GOING TO AND FRO

"Where have you come from?" 

"From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it."

This is at the beginning of the Book of Job.  God and the Devil as circuit-riders. Once I roughed out a book to be an account of my un-godlike circuit-riding as a Unitarian-Universalist minister between 1982 and 1985.  At the time I was the only full-time UU minister in the state.  All six Montana congregations were “fellowships,” meaning they had no full-time minister.  Two fellowships opted out.  The four who remained were Helena, Great Falls, and the two university towns, Bozeman and Missoula.  The idea of the book was going to be assigning a dimension of ministry to each town: social action, ethical reflection, spiritual growth, organizational development.

I lived in an old Ford F150 van.  It had no windows, only the two front seats.  I built two plywood boxes, one across the back for a bed and one along the side for a desk.  The sides were open so I could stash stuff. (Actually, I had a little backup studio apartment in Helena but I wasn’t there very much.)  It was news to the congregation that I was there for board meetings, classes, discussion groups, counseling, and interfacing with the larger world.  They hadn’t thought much about pledging either.  From the denomination’s point of view, I was there to enlighten them.  From their point of view, the idea was to make them feel good on Sunday morning and then get out of the way. I came to one town on Thursday, preached there that Sunday morning, drove a hundred miles to another, preached an evening service, and stayed until Tuesday.  On Wednesday I slept.  Then repeated.

Each community was like an on-going play in which I had a part, but was not the director.  My first job was to understand what the play was about and then to coach the cast as they interacted.  Each town had its own “script” though there was a lot of room for improvisation.  The “cast” was liberals, outliers, artsy types, and stubborn individuals, who are generally who “auditions” for Unitarianism.  

Great Falls is a working class place. The Falls themselves, which once supplied energy for a copper refinery, and the railroad that fed it, had become less important by 1982 -- in fact, economic reconfiguration was the theme in all groups.  Paris Gibson himself, the Universalist from back east who founded the town, had changed careers several times and was sheep-ranching when he laid out Great Falls with stakes, string, and a compass.

Military was strong, both the presence of the Malmstrom Air Force Base and the missile silos scattered through the wheat fields, but it was the wheat fields themselves that really counted.  I can’t think of a livestock rancher in the group.  There was an interesting sub-group that craved culture, many of them wives of military or of ag sons who happened to be back east when they felt the impulse to marry.  We met in the YWCA.

Missoula is the humanities town -- as the bumper sticker has it, “only thirty miles from Montana.”  (West of the Rockies.)  And about three thousand miles from its self-image, which is Ivy League Wannabe.  Effort has been made to line the streets with familiar hardwoods.  The fellowship had bought Leslie Fiedler’s house when he left and kept his spirit alive in it.  Except there was a counter-current of New England abstinence and control, hierachy and status.  The fellowship had nothing to do with the timber-and-sawmill crowd and nothing to do with Native Americans.  They thought of the fellowship as a kind of faculty club.

Bozeman is the cowtown, the ag school, highly athletic.   One Easter eve I got snowed in on the parking lot of the Student Union, slept there overnight, and went in for breakfast.  I was surprised to see a hundred students, all male, clearly minority and probably Islamic. Enrolled for engineering and science, they normally weren’t obvious.  This UU group was adventurous, open to difference, and had a couple of members who were also liberal Lutherans and quiet lesbians.  The fellowship met in the quite liberal Congregational church and could talk French deconstruction.

The Helena group kept flickering in and out.  At the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th century, there were so many New England engineers and bankers -- to say nothing of copper millionaires -- that the town built an elegant Unitarian church.  Since then, the church had become a library and then the Grand Street Theatre.    This group met in the chapel of the progressive Methodist church.  Once, memorably, we met in one of the grand mansions where I spoke standing on the staircase in the wide hallway while the hymns were accompanied by a man playing a grand piano in the upstairs balcony hall.

The spine of of all these dramas was “change,” not opposing it but bending to it and transforming over time -- becoming multiple and yet finding coherence.  Some of the energy came from the local social ecology. But these were coalitions of atypicals who sometimes paid a high price for their marginality, not least in terms of getting along with each other.   My wages and expenses came mostly from a pot hidden by Midwestern small-town Universalists when their denomination became so small that they were forced to merge with the larger urban Unitarians.  They did not trust city slickers.  In the end they thought that Montana UU’s were a legitimate use of their hoard, so I spent it.

The commonality between the two “U” groups was their rejection of Calvinism, an intolerant and punitive understanding of God that the Taliban would approve.  Both U’s kept the concept of God at first, but the Unitarians gradually went over to humanism/atheism and the Universalists put their trust in Jesus the person.  Both have always had a mystical strain, something like Quakers.  Part of my task as minister was to bring this history to the groups, but most of the members only felt that their group was “people like me” whom they could trust.  Sometimes they were not.  So then there was drama.

And much going to and fro between God and Devil or whatever other forces in the Cosmos one chooses to personify. The old binaries don’t work anymore.  Now we begin to see the continuums and interactions everywhere, the boundaries that can be moved or made permeable, the nations redefined, the oceans opening into outer space, the Chinese dust falling on the high Montana prairie, the water sinking away from us all.

We go to and fro over the landscape of thought much as we cross the realities of land, each of us in our own little F150 van bodies with a box for a bed and a box for a table -- only surfaces, each with an open side.  The point of the congregations is not destination but fellow travelers.  I’ve dropped out.  Now I am clamped in place, an anchorite.  But the fellowships go on.  It’s a road show, a touring company.

When April with his showers sweet

The drought of March has pierced to the root

And bathed every vein in sweet liqueur

Of which virtue empowers every flower,

When breezes also with sweet breath

Inspires every grove and heath,

Tender crops, and the young Sun

Has in “the Ram” his half course run

And small birds are making melody 

That slept all the night with open eye,

So awakens nature in her courage; 

Then folk long to go on pilgrimages.