DUMPING THE SERMONS

Yesterday I said I threw out all the sermons I'd kept since 1978, the year I started preaching in seminary.  Two men reacted.  One just endorsed the idea because he believes in dumping everything except what will fit in one bag.  To him it's a sign of freedom and a kind of faith that he will survive through the kindness of others who loan beds and showers.

The other man asked the journalist question:  "How did it feel?"  Because, I suspect, he has the journalist's sceptical assumption that religion is an encumbrance and that one would naturally feel lightened by breaking with these symbols of religion so as to look at "reality."

Neither one of them is right.  Neither one of them really knows what it is to dump that many sermons:  a physical task.  In this little town one takes one's trash to the roll-off a mile out of town, next to the sewage lagoon.  It is a ridge with an arroyo alongside so that three huge dumpsters can be parked with their tops level with the drive-up ground, so you can back up your pickup and throw your junk into the dumpster.  Every morning the meat cutting courier brings out a carcass to discard the entrails, which makes the eager seagulls very happy.  People throw whole sofas in.  I've seen a complete kitchen: sink, fridge, stove.  A few times there have been sheets of corrugated tin and I beg to have them for my shed roofs.

I don't want to discard the plastic document boxes with lids that the sermons are in, though I cheerfully throw out the cardboard versions, esp. after they've gotten wet.  So I transfer the sermons to plastic bags, using contractor's bags which are much bigger and stronger than ordinary garbage bags.  Once an inspector for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings found one of those big bags with a dead woman inside.

The woman who runs the rolloff is strong and intelligent, the paycheck for the family.  She took the day off, probably to go shopping now that school has started, and a substitute old guy wielded the clipboard list, which is how you pay, along with holes punched in an annual card.  I always shudder when this happens because the male subs are from a generation of men that tells women what to do and does all physical stuff which they are convinced they know all about.  They attack the back of the pickup and can't tell garbage from laundry, so I have to confront them and tell them off.  They stamp off angry at women.  One or two have almost become dangerous.

This trash is driven away and re-sorted at a place miles away where it is not burned but piled up as compost in a huge mountain.  Trees are planted around it and eventually covered by dirt.  Skunks always hang around so you get a little whiff when you drive by.

Packets of 81/2" by 11" paper don't burn very well because there's no way for the oxygen to get between the pages.  They don't compost very well either for the same reason.  Burning and some composting but certainly all animal life is based on the process of oxygenation.  I've had little fantasies about someone pulling an edifying page out of the compost.  Intellectual oxygenation.

Both Twitter commentators seem to think of sermons as socially sacred somehow, a myth encouraged by those who create and voice them but not so much by those dozing in the pews.  My sermons are just like my blog posts: little stories mostly, with some proposal of meaning attached.  Rungs up the ladder of understanding.

You could call it "Jacob's ladder" if you're into that kind of thing, or the axis mundi ladder up to the entrance to a SW kiva. (which is in the roof) if you read Joe Campbell.  The thought called up in my mind's eye is the Sunday that Jon Chacopulos had just bought an old hook-and-ladder fire engine and the entire Helena fellowship climbed aboard, traveled through the window of a Dairy Queen so that we were all properly equipped with ice cream cones, and then toured the city, running the lights and siren.  Isn't that what a church should really be like?

All the holiness has worn off in a hail of potlucks, arguments, Sunday school, board meetings and other trash of living.  The real emotional task will be later today when I tackle the four-drawer file cabinets.  There are six of them:  one for Bob Scriver memorabilia, one for Blackfeet school's lesson plans and theory, one for writing, and one for stuff I intend to get to someday.  That last one will be easy.  OUT.  There are two for UU stuff.

I've tried to find archives that will take these old newsletters, correspondence, song-sheets, convention notes and so on, but no one wants them.  I'm not forbidden -- though if I made a fuss I might be -- but merely bypassed as irrelevant.  I don't have passwords to the organizations.  "Elderberries" is the newsletter of the retired ministers, but I only read it.  They go on trips and cruises and conferences and do good and have lovely homes: all things that take a decent income.  I know there are other veterans like me who have simply disappeared.  The denomination did such a good job of representing prosperity, education, and leadership in the world, that people we always defended in absentia (dark, uppity, foreign) have now captured the castle to show they're just as good.

No matter.  It showed me that only winners are welcome, that there is no particular advantage to any bureaucracy, religious or not, and that no one will rush up to say,  "Oh, yes!  We want your records of three years of fellowship growth where everyone said it was impossible."  The young women who are now the district execs and growth chairs don't know my name, and don't grasp the heroism of living in a old van while driving among four fellowships.  But they still believe -- secretly -- that the idea is to maintain the organization and not much more, really.

Circuit-riding was a conceit anyway.  A dodge.  A selfish bit of narcissism that meant I snored so loudly that no one would room with me, so I went on sleeping in the van at minister's meetings.  I'll keep the stories of those years because they were so much fun as well as sometimes hair-raising.  I'll throw out the 3X5 cards for people but that will be the hardest, because each name is a real person.  Some have stayed UU.  I don't know what percentage.  

