A RE-POST ABOUT THE INSTITUTIONAL WORSHIP OF THE UUA

“The Bone Chalice” started out as a simple proposition: that worship services didn’t have to be the same old “hymn sandwiches” even for the Christian-based religious groups like the Unitarian Universalists.  Indeed, the whole idea came out of the Pacific Northwest District’s workshops at Leadership Schools designed by Peter Raible, Rod Stewart, and Ord Elliott in the Seventies.  In seminary I began to run into issues that I couldn’t quite grasp and then lately issues so amazing and new that they seem to change everything, except that they don’t.  They confirm what I thought from the beginning.  

Alan Deale, Peter Raible, Rod Stewart at Fort Worden, WA

Historically, the Unitarian movement has always been a “thought” game:  principles, logic, academia.  Services are exercises in words.  They come from the Jewish root of the Middle Eastern source: the study and prayer groups.  The Universalist movement is Jesus-based, focused on compassion, forgiveness, women.  It values the Communion, an act of giving and nurturing.  This usually hidden schism affects the design of ceremonies.

Mostly it has been UU men who have gotten interested in liturgical design and they generally have seen it in a priestly light: that is, a primary figure directs the event and a supernatural overtone is not discouraged.  In the UU context in America, there have been several experimental sub-types:

Vern Barnett

ABRAXAS, a group, on the one hand picked up the English Vespers pattern (Rev. Duke Gray) and on the other the use of materials drawn from world religions.  (Rev. Vern Barnett, Center for Religious Experience and Study, Kansas City.)  There was also strong input from Rev. Fred Wooden and Rev. Mark Belletini, who both entered through music, both traditional and newly composed.

Dean Willard Sperry

Dean Willard Sperry at Harvard used the syllogism of thesis/antithesis/resolution as a worship pattern and was mostly sermon-centered.

Rev. Von Ogden Vogt used traditional European Christian structure in both worship and building but filled them with industrial images, which to him were the cutting edge of modernity: steamships and locomotives.  His ideas were used to create the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, which is patterned on an actual European cathedral, but embellished with industrial images

Rev. Kenneth Patton, a Universalist, kept the structure but went to science: the cosmos, anthropology, and a steady flow of compelling human images expressed in words.

The feminist movement brought in a new concern for words, since English is so gender-linked, but also an entry point for lay people and women who were less interested in being “priests” than in organizing cooperative experiences; a wave of new music composed to be inclusive  (Carolyn McDade); more openness to the “enthusiastic” emotional Christian denominations and the folk element in the Catholic context; sharing of space (sometimes members) with the Metropolitan Community Church congregations; Starhawk; Third Force Psych exercises. 

  

Alan Deale and Harlan Limpert, First Unitarian Church of Portland, OR

Norbert Capek's flower communion expanded into a whole family of communions, most notably the Ceremony of Water Mingling, which had universal precedents.

Meadville/Lombard Seminary, where I began work on this subject, was a tiny seminary attached to the University of Chicago Divinity School.  It was the most conservative of the three possibilities I considered and the most academically stringent, which is what I wanted though I had to struggle.  The new theories of Foucault et al were just taking hold and no faculty member had studied them.  Though much of that work comes out of language, esp. semantics and semiotics, it was trying to access “meta” language, primal thought.  

Dean Barnlund

My undergrad School of Speech work at NU had included Dean Barnlund’s “Language and Thought” classes (mostly based on S.I. Hayakawa at that point).  Likewise, since childhood I’d read fairy tales and mythology, which should have led me to Eliade, but at Meadville he was inaccessibly in residence.   His "discipline" is called Comparative Religion or History of Religion.  (Joe Campbell is a “cousin,” a popularizer of the same concepts.)

The important point is that my faculty advisor, John Godbey, wanted me to have a faith standpoint but I didn’t.  I had an experience standpoint.  He wanted me to have "God", though he understood the idea that “He” could only be accessed through a mask.  He didn't want to confront my dismissal of God because we were supposed to pluralistic.  Nevertheless, to him, a conservative man, a liturgy that was not based on formal philosophy and words, was not worship.  At least it was not academic and academic was the route to ministry. Thesis paralyzed.

A challenging and therefore valuable parishioner in Missoula balked at the cost of having a minister, as well as the role itself.  Sunday morning services, which I provided two Sundays out of the month, were not worth his pledge of $100 a month.  He could go to a movie or read a book to get the same ideas.  He valued only the sermon, which is pretty typical of many UU’s.  He had been a lawyer and could do handsprings with our principles.  He recognized that the UUA is an institution but could not see any “spirituality” in it.  Even our social justice programs to him were limited and self-serving.  (They do buy considerable respect and influence.)  All denominations are socio-economic.  I agree.

Headquarters of the UUA

Is a religious institution irreligious?  That is, religious institutions ennoble, accompany, and justify wars on every hand.  What is the difference between all that and the deep power of somethingorother that makes us value and love our lives, even in the face of death?  Or give up our lives for what we love?

In the struggle between the individual and the group, a religious institution is clearly on the side of the group, even if it explicitly states that the individual must be protected and honored.  Institutions pretend to be based on new visions of truth, but to use the Biblical metaphor, they put new wine in old wineskins.  Like Von Ogden Vogt, they only replace the symbols in the frieze around the sanctuary.

