some of the Jewish priests into little positions of power — nothing too high up in Caesar’s administration, you understand –just high enough to keep an eye on their own, collect taxes from them, keep the thumb of control on them for the overlords. You know what I mean? Look around poverty-stricken, frustrated communities today. Look at the minor power brokers who keep the seething to a manageable brew of anger, pain, discontent.

Jesus isn’t one of those. His power is from the soul — from God. It’s unmistakeable. He shines with it. His power changes things inside people, who then feel empowered to change things outside of themselves, right? They gather around this guy in big crowds.

He’s dangerous.

Really dangerous. Because when you’re trying to keep society operating in that clear hierarchal way where the wealth and power are concentrated on the top with a permanently disempowered underclass, a guy like Jesus is a problem for you.

But here’s where the real pathos comes in. Jesus and his close community of followers (we know them as the disciples) are riding into Jerusalem to have their Passover feast there. The symbolism of all these Jews pouring into their holy city to observe the festival of their liberation from slavery makes the Romans a bit itchy, but they’ve handled this before, they have the boots and shields and billy clubs and crucifying nails all ready to go, and they have already well established that they won’t hesitate to use them if the Jews get too uppity. Does this remind you of anything happening anywhere in our world today?

Like William Faulker said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

The disciples are all psyched because they think Jesus is going to do some kind of  — I don’t even know, exactly, but let’s just say they think he’s going to do some kind of “Die Hard” Bruce Willis kind of savior thing.

But Jesus has no such intention. He is going to actually die hard, but not in a Bruce Willis kind of way. What he is going to do later in the week is gather his followers around him and institute a mystical ritual of remembrance by which he will promise to be with them in the eating of bread and the drinking of wine when they are gathered in his spirit. “Do this in memory of me.”

What will happen next is that one of his own people will turn Jesus in to the authorities, and a terrible calamity ensues, or the will of God ensues: it depends on your theology. That is what’s coming.

My own theology is that the events of Palm Sunday illustrate the breaking point between what the soul must do and what the world insists we should do (with a knife at the throat or a whip in hand for added persuasion).  For me, Palm Sunday is the story of how God is with us and within us even when we suffer terrible agonies in the process of choosing integrity of the soul over the brute machinations of the world.  The people waving the palms at Jesus have no idea what kind of internal struggle he is experiencing as he rides past them. The poignancy is almost unbearable.

Jesus is the soul teacher whose lessons are grounded in our political and psychological realties, which is why I follow him  as opposed to gurus whose teachings do not directly address political reality.

Palm Sunday is very, very sad for me. I need to experience this sadness as I consider Jesus’ own awareness of what is going to happen to him as he rides into Jerusalem, as I wonder what it was like to have his thoughts. I believe he knew the agonies that were on the way because he was enlightened about human nature and had painfully acute insight into his own particular context – not because God was whispering a script into his ear the whole time.

Palm Sunday matters a lot to me as a Unitarian Universalist because it speaks to me about the hollowness of trying to do social reform from a place that isn’t grounded in the soul. You know why? Because the powers of the world (what Paul called “powers and principalities”) must be met with more than good organizing and a vision for better days. I find in the Biblical prophets and in the gospel narrative, clear and compelling evidence that a just and equitable society is not just a mushy liberal fantasy but how GOD ACTUALLY WANTS US TO SHAPE REALITY in accordance with some kind of cosmic law. I mean, when I think of how Jesus encouraged us to live, and I look at the environmental crisis we’re in, I think, “Yea, laugh if you want, sophisticated folks, but if the Western world had actually adopted Jesus’ code of conduct (“don’t store up treasures on earth,” etc.) we wouldn’t be in this mess at all.”

And speaking of ears (which we were a paragraph ago), there is an amazing moment coming in the melee of Jesus’ arrest (technically Maundy Thursday, if you’re looking to observe Holy Week) where Peter whips out his sword and slices off the ear of one of the servants of the high priest Caiaphas who has busted up their dinner party. Guess what Jesus does! In the midst of this chaos, he stops and reattaches Malchus’s ear!! This miracle only happens in the gospel of Luke, which is my favorite for lots of reasons (more women stories, for one), and it is one of my favorite gospel moments. On one level, it’s a fantastic Jesus moment of correction: “No, reality isn’t supposed to be this way, so let me fix reality for a moment to show you what it needs to look like.” On a symbolic level, it’s wonderful that he reattaches someone’s ear, the body part responsible for listening and hearing. What do you make of that?  I make of it that we need to be able to “hear” each other (whether we are hearing or deaf people, it’s not literal) rather than lashing out with our swords.

Palm Sunday gives us the triumphal ride into Jerusalem with the rock star messiah Jesus being “hosanna’d” by crowds waving palms (kind of the first century messianic welcome version of holding up your lighter at a concert). It leads us to the quiet, holy mystery of the first communion during the Last Supper (I have always wondered why we don’t call that event the First Communion instead of the Last Supper, actually. I mean, if we call the death day of Jesus “Good Friday,” it would certainly be consistent). We’ll be checking in later in the week to talk about Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. At least I hope I will have time to. If I don’t get to Maundy Thursday before Good Friday, at least you know a bit about it. Unitarian Universalists do not traditionally host Maundy Thursday services, although some do. It is the traditional time of year to have Communion for many of our New England congregations. Some of our congregations host a Passover seder and I have attended a Passover/Maundy Thursday combined observance in one of our congregations.

And so I will leave this here. Thanks for your interest and companionship. Would love to hear from you.

Recommended reading:

The story of Malchus John 18:10–11; Matthew 26:51; Mark 14:47; and Luke 22:51.  Pastor Brad McDowell’s Palm Sunday sermon.  Journalist Sara Miles’ memoir of how randomly deciding to take Communion one day changed her life: Take This Bread.

If I was the Apostle Paul, I would start this letter with something like, “Dearly Beloved in Christ.” And then I would write some brilliant, heart and soul-searing advice about how to be the Church together. And then I would run from the Romans and wind up getting arrested while preaching the gospel in a pagan center like Ephesus and then go to prison and get beaten and tortured and continue to write staggeringly insightful and loving epistles on, like, my blood-stained garment (I don’t think they gave Paul paper in prison, right? And they didn’t even have pens back then) that I would sneak out the window to a waiting messenger who would then take it to the Jesus people in the city it was intended for, and my words would survive and be translated into many languages and people would read them many hundreds of years later and be very touched by them.