BUNDLES V. BOXES; JOURNEYS V. WALLS

This is an attempt to round up and list some of the ideas I’ve been chasing off and on.  They mostly come from thinking about Indian tribes (Blackfeet) and religious congregations (UU and Catholic).  The roots are in a little sermon I gave years ago that compared “bundles” with “boxes.”   Boxes are the way the Euro world has stored things as far back as the Ark of the Covenant (a box that carried the pieces of the stone Ten Commandments)  which links boxes to writing and to rules. The box keeps its shape no matter what.  Hard to pack on a horse, camel or donkey, but easy to lift into a wagon, which is a box itself.  Euro-style is a box.  "Box goods" are wooden square kinds of furniture, like beds, tables and chairs.  

Travel trunk for a ship, a wagon, a railroad.

The bundle is even older, going back to the swaddled child in a blanket.  Bundles, which are the way the Blackfeet transported things, take their shape from their contents, so they can change shape -- that is, adapt.  A tipi or tent is a wrapped flexible fabric surrounding a framework or object.  The most basic shelter is a person wrapped in a blanket or bison hide.  (Not counting the emotional shelter of someone's arms.)

A wrapped bundle of sticks.

There’s a relationship to the way journeys go -- winding paths or squarely-measured streets and blocks.  That links to the contrast between rural and urban, and also to the contrast I talk about sometimes between the way my father could find his way on the chess-board of surveyed fence lines and the way my mother could find her way along waterways and by landmarks.  We might think that rationality is full of right angles like a box, but that might not be a justified assumption.  Even some cities have sinuous streets, serpentine, labyrinthine.

Today we’re told that mammal cerebrums contain cells that monitor which direction you are facing, supply a grid overlying areas, and tells whether you are close to an edge of some kind.  I watch the cats choose where to hunker down: often at the edge of a shadow or a porch or the rug -- on the side where they are harder to see.  But those edges might be curved or complex.  There is probably something in the brain about what will cause a mammal to be camouflaged.  Most camo is in "organic" blob shapes.  Not being seen would be a survival advantage.   Being plainly graphed is a mathematical advantage.

Now I’m moving to talking about organizing principles that contrast:  those that gather around a center, a kind of concentric accumulation driven by attraction to the middle or pressure from outside the formation, biomorphic ; and those that are based on decisions that draw sharp edges, boundaries, barriers, a difference between one place or condition and another.

A pipe bundle but maybe not so sacred.

This defining difference lets me think about the difference between a pre-contact Indian tribe, which is a freely assembled group of people usually gathered around an admired leader or genetic nucleus and responding to the larger ecology by moving; losing individuals through war, misadventure, aging, disease or famine; but also gaining members by accepting visitors, marrying, capturing, and birth.  The group can change in size as well as its demographics, so that sometimes there is a high proportion of men versus women or a high proportion of young versus old.  If the group is too small, they can join with another group; if they are too many, they can split.  This is biologically and environmentally related so it can be true of pre-humans.  Cultural memes develop in response to all these factors.

Boxes can be locked.

The discoveries made in the “Cradle of Civilization,” the Middle Eastern countries, were originally driven in organic ways until certain new techniques were discovered.  One was geometry, which allowed the drawing of boundaries that were based on mathematics, drawn in reference to stars, mostly driven by the need to keep track of owned property, either land that could produce profitable crops or the exchange of virtual value: money, debts.  Soon towns formed -- with boundary walls to protect accumulations of value like granaries -- and that meant they offered an increase in safety inside the wall.  This hardened the relationship between those who belong and those who are “other” and also created value by controlling the gate.  People might pay toll in order to enter or leave, which means a “salary” for those who kept the gate.  

A woven sack.

It also enabled the creation of formal laws, written and recorded so therefore transcending any one person’s memory, leaving no arguable wiggle room.  Controlling those laws also meant a source of power and profit.  Enforcing the laws and enacting laws that benefitted one group or individual over the others led to the elevation of someone to being the “Decider,” as Bush liked to call it.  This is the beginning of class divisions and the discrepancies in prosperity that we speak of now as the super-wealthy 1%.  If it all becomes too harsh, too burdensome, the 99% will breach the wall and tear down the geometry of the town.  Smart rulers shelter their people.

Change categories.  At first Christianity was an organic religion based on a shift from understanding virtue as privilege to virtue as generosity and gratitude.  When the local religion merged with the Roman Empire, it was an attempt on the part of the Caesar and ruling senators to shift to those values, but instead it transformed Christianity into an INSTITUTION.  As soon as a population is organized around rules, boundaries, safety and prosperity, it becomes an institution.

Institutions like it best if there is a clear boundary between who is in and who is out.  As soon as a reservation was defined in contrast to the fluid moving back and forth of tribes, they had created an institution called a “tribe” and named according to Euro names (Blackfeet) which meant that a supervisor could be appointed, rules could be imposed, and resources could be managed.  At first the reservation was like a kingdom with the agent, at that time under the Department of War, having total power over the people -- ANY people, Indian or not, who were within that boundary.  What he did with that power was determined by Washington, D.C.  (too far away to know or or interfere -- operating only on theory and desire) or by his own conscience.

Religious institutions are subject to the same forces as any other human institution.  Spirituality and meaning form the way families form or the original Siksika bands found an organic form.  Though religious institutions try to be gatekeepers who build a wall around these organic forms, spirituality and human institutions do not exist in the same dimensions.  Spirituality does not respond to geometry or prosperity or safety.  It is “wild,” outside civilized writing and buildings, and always will be.

