RANK BY RANK AGAIN WE STAND

After ten years of teaching I’m a bit like an old fire horse who wants to run when she hears the alarm bell ringing. Likewise, after ten years of Unitarian ministry (more if you include my lay-years), in June I begin to think about the Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly. www.uua.org/events/generalassembly/ Once a genteel sort of chatauqua picnic in the neighborhood of Boston, it has become a huge media event very much influenced by where it is held -- which might be anywhere on this continent except Mexico. It is normally a masterpiece of organization and habit, though pretty various in the actuality.

One of the most memorable I attended was in Philadelphia, where I ditched the events long enough to visit the Museum of Natural History to see the mounted okapi diorama and to visit the Rodin museum, so underfunded that the grounds had not been weeded or cut and the air conditioning was windows standing open. It was like wandering into a slumbering enchantment with the smell of mimosa from a nearby grove drenching everything. At another moment, desperate for air conditioning, I ducked into a movie house showing “Caligula,” confident that no other ministers would be there. When my eyes adjusted, I spotted half-a-dozen. None female.

That was the time the RE director of the church made our housing arrangements and believed she had achieved a coup of economy by booking us at the YMCA, which had a floor for women. In our home church town, the YMCA was new and quite orderly. In Philadelphia it was a slice of real life. No air-conditioning, but a huge man-mountain of a black guard who monitored the elevator (the only access) and would not let dubious persons get on with us nice ladies. We moved when we discovered the bedbugs.

On another occasion the Rev. Riordan and I were in the little hotel shop when an old woman collapsed. She wasn’t with us; she was with a tour that had fed them box lunches evidently contaminated by food poisoning. Her bowels were determined to get it out of her system at once and she was mortified. Her daughter left to try to get help so Riordan and I tried to cope, seating her on a pile of newspapers which were quickly and repulsively drenched. The other ministers thought it was very funny and laughed like schoolboys while keeping their distance. The owner of the shop was greatly indignant at the lost sales so Riordan bought her damned newspapers -- all of ‘em.

A whole lot of hooking-up (Blackfeet would say “snagging”) goes on at GA. One woman was so efficient that certain ministers would find seats where they could watch the door to her room, making bets on how long it would be before the next privileged person came out, slightly mussed and yanking on his coat. It was a while before I figured out that one of my most beloved ministerial friends (NOT one of the old bulls from the PNWD) was going to bed with a different exceptionally beautiful young woman every night. He and I had long walks and talks in the afternoon. I asked him why he was doing that, esp. since he was quite happily married to a woman more beautiful than any of them. He said he “liked the variety.” He assured me his wife didn’t know and it didn’t affect their relationship. When he died of a heart attack -- quite young -- it turned out that she HAD known and had put up with it in spite of pain.

It didn’t occur to me to wonder why he didn’t try to seduce me, since I had established early that I didn’t do that because it is too emotionally confusing. But later I thought that the talking was the same thing and that what he craved was intimacy. Maybe that’s what took him into the ministry, esp. the intimacy of shared ideas. That was certainly what I was after, although it turned out after a number of years that this was more characteristic of the ministry than the laity. Many of the kind of laity who attended GA were after power. Ministers, too, but maybe not so much -- just enough to stay employed.

The Unitarian Universalist Association has a split root: the Unitarians being eggheads from New England who thought the Trinity made no sense and the Universalists being rural people from farther west who believed in a kind God as described in the New Testament. (Maybe you noticed that in the movie “There Will Be Blood,” the evangelist rails against Universalism.) On the basis of shared anti-Calvinism, they joined in my home town, Portland, Oregon, in 1961, and my father went over to see what it was about, but didn’t ever join the movement. (The ministerin the UU church in Portland at the time was Jewish.) The association of free congregations is open to the larger culture, disciplined mostly by vague principles and friendship networks, and inclined to vary wildly across the country. Put a California “hot tub” UU down in Kings Chapel in Boston and he or she will be totally confused. But very proud. The variety is a point of pride. At least until it comes down to specifics. Then there’s war.

When I was active there were about a thousand congregations, which is a small enough number for most people to know most people but too small for effective funding, so the Word went out from Boston and it was GROW. The denomination had taken two huge cultural hits that drove people away: one was the Vietnam War and one was the Black Liberation Movement. The War probably played out mostly congregation by congregation between those whose sons accepted the draft, honorably serving, and those who opposed the deaths of anyone’s sons at all. The Black struggle was much more of a General Assembly battle: people stole the microphones and fudged the money. Nice people always think that nice Black people will be just like them, except Black. NOT. Have you see the photos of Obama’s African family that are circulating? It’s a lot harder to be pluralist than anyone thinks. ANYONE.

But every June the UU’s get together, bravely and with great flurries of paper (I loved the daily “newspapers” that kept us on the same page), taped up sheets of newsprint, and not-so-magic markers -- I suppose by now largely superceded by bullet lists on laptops. I would be bored if I were there, and yet... yet... when the ministers -- some of them dear friends and some of them deadly enemies -- stood together to peal out “Rank by Rank Again We Stand”, I wept with emotion as I sang. My eyes are wet right now.