There was something telling in one word, a mere conjunction, buried in a sentence in the 19th paragraph of an article in this morning's New York Times . Under the headline, "The Daughter of a Maverick Goes to Battle" [it has a different title online], the Katie Rogers' article began: "As Meghan McCain delivered a eulogy for her father on Saturday, she was at times too grief-stricken to catch her breath. As she described his sickness from brain cancer or his love for her, she struggled to look up at a crowd full of boldface Washington establishment figures who had gathered at National Cathedral. But as Ms. McCain shared one of her father’s dying directives — “Show them how tough you are” — her voice stopped wavering. The warrior...

Dear "Spiritual But Not Religious" person, I'm encouraged by the interest in spirituality, in spiritual growth and development. There are lots of ways to walk a spiritual path: books, classes, spiritual directors and counselors, practices you can undertake by yourself, guided by a teacher, or books, or youtube videos. Even without intentional cultivation of spirituality -- without any books, classes, counselors, teachers, or videos -- "being spiritual" might just mean that you're open to, and value, those intimations of wonder and peace when they come: seeing a sunset, hiking in the woods, or strolling on a beach, say. My path happens to be more the intentional kind. I find that following some disciplines helps me be open to wonder. My p...

Asking myself: What exactly do we do when we "let go"? It occurs to me that: We sigh. Sighing is the physical correlate of letting go. Or is it? I gave Science a call. Science and I chat regularly. She is particularly keen to bend my ear about climate change -- and she has quite persuaded me that the matter is indeed urgent -- but she is also happy to chat about lots of other things. About sighing, Science says that a sigh is a fundamental life-sustaining reflex. It’s not just a sign of frustration or despair. “A control system in the brain keeps humans sighing about a dozen times an hour,” says Science. Apparently our lungs have tiny sacs called alveoli, and regular breaths don’t inflate them fully. They need periodic full infla...

Why do we vote? I mean, those of us who do. I'll begin with something that appears completely different: the case of a German rueful about insufficiently resisting the Nazis in 1935. From there, we move to the broader question of Kantian fantasy -- and from there to our popular rationales for voting, and why they miss the point. Milton Mayer's book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (originally published 1955) includes a story of a German who says, "The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany, and it was I who lost it."The man tells how, in 1935, Germany adopted the National Defense Law. The man was employed in a defense plant at the time, and the new law required him to take an oath of fidelity. The man opposed i...

Living Your Faith, part 1 There’s a saying about the function of a congregation, I've mentioned before. The two-fold function of the congregation is: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It sounds like two different things: comforting afflicted and afflicting comfortable. You might read this as separating the comfortable from the afflicted in much the same way the sheep are to be separated from the goats: the comfortable being the goats, are to be afflicted. I don’t believe in a separation of people into sheep and goats. I resonate with Alexandre Solzhenitsyn who wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and de...

Living Your Faith, part 2 The "infirmary model" emphasizes to role of the congregation (and the practices and faith it helps its members develop) in tending to spiritual needs of the soul-weary and the heart-broken. The "gymnasium model" emphasizes the role of the congregation in encouraging the exercise that strengthens our spiritual muscles. The "insurance policy model" just says that if you pay the premiums of participating in your congregation and its faith and practices, then God will smile upon you -- in this life (as in, prosperity theology, especially), the next, or both. The interplay between "gymnasium" and "insurance policy" runs through the debate in the Christian tradition between between “salvation by works” versus “s...

Living Your Faith, part 3 Rosh Hashanah this year began in the evening last Sunday, Sep 9. Yom Kippur ended on Wednesday evening, Sep 19. In between were the Days of Awe and Repentance. It's the Jewish New Year. How are you going to live your faith this year? We have options for ways to exercise your caring and compassion muscle on behalf of justice for a bruised and hurting world. We have SJTs -- Social Justice Teams – pick one. Maybe two, but at least one. Our social justice teams each have a chair, or two co-chairs. They each have a leadership core of five people. Then there are the active members, who show up at the monthly meetings and at events that are the work of the team, who answer and share emails about the team’s activiti...