This did not prevent one arm of the most Euro of religious institutions, the Roman Catholic Pope’s “army” (Jesuits), from coming at once to the Blackfeet territory -- even before it was a reservation -- to compete with the newly formed reservation machinery.  They had their own networks and gatekeepers of great power and determination.  Many indigenous with destroyed lives responded to this as a way of surviving and finding a new meaning.

Miraculously, in spite of rigidity and a punishment mentality, spirituality seeped back in.  Today we see a Pope educated in the Asian spiritual traditions, a Jesuit who studied Zen and Tao, leading us back to what had been walled out:  joy and the Gospel of generosity and gratitude.  Meanings without boundaries because they come from human sensory life.  Some feel that Buddhism was what converted Jesus to the Gospels.  

But those who have done well with the Procrustean forts, commodities, and railroads -- cling to the patriarchal ideas of the Old Testament which justified the destruction of the vulnerable, the defiant, the rule-breakers and the “other”.  Strangely, China has joined the Old Testament believers, maybe through Shinto, the worship of family ancestors, the use of genealogy to justify power and status.  But then, they always believed in Great Walls and emperors.  These are impulses that arise from too many people, too few resources, but enough prosperity for some people to become mathematicians, lawyers and . . . uh-oh, scientists.

But scientists ask why, why, why?   So do artists.  They are always escaping from the scouted territories, the maps and therefore the blueprints.  The reason that is a GOOD thing is that it leads to new resources, new ways of being in the world, and more world than anyone living inside a wall according to the past can ever imagine.  But the easiest way to drive people inside confining walls is fear.  Surveys now are saying that people are valuing security more than prosperity.

Why, Why, Why?

HURRAY FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY !!!

When the Fourth of July fell on a Sunday about twenty years ago, I had been scheduled to preach at Atkinson Church in Oregon City, Oregon.  Living in Portland where I grew up, out of ministerial fellowship and working for my living as a clerical specialist for the City of Portland,  I  did pulpit supply at Atkinson Church in Oregon City  http://www.atkinsonchurch.com/  or at their breakaway fellowship across the Willamette River in West Linn  http://www.southparkunitarian.org/  UU communities often fall into an earth-and-moon configuration in which there is a large church with a small fellowship not far away.  It’s a matter of culture more than dogma.  Fellowships are nearly family churches, close knit and free-wheeling.  A church is building and minister, organist and office manager.  I enjoyed both of these groups immensely.

Atkinson Church’s history goes back to 1844.  (Look for their history on their website.)  Oregon City proudly preserves many historic houses, including that of Doctor John McLoughlin, factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company who ran the Pacific Northwest before it was even a territory of the United States.  The two-story gracious home was moved from Fort Vancouver to its present location on top of the bluff overlooking the town.  Oregon City is a barrier to ship travel on the Willamette because of the falls that supplied energy for industries in the early days.  Before white people, it was a great place for tribal people to catch eels.

From the Atkinson website:  “Founded in 1844, Atkinson Memorial Church is the oldest self-governing religious society in the continental West. During its history, it has been in fellowship with two denominational traditions: the Unitarian Universalist Association and the National Association of Congregational Churches. Founded as a Congregationalist church originally, Atkinson was dually affiliated for a number of years. Recently, the church has elected to be a member UUA church. Both traditions have long-time fraternal ties and common historical roots in 17th and 18th century New England, beginning with the Mayflower Pilgrims of 1620.”

The beautiful historic building with its distinctive round sanctuary, like all such edifices, always has maintenance problems that press on the budget.  The congregation itself split once when the much more numerous conservative members left in the Fifties.  Another splinter group of more liberal members formed South Park Fellowship later.  The core congregation clung desperately to the identity its key historical minister, Reverend Harold Bachelder, defined with an Edwin Markham quote:

He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.

A third fellowship, newly formed and from an aggressive new-fangled point of view I call “Triumphalist Unitarianism,” gave the church its biggest trial in my time by joining them, sending their comfortable culture tail over teakettle.  The newcomers wanted the building.  It took a while to settle down, but they did.  Today they are stable, functioning and content with a female American Buddhist/UU minister.  But the more Christian Congregational element is pretty much gone and I suspect the mobile of the Markham quote has been taken down.  It looked like a mobile of the earth and moon.

In the last few weeks I’ve been exploring my own family history on my mother’s side which is as contentious than any church and over the same issues:  prosperity, cultural heritage, leadership rivalries, and so forth.  I find that in the early records I’m descended from a sea captain, the same as Bob Scriver was.  I could join the Daughters of the American Revolution or the Daughters of the Oregon Trail.   I’ve been the progressive satellite of an essentially conservative if various family.  

Much as I enjoyed Atkinson, I was a better fit at South Park where the members tended to be teachers, counselors, environmentalists, and Irish poets, Quite a bit younger, small enough to turn sermons into discussions and include the older children in them, they still meet at an arboretum created around a doctor’s house.  Just down the hill along the river on private property in those years some avant garde architect was building one of those white square houses.  This progressive congregation was not convinced it was environmentally sound.  They had their boundaries.  (There's always someone more far-out than you are!)

