Class and Unitarian Universalism

Two of the workshops I attended this GA were on classism. I am finding this to be a complex issue bound up with both difficult theological questions and disturbing emotional issues. Given our historical difficulty in confronting institutional and personal racism, it is not surprising that classism is sometimes seen as a diversion from 'the real issues'. But class and race are intertwined, and are woven with other 'isms' so that such such reductionism of oppressions is unhelpful. Consider that shame is a central emotional component that emerges in conversations about both class and race. I suspect that addressing shame with one of these 'isms' will carry us much of the way with the other.

Classism in the UU movement has a complexifying component: education. In many of our congregations, education is seen as more important than economic status, but education is bound up in economic status. But being self-educated is often not seen as an adequate substitute to many of us, as one workshop participant painfully made clear.

I worry that many of us make assumptions about the theological preferences of people based on class. I bristle at the conclusion that working-class people prefer an otherworldly theology to one focused on this world, as ours is. To me that just seems to be a way to excuse classism in our movement.

I think our strength is in our universalizing ideals: that every person has worth and dignity, that salvation is available to all every person, and that our salvation is bound up in a network of mutuality. These transcend class. We need to take them beyond words and into lived action.

Casting my Lot

On Saturday night, the two candidates for UUA president debated. I tried to hold an open mind going into this presentation; after all, my role at Unity Church was the "Hallman Intern", honoring her as a former congregant, and yet the minister of my home church is Peter Morales. I found myself leaving presentation still somewhat ambivalent, but casting my lot with the Morales ticket. Peter articulated issues facing the UUA quite well, though I would like to see Peter develop a more positive message of change for our movement. Laurel's message seemed to me to be 'let's stay the course', and I had hoped to hear something more visionary from her. Maybe that's my message to both candidates: offer me an expansive, bold, but possible vision, and I'm yours. Peter's attention to growing the movement - evangelism - seemed to be the best current articulation of vision. I look forward to the unfolding of this campaign, and to deeper reflection from both candidates.

Love and Death - Forrest Church

"Love and Death" was the title of Forrest Church's talk to a large GA group on Friday afternoon. Forrest spoke beautifully; this seemed to be a distillation, a concentration, of numerous previous messages into what will likely be his last words to many of us. He spoke of the most profound grace of performing funeral services, of the great improbability of each of us being here, and reminded us that grief is what trails after love. But, he reminded us that what remains after we die is the "love we give away before we go."

I was fortunate to be in the second row, and took a picture. The woman next to me leaned over, and said, 'let me see that picture'. She pointed out the spot above Forrest, and said, 'many of his pictures have that orb in them'. I do not know if such orbs are merely photographic artifacts, or have deeper meaning, a thinning of the veil, perhaps. At the very least, the orb is a fitting metaphor for attention to the journey through this life and into the mystery beyond, and I appreciate Forrest's contemplations on his journey.

Service of the Living Tradition

What a beautiful Service of the Living Tradition! Victoria Safford's sermon "Remind Us Again, Brave Friends" was perfect for the occasion, as she spoke of our role, and call, to offer blessings to the world, and we do this even in our imperfection, which gives permission to others to live in their imperfection.

I was privileged to be among those on the stage, receiving the blessing of preliminary fellowship. I felt deep gratitude to be in this body, to process to the stage surrounded by many old friends and good peers, and to have so many others looking on, a congregation both in the hall and over the internet. In my robe I found an old package of tissues; I was glad to have them.

I have loved the transition in form of the Service over the past couple of years from honoring the individual to honoring the gathered body; from an ersatz graduation ceremony to a service of religious covenant. This year, we did not walk across the stage, we did not even stand when our names were called. Instead, our images were projected on the screens as we were named. Thus, this roll call included those who did not come to General Assembly, either out of protest or for other reasons. Some effort was made to discourage shouting for individuals, and generally that worked: just a lone shout here and there, rather than cheering sections, as has happened in the past.

Some of my Starr King buddies and I retired to Waxy's pub for continued celebration; it seemed that half the congregation had reconvened there that night.