But I am not the Apostle Paul. I am Victoria Weinstein and I am sitting in a study on the top floor of a little house in Lynn, Massachusetts, typing into a keyboard while rolling my right foot around on a frozen water bottle, because I have plantar fascitis. I will not be risking my life by talking about Jesus of Nazareth, because everyone has heard of Jesus of Nazareth already, and a lot of people they know and understand everything that happened to Jesus of Nazareth (P.S. Important Things About God!) and are total asses because of this (there will be cuss words in these next posts — please understand that I am committed to total authenticity here, and I apologize if it offends you), and some people are wondering about what happened with this whole Jesus thing, and some people are sick and tired of the whole story and wish it would go away already, and you, dear reader, you have expressed curiosity about it.

You are wondering what Easter is about for me, and for you, and I have offered to take you on my own Holy Week journey, starting from today, which is no special day but a Wednesday night in Lent.

I want to make it clear to you that I am writing these posts as a friend who is also a minister, who is also a Unitarian Universalist, who is also a Christian. Who is mostly, for the purposes of these posts, a lady who loves Jesus and who has 100% crazy irrational beliefs about what happened during Easter. So let me say from the start that it’s totally okay with me if you part ways with me at any point in this journey but I hope you won’t, because it’s lovely to be together whatever our beliefs or non-beliefs. I have been a Unitarian Universalist all my life, and a woman of Jewish heritage, and a Christian officially since 1999 (when I was baptized), and I am very used to people being freaked out by my beliefs: either offended that I am not Christian enough, or offended that I am Christian at all, or offended that I am a Christian who reads Tarot cards and has witchy powers and practices (I can’t help any of that), or offended that I am a Unitarian Universalist with unpopular opinions who dares voice them.

I like labels when they’re useful, and those of us who want to work as ministers in any legit official capacity need to identify as some flavor of religion, so that’s fine with me. I am a Christian-flavored Unitarian Univeralist, or maybe a Unitarian Universalist-flavored Christian.

Here’s why: Jesus is my personal Lord and savior.

JUST KIDDING!!

But kind of not!

Let’s break this down, because that’s fun. Now that I’ve shocked you, let me help you up off the floor and ‘splain.

Yes,  “personal Lord” is taking it too far. I love the majesty of the word LORD, especially in the context of considering creation itself. When I look at mountains, for instance, LORD is the best word I can come up with for what they evoke.  But “personal Lord” is kind of cute. It’s like Jesus is a little pocket version of that LORD-energy of the universe that I mostly think of as God. I kind of like that.

“Savior” is a nice term for someone whose spirit presence, teachings and love guide and guard and sustain me like Mr. Jesus does. I don’t believe my soul needed or needs saving in the conservative Christian sense (and I take Jesus’ own preaching on that subject in his first century apocalyptic Jewish context), but I could honestly say that Jesus “saved” me from dipping my toe into a variety of religious traditions and never getting deeply immersed, challenged or transformed by any of them (and not for lack of desire or trying). Thanks for saving me from wandering around the religious marketplace hungry and thirsty and lonely, Jesus!

Since a whole bunch of the Christian world would totally deny my legitimacy in the faith, I am also fine just identifying as a “Jesus person.” I don’t really like “Jesus follower,” because I so often walk right off the Jesus path and wander into the wood or stop for a really long coffee break to people-watch or go shopping or something and totally ignore Jesus, it’s really not fair to say I’m a follower. I’m a terrible follower. I’m a devotee and lover of Jesus. If you want to read more about that, find the book Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism. I wrote one of the chapters.

Another reason I’m a Christian-flavored Unitarian Universalist:

I love the Bible and I read it all the time – mostly the Christian scriptures. I think about it all the time. It’s the best book ever put together by the most dysfunctional species on the planet and maybe in the entire cosmos. Can you imagine any other species coming up with this range of evil,  betrayal, stupidity, agony, and transcendence? I love lions and everything, but they just don’t have our variety. The Scripture of the Lion: “We got born, we nursed from our mom, we hunted stuff, we tumbled around, we learned how to hold other animals down with our paws and tear them apart with our teeth, we slept, we woke up, we formed prides, we had some alpha male battles, we were created awesome so we didn’t really evolve into anything much different than we were a million years ago. We had no moral dilemmas. We didn’t like dying but we didn’t fear death.” Done.

The Bible is the family photo album of the Western world and I can’t stop looking through it and going back with a magnifying glass to look some more. To wonder which side of the family I most resemble (it changes as I age). To re-read the scary and disturbing parts because they’re so horribly fascinating. To get high on the glory of the visions of the prophets and the mystics (John of Patmos! Joseph!). To laugh at the jokes (Proverbs! Jeremiah’s snark! Jesus’ snappy retorts!).  But most of all, I read the Bible to stand in solidarity with the ultimately impossible human project of naming the God-thing. God is an experience and an encounter, and we keep trying to define it as a noun. I won’t try to do that myself but I sure do appreciate those who did. Those are the parts I read over and over and over: the parts where human beings directly encounter God and try to explain what that was like. In Jesus, I feel like he had a direct encounter with God that was his whole life, and what happened after he died, and then happened to his community of followers after that, and then that happened to the communities that formed after that, and so on, down to me and my community.

I love all kinds of communities and treasure their sacred stories. I’m not interested in making people Christian at all. I’m REALLY interested in helping groups of people become communities. I don’t care who or what we are or what we believe: communities save. If you want to know my deepest religious conviction, I believe that the thing that gathers us into communities is God. It is holy. It is “deep calls to deep.” I have been having direct, unmediated experiences of God all my life, but it didn’t amount to much of anything until I was called into a life of community. Community is where the God who speaks to us by our lonesome pulls us out of self-absorbed mystical musings and makes of us a people.

This would be a good time to say that I consider Easter the most important and serious time of year to reflect on how God makes of us a people. It’s about Jesus’ individual path, yes, but Jesus didn’t have an individual story — he had a story on behalf of the community, the ecclesia, the koinonia. If you know that I am a scholar of the congregational covenant tradition, that will not surprise you. The Easter narrative that starts on Palm Sunday has its origins in Passover, when God makes the monotheistic nation of Israel a people. So, this is really, really my time to totally give in to my amazement at that miracle, which I really experience as miracle every day in my work.