At Atkinson on the Fourth of July I decided I would NOT be progressive but would borrow the triumphalist mode to celebrate patriotism.  I preached about the Pacific Northwest, the fine qualities of Oregon, the courage and tenacity of those who walked the Oregon Trail (including my ancestors), and the abiding wonder of American Democracy in the face of every challenge.  We sang “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Land of the Empire Builders” and “Roll on, Columbia, Roll on!”  The snow-capped faces of the congregation shone with delight and the voices rang out.  Is there anything wrong with that?  

Like Edwin Markham’s poetry, patriotism has gotten kind of narrowed and subdivided over the decades.  It gets harder and harder to draw a circle that takes everyone in.  More and more people want to stigmatize the heretic, the rebel, the different.  When we say “man” we don’t mean all human beings anymore.  Some don’t even mean the human species -- they can’t quite define WHAT they mean.  We’re exploring spaces both outer and inner, some trying to capture honor and some trying to capture the other guy’s fortunes -- or church or country.

I wonder what happened to that shockingly aggressive little fellowship that invaded Oregon City.   I can’t even remember their name so I can’t google for them.  They might have died out.  I preached there only once, and witnessed a fight full of insults -- some aimed at me!  One man insisted on challenging the leadership and since he was in a wheelchair, the board went to a room upstairs (no elevator) hoping he’d be excluded.  But he went up the stairs on his butt. In the end I think these folks were sort of like shock paddles that started the heart of Atkinson Church again, if only in self-defense. 

But the less-boisterous little South Park breakaway group preserved something precious that would not have persisted in a larger group.  In my Oregon heart, my sea captain genes, my long trail life, I still draw a circle that takes them all in.  Pioneers, renegades, Indians, eels, Doug firs dripping in the rain -- all, all.  

Our ways go wide and I know not whither,

But my song will search through the worlds for you,

Till the Seven Seas waste and the Seven Stars wither,

And the dream of the heart comes true.

I will find you there where our low life heightens,

Where the door of the Wonder again unbars,

Where the old love lures and the old fire whitens,

In the Stars behind the stars.

--Edwin Markham

THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION MAKES CONTACT

Not long ago I got an automated email from the current head of the Meadville/Lombard Theological School Alumni Association, asking for money and, of course, as one is supposed to do, asking for feedback. So I said, as I do every year, “What about the people who started at M/L but didn’t finish? Who transferred or quit midstream or started in the ministry but then left?” (Like me. I stayed in ministry six years.)

I had just gotten another mail solicitation from the University of Chicago. (In my day UU’s at M/L got a double degree, the U of C tucked into the M/L degree which allowed the U of C Div School to count all Meadville students as their own ministry students, because the truth is that they mostly educate Ph.D. academic students -- or did -- and some of their endowment is dedicated to the creation of ministers.) U of C goes out of their way to claim the people who only attended a short time and never got a degree -- or, as often happens at the U of C, were technically students writing their thesis for decades, but never did really do it. Nevertheless, they are listed as Class of X instead of Class of 1982 or whatever. Often they are people who went on to considerable achievement. Of course, when you’re looking for donations, the wider the base the better.

So I asked, “Is there a list somewhere of M/L students who didn’t finish or who dropped out of the ministry? Why not ask THEM for feedback?” I got back a stiff email reminding me that I’d asked the same thing last year and, really, if they dropped out, they weren’t ALUMNI, were they? Try the UUMA. (That’s the ministers’ association.) He said, “You sound like you’re just looking for old friends.” He sounded like he thought leaving was a kind of betrayal.

Actually, between Google and Facebook, I managed to make contact with just about everyone a year ago. Word must have gotten around. They were not excited about hearing from me. No one has kept in touch. I’m out of the game. Ministry is a contact sport. If you’re off the field, you don’t count and we don’t want to hear from you. But I was curious to know whether there were patterns that might be interesting or even useful in a time when the building is being sold, the school itself is more or less consolidating with a less directly Unitarian Universalist school, and the whole nature of the denomination is changing.

At one time the general idea of what a UU minister was like was what Robert Sapolsky calls a schizotypal, a brilliant young man, introverted, not exactly conventional and deeply serious about religious issues. This was the interpretation of “learned ministry.” But now, judging from the newsletters, the students are on their second career, inclined to be motherly women or beard-and-belly men -- no one has been starving in the previous career -- and gregarious. These folks are congregation builders. Numbers count if you’re going to keep a church or denomination alive. And if these ministers are going to have pulpits, they will have to sell themselves to congregations. There is no shortage of UU ministers.

Steve Beall, one of those who walked off before jumping through the last hoops, used to argue vigorously that a theological seminary was a good place to go if you had questions about life and that there should not be any obligation or pretense of meaning to be a minister. But the school itself, some of whose faculty had taken a pass on Vietnam on grounds that they were engaged in serious social action through ministry, tended to raise funds in terms of creating ministers. The truth was that my class, entering in 1978, included four students, hardly enough to justify the cost of the building.

Which is going to be sold anyway. Gothic stone and marble lavs are out-of-fashion. The humanist cathedral across the intersection doesn’t even have a steeple anymore. In the days when I was there, the point was to show that science could be religious. Now the idea is more like, “make your choice.” No one wants their religion to be out-of-fashion. The whole idea is to be prestigious, cutting-edge -- maybe not so learned that one is out-of-touch. Not uncomfortable.

