RELIGION IS NOT CHURCH

We get into so many dead end arguments about religion -- generally ending in either violence or ostracism because we consistently start at the wrong end:  the end of the formal institution rather than at the other extreme, which is the emergent meanings of people interacting with the world.

Institutions have only one faith, one demand, one principle, always the same: the perpetuation of themselves.  Beginning with small groups who share a point of view, the origination development path proceeds through buying property (declaring it sacred) and hiring specialists (often granting them “supernatural” power), excluding dissenters (heretics), gathering power through legal status that gives exemptions in exchange for endorsements, and finally justifying war.  The newest wrinkle is claiming to be a virtual person.  Not an iconic person like Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed, but a virtual person, institutional and corporate, with all the rights and entitlements of an actual human being.  At the same time, persons who are not IN the institution are considered non-persons -- animals.

Its helpful to reflect in the terms of "Game of Thrones."  The naked self-perpetuating institution clothes itself in theologies drawn from the local ecology: sky theologies in the desert, tree theologies in the forests, bison valorized on the prairie, axolotl connected to the god of deformations and death -- Xolotl in the Aztec underworld imagery.  The most clever institutions hold up the human family -- sons and kings and virtuous mothers -- because that part of the ecology is always with us.  Hard to explain a tiger salamander to an Inuit, though he’d have no trouble with an Irish selkie who was his mother and disappeared.

"This is the forest primeval."

The evolutionary point of all this is simply survival, but on two levels:  if the survival is meant to save the individual, that’s quite different from survival of the group.  For the individual, abortion or killing is sometimes survival.  For the group, anything that diminishes the total number of members is a threat to survival.  The sin/evil/heresy labels are assigned accordingly: no abortion, no birth control, no morning-after pill, no infanticide except by neglect and poverty.  Kill only "others" or those who break the succession of power.  The civil laws follow the religious thinking, because a civil society cannot afford dissension because it breaks the illusion of consensus that are constitutions and laws. 

But now we realize that the survival of ourselves and other species may depend upon reducing the number of people consuming resources.  How can global religions dependent upon birth as a sacred event respond without revealing that they are derived from different circumstances, different times?  Of course, if there is a major population die-off of humans (pandemic, famine), producing children will be highly relevant again.

She is not virginal -- simply childless.

Thus powerful like Elizabeth I, not II.

The more powerful and protective a nation is, the more patriotism it can muster, the more it becomes a religious institution itself.  If it is destructive and oppressive, or simply chaotic and ineffective, it will trigger movements from both inside and outside that will struggle to replace or control it.  This is the principle of “Game of Thrones.”  The dragons are only window-dressing.  The real power is Daenarys as what a mother is supposed to be, dressed in Della Robbia blue robes.  She’s Pinocchio’s fairy godmother, Dorothy’s Glinda the Good Witch.  In the end she is the only kind of survival that MUST survive because otherwise there will be no babies and there must be SOME.  Same with Gillie.  Violence and strategy are all very well, but in the end there is either creation or transformation or extinction.  Those are the real options of power.

The Catholic church, the Jewish diaspora, the Buddhists, the Amish and so on all know this.  At their best, they guard the basics and discard the irrelevancies.  The Blackfeet are just now trying to understand what is basic and what is irrelevant.  I’m working on myself.  The USA is having a very hard time with it, but remember that Daenarys comes from the most primitive and harsh kingdom. When she steps into the fire, she is purified enough to walk on into the future.  Otherwise, her people would be ended but, like Jesus, she frees the slaves and gains a population.  (India needs to think again -- burning 25,000 women a year won't work.)

So if we want to imitate George W.W. Martin, how do we develop our own philosophical/ecological understanding and where does it come from?  Some is inherited from the great anthropological and literary ransacking of the planet, of course.  Maybe some is from today’s dragon eggs: science as it cracks open the genome, the cosmos, and the paleo-past.  Some of it will be forced upon a person by assumptions from history and family and their genealogies, the locale of your childhood -- which may be multiple -- and the extent of your schooling.  Much will depend on what generation you are.

But the point is that spiritual meaning -- as opposed to institutional meaning -- is EMERGENT.  It doesn’t drop down from the sky, but climbs up from your bowels to your throat and bursts out as song.  It is a relationship with the universe that gives you something to put in your hand, whether a sword, a flag, a cup, a ring, or another human hand.  Possibly a paw.  Some like -- oh, you know -- roses -- but the Inuit hold bones.

You should wander a while, then sit.  You might end up on an outcropping, or floating in a spaceship or at a keyboard, trying to remember to get up and walk around now and then.  Probably not a throne of swords.  Anyway, that bit of furniture is occupied as usual.  (Putin squats there now.)  Maybe you’ll take a seat on an old unmaintained bus on a narrow high road and unsurvivably crash.  Them’s the breaks.  Or lack of brakes.  Living forever is not possible on this planet.  You could have been in the one-fifth of conceptions that barely get past implantation -- not even a zygote before they are resorbed.