With all that love for the Bible, I have an appreciation for other sacred scriptures like Nature, and Shakespeare, and poetry and Sondheim. As a Unitarian Universalist, I get to shape worship around multiple sacred scriptures, and if I was a Christian minister who had to preach from the Bible every week and craft the liturgy around it, I think I would miss the other scriptures a lot.

When I’m in a Christian community, I love how easy it is to talk about spiritual matters, because everyone shares a common language. You can pray without prefacing your prayer with a lot of euphemisms (“O, Source Of Life, O Spirit of Community, O My God Are We Ever Going To Get Going On The Actual Prayer”), you can sing Jesus and Christ-y songs and not worry about them being too Jesusy Christ-y. That’s a nice experience, although I have noticed through the years that you can’t really assume that just because you’re all ostensibly Christian, you’re all on the same page about anything theological. We have entered a new age of eclectic spirituality where pretty much everyone you meet outside of the Bible Belt has a variety of religious influences. They’re Methodists who do yoga and go to a medium in Salem to talk to the dead, and they have a little Buddhist meditation altar set up at home. This is why I really love shared spiritual practice best, where you all go and try to do something in common (or read something, or work on something) and then you come together and do theological reflection on that activity. That’s where I experience God-time most: in conversation and listening and sharing the scary work of surviving life and coping with mortality.

So that’s a little bit of background. Now let’s talk about Palm Sunday. Are you ready? Any questions?

The Unitarian Universalist Association unveiled its new logo the other day, and it has generated a tremendous amount of heat and light.

For your consideration, here’s the most recent logo:

I remember when this one came out. Some hated the “vagina dentata” toothiness of the radiant orb surrounding the chalice. Others liked how much the image hearkened to folk art images of La Virgen de Guadalupe.

We had many opinions and modes of expressing them. The earnest and heart-felt collided with the snarky. The self-appointed crowd control agents informed everyone that they should just calm down, it’s just a slogan. Those who bristle at being silenced bristled at being silenced.

Here is the new logo:

I like it. I like the warmth and lines of the design, I like the use of negative space that creates two Us (which was pointed out to me by a lay leader of my congregation who is a graphic designer), I like that it evokes for me the Ottoman tulip design of which I am extremely fond.

But logos and symbols evoke visceral and very personal reactions, so it does not offend or upset me that so many of my co-religionists hate the new logo and see in it a phallus, or a vagina, or a bomb.

Let me tip my hand here and admit that I am much more interested in the phenomenon of community reaction than I am in the actual logo. FWIW, my own congregation has its own favorite chalice logo that we use in all our materials in order to create a consistent visual message (yes, a “brand”) throughout our organization and community. We may or may not use the new logo ourselves, but I certainly assume we’ll interact or cross-pollinate with it somehow.

We have always had tensions between our independent association of congregations and our covenanted “denominational” identity. One proof of this is how many Unitarian Universalists think that our 7 Principles are their own congregation’s covenant. They are not: The Principles are the covenant between member congregations of the UUA.  Each autonomous congregation may have its own congregational covenant (and, I believe, should — just as much to experience the process of crafting it together than to be bonded in a meaningful way by the resulting statement). None of our congregations has to have anything to do with this logo if they don’t want to.

Putting on my congregational consultant hat, I would have recommended that the UUA leaders be aware that times have changed a LOT since the last time they rolled out a new logo, and that they could expect a huge reaction to explode on Facebook, where thousands of their ministers and lay people would have instant access to the image and where reactions to it would go viral among our little community, with major seepage into the broader community of liberals, who are highly networked on Facebook. If you believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, the last 24 hours of UUA-wide conversation, hand-wringing, shade throwing and thoughtful reflection has been a fabulous PR campaign. Whether we have shown ourselves in the best light during this moment or not is a matter of opinion.

In addition to instantaneous Facebook reaction, UUs have taken to other social media outlets to express their opinions. This blog post, which might seem to be “of the moment” in terms of the logo roll-out, is actually quite belated in social media concepts of time. By the time I have gotten around to writing this, many of my colleagues have already posted lengthy reflections on the new logo on their own blogs; some have written multiple posts.

If I was consulting with the UUA leadership (and I’m not) I would recommend that they make a list of UU Influencers and enlist their support and involvement before such a big roll-out, not afterwards. There is nothing unethical about being savvy about how social media works and reaching out to influencers in your field. I read the recent UU World articles about board issues and read the president’s report, appreciate that the Rev. Dr. Terasa Cooley, the UUA’s Programs and Strategy Officer, went onto the UU on-line talk show the VUU to discuss the new logo and to give some of the denominational (technically “associational,” but let’s not open that can of worms) perspective on the new logo.

I watched the VUU episode, but it’s a lot to expect the average UU to sit through an hour of talking heads to get to the part where Dr. Cooley fills them in on this latest branding effort.  I love the VUU because the panelists are close friends of mine, and I have lots of patience for the, let’s say,  homegrown production values of the show. It’s a Google Hangout with five or six people chatting from various locations around the country, and although it’s a very pleasant hour, it has a small viewership and can’t be expected to do much heavy lifting by way of associational communication. One of the most provocative remarks Rev. Dr. Cooley made on the show was that she felt that the UUA had been presenting an “inconsistent message” in the past that confused people. I have no idea what she means by that but it’s a really interesting thing to say. I would love to hear more about that.

I personally think that the furor about the logo has revealed the identity crisis within our Association, and the serious rift between ministers/lay people (people in the local congregation, and especially the little ones) and our UUA leadership. I know that I am very confused by the roll-out of campaigns and initiatives from what used to be referred to as “25 Beacon Street” (we’re moving — but I am guessing that the nickname might stick). We’re drowning in lingo, but the bottom line is that people in the Association have opposing ideas about what our focus is and should be.

Last night around midnight, as the Facebook comments were flying fast and furiously and we were in full Family Feud mode, I posted on my own page that I felt that the negative reaction to the logo might be about much more than just the logo. I wrote,

I think a lot of the criticism coming out about the new UU logo is sideways hurt, anger and defensiveness from clergy who don’t feel included in the UUA leadership’s new vision. There’s a communication crisis, possible misunderstanding or just good old-fashioned disagreement about the future of the movement, and a logo is a safe place to vent fear and resentment. I’m a huge supporter of “beyond congregations” ministry and UU evangelism, and yet I also happily serve a local congregation. Along with many of my colleagues, I am sometimes unsure if our denominational leaders have much patience or respect left for our local communities of faith. However, unlike enough of my colleagues, I guess, I have received recent, meaningful support from denominational leaders that illustrate their care for the local congregation and its ministers. I think the tulip is fine. What isn’t fine is the level of anxiety in our system, which I think is there for totally legitimate reasons that would be really good to address.