I guess exit interviews are old hat. Consultants are in. Consultants tell you what you want to hear. So do alumni. I mean, the in-group reports what they know, but the out-group tells you what you don’t know. If the goal is to expand beyond the palings of the fort, it may be more important to hear what they have to say

For instance, the advice now accepted is based on commodification, the strategies of the commercial world, the algorithym, polling, and the prestige of pre-existing platforms. Quotas and target goals are denied but one is told that one in a thousand people is a natural Unitarian and that it takes three hundred people to support a building and minister. We constantly survey ourselves to see “who we are” and are always surprised that we turn out to be us, asking ourselves our favorite questions. We have not thought about the "long tail" in any depth.

Beyond this problem is the refusal to admit that religious denominations constantly morph and last century’s elitist white man head-trip Unitarianism is nothing like today’s mildly do-gooder, diligently narcissistic, upwardly mobile UUist. We seem to have lost the joyful release of the Sixties and Seventies person who was enough of a free-thinker that all the conformists with “good personalities” told him or her they were “just a Unitarian,” which turned out to be true. As a society and probably as a denomination, we’re back to our original Puritan roots, working out, passing safety regulations, checking rumor with Snopes.com, trying to have proportional representation of minorities, hovering over the children.

When I found it in the Seventies, this denomination seemed so much like the home I hadn’t known about that I couldn’t help crying out, “Oh, so THIS is where everyone is! Why didn’t you TELL me??” But now that feeling is gone. Even if it’s my “fault” and I’ve simply changed away from the group, is there another denomination where I fit now? Is one that needs to be formed? Or is it the concept of denominational congregations that is simply “over?” Like elaborate stone seminaries in big cities, attached to major universities?

A GREEN STICK

THIS IS A RERUN. The sermon was preached at South Park UU Fellowship in West Linn, Oregon, on Easter Sunday in 1997. It’s slightly abridged.


This Easter we have a current event to deal with as we consider a two-thousand year old tradition in addition to a three or four billion year planetary event. Let’s look at the most recent first.

In a San Diego mansion a group of people decided to commit suicide. They were mostly computer programmers -- intelligent, talented, loved by their families. They were influenced by a tall, maybe 70-year-old, conflicted gay man -- a singer, teacher and PK (preacher’s kid) maybe suffering from terminal liver cancer. Wearing Nikes, black clothes, short hair, and plastic bags, they followed Hemlock Society drug protocol and died ever-so-neatly in K-Mart bunkbeds with Target down comforters, purple cloth diamonds spread over their faces and chests.

This would never happen to Unitarians. In the first place the social activists among us would object to the Nikes on grounds that we should support Third World labor by boycotting shoes made under poor working conditions. In the second place many of us think that dressing alike is fashion tyranny. In the third place we are far too individualistic to get the same haircut, do the same thing at the same time, or shop at the same place. We refuse to lie down neatly and die.

On the other hand, we do include many computer programmers and gays, we have been excited over the comet Hale-Bopp, and some of us have been very much intrigued by New Age ideas such as eloping with the dome-headed, bug-eyed operators of UFO’s. Thank goodness we are too anti-authoritarian to ever be described as a cult. Many of us are simply too sceptical to be taken in by sci-fi fantasy.

Though we are founded on the principle of freedom of thought, I object to believing in the preposterous, I object to defining religion as believing in things that are not true, I object to defining community as a group that goes apart from the rest of the world and defines itself as special or privileged, and I object to events that distract us from our real allegiance, which is to the planet from which we arise. These points are at the heart of what I have to say this morning.

Christianity has always had a dangerous edge where inspired poetic theory overtakes mythic story or recorded history, creating a spurious aura of miracle. Thus, over and over everywhere recurs the human phenomenon of a reform leader who is captured and killed by dominating autocrats in the name of keeping order. In Eastern Europe, in parts of Africa, in the southern United States where slave leaders tried to push towards freedom and on the Western prairie where Native Americans tried to preserve their lands, the story is archetypal. We easily recognize it.

The inspired notion that created Christianity and set is apart was the idea that another realm exists in the spirit -- entirely unseen -- and that from this spiritual realm one leader had the indestructible power to survive and then to prevail over this world. Thus Jesus, the man, is killed but the Christ, which is part of God, survives and will return to set us “free.” Some Unitarians have always said this is fiction. Unless you want to call it metaphor.

It’s easy to slip this Christian conviction, which many in our society claim to believe literally, over onto the idea that a UFO traveling in the wake of a comet can carry beings who will come and save us, as this cult believed. Unknown, nonexistent, virtual worlds can be described any way you want. After two thousand years the people in charge of the Christian story have got a pretty good grip on it. Anyone who claims to know better than the Christian establishment story is probably not going to find a big audience. In short, declaring yourself to be the returned J.C. is probably not going to work as well as declaring yourself the returned E.T.

We are used to the institutionalized church celebration of Easter which has grown up around reenactment of the last days of Jesus. Now we have added commodification. I see in the paper there is available a little set of dolls complete with a crucified Jesus, a mourning Mary, and an open-doored tomb with a little plastic stone slab for the body not to be found upon. I don’t know how play with such dolls might shape a child’s mind. Certainly it would be interesting for a therapist to overhear. I wonder what Brother Cadfael, that practical monk of the PBS mystery series, would say.

It seems to me at once trivializing and interiorizing, making something liturgical into something merely subconscious, patterning for self-sacrifice and impossible survival, pre-conditioning for cults. Of course, a modern cynic would simply say it was a marketing opportunity about like the figures for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, complete with ambulatory gargoyles. That was a redemption story, too, wasn’t it?