When to let go? When not to? APOLOGY IS POWERFUL "Letting go" has many forms, and this month’s On the Journey issue shows. I'll be looking the kind of letting go that is forgiveness: letting go of the wrong committed against us. The blessing of forgiveness isn’t always in the forgiver’s hands. It can’t happen without the other party having contrition, apologizing. Sometimes, no matter how much we might want to forgive, the healing power can only be unlocked by sincere apology. Not always: sometimes we can forgive and let go without getting an apology, and other times apology isn’t enough. But there is a middle area where the apologizer’s willingness to let go of self-protection and defensiveness and acknowledge the wrong they...

Forgiveness. Kavanaugh. Also Cowbirds. part 2 COWBIRDS Our reaction to cowbirds gives us some insight into how the moral judgment part of our minds works. If you read this week’s e-Communitarian – the newsletter that CUUC emails out every week on Thursday or Friday – and if you read all the way to the bottom – you got the bottom where it says “message clipped – click here to view entire message” – and you clicked, and read all the way to THAT bottom . . . If you did that, then God bless you. That’s wonderful. If you did, then you found a little item at the bottom called “Your Moment of Zen.” I took the phrase from The Daily Show , and I’ve been putting a moment of zen at the end of all our e-Communitarian issues f...

Forgiveness. Kavanaugh. Also Cowbirds. part 3 THE CASE OF KAVANAUGH Do we say, then, that a 17-year-old boy’s behavior shouldn’t be judged? I hear US Senators saying, “If true, he was just a 17-year-old kid.” Wait! That’s not what comes after, “if true.” I’ll tell you what comes after, “if true.” After saying, “if true,” what comes next is “what has he done to own the responsibility for the mistake? Is there sincere remorse? Is there apology?" When the allegations first come to light, does he say, "Oh, my God, Christine, I barely remember that night – I was intoxicated, I’d been taught all my life that women’s autonomy didn’t matter, that assault was no big deal. But hearing from you now, reading how tha...

An article by Yoni Appelbaum says, in essence: “The American Idea” asserts that universal and equal rights, freedoms, and opportunity is both a good idea – indeed, a moral imperative – and an American idea – that is, the U.S. bears a special responsibility to model a civic culture that embodies rights, equality, and democracy in a way the world had not seen before. Americans have been held together by the conviction that the United States had a unique mission, even as they debated how to pursue it. From the first, the American Idea provoked skepticism. How could people be allowed to define their own destinies without the stabilizing power of an aristocratic class? It bordered on absurd to believe that a nation so sprawling and ...

The American Idea, part 2 From Paul Simon's "American Tune": We come on the ship they call the Mayflower We come on the ship that sailed the moon We come in the age's most uncertain hour and sing an American tune When I heard that as a teenager, it didn’t occur to me to ask, “What ‘we’?” A lot of us who now share this land didn’t come on the Mayflower, and none of our ancestors did. For African Americans, of course, many if not most of their ancestors who weren’t born in the New World but who died here were brought here on slave ships. Others of us here today have ancestry among those who were here thousands of years before the Mayflower. And millions more have ancestry among people born in Asia, or in Latin America. And th...

The American Idea, part 3 The American Idea (1) is a fluke, (2) includes some values worth keeping and building on, and (3) is in mortal peril. Running through the American identity has been a certain historical account defining what being an American meant. It’s the story that ran along lines typified by Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization – 11 volumes published over 40 years (1935-1975). The Durants, "basically told human history (mostly Western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The series was phenomenally successful, selling over two million copies." (David Brooks)As Ameri...

Discovering America, part 2 The European powers’ shared Christianity helped motivate them to not fight among each other over the new lands. The earlier history of Crusades had accustomed them to the idea of Christians – despite constant wars among themselves – unifying to fight nonChristians. Then they started explaining to themselves what principles they were following to avoid fighting among themselves. Explanations, justifications – principles – can take on a life of their own, far beyond the immediate context they were formulated for. Sometimes this is a good thing. Philadelphia, 1776 We zoom in on the Continental Congress and see them signing the Declaration of Independence. It says that the colonies are separating from Gr...

Discovering America, part 3 What we’ve seen so far in our journey to look for America, is a tale that seems to have a certain sad inevitability to it. Once the Agricultural Revolution had led to standing armies, then all the rest of it -- unending cycles of mass warfare and conquest with attendant rape, pillaging, enslavement -- looks unstoppable. Europe seems to have been bound and doomed to do in the Americas exactly what it did do. But it wasn't unstoppable. It could have been different -- could easily have been different. It didn’t have to be this way. We had the wherewithal from early on to know better – and that’s the deeper tragedy. We had ideas of social justice going back to the Hebrew prophets. We had ideas of democracy...