Security Theater at GA

After all the hoopla about the security perimeter, showing IDs, and the culture of fear at General Assembly, it comes down to this: a haphazard, thin show of security at the Ft. Lauderdale Convention Center. When we walk in, our IDs are cursorily checked, when we ride the buses , we don't show an ID. The security situation at this convention center was supposed to be fixed months ago, but now I understand it is pushed out to 2011. To me, this smells of interagency conflict and intransigence, the same kind of behavior that contributed to our failure to stop the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.

General Assembly - Ft. Lauderdale

The UUA General Assembly in Ft. Lauderdale is off and running. So far, it seems well put together, and plenary meetings and workshops are tight and well run. The opening ceremony, with the Sources Cantata by Jason Shelton and Kendall Gibbons, was beautiful, though I had to perceive that beauty through the distorted amplification. We still don't have a handle on how to support choral singing in a giant convention center hall. Kendall told me the recording was suprisingly good, so maybe I'll get a chance to hear that.

GA attendance is down about a third, I understand, from previous years. Not surprising. We're all cooking down here in the steamy Florida heat. I remember this heat, the same Houston heat and humidity, and while one adapts to it, one never truly gets used to it.

Beside the heat, my one other whiny complaint has been internet access. My hotel is great in every other way (free breakfast!), but even when I broke down and was ready to pay the usurious $10 a day fee for internet, it wouldn't work with my machine. The internet at the convention center cafe was broken, too. I was reduced to poaching free wireless outside the door of the low-priced hotel a friend stayed at. Finally, I found a coffeeshop with French pastries and free wireless., so I'm catching up on email, journaling, and these posts. Life is good.

2008 Berry Street Lecture

After the end of Ministry Days, the Berry Street Lecture is presented. This is an annual presentation dating from 1820, in dawning days of American Unitarianism. The offerings come from the most talented thinkers in UU ministry, and this year was no exception.

Christine Robinson offered a wonderful commentary for all of us who minister in support of the spiritual lives of others, comparing us to theme park designers, 'Imagineers' who at their best offer something more than fun and education - they connect us with the transcendent. I know this is true, from the days when I worked as a show operator at the Denver planetarium. The most loved shows we offered hinted at something larger, more meaningful, a greater purpose, than we experienced in our everyday lives. People came to these shows for more than the science.

But Christine noted that for many of us, the life of the spirit has been shamed out of us, and we in turn and (perhaps unknowingly) use sarcasm and cynicism to shame others. This, to me, explains well the vituperous response some of those in our midst offer to anything that seems even mildly spiritual. Maybe this understanding offers an avenue for compassion and healing.

John Cullinan, a first year minister, responded that he struggles with the anxiety of church administration that leaves little space for the work of the spirit. This rang true for me too, because I enjoy most aspects of administration, and can easily see myself drawn from spiritual aspects of ministry into the technical aspects. Thanks to both Christine and John for these insightful reflections.

Sermon: What Remains

This was my last sermon of my internship, and unlike the others, I was given free rein to pick the topic and theme. The initial theme was 'Impermanence'. This emerged. My worship associate, Craig Allen offered a words of welcome, referencing Heraclitus and Plutarch, that wonderfully set the stage for this sermon.

When I was a volunteer at the Denver Museum of Natural History, we often had opportunities to participate in other programs offered the museum. One of these was trip to a research dig on the prairie east of Denver. We traveled by bus out to a site, and visited various digs the team had going in gullies and washes in the area. At one site, Kirk Johnson, one of the research paleontologists at the museum, pointed out among several layers of soft rock the one thin layer that represented the KT boundary. This is the dividing line between the Cretacus and the Tertiary periods in geological history, between the time of dinosaurs and the time when dinosaurs no longer existed. The thin layer was the remains of a catastrophic meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and a significant number of other species on earth.