Easter has two parts: Good Friday’s endarkenment and then Sunday Morning’s enlightenment. Where are the dolls of transcendence? Are they those little gold cherub pins made popular by the Brown family, who wore them to the OJ trial to symbolize their murdered daughter? Are we to take Nicole Simpson as a sort of Christ-symbol, someone crucified and now returned as a pure spirit who hovers over her children? Religion always ends up in such a mix of opportunism and suffering, scholarship and obsession, institutions and insanities. But my darkest thought is that once again we are, as Annie Dillard put it, making itsy-bitsy statues to itsy-bitsy gods.

As Christianity has gone around the world, transforming itself as it passed the boundaries of countries and through the eons of time, the Easter ceremony has become in some places a masochistic and terrifying pageant of people being actually nailed to crosses, as they are in the Philippines. In this country Easter has become so entwined with Martha Stewart Easter egg trees, baskets, bunnies and egg hunts for little children -- all baby pastel and sentimental ruffles -- that no hint of blood persists. Not the blood of crucifixion and not the blood of real birth, real sexuality, real union and conception which is the basis of the historical fertility cults of Europe that gave us rabbits and eggs.

Somehow we are able to accept without reflection the juxtaposition of eager little girls -- in their ribboned, flowered bonnets and Mary-Janes -- with the brutality of an ancient crucifixion that compelled a mother to take in her arms the broken body of her son. So are we able to combine with crucifixion the banal and conforming suicides of three dozen computer nerds, people an unkind denizen of a Waldport bar called “losers,” people so rejecting of fertility that they had been castrated? Is there a difference between the twelve apostles who followed Jesus around and the 39 followers of Bo -- minus Peep? Is there a difference between the Assumption into Heaven which is the official Catholic dogma and the UFO that this group expected to come like Ezekial’s chariot to rescue the human caterpillars into butterflyhood. I should think so.

This is the difference I see. Strategies of escaping to paradise are doomed to failure and corruption because we are creatures of this time and place. Though we can imagine other places much finer and easier than this one, nevertheless, we must stay here. Not because we are trapped or condemned, but because we are part of the Here. We are made of the Here. Our bodies arise from what is Here and our minds and spirits arise from these bodies. To reject our real bodies and this real time and place is to make ourselves unreal, untethered, and susceptible to traveling lecturers in small town motels with conference rooms on the edge of the world.

My favorite Easter story is actually several months after the crucifixion. It is about how Jesus came back to visit his apostles. Early one morning they were out fishing and He was simply waiting on the shore when they came back. Remember that Peter got so excited he jumped out of the boat? And Jesus just hung around the campfire for a bit, toasting bread and visiting. Does it get better than that? Is there more than that?

Unitarians do sometimes lose their grip. A month or so after I enrolled at Meadville/Lombard in Chicago in 1978, the James Jones Guyana mass suicide happened. In the religious community of the clustered seminaries around the University of Chicago, there were connections to that doomed cult. One of the scariest was that Jim Jones had courted Jack Mendehlsohn’s favor. (Mendehlsohn was a major UU minister.) Jones was running what then appeared to be a progressive inner city church with a strong social action program. He inquired about becoming a UU minister and Mendehlsohn was willing to suggest him as a possible Starr King student. The hitch was that Jones didn’t have an undergrad degree, which is a prerequisite for a ministry degree.

Another more anguished connection was a less-known UU minister who was serving a church in San Francisco when Jones’ ministry began to oppress people. The sister of one of the group who died in Guyana came to this UU minister for help, but neither the minister nor other authorities believed her tales of perversion and abuse. Nothing was done. The stories were too awful for him to believe. He just didn’t think people were that bad. Afterwards he spoke to the national gathering of UU ministers in penitence.

That’s enough talk about the dark side of Easter. The shadow has passed. Some of us even saw it pass over the face of the moon a week ago as we shaded our eyes from the city lights while searching for the comet Hale-Bopp over by the constellation called Cassiopeia’s chair. Eclipses and comets are cyclical, like night and day, like the seasons, like the constant coming and going on of generations, like the cyclical mammalian movement in and out of fertility. These are the raw material of liturgy. They are far deeper than ideas, or dogmas, or even civilizations. The awakening and renewal of Easter is not the property of any church or religious position. It is simply produced by the tipping and turning and circling of the planet, something as real as we are, something we belong to, something we are made of. This Easter celebration of the return of the sun is the way life adjusts to seasons, no more and no less. Because we are part of the life adjusting to the seasons, which here in Oregon means mostly adjusting to warm rain instead of cold rain, we feel this in our flesh, our very cells. We cannot help but stretch, awaken, inhale the new smells (some of us will sneeze!) and feel better every minute that the sun floods down on us.

. . . I keep a file of Easter sermons, as do many ministers. The Easter Potato is one of my favorite ideas and I like the empty tomb motif, when people go to the cave expecting something sad and decaying but find instead an echoing emptiness they can fill with hope. Most often I come back to the Tolstoy quote: “Somewhere in the world there is a green branch and on it is written the word that will save the world.” Or something like that, since the original is in Russian.