 

A UUA staffer popped in to ask me to say more, and I did (of course!). One of the things I talked about was how everyone needs to be clear about the authority and the job description of the leader before effective leadership and “followership” can happen. I am not at all clear what kind of  “followership” the UUA leaders really want from me as a clergyperson, and I want to encourage them to be clearer with us.  Yes, we’re in a partnership, we’re in mutual relationship. But there are some things (like managing our public image in the extra-congregational setting) that I feel fine being told are under the authority of the UUA staff, and I support everyone getting clearer and more mutually supportive around that.

I get thumped for not reading all the UUA board reports and getting confused between statements that are made by the board versus the President, and etc., but I represent the average Joe UU who does her best to keep up with the news out of “25 Beacon” (now in quotes!) while serving a very busy congregation. When I read the UUA materials about vision and mission and the future, I come away with a headache from trying to figure out what is actually being said.  We definitely have a communication problem, Houston, because although there’s lots of information, there’s very little that I can actually understand. Is this because we are all afraid to say where we have authority and where we expect someone else to have their own and do a better job with it? I suspect that might be part of the issue. I have recently moved to a congregation that has policy governance, and I can’t tell you how much I love being clearer about what is actually my job, and where I have actual, rubber-meets-the-road authority.  This allows me to take full responsibility where I need to, but also to be clearer with my community about where they have authority and a job to do (that I am covenantally obligated to support to the best of my ability as long as we have discerned together that it all connects with integrity to our mission).

Tandi Rogers, UUA Growth Strategist, explained to me that there is a UUA staff shift from “being capacity” to “building capacity,” which I intuitively understand and definitely support. But I am not sure where that puts me in terms of my covenantal obligation to the UUA leaders. What is our relationship? In responding to Tandi, I talked about needing clarity about what my “job” is vis-a-vis the UUA leadership, and how I would like to be asked to do that job after actually being brought up to speed on what it IS. Obviously the relationship between our UUA staff and our clergy has changed significantly. I get the feeling that I’m supposed to understand how, exactly, and to get on board with it. But I genuinely do not understand the shift, as it seems to be a subject that is being discussed while everyone stands around on eggshells trying desperately not to crunch. I wrote to Tandi,

I still feel a residual “top down” hierarchical thing happening out of our HQ, because that’s our past and it’s hard to give up. I’m not at all adverse to hierarchy, but we all have to know what’s on top of that hierarchy, and right now there’s serious disagreement about what belongs up there. We have to find some common “ultimate” up there to which we all feel ultimately committed, and right now, it could be Growth, it could be Mission, it could be AR/AO work, it could be Congregations. it could be God… no one knows, and there’s a real battle raging about it that is manifesting in very challenging ways.

Here’s a great comment from my colleague, The Rev. Patrick McLaughlin, who expresses a similar kind of frustration. His frustrations are a bit different from mine, but he echoes what I am hearing again and again from my colleagues: “We’re sort of informed about the new direction the UUA wants to take, but it’s a dramatic shift and we’re not clear on the details and what our role is in it.” Of course we all know that we’re called to rally the faithful, preach the message, support and minister to our congregations, bring the UU good news into the broader community, promote the latest initiatives and attend the marches but what are we supposed to do with a new marketing campaign? That involves us, too, and while I don’t think it would be necessary or advisable to send out proofs for pre-approval (Good Lord, what a nightmare!), some form of advance communication would have gone over well.

Here’s Patrick,

…Although I’ve been a supporter of the UUA, I’m not sure that I’ve really felt “included in the UUA leadership’s… vision” (new or not), ever. What gets articulated, when it does, is buried in jargon that one needs to be an insider to fathom (both because it’s insider jargon, and because the nuances of what that kind of jargon mean within the walls of the UUA is an unknown). Until they can — and do — express that vision in a way that newcomers can hear and understand, it’s well intended chatter inside the echo chamber. The critique is precisely what I’d give a seminarian who offered a sermon full of theological insider jargon. Hunh? I’ve no idea what the new vision *means*. I see lofty words, but can’t figure out what’s between the foggy vision of the castle (in the air or not?) and the ground, where the rubber meets the road.

But I’m puzzled by the notion that I have a job, as a minister, vis-a-vis the UUA (and its staff) that the UUA Board gets to decide, determine, define, and express. Maybe I missed it unmooring from being the board and staff of an association of congregations, a ground *up* movement, not a top down “movement.” The UUA was created to serve the member congregations and to help grow the faith–to foster the establishment of new congregations. From my perspectives, it’s allowed itself to be captured by those hurt in the incredibly successful Fellowship Movement (version 1.0), which like any new and major and effective thing, had drawbacks. But instead of figuring out how to do that sort of incredibly effective and efficient faith and congregation growth thing *again* (only much better, based on learning from the problems of 1.0), it’s been off pursuing spending resources ineffectively and inefficiently to build single, new, top-down congregations (and failing dismally). Or engaging in “denominational” led social justice work (which has at least been more substantive) — which is great, but not clearly serving congregational needs, Nor growing the faith.

If the UUA has decided that it’s going to convert itself into a missional organization that’s saving the world, I’m ok with that. The world needs a hell of a lot of saving. But if so, we really do need an association that is of congregations and seeking to serve their needs and that of growing the faith.

The logo? It’s a logo. I think it’s cute, but has no appreciable UU character. It’s red (or whatever). And it doesn’t seem to achieve *any* of the things that were said to justify trashing the new-old one and getting a replacement. But yes, it’s au courant. And if that’s its real saving grace, we’ll see another one inside the next decade. So don’t get attached to the tulip, or put it on stoles, or anything.

 

As I said, I like the tulip, but what I like much better is this opportunity to talk about what’s going on, what our various roles are meant to be in what’s going on, and what we need to be able to ask of each other.

Social media has radically changed the terms of our communication. It is now impossible to slowly roll out a new message or platform, or to finesse it in the classical sense of honing the message before hordes of opinionated big mouths like me get hold of it, smell it, roll it down the alley to see if it hits any pins, and starts messing with it to improve it.All leaders everywhere probably have to get used to this idea and learn to make the Beast work for them rather than against them. We’re nothing BUT instantly and constantly connected these days. Let’s learn to make the most of it.