Touching this thin dark layer, putting my fingers on it, had as much significance as touching a martyr's relic in some European cathedral; actually for me, it had more significance. I could feel, at least at some level, a sadness for all the life forms that ceased to exist in that short time. I also felt a chill, for this thin layer, this boundary, represented the contingency, the randomness, the seeming senselessness of the universe. It symbolized the reality of constant transition and churn. It reminded me that all things, and all people will one day die.

When we are gone, what will be left behind? What is our legacy? The most obvious answer (and hope) for many people is their children.

And yet, we've seen examples where this can be taken too far. I recall one friend, a university professor, who regularly lamented about his grown son, whose career choice, working in a big box store, and lifestyle, living in a trailer park, didn't measure up to my friend's hopes. He lived in anguish over his lost hopes, and couldn't see the good. His son was not a abusing drugs, like the sons of other men I knew, or estranged and out of contact, like the child of another.
Consider of Kahlil Gilbran, which we heard earlier:

Your Children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself...
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,...
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For some these words suggest too much permission, but I see in them as a reminder that our task as parents and as a loving congregation is to equip our children for their future. We cannot control that future and we cannot live it for them.

Others seek legacy through their vocation, hoping to leave some permanent body of work.
I know I've been guilty of this sort of thinking. What programs, what creations would I leave behind in my job, in my ministry, even here at Unity Church? Again, there is a danger here, of letting our egos take control. We want our work to remain when we are gone. We lose focus of the larger mission or purpose that our work serves.

When I get too focused on the idea that my work must have some permanence, I think of an incident that happened in Denver over a decade ago. Some Tibetan Buddhist monks had come to create a large sand mandala at the art museum, and over many days they carefully poured out intricate patterns of colored sand in a complex geometric design. When they were nearly done, a man jumped up on their platform and began to destroy the monks work, screaming something about 'the work of the devil'. I remember being so angry at this destruction, and not understanding how the monks could be so calm about the whole thing. But they simply reminded everyone they were simply going to sweep off the whole thing in the end anyway. I still remember thinking: sure a sand mandala is about impermanence, but no one got a chance to preserve the completed work with a photograph!

In striving for legacy, we long to see both how we fit into history and how we will be remembered in the future. In this process we lose sight of what really matters -- the here and now. Anne Morrow Lindbergh speaks to this:

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

So while Morrow Lindbergh was speaking of coupled relationships with this quote, and it remains a favorite wedding reading -- it was read at my own wedding -- it applies to larger relationships, congregations, cities, even nations. In particular, I hope we as a nation can get beyond false, fear-based security of owning, demanding and possessing to a real security of living in the here and now.

Let me turn to one of the strong theological threads that weaves through much of modern Unitarian Universalist thought. This is Process Theology, a small but important theological strand which was developed initially by Alfred North Whitehead in the early twentieth century.
The basic idea is this. Rather than the universe being filled with relatively fixed things, like atoms and particles, the universe is better seen as in flow, a process of events, a becoming. Everything, atoms and molecules, even we as individuals, are comprised of a series of these events happening one after another. As each new event happens, the event makes decisions based on every prior event that has happened. Every event. That's a lot of input data. So these events are immediate, they come in and go out of existence in an instant.

But the remains of the events, the history, what Whitehead calls 'past occasions', are preserved forever, and they constantly feed the future.In this world of process, everything is alive.

Process theology contains the possibility of God. Yes, you can substitute another word for this possibility if you want, but I think it's good practice to reclaim good religious words like God for our own use. Now this process God is not the almighty, all-knowing, perfect and unchanging God of traditional Christianity, but a transformative being that is, like us, a stream of events, undergoing change, and fully embedded in the universe, deeply connected with each of us.

This god invites us toward creativity, toward engagement and beauty in this world. We are free, event by event, to follow or to ignore this calling, this lure toward what is good and beautiful. And when we respond, we inform and increase the potential, the possibility for good that is God. This god, unlike the ancient father god, can suffer with us, and experience joy with us, because this god is so closely connected with us. We are drawn toward this process god, and in responding, co-create with god, a just world, one full of joy, full of beauty.