. . . Once on Sauvie’s Island long, long ago, we kids went for a walk with our parents. We stopped at a willow tree. The sap was just rising. My mother borrowed my father’s pocket knife and cut a green branch the size and length of her finger. Then she took the knife by the blade and pounded the stick with the handle until somehow she had slipped off the bark. A quick notch and a slot, the bark slipped back on, and she blew it -- a perfect whistle with as clear and sweet a tone as a bird!

. . . My mother’s willow whistle was the call of the goat-footed balloon man -- so far and weeeee! The one that Unitarian “PK” e.e. cummings wrote a poem about, about spring when it’s mud-luscious. Follow that whistle among the trees! Real branches with real leaves spread out to the sun. Today, forget the other planets. You can lie down and die some other day. Today, look for a green branch. Read what is written on it and then -- if you want to -- chew on it.

It is real! This is a spring day with a new world beginning! Cast off your old self! Be reborn! Kindle hope and reach out your arms! Dance on the green and twine flowers in your hair! Why yearn for another world when this one can be so very sweet!

PASSIONATE DISSENT

My minister in Portland -- the old-fashioned male one who was not afraid to thunder from the pulpit -- used to ruefully note that there was a man in the congregation who said he didn’t know what position to take on an issue until he heard what the minister said -- then he knew he was convinced of the opposite. There are movie reviewers like that, too, valuable because they are so dependably opposite. When kids take that attitude they are said to have “oppositional defiance disorder.” But the Unitarian Universalist denomination formed in oppositional defiance to Calvinism. The Unitarians thought the Trinity was a nonsensical doctrine and the Universalists thought predestination to hell made no sense. In those days denominations formed based on doctrine. The two separate movements found common cause and merged in 1961 for more practical reasons -- like money.

Anyway, it is perfectly obvious that most denominations and religions (“denomination” is a word invented to describe subsets within the Christian context) are mostly social affinity groups based more on class, education, ethnicity, and similar forces. But the UUA advertises itself as a denomination that can absorb people of many different kinds and styles, that protects doctrinal heresy.

The very fact that the boundaries are weak and porous makes the institutional maintenance of the denomination pretty problematic. That is, the practical matters of hiring, creating materials, supplying managerial needs, encouraging growth, and all the other business of any corporation are based on defining the edge. Usually it comes down to money and membership numbers: if a congregation has enough people willing to sign up and pay dues, and if they forward their obligation to the “association,” then they’re in. It’s a very loose, rather fragile, and hard to explain sort of thing, usually dodged by going back to the doctrinal statement, which in the UUA is so inclusive as to be meaningless or at least interpretable.

This make Robin Edgar very angry indeed. He has mounted an attack through blogging: http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com

“The Emerson Avenger is a "memory hole" free blog where censorship is scorned. This blog will "guard the right to know" about any injustices and abuses that corrupt Unitarian Universalism. Posters may speak and argue freely, according to conscience, about any injustices and abuses, or indeed hypocrisy, that they may know about so that the Avenger, in the form of justice and redress, may come surely and swiftly. . . "Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely." - Ralph Waldo Emerson”

Robin’s quote is from THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW lecture read in the tabernacle, New York City, March 7, 1854. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11 (Miscellanies) [1909]
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27

Robin Edgar says: “In 1992 I underwent a profound revelatory experience of God which revealed that the total solar eclipse "Eye of God" is a "Sign in the Heavens" that symbolizes God's divine omniscience. This revelatory religious experience inspired me to propose an inter-religious celebration of Creation that would take place whenever a total solar eclipse took place over our planet.” [Robin was labeled a cult leader.] I am now an excommunicated Unitarian whose "alternative spiritual practice" includes publicly exposing and denouncing Unitarian*Universalist injustices, abuses, and hypocrisy.”

So Robin wants “in” to the denomination and the denomination wants Robin “out.” Or at least his opinions and denunciations. They call him a madman, he calls them corrupt. I am familiar with this dynamic, having stepped out of the UU ministry, a context which provided me with lots of stories of injustice, abuse and hypocrisy -- to say nothing of prosecutable offenses. They are present in any defined institution one is able to identify. The schools, the government, the military, the village -- all being assembled of human beings, all include faulty and wicked people. The institution, of course, tries to define critics as the problem and to throw them out. (Kill the messenger.)

Robin has the idea that the UUA is based on monotheism and once upon a time it was. Since the 19th century, it has become a haven for atheists and with atheism has come a streak of defiance of all laws that used to be enforced by the Great Papa God. “You can’t tell me what to do” linked with “you don’t exist anyway!” It’s a way of defining oneself against limits that no longer exist. What is passionately effective against an old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priest with beard and mitre, one of those powerful men who make and break history, is completely ineffective against a nice, well-educated, sympathetic, young, suburban, female UU minister. (This seems to be the new pattern.) Not that some UU ministers, male and female, don’t persist in thinking they are old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priests, which goes to one of the sources of corruption.

What is to be done? Why do anything? What would be the goal? So long as Robin doesn’t enter the public assemblies of UU people and disrupt their proceedings, what’s wrong with him blogging and emailing as much as he wants? Isn’t that exactly what Emerson was doing when he delivered lectures against the Fugitive Slave Law ?

When I was doing my hospital chaplaincy on the neurology ward, I ran athwart a brain surgery formerly a Jesuit monk. He wanted me prevented from talking to a man who had a brain tumor. The man said that a “ball of light” came to him in the night and told him he would be healed. The brain surgeon was afraid I would tell him he was a nut case and that his epiphany was just brain damage. He assumed I would take a scientifically-based and rather brutal approach because I was a UU.