Attending a church, joining a denomination, is not necessary for accessing the deep meaning we call “spiritual.”  It wells up now and then, sometimes with no warning and with no message except “you are here.”  It’s not so much the next step in evolution but in the skillful management of the brains we already have so as to step outside our assumptions without freaking.  It is not denying formal religions, but reaching back through them to their creations.  This is the way the brain itself works: the prefrontal cortex reaching back through the limbic brain and the reptile brain, until it grips the spine.

Inuit Shaman Mask

SHOULD WE START A CHURCH?

Confronting Rothko from http://www.socialhistoryofart.com/

"The Conversion of Saul"

I quip that Pope Francis is trying to return Paul’s church to Jesus.  I hope he has better luck than Buddha did.  (The latter never quite succeeded in convincing people they should not worship HIM.)  What I’m saying in code is that Jesus was not “religious” in terms of institutions -- he had no institutions nor interest in starting one.  But Saul, who had a great transfiguration and was then Paul, kept more of the twisty stuff of institutions (chromosomes, if you like) and pushed what he knew from his previous life as a formal leader.  People who know the relevant documents and evidence will make fun of me, but I believe that it was Peter who was supposed to be the Rock on which to found a church.  It was Peter who tried to walk on water, who denied Jesus, etc. etc.  A much more human sort of guy.  This is all barnacles on the great ship of faith. It’s fun but I don’t take it seriously because it’s not the heart, the key, the root of being human.

For a little while I was in the business of founding and growing congregations.  It’s not very hard if you have a message that people really want and need.  If you don’t, nothing will work for very long.  

The next step, the building of networks among congregations until there’s a denomination -- a system big enough to have a name (nom) -- begins to feel a lot like advertising and corporations.  There must be a headquarters, a logo, and then someone issues formal materials, and no matter how democratic the elections, the leaders begin to think like Paul and tell all the little congregations what to do.  They might be right but piles of letters to this and that community takes the leadership out of the hands of locals and away from on-the-ground experience.  Once you get past the Gospels, that’s about all the New Testament is: letters from headquarters.  With a horror story (Revelations) tacked onto the end.  This is just the Middle Eastern kind of religion.  There have been dozens, not just three.

After all, I’m not very interested in religion.  I’m interested in human beings and their experience of the world and by world I mean something more like cosmic galaxies than like the United Nations.  It’s the “experience” part that I’ve been reading about in order to understand better how being human can be exuberant, creative, and thoughtful in a sharing way.  If a group comes together to be those kinds of things together, that’s fine.  If you want to call it “spiritual” or “worship”  or “ceremonial” and if you can resist Robert’s Rules of Order, then I am interested.  But I will maintain my solitude.

The Inter-Faith Chapel at the University of Nome by Robert Baldwin

Despite the necessity of the raw world and the cultivation of experiences contacted through exploration, some things are teddy bears -- familiar links to comfort.  But I wouldn’t want to attend a church where the pews are full of teddy bears.  Well, maybe once to see what it was like.  At the other extreme, I would avoid a church full of grizzly bears out of self-preservation.  The question is “what does it mean to attend a church full of humans?”  Or “what does it mean to attend a church at all?”  When is a theatre a church?  When is a circle of Blackfeet sitting on the ground, singing about the lives of familiar animals, actually a church?  

So is the definition of church in the content, the procedure, the nature of the attenders, the ecology of the community and the land where it is situated, the formal account the leaders can give of what’s happening, what a trained observer (anthropologist) might write about it -- ???   Jesus, Francis and Buddha might say it all depends on whether “God” is present.  So what makes the circle holy?  

I suggest three things:  1) Does it guide the people’s life-decisions?  2) Does it unite a community? and 3) Does it give life meaning?

Can a school be a church/can a church be a school?   Can a studio be a church/can a church be a studio?  I say yes, yes, yes.  Quoting Molly Bloom that way always made the older UU ministers (all male) laugh because to them it meant sex.  Can sex be a church/can a church be sex?  Yup.  (Molly Bloom as a cowgirl who gets the blues.)

MY BOOK HAS MORE BOOKMARKS THAN PAGES…RESEARCH BLOG BY CIARA MADIGAN, 

MASTERS STUDENT IN ENGLISH: MODERNITIES AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK

And you see what I just did?  Linked to a literary canon, both citations a little bit scandalous.  Can church be a scandal?  Can a scandal be guiding, uniting, meaningful?  Yup.  Can a group of people holding candles in the snow around the site of a murder, whether a beaten child, an unarmed black man, an historical massacre of indigenous people, be a church?  Of course.  The holiness is not in the event, but in the response.  Candles and singing are not enough, but only the beginning.  Did it show empathy?  Did it prompt giving of time and energy to the future?  Could you feel the meaning?

I’m going to spend the rest of the day building a bibliography for those interested in what I’ve been reading and as a reminder for myself, because I need to reread some of this.  prairiemarybibliographies.blogspot.com.  Not much there yet.