More later, but that’s way more than enough for now. Thanks for reading.

I named myself a Witch way back in fourth grade. It wasn’t just because I was obsessed with “Bewitched,” which I was (Endora was my girl — Samantha was cute, but didn’t interest me any more than Disney princesses interested me. Maleficent, now she interested me). It was because I was a witch and I knew it. I was in touch with the Unseen realm and I knew how to read it and even sort of how to manipulate it. I read everything I could find about witches and witchcraft and the paranormal. There wasn’t a lot. There was nothing in my school library about other cultures or shamanic traditions, for example, that might have shed some light on what I was experiencing. I did my best to educate myself with books of medieval studies, Puritan New England, alchemy and 1970’s pop material on psychic phenomenon.

I am a Witch and witches are real. I don’t do actual spells any more, as I never worked one that wasn’t effective, although they all came with unfortunate side-effects or unanticipated collateral damage. My witchiest years were full of “I Love Lucy” sitcom kinds of moments, which would find me moaning, “Oh my gosh, I just wanted to kiss that guy, I didn’t want anyone to get hurt so I could have that chance!” Or, “Now that I have all that energy coursing through me to get through that test/show/day of work, I don’t know how to turn it off!” Cue obnoxious Energizer Bunny inflicted on family, friends or co-workers.

With my full library of Wiccan resources, courtesy of the 1980’s Harmonic Convergence and subsequent opening of the broom closet for witchy types, I learned to work spells. I raised the cone of energy with pagan groups and studied with priestesses. I became more and more adept at managing energy. This was really thrilling for a long time, until I realized that the sad trombone of unanticipated stupid or even slightly dangerous side effects still seemed to accompany my magical successes, so I stopped before getting myself or anyone else into serious trouble. Today when I pray “Thy will be done,”  I have an intimate relationship to the words. The only spell I want to cast at this point in my life is to more mindfully align myself with Lady Wisdom, who has a traffic pattern and flow worked out that I feel I should not interrupt with my personal desires, no matter how altruistic they may seem to be. I do pray a lot: but only to enter into the spirit of peace, to receive clearer understanding or to connect with God’s will, which I understand as a kind of bus that I need to run to catch and board. I don’t know where it’s going and I’m not driving. But I need to get on.

Given my personal past, I was incredibly excited to hear last year that “American Horror Story: Coven” would deal with witches. Contemporary witches! Yessss! My people!  I knew it would be too much to expect that television writers would write about witches in an entirely responsible way, but I thought it reasonable to expect that the creators might at least deal well with women’s spiritual power. The producers announced that Jessica Lange, Gabourey Sidibe, Kathy Bates, Lily Rabe, Angela Bassett and Frances Conroy would have major roles! How could this fail?

Miss Angela Bassett gave me LIFE in this role!

Well, it did. It failed miserably. The show bit off far more than it could chew in terms of addressing America’s racist past and present, setting up a rivalry between the Black voudoun priestess Marie Laveau and European white Fiona Goode, “Grand Supreme” of the Salem Witch legacy. That was a disappointment, but not a surprise. It was an audacious theme to raise, and writers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk were unable to take it anywhere meaningful.

Where Murphy and Falchuk might have been expected to do better — much better- is in imagining the ways that women might use extraordinary powers. In the end, they could only really imagine three ways: To preserve heterosexual, patriarchal norms of beauty, to compete and take revenge on each other, and to manipulate sexual partners. Every one of the witches longed for heterosexual consummation, except for the sweet and dear Misty Dawn (Lily Rabe) who alone represented the accurate historic role of Witch as healer, knitter-together of shredded pieces of people and situations.  I will never forgive Ryan and Falchuk’s despicable treatment of Gabourey Sidibe, a very heavy African American actress whose character sought coitus with a minotaur, and whose body was positioned in humiliating ways throughout the season that the white, slim actresses were never, ever subjected to.  The season is a horrific testament to unconscious hatred of black bodies and fat bodies.

The woman-on-woman violence in this season sickened me. I watched through to the end of the series because I wanted to see if the writers would ever figure out that powerful women have concerns beyond getting the guy and out-performing each other for more (pointless) power and glory. The one female character who was not a witch was a sadist who delighted in torturing black men, a spectacle that Falchuk and Murphy inexcusably played for entertainment value by the final episode.

I wonder what I would have gotten from “American Horror Story: Coven” as a young witch. I’m sure I would have loved the fabulous costumes, the goth drama, and the first promising episodes. Would I have eventually recognized the deep misogyny and racism in the writing? Would I have continued to love the series because it at least recognized energy work and magic, in however distorted a way? I don’t know. I only appreciate that  magical young women these days have many more resources to go to than I did when I was first exploring the contours, possibilities, limits and responsibilities of my own spiritual power. Sister Witches, I’m sorry that “American Horror Story: Coven” treated our kind with such ignorance and disdain. Go out and write a better story.

Best character from the season. In the end it was all about Myrtle Snow for me (Frances Conroy).

I totally want those hats.

Dear Lizzie,

Hey. I haven’t known you for that long, but I watched you last night fighting with your husband about having a baby, and I feel like we need to talk.

I don’t have a husband or kids, Lizzie, and I’m really happy.  To be honest with you, I think you’d be happier if you stopped tormenting yourself about the baby issue. I’ve been watching you, girl. You LIVE FOR YOUR WORK. You totally do. And that’s okay, Lizzie! You’re amazing at catching bad guys! Keep catching bad guys!

I’ve watched you climb an elevator shaft in heels and I just gotta say, a Snuggie is really going to cramp your style.  You won’t even have time to blow-dry your huge, Country Western music star hair anymore. For like, the first ten years of your child’s life. Are you sure you can live with that?

Now let’s get real about your baby daddy. It’s time.  You know you don’t trust him. Neither do I. Neither does the entire UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Lizzie. I’m talking millions of us. We’re worried about you!  Tom says he’s an elementary school teacher but yet he has enough time and energy to make you a totally gourmet dinner and go to an art show opening and flirt with an obviously nefarious female with mean eyes and bad girl lipgloss after a day of work? He’s NOT an elementary school teacher, Lizzie. If he was an elementary school teacher he would be comatose by the television by 8:30 PM with an empty Lean Cuisine container on his chest.