I was never clear about whether this surgeon didn’t want me to upset his patient or really was quietly leaving room for the possibility that the “ball of light” was real and the epiphany was valid, if possibly misinterpreted, though he had to know from his own explorations that the reality was brutally fatal. We didn’t talk.

But I did, in defiant opposition, sneak in to talk to the patient. He told me, his face glowing, about his vision. I told him he was fortunate indeed to have such a precious and merciful gift.

BUMBAUGH'S DECLARATION OF LIBERAL RELIGION

In January the Reverend David Bumbaugh, who is retiring from being the professor of preaching at Meadville/Lombard in Chicago, my seminary of origin, gave a convocation address in January that I find quite powerful. I know my environmental friends will like it, too, though it’s about Unitarian Universalism and that’s the point of the speech. Two denominations, Unitarian and Universalist (Bumbaugh’s original affiliation as a minister -- he was raised Salvation Army), merged in 1961 but the result has been a denomination as unwieldy as the name. Bumbaugh’s position is that this is because the Universalists had gathered around the idea of finding a new theology (universal salvation), while the Unitarians were interested in organizational growth (and the rural but frugal Univeralist’s assets).

The Montana circuit-riding ministry that I did http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif1982-85 was financed in part by Universalist money that was hidden to keep it from being merged. Russ Lockwood and Emil Gudmundson knew where it was and thought that the comparatively rural ministry to Montana fellowships was in line with Universalist values.

Bumbaugh’s tone is divided between the elegiac and the prophetic. His respondents scold him, diagnose him, and simply don’t “get” him. I won’t put the whole speech and response in this blog (go to www.meadville.edu -- you might notice that Lombard got gobbled up in the address.) His message is that there is an essential contraction between commodifying religion to market it for the sake of growth and the actual pursuit of meaning and community that the denomination is supposed to support. The means overtake the ends. I strongly suspect that this is the essential human contradiction in many realms: politics, the arts, settlements, and so on. The tribe eats the Indian. The nation eats the citizen.

Many of the people who rail against religion are totally unaware of the huge Liberal Religion body of thought. Far from knowing what it might include, they don’t know it exists today, much less historically. But Bumbaugh has not forgotten. Below is his beautiful, true, and moral list of beliefs in the age of cosmic physics, evolution, fMRI’s and the genetic basis of life itself.

We believe that the universe in which we live and move and have our being is the expression of an inexorable process that began in eons past, ages beyond our comprehension and has evolved from singularity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity, from disorder to order.

We believe that the earth and all who live upon the earth are products of the same process that swirled the galaxies into being, that ignited the stars and orbited the planets through the night sky, that we are expressions of that universal process which has created and formed us out of recycled star dust.

We believe that all living things are members of a single community, all expressions of a planetary process that produced life and sustains it in intricate ways beyond our knowing. We hold the life process itself to be sacred.

We believe that the health of the human venture is inextricably dependent upon the integrity of the rest of the community of living things and upon the integrity of those processes by which life is bodied forth and sustained. Therefore we affirm that we are called to serve the planetary process upon which life depends.

We believe that in this interconnected existence the well-being of one cannot be separated from the well-being of the whole, that ultimately we all spring from the same source and all journey to the same ultimate destiny.

We believe that the universe outside of us and the universe within us is one universe. Because that is so, our efforts, our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions are the dreams, hopes and ambitions of the universe itself. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe is reaching toward self-awareness, toward self consciousness. We believe that our efforts to understand the world and our place within it are an expression of the Universe’s deep drive toward meaning. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe dreams dreams and reaches toward unknown possibilities. We hold as sacred the unquenchable drive to know and to understand.

We believe that the moral impulse that weaves its way through our lives, luring us to practices of justice and mercy and compassion, is threaded through the universe itself and it is this universal longing that finds outlet in our best moments.

We believe that our location within the community of living things places upon us inescapable responsibilities. Life is more than our understanding of it, but the level of our comprehension demands that we act out of conscious concern for the broadest vision of community we can command and that we seek not our welfare alone, but the welfare of the whole. We are commanded to serve life and serve it to the seven times seventieth generation.

We believe that those least like us, those located on the margins have important contributions to make to the rest of the community of life and that in some curious way, we are all located on some margin. We believe that all that functions to divide us from each other and from the community of living things is to be resisted in the name of that larger vision of a world everywhere alive, everywhere seeking to incarnate a deep, implicate process that called us into being, that sustains us in being, that transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, that receives us back to itself when life has used us up. Not knowing the end of that process, nonetheless we trust it, we rest in it, and we serve it.

Both Unitarianism and Universalism were reactions to the harshness and illogic of Calvinism (Puritans, Taliban, Fundamentalists) but the Universalists took on the harshness while the Unitarians took on the illogic. Both were reform movements. Now the harshness and illogic are back but ineffectively opposed by religion because we’ve gone to “therapy” and commodification.

I remind you of my own exo-UU (not former, but outside) credo: “Everything is connected, everything changes, every change you make in yourself changes everything else, the God you get is the God you make.” I’m not inedible, but I hope I’m gristley. (Not grisly -- just indigestible.)