THE RIGHT TO RAGE

Rebecca Ruiz

I read an interesting piece by Rebecca Ruiz on Aeon.com the other day.  It was called  “The 12-Step Dogma” and was an inquiry into whether "Higher Powers" and group support were still valid in this day and age when we know so much more about how brains and addiction really work in the body, molecularly, and have meds that can sometimes compensate. Here’s a quote:

“Some argue that AA offers just that opportunity [a way to sobriety], with its steps, affirmations and peer support. Back in that sunlit room in Berkeley, surrounded by recovering addicts who share testimony about the salvation of AA, I can see their path to redemption. The suffering in the room feels like the movement of a wave – that moment when the ocean’s water is pulled back into the abyss and the sand disintegrates beneath your feet. The hour-long ritual of sharing and grieving and lamenting is a way of resisting the void, of pushing it back so that it doesn’t consume you again. With newer therapies so emergent, with research ongoing and trials incomplete, this seems a proper way.”

Lord Varus (Conleth Hill)

The Rev. Mark Belletini

The next thing I happened to pick up off my “to read” pile was the Spring 2015 issue of the UU World.  In it was an excerpt from Mark Belletini’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay: the Colors of Grief.”  http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/300862.shtml  I know Mark only distantly as a musician, liturgist, and respected preacher, but I did know about his sexual identity.  He's quite frank.  He always reminds me a bit of “Lord Varus” from Game of Thrones, but he is not a eunuch or a schemer -- just wise, stable, quiet -- and gay.  

In the Eighties the UUA already had a number of “out” gays.  The Rev. Mark Mosher DeWolfe, who was serving a UU congregation in Mississaugua, Canada, worked with me to line out a theology of the landscape before he died of AIDS.

The Rev. Tony Larsen

The Rev. Dr. Tony Larsen has been the minister of Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church in Racine, Wisconsin, since 1975. He was born in South San Francisco, California, in 1949; studied to be a Catholic priest for ten years; and was ordained a UU minister in 1975. He is not afraid of a little action.  In fact, he said, “Because the first criterion for getting into this church is: you've got to know how to sin. That's very important to us; and not everyone knows how to do it. We don't want people here who never do wicked things. We don't want people here who are holier than thee or thou. We don't want people who have made it in the salvation department and are just waiting around to get picked up. Because people with too much heaven in them are hell to live with.“

Belletini is not so much the provocateur.  Here’s a bit of his story:

“I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for twenty-four years. In 1981 I remember reading the New York Times thoroughly one summer day as I rode the subway. Somewhere way in the back pages I saw an article reporting that a number of young men were suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer usually found only in older men with Mediter-ranean heritage. The only thing those young men had in common was same-gender sexual activity. I clearly remember actually saying aloud in the crowded subway car, “Now what?” . . .

“Over the next decade, I lost friend after friend after friend. When my best friend, Stephen, told me that he had tested positive for HIV, I kept my feelings within me as he talked and I listened. After all, others were in the room when he called. Then when we ended the phone conversation, I went into my room, closed the door, and threw myself onto my pillow and sobbed bitterly. In those days, before the medications available now, such news almost always meant an early death.

“I officiated at the memorial services for many friends. When Stephen died, I fell apart for a good long time. Nothing was right about the world. . . I feel like I have been weary to the bone for almost two decades. Memorials almost every weekend. Not a day went by when I didn’t open the newspaper and see the face of someone I used to know—and often cared about—in the obituaries. I just shut down so many parts of my soul. I feel like I am recovering and opening my soul so that it once again can move through the world with openness and gratitude.” . . .

“Grief has often worn me out, while restoring me to myself at the same time. But the one does not seem to come without the other.”

In another place Belletini told about the years in SF when he lived in a loft that had been divided into apartments.  For many years he belonged to a drawing group.  He stacked his drawings together, a major accumulation on big paper.  Then one day the plumbing broke and cascading water from the floor above made all the paper into a solid block of papier maché.  He had to work on that loss for quite a while before he came to terms with it.  Excellent sermon material because most people can identify with the process of loss, recovery, reconciliation.  It's an old Christian template.  We are all so invested in healing, harmony, overcoming obstacles and so on.

But I know another guy who is gay who is not a UU minister (you have to be a college grad and he’s an autodidact -- the difference is paperwork) but spends every day of his life, every moment of the day, in ministry to at-risk boys, the ones so crazy, defiant and sometimes needy that no one else will take them.  His armor is rage.  Theirs, too, though they tend to grow out of it.  He never has.  He goes back to the molten source, extreme abuse in his childhood, and refills his gut over and over.  But also, like Belletini, he learned how to nurse the dying, make casseroles, change bedding and just sit there, during the terrible genocide of gay deaths. 

Anyone will tell you rage is bad for your health and it has been.  He’s in constant pain.  Painting, photography and other art projects have sustained him all his adult life, but also the kids.  It’s not all dramatic Robin-Williams-type breakthrough moments.  These kids have HIV or even AIDS and that means housekeeping: constant laundry, careful dishwashing, diligent household maintenance, good diet -- because HIV, even on all the drugs, makes a person vulnerable to every infection that comes along.  Even mosquito bites are worse for HIV people.  Serious flu can flatten them.  I can’t think of a Game of Thrones character who fits him.  Someone from the North.

The rage works.  It fuels him and the kids through their weekly insulting and painful public clinic visits, which they endure only because it is the price of staying alive.  It’s the prod that makes him invent one money-raising device after another even after all his beneficiaries are exhausted.  And to constantly rage about the lack of a cure, the fading of consciousness.  It makes enough space in him that when one of the kids is sick or hurt, he can go to sit by them in the hospital, holding their hand.  He survives, a lot more of the kids survive than would without him, but he don’t get no respect.  He doesn’t fit the image.  Why should he?  But cultures have no mercy.

When Dragons grow up.

My rage is not like his.  I smolder.  I lay low and scope the territory.  I keep lists.  Mark, Tony, and the other Mark are institutionalists.  But I’m finding that system to be mostly paper, all wet.  I’d rather burn.  I’m on the side of the guerrilla dragons, inconsolable.   Resisting the void.