How can you still trust this dude, Lizzie? Maybe it’s because you’re ALWAYS AT WORK DOING WHAT YOU LOVE CHASING SOCIOPATHS and you hardly spend any time with him! No hanging out after work, no grocery shopping together (all that Chinese take-out), no walks with the dog (and I recommend that you two get a dog and see how that goes before adopting a child), no folding laundry together. Who does your laundry, Lizzie? I’ve been wondering.

But I understand, Lizzie, and I sympathize. As a woman who totally loves and lives for her work, I have often made the same mistake about men. Not seeing that they’re shady, lying creeps who are leading double lives, I mean. Don’t feel ashamed. A lot of awesome and brilliant women are really stupid romantically. All I’m saying is, you can’t go having a baby with a man who was recently under FBI investigation. It’s just not wise, you know what I mean? You guys have major trust issues. Also, I could tell you hated being at that baby shower. You can tell me. You hated it. I saw it in your face when you were blindfolded and tasting pureed carrots. You wanted out of there so badly. You were dying to get back to climbing elevator shafts in your high heeled boots. I felt you.

Look, I’m going to say it: you’re not cut out for family life. It’s not that you never make it home on time, it’s that you never make it home at all! You’re obsessed with bringing evil white men to justice (it appears that only white men make the Blacklist, a fact I find somewhat ironic, but aside from a smattering of people of color in your work environment –and in your father figure Red’s personal entourage of people who either protect him or get killed for him– your universe of Criminal Masterminds seems to be 100% snowy white European. I’m more than a little insulted by this, but that’s a conversation we can have another time). You frown all the time. You’re only truly alive when you have a gun in your hand and you’re shouting at Croatian mobsters or serial killers.

Lizzie, Lizzie. You’re never with children! How do you even know that you like them? You have no community of support or social involvement. You never go out to lunch or want to sleep in, and the only incoming calls you get on your cell phone are from the FBI telling you that they found a guy who changes the DNA of his victims in order to fake the deaths of psychopaths who can afford to pay him big money (because we all know that lots of psychopaths have this kind of dough in the bank). My point is, Lizzie, you’re not going to be happy at the park watching a little kid push a toy truck around in the sandbox. You’re going to be really resentful. You’re going to be taking calls from the FBI in the middle of Mommy and Me time because you can’t help it. It’s who you are.  I’ve got news for you: motherhood isn’t going to magically provide you with a personality transplant. You can’t expect one little tiny human being to change you that much. If you had a great hub and you guys were solid, I wouldn’t be so worried. But you guys are SO not a team. He can beam his bright blue eyes on you from behind those fake hipster glasses and say otherwise all he wants, but the guy is SHADY, Lizzie. He’s not there for you. And if he’s not there for you and you’re not there for the bambino on your own or with a partner, someone’s going to wind up in life-long therapy, catch my drift?

So talk to your writers, Liz. It’s all in their hands, really. Tell them that the viewers of America are concerned that you’re pushing a plot line that is totally inconsistent to your character’s integrity. Tell them that we know you’re smarter than to not have had the Honest Talk with Tom yet.  Tell them that they can go ahead and script that talk and that we will all breath a sigh of relief and move on to the real business at hand of Catching Bad Guys and watching James Spader deliver their hilariously psychopathic dialogue with ultimate comic villainy and panache. Oh, and while you’re at it, Lizzie? Please let your writers know that not only white men are capable of being brilliant, dazzlingly creative sociopaths.

We’ll be watching.

I’d like to go to church this morning, and I’d like to know when your church service is. It is 9:18 AM and time is of the essence. Is the service at 10AM? 10:30 AM? 11:00? We’re well into the 21st century. This information should be easy to access.

I just went to your church website and here’s what I found:

A front page with lovely images of your church but no helpful information  — just lots of links I can click on. So I start to click. I click on:

A “Welcome” from the pastor page that says nothing about what’s going on today. Also, I happen to know that the pastor hasn’t been there for months. I wanted to see the new pastor preach. She isn’t mentioned anywhere on the site although she started several months ago.

An “About Us” page that is all about the historic New England church building. No information about when your service is.

A “Directions” page with directions to your church — but no time for worship information.

A “Contact Us” page that has lists of committees and an e-mail address for an administrator who I’m sure isn’t checking e-mail at 9:18 AM on Sunday.

A “Worship” page that describes the tradition of worship at the church. Still no information about Sunday worship THIS MORNING.

I have followed five dead links on your church’s website and nowhere have you informed me when your congregation gathers for worship. I conclude that you don’t want me to join you, so I give up.

I’ll read the NY Times and go to brunch instead.

And we wonder why the mainline Protestant church is dying? We wonder why our charming New England churches aren’t growing? How much research do we require seekers to do before they can access basic information regarding the time of our worship service?

No excuse. Your church website is your Welcome Mat to the world. Unless you intend to build your congregation solely from people who are within walking distance of your exterior signage, you cannot afford this oversight.

I respect the opinion of the marvelous Executive Director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, the Rev. Laura Everett, who started a tiny Twitter dust-up by posting this [click on the image to enlarge it]:

I don’t find that offensive.  I don’t visit as many churches as Laura does, but when I do I often arrive late because I’m notoriously bad at finding new locations when I haven’t had enough sleep or coffee. When I see this sort of notice in the bulletin, I am grateful that the ushers have a set time to seat latecomers so that I don’t have to figure it out myself (I don’t know the liturgy, so I’d rather not guess when the best time would be to find a seat), and the ushers don’t have to get anxious wondering what the best moment might be to seat me or let me in.

Laura writes that she gets a sense of “don’t disturb our performance” from this detail in the program. That’s interesting to think about. When I attend worship as a visitor, I hope that it will be a carefully planned and executed liturgy, with excellent production values. I understand that that’s a traditional preference but I am not attracted to casual services, as I find them nerve-wracking and often even embarrassing. To me, the “Latecomers seated” suggests that this faith community knows and respects its liturgy, respects those who are leading and attending it enough to set boundaries around it, and is actually considerate of the latecomer by acknowledging that we’ll undoubtedly be present and because we will be, they want us to know when to join the service in an appropriate way.

Thanks, Laura! So — what do you all think?