Learning to Love Diversity, part 2 Stage 3, minimization of cultural difference, is not quite as awakened as it might seem. When we disregard real differences, we end up using ourselves as the standard. We thus treat other people as versions of ourselves. We neglect the importance of our own culture in shaping who we are. We’re emphasizing these universals – features universally true for all of us -- but these supposed universals, on closer inspection, turn out to be assumptions of our particular culture. Once we notice that our assumptions and habits of thought are themselves cultural products – that is, not the natural, universal pattern – then we’ll recognize that cultural differences are more real and important than we had ...

Learning to Love Diversity, part 3 A few weeks ago I was introduced to a woman. She was wearing the style of head covering that I associate with Muslim women. When I was told her name, it sounded to my ear like a middle Eastern name. I bowed and said I was please to meet her, and I asked if she shook hands. I asked because I know that many versions of Islam include a practice of not touching members of the opposite sex. I would say that in that interaction, I had one foot in stage 4 and one foot in stage 5. I was like a person who has just picked up a clarinet, without being able to play any other musical instrument, and has had a couple clarinet lessons. Such a person has moved beyond having a respectful interest about clarinets to actu...

Wrote Rebecca Traister:“What happened inside the room was an exceptionally clear distillation of who has historically been allowed to be angry on their own behalf, and who has not.”The room to which Traister was referring was the chamber of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday September 27, the day when testimony was heard by that Committee and by much of the nation – first, from a woman, then from a man. The woman was, she said, terrified, but her tone was calm and her language precise. The man, by sharp contrast, was clearly angry, and his language much more figurative. Whether it crossed over from Holy Anger to Unholy Rage, I will, for now, not comment, but all sides agreed he was angry and showing it. Male anger won the d...

Holy Anger, part 2 So – my brothers who are accustomed to using anger to assert and reinforce your power, and my sisters who are newly claiming the power of anger – some things that might be worth keeping in mind. First, anger is a gift. Anger arises when we feel an injustice. Whether the injustice is that your spouse keeps leaving dirty dishes around under the apparent assumption that you’ll take care of them, or a social systemic injustice against a whole class of people, we get mad. And that anger is the energy to confront and correct the injustice. Rosa Parks used her anger to bring change. Forget the story you might have heard that she decided not to give up her seat on the bus because she happened to be tired that day. Rosa P...

Holy Anger, part 3 It was hard for me to learn that anger can be expressed without being indulged, and that it can be an important, healthy thing. Hard as it was for me, how much harder must it have been for Yency – the Honduran young man that LoraKim and I adopted 14 years ago when he was 17. Yency grew up with an abusive father. All he ever saw of anger was his father’s rage in which people were going to get hit – often his mom, often him, as when he would step in to protect his mom. In 2011, Yency, then age 24, was sworn in as US citizen. I was at the ceremony. I was so proud. The next day I drove him down to the voter registrar. This was Florida, so they hide it. But after some searching, we found the address tucked down a rece...

In 2008 I was living in Gainesville, Florida. On Tue Nov 4 that year, I went to my local precinct and voted. When I came home, I wrote this poem that expresses the growing sense I have had of the sacred act of prayer that we call voting. November Fourth It felt like church: sacred, moving. Gathering at the temple/precinct with my neighbors I say hello to the greeter, am known, identified. I receive my order of service, the ovals to fill in. My neighbors and I have come together because we, the people, have work to do. This is our liturgy, which means “the work of the people.” The sacramental power is stronger in conjunction with scripture study. For this worship, the lectionary prescribes Newspapers, magazines, candidate records and ...

Why We Vote and Why We Don't , part 2 As discussed in part 1, from a consequentialist point of view, the rationale for voting is very weak. We turn now to the other major school of ethical theory: deontology, most notably the ethical thought of Immanuel Kant. It boils down to: Ask yourself, what if everybody did that? If you wouldn’t like the result of everyone doing that sort of action, then you shouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t want to live in a world in which everyone lied, cheated, or stole, so you shouldn’t lie, cheat, or steal. The way Kant put it was: “So act that the maxim of your action can be willed a universal law for all.”A Kantian rationale for voting might look attractive: we ask, what if everyone did that? What if ...