I'm sure you've noticed several references from Buddhist traditions in this worship service. We used a hymn that quotes the Buddha, and words that recall Thich Naht Hahn's idea of interbeing. I find that Buddhist theology and process theology generally travel together as amicable companions. True, one is ancient and one is modern, but they share some essential concepts - ideas of constant change, of interconnectedness. I want to be clear, these are two distinct ideas and traditions, but the similarities allow us to compare them and come to deeper understanding of each.

But I'll be honest - I bring in elements from Buddhism because process theology is not a practiced religion, it's a theology. It offers little in the way of ritual, or poetry, or song, or heroic stories. I think that perhaps the reason process thought is not more widespread is that it is so academic and intellectual, with little to offer for the heart. Perhaps it is too new to allow the poets time for reflection. This is sad to me, because these ideas are so awesome, so expansive and far-reaching, I get a tingle up my spine, I feel myself carried away contemplating them. Perhaps some of you might find the poetic words or the stories that might bring these vast ideas into the small but welcoming chambers of our hearts.

Here's an example of what I mean: There is a story in the Buddhist tradition in which the Buddha was preparing to lecture to his monks who were gathering and taking their seats. The Buddha noticed a lotus flower in a muddy pond, and plucked it up, root and all, and held it up for all to see. Many of his followers didn't even notice, they were settling in waiting for him to speak. Suddenly, his main disciple, Maha Kashyapa, smiled. The Buddha saw his smile, and acknowledged that he understood the message. The message was a truth that could not be communicated with words or with the intellect.

Similarly, in Kenneth Rexroth's poem, a version of another old Buddhist parable, the Buddha communicates not with words, but with leaves. In Rexroth's poem, the Buddha said,

"I have given you
A handful of truths. Besides
These there are many
Thousands of other truths, more
Than can ever be numbered."

Buddha reminds us that the truths he has to offer, and all the truths we know are only a small part of all the truths there are. In the world in process, perhaps it is not so much that the truth we know is only a part of all the truths, but also that all truth is expanding and evolving, as we work with the creative and transformative force in the universe in acts of loving creation.

Back at the Denver dig, I learned another important lesson about what remains. At another site a few hundred yards away from where we found the KT layer, graduate researchers had exposed a formation of gray shale that had once been mud at the bottom of a pond. Kirk picked up flat pieces of shale from a pile of rock, and casually split them with his rock hammer. Most split open to reveal large leaves of various unusual forms. Kirk would pick up a piece of rock, split it, and pass the specimen to one of us, before quickly picking up another, and splitting it.

We were soon surrounded by a wealth of these fossils, dozens of them. Kirk explained that the numbers of these fossils allowed statistical analysis describing the kind of trees in the forest and giving clues to the climate. Clearly this had been part of a temperate rain-forest. Kirk was excited about this project because it showed that life had returned maybe ten times more quickly after the meteor catastrophe than was previously thought.

These fossil leaves were part of some storm run-off sixty five million years ago, buried in the mud. They formed the basis of an ecology that allowed the rise of mammals, and ultimately humans. As they lay in the sun for the first time in millions of years, I realized their connection with us.

To me, the leaves in their layers of rock are a metaphor for the past events in process theology, laid down in some ancient period, yet somehow available to us as we move through this world of change.

So this is end. The end of my last sermon in this role as Hallman Ministerial Intern at Unity Church. In the fall I will assume a chaplaincy residency at United Hospital here in St. Paul. I will keep a respectful professional distance from Unity Church, so that the new Hallman Intern, Leon Dunkley, can most fully assume this role.

I am deeply grateful for my time with you. It has been a wonderful, challenging, creative and joyful time of learning and becoming into ministry for me. I hope my service here has both responded to that larger luring toward goodness and creativity, and been in service of you, in your own spiritual transformation and growth.

When I think of what remains, and what should remain, it is love. Perhaps the words of the song Everything Possible by UU minister Fred Small, the one sung last week by Kerri and Rob, are the best reminder. "the only measure of your words and deeds will be the love you leave behind when you're done."