I admit it. My thoughts have been very dark lately, especially in that particular time of honesty at the close of day when I am drifting to sleep. After the work for the day is done, the dinner dishes washed, the dog and cat cared for, the beauty routines attended to and it’s just me in the womb of my little room and the warm bed and the pillow, I find myself in bewildered grief about my own species. My mind and imagination travel to the many places where cruelty, savagery, torture, exploitation, and simply petty meanness ruin lives and torment souls. I ask God to help me understand even a tiny bit of it, the great WHY from one extremely fortunate woman on behalf of those who are suffering terrible conditions and punishments at every and any given moment. I know the reasons, sort of. The sociological reasons, the historical reasons, the biological reasons for aggression and hatred (with many thanks to new understanding of neurological damage that leads to sociopathy and sadism). “LEAVE THEM ALONE!” is the phrase that comes to mind again and again when I think of what humans are doing to other humans when they think they can get away with it. Leave them alone. Let them live. God almighty, why can we not just let everyone live? I suppose in my own way I am in the Advent season of waiting.

I posted that a couple of weeks ago on my PeaceBang Facebook page, and I’m going to write more about this now.

Last week I stopped for coffee at a groovy little surf shop/cafe the next town over. I got into a passionate discussion about the economy and income disparity with the two 20-something guys behind the counter, after mentioning that my church and I had worked very hard on the Raise Up Massachusetts minimum wage increase campaign.

One of the guys sad, with a thoughtful and respectful frown, that he was really against raising the minimum wage. I asked him to tell me how he was thinking about the issue, what might I be missing, what was the view from where he was standing in life. He responded with a story about friends in the restaurant industry suffering lay-offs and lost hours in New York after they raised the pay for restaurant servers there. We talked about  all of the factors at play : greed, scarcity mentality, fear, and above it all, the scrambling among those of the working class for diminishing resources while those at the top — the people who move money around for a living — make more and more money.

We talked about those who do the work being made to feel that reality itself is somehow fixed — like there’s this limited amount of money available and they’re lucky to get any of it. It’s a crock, an illusion, a myth that has achieved the status of religious doctrine in our country: “You better be careful, because there’s just not that much here for all of us.”

There’s a TON of money in this country. It’s just being distributed in insane ways. I, a comfortably middle class woman with an education that is mostly paid for (and I fully expect to be finished paying for it in a few years), a homeowner, a tax payer, a health-insured lady with a car that works reliably, a manageable credit card debt (which I intend to retire by late summer of 2014) and a solid set of teeth (and dental coverage), am becoming increasingly horrified by the widening chasm between reasonable economic expectations and the actual economic reality. I feel most days that I am leading a charmed life, like I have somehow escaped a terrible monster called Pre-Poverty by sheer timing and good luck.

Pre-Poverty, like pre-diabetes or pre-cancerous cells, is the de facto condition for millions of young people who don’t even know they have it. As educational costs rise, housing costs soar, the cost of actual food that isn’t mostly sugar, salt or chemicals goes up, and job prospects hold steady at “meh” to “miserable,” the younger population can look forward to spending their most energetic years struggling to get a foot hold on independent living and worrying every month about how to pay their bills.

This is to say nothing of the segment of the population that is already historically mired in chronic pre-or actual poverty.

And you may have noticed, by the by, the chronic worry, shame and the sense that somehow you’re being screwed over by forces greater than you brings out the evil in human nature. Fear and privation trigger all kinds of reptilian brain behaviors. Addiction, violence, back-stabbing (literal or metaphorical), cheating, stealing, fight-or-flee. Constant, steady financial anxiety and worrying about the future exhausts inner resources and can trigger debilitating depression, the resigned neglect of self and others due to heart-brokenness and spirit-brokenness.

You wonder why Jesus talked so much about riches, money, wealth and treasure?

I never thought much about it, taking it as a given that every human being deserves to have their basic human needs for food, shelter and compassion met by the community. Now I think about it all the time –about how radical this sentiment is beginning to seem in my own society, where too many of us waste our time or have it wasted by petty infighting about small doctrinal matters, or by trying to out-clever each other on the stage of public thought and opinion.

Meanwhile, six year olds are being sold by the hour in shacks to sexual predators. Gotta make a buck somehow, right?

Someone left a baby alone in a soaked diaper and a cold apartment to go to work for $7.50 an hour. It’s going to cost that person $5.50 to get back and forth to their job.

An elder somewhere is discussing with his wife whether they should pick up the prescription or fix the flat tire on the car. They can’t do both.

A young man who is about two weeks’ savings from renting an apartment and who rides his bike to work (he has a good job), has been sleeping in a friend’s car. It’s a great plan, except for the fact that he has caught a cold that is going to turn into pneumonia. In two weeks he won’t have savings – he will have lost his job due to being out sick for so long.

My liberal religious tradition would say that these people, who are one bad turn of events away from sheer desperation, may do bad or criminal things because of that desperation. I agree. They certainly might. I certainly might do that if I was in their position.

What my liberal religious tradition does not acknowledge is that on top of this level of human misery, fear, need and desperation is a pre-existing human condition called evil. Maybe it’s biological, maybe it’s existential – who knows?  While a century and a half ago, liberal religionists were busy debating about whether humans were born with original sin or original grace, I feel that today we must argue with equal anger and passion for living conditions that make it possible for all humans to live into basic decency, whether or not we’re born with it.  In my Unitarian Universalist tradition, we argue a lot about our first principle, which affirms and promotes “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” We argue about whether or not it is possible to forfeit that dignity. We argue about the limits of upholding that principle when toxic, destructive individuals use it as a get out of jail free card in our congregations, or when their protectors and enablers quote it on their behalf.

For me, now, inherent worth and dignity is an important principle but will mean very little if society keeps progressing in a way that squeezes human beings so hard economically that privation, fear and panicky competitiveness pound steadily at human beings –whose moral well-being and moral behavior is, let’s face it — largely contingent on justice, equity and compassion (another one of our UU principles, but one to which we give far less attention than our first).

I live in a city now, with many people who live in economic hardship. I am not worried, as many presume I must be, of crimes that will be committed against me by the poor and desperate. I am far more worried about the morale and morality-destroying bitterness, exhaustion, despair and fear that is being inflicted on my community by forces that seem to be beyond our control, but are actually not. Those forces can be met, and should be met. However, I am very well aware that those forces can only be met and engaged by those of us who have enough heart, energy, hope and time to devote to social change.

A popular Unitarian Universalist slogan right now says, “Go love the hell out of the world.”