Why We Vote and Why We Don't , part 3 When non-voters are asked why they don’t vote, they usually say something like their vote doesn’t matter: the system is corrupt, or rigged, or won’t make a difference. If the standard for my vote mattering is: the candidate I vote for will win if I vote for them and won’t if I don’t , then these nonvoters are surely right: my vote doesn’t matter. There was an NPR piece a couple months ago interviewing nonvoters about why they didn’t vote. Buried three-fourths into the 7-minute segment, we hear one interviewee, an African American identified as Raymond Taylor, saying that his vote doesn’t matter because in his district or state the race isn’t close. Then the reporter says: "He told m...

Opening Reading: "Dwell in an Artist's House" Leo Tolstoy said: “All great literature is one of two stories: A man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.”One may wish that it had occurred to Count Tolstoy that women go on journeys, too – and their stories have as much literary potential. Still, one sees his point. In either case – embarking on a journey or a stranger coming to town – it’s about the encounter with something new, something different, and what that encounter does to us. This is the compelling subject of literature and of life. Without that encounter with the stranger – whether we head out or the stranger comes to us – life is a flat unchanging monotone. To open ourselves to the stranger – whether ...

Welcome the Stranger, part 2 We are here to be in service to something. It need not be vertical. When we speak of a higher authority, or a deeper truth, these are vertical metaphors: up to the higher, down to the deeper. The something that we commit our lives to might be horizontal. I’m not so sure about a higher power, but I believe in a wider power. I stand on a level plane with the others of the community, the nation – the other beings of the ecosystem – of which I am a part. This something – whatever it is that is the purpose we choose, or accept, for our life – it must have two features; two opposite features. It must have definition, boundaries. And those boundaries must also be porous. Your body sustains your life throug...

Welcome the Stranger, part 3 We are not such a diverse lot ethnically, or in terms of socio-economic class. Yes, we do have members from various ethnicities and economic classes, but not in numbers proportionate to the general population. Nor are the political opinions among us reflective of the general population. Even theologically, people with conservative forms of their religion are probably going to be more comfortable somewhere else. We say everyone is welcome in our congregation. And we do mean it. At the same time, the people likely to make us uncomfortable themselves feel uncomfortable and don’t come, or don’t come back. We don’t say anyone is unwelcome, yet we can pretty much count on it that the people who stay will be b...

ACT I: PROLOGUE Religion is stories, and music, enacted in ritual. Our ancestors gathered around campfires. There would be drumming and dancing, chanting or singing. And there would be story-telling. The stories helped them make sense of themselves. The stories told the people’s history. They would tell of how the world came to be, and how the plants and animals came to be, and how they themselves, the people, came to be. They didn’t know how the world, and life, came to be so they guessed, using imagination to fashion a tale that seemed to them credible. We do the same thing today. Our story today says that there was a singularity 14 billion years ago that expanded into the universe as we know it. Our story today is continually revi...

Curiosity killed the cat, the saying goes. Shakespeare didn’t say that. In Much Ado about Nothing , there’s a line that care killed a cat – meaning worry or sorrow. The earliest known appearance of the phrase "curiosity killed a cat," replacing Shakespeare's "care" with "curiosity," is in an 1868 newspaper. It must have been in use before then, since by 1873 “curiosity killed the cat” was included in a handbook of proverbs. The image conjured up is of a cat – a naturally curious animal – investigating something and getting into fatal trouble from messing around in something better left alone. The idea is to warn us about dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation. Leave well enough alone. But that’s often not...

Three Curiosities, part 2 The first curiosity (HERE) manifests as love of learning. The second manifests as empathy. 2. Curiosity as Antidote to Judgmentalism There's a kind of curiosity that is paying attention particularly to other people -- the living, breathing ones with whom you interact -- and being curious about them -- their feelings and needs. This is the kind of curiosity that the business consultants are talking about when they come in to teach about being curious. They aren't recommending that workers spend more time watching documentaries or reading about the House of Plantagenet. They're saying be curious instead of judgmental about the people around you: co-workers, and clients or customers -- and curious about yourself. T...