Perhaps in 2014 we might make a shared, community resolution to hearten each other for this work, for this steady confrontation with forces that lie, steal, starve and shame a huge percentage of the population which regards its lack of financial success as a personal failure. Perhaps in the new year we might refrain from one or two in-fights (per week? per day?) among our own over relatively small matters or semantics and stay focused on the hell in the world, which I believe we can successfully discern if we stay clear about where and what it is.

The Holy Spirit moves among us as a people but speaks to each of us individually. My cause will not always be the same as yours, but our causes intersect and converge in important ways, and are always identified by authentic suffering.

I started this post a few weeks ago and now I have forgotten how I intended to conclude it. I invite you to do so with me. Please contribute a word of hope, a commitment of your own, or a benediction.

I made this last week and shared it with my neighbor, Jan. She loved it and wanted to know what it’s called. I didn’t have a name for it, but I do now, in honor of her beautiful, noble collie who died yesterday. He has a fancy name, but as often happens with silly nicknames, his stuck. His mama cooked for him every night, so tonight I’m cooking for her. We will lift a glass to our dear Dufus.

DU’s STEW

3-4 plump chicken breasts

a large can of hominy (15 oz)

1 can tomatillos

frozen roasted corn

1 potato, peeled and chopped into 1″ chunks

3-4 cloves chopped garlic

chicken broth

cumin, adobo, salt, pepper, (optional) small can of green peppers or jalapenos

crock pot

Heat up 1-2 teaspoons of olive oil in a skillet and brown the chicken breasts, coating them with cumin and adobo powder. Set aside to cool.

Drain and rinse the can of tomatillos. Warm up a little more olive oil, scrape the bits of browned chicken up, and gently sautee the chopped garlic cloves until fragrant. Be careful not to burn them. Keep the heat low and add the tomatillos, smashing them carefully with the flat end of a spoon or spatula. Get the tomatillos nice and garlicky. Add some salt to taste.

When the chicken breasts are cool enough, shred them with two forks. They won’t be all the way cooked, but they should be firm enough to shred.

Open and rinse the can of hominy. Drain and add to the crock pot. Add the potato, 1/2 to 3/4 cup of frozen roasted corn, the chicken and the tomatillos and garlic mixture to the crock pot. Pour about 1-2 cups of chicken broth over everything and mix well. Make sure the potatoes are in liquid.

Cook on low for about 3 hours. Mix in some sour cream before serving for an extra creamy kick.

This would work well with leftover turkey for a Southwestern style option. Bon appetit!

Today is Black Friday, that day when millions of Americans head to the mall and millions of other Americans get on large soap boxes to preach against the false gods of materialism and consumerism.

Hey, I got nothing against soap box preaching. I my very own self preached against consumerism and materialism from my pulpit a few weeks ago. My sermon was titled, “Enough Already!”

But I want to talk about the tipping point when a good and righteous cause changes in tone from earnest and thoughtful to smug and shrill. It’s not something you can pinpoint exactly, but it’s a felt shift that happens for me when I notice when social media is packed with rants about the stupidity and badness of those who don’t get on the bandwagon. In other words, the cause about a behavior becomes an attack on the people who engage in the behavior.

In this case, shopping.

I was so taken with Bill McKibben’s lovely little book, Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case For a More Joyful Christmas several years ago. I read it, recommended it, bought copies for people, read it with two congregations, and changed my holiday habits as a result of it.

It worked. It did its thing. It achieved its purpose. It named a problem and it recommended a solution. In tone and in intent, McKibben’s book was caring, inclusive and creative. It didn’t just want to stop a behavior or to take something away from people, it gave us better ideas that sounded fun and happy things to do.

The liberal moralizing around shopping I’ve seen lately bugs me because it’s high-horsey, judgmental and just plain TRENDY. That really bugs me. Bashing mall-goers this time of year is the social justice arugula of the season: an instant way to earn that enviable aura of moral sophistication or even enlightenment. Meanwhile, a whole lot of folks I see engaging in this conversation drive nice cars, have nice homes, and pretty much already have everything they need. For them to unplug from the Christmas machine isn’t going to a huge sacrifice, as they are regularly able to give themselves and their loved ones the little jump in mood and endorphins that comes at the price of a new sweater or nice dinner out.

There’s a lot of classism in this issue.  ‘Nuff said.

Like I said, this isn’t about me disagreeing with the Buy Nothing Day commitments.  I have gone on record as a preacher expressing concern for the ways that materialism seduces us with false promises and traps us with debt and an oppressive amount of possessions that suffocate us and our planet.

I just think that the issue of consumerism, like every other one we embrace as religious liberals, needs to be treated as a pastoral concern first, and a social, political and environmental one second. The reason is that we cannot reach anyone if we don’t come from a place of solidarity and affection.  If you have never known the thrill of finding a pair of Franco Sarto knee-high boots in your size for 40% off at Nordstrom on Black Friday, remember that those of us who have are not unenlightened sinners in the hands of a retail god, we’re average Americans.

As the church becomes increasingly irrelevant in society, the church has to work harder to understand and connect ourselves to the human experience. When we get into our echo chambers of righteous rhetoric denouncing this or that “ism” (in this case, consumerism), we wind up isolating ourselves from tons of ordinary people who suspect — and I think rightly so — that when we denounce the “ism” we are denouncing the human being who is participating in it.  This accomplishes nothing but to activate defensiveness and to separate us from each other.

Religious liberals are really good at identifying things that people should not do. We’re not always as good at recommending things that we should do instead of the other, bad thing.

To myself and all my colleagues who are preaching against consumerism lately: what program did our congregation offer today, on Black Friday? Did we open our doors and serve hot chocolate and have a game day? How many of us hosted a Make a Gift or crafting workshop for all ages?

If you did offer something like this to be a fun, creative, life-giving alternative to the mall, I’d love to hear about it. Let’s share ideas.

But if we did not – if we merely shook our fingers at shopping and failed to provide emotional support, creative alternatives and a place to do something that would help anxious people feel that they were preparing for a meaningful holiday (something that shopping accomplishes, believe it or not), then we shouldn’t wonder why it is so easy to ignore our fine advice and high ideals.

I’ll see you soon in my Franco Sarto boots. But don’t judge: today in the mall I had great conversations with a half a dozen people and encourage two women to give tickets to cultural events in lieu of gifts. Their kids may groan when they get a day at the MFA with mom instead of the Uggs they wanted, but I hope they’ll start a wonderful new tradition.