Gabor Maté, the MD who works with hard-core addicts in Vancouver, B.C., tries hard not to be arrogant or controlling.  In the interest of showing his vulnerability, he confesses that he is obsessive/compulsive.  (OCD or whatever) Luckily, his fetish is not chemically addictive in any obviously destructive way: it’s classical music, which he buys in complete sets of works, never satisfied, and not even listening to all of it because there’s not enough time in any day, though he performs his medical work, buys his CD’s, and then short-sheets his family despite their pleas and his promises to "pay" more attention to them.  By now he seems to have a bit more control over his obsession which he achieved by paying a fine to his wife and/or employer for each failure.  Money.  Hmmmm.  Merde.  Fertile if you have seeds.

Maté’s past is Jewish, haunted by WWII holocaust, and also affected by his relatively small size.  His first year was uncertain and chaotic, but then things got better.  (That infant is still in there somewhere.)  It seems clear that to him classical music is 1) civilization in the European style of mastery of intricate patterns, 2) high-brow, a sign of sophistication, 3) a sign that he is wealthy (superior) since he runs up bills in the thousands but doesn’t go into debt, 4) something that is just “his” -- not even anything to share with the family so long as he uses headphones, though his son said that as a kid he got tired of the blasting symphonies, 5) something that can go everywhere with him via iPods and car speakers, 6) basically a teddy bear, or speaking more formally, a “transitional object” that helps him maintain identity and safety in a world that constantly challenges all that.  It comforts him, distracts him, rewards him, which he needs given what he battles daily.  He was slow to realize that it was also an avoidance and hurting his family, but as soon as he saw that, he had the power to stand outside himself, make a diagnosis, and devise a cure -- the same as he would for anyone else.

In the end, that turns out to be what the rest of us should do as well.  It’s part of the Great Tango that is human life, an erotic dance with Hungry Ghosts and teddy bears. 

NOTES FOUND IN A "TO FILE" PILE THAT'S WAAAAAAY TOO TALL

I'm sorting again.  This big pile is only part of what's waiting to be dealt with.  Originally the idea was that I might run out of things to write about.  It turns out that I'm more likely to be trapped under an avalanche of paper.  Here's bits of what's discarded now.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS FOR A CHURCH

1.  Setting clear goals and identifying options

2.  Securing emotional and financial investment

3.  Building in safety nets

4.  Creating monitoring mechanisms:  accountability

5.  Paying the dividends

6.  Fitting to the insider? instant?  insular????? (unintelligible)

COACH (as opposed to trying to be a player or controller) 

Set policy

Provide resources

Build morale

Create strategy

___________________________________________________________________

Blackfeet Learning Academy summits at Divide

TEACHING BLACKFEET KIDS

Use as many techniques as there are kids

Land is the reference point

Need to give up stuff previously taken for granted

Educating the whole community is the only ethical basis for social tinkering

RETURN:  Not to farming

                  Not to the horse

                  Not to the dog

                  TO THE LAND

What are the qualities of successful hunter/gatherers?

How do cohort groups, like bands or clans or societies, actually work?

________________________________________________________________________

WISDOM FROM WILLIAM VOLLMAN (the writer)

THE SHEPHERD’S MAXIM:  As authority enlarges itself, its obligation to protect from violence the individuals it controls increases, and the ability of those individuals to defend themselves from violence correspondingly decreases.

THE AMERICAN MANTRA:  Because the right to self-defense remains inalienable, each of us can and should maintain a self-reliant distrust of authority.

BILL’S OBSERVATION:  “Give me a doctor anytime.  For straightforwardness a soldier cannot be beat.  Like cops, doctors, mothers and whores, they’ve been through it and they cannot be fooled.”

CAESAR’S MAXIM:  Should I extend mercy beyond expediency, then I have the right to commit whatever aggression I please.

CORTES’S MAXIM:  In order to secure and defend my ground, I have every right to conquer yours.

THE KLANSMAN’S MAXIM:  if I believe your race or culture threatens mine, I have the right first to threaten you back, then to remove your threat by violence.

THE VICTIM’S MAXIM:  If any members of your side harmed any members of my side, then your side is in the wrong.

TROTSKY’S MAXIM:  No one who disagrees with me is allowed to judge me.

* * * * * * * 

MARY’S APPENDIX:

MONTANA MAXIM:  Winner takes all.

REZ MAXIM:  Being the “last man standing” is the same as winning.

__________________________________________________________________

REPORT OF THE FOURTEENTH SUBCOMMITTEE 

ON CONVENING A DISCUSSION GROUP

by Marge Piercy

This is how things begin to tilt into change,

how coalitions are knit from strands of hair,

of barbed wire, twine, knitting wool and gut, 

how people ease into action arguing each inch,

but the tedium of it is watching granite erode.

Let us meet to debate meeting, the day, the time,

the length.  Let us discuss whether we will sit

or stand or hang from the ceiling or take it lying

down.  Let us argue about the chair and the table and

the chairperson and the motion to table the chair.

In the room fog gathers under the ceiling and thickens

in every brain.  Let us form committees spawning

subcommittees all laying little moldy eggs of reports.

Under the grey flourescent sun they will crack

to hatch scuttling lizards of more committees.

The Pliocene gathers momentum and fades.

The earth tilts on its axis.  More and more snows

fall each winter and less melt each spring.

A new ice age is pressing the glaciers forward

over the floor.  We watch the wall of ice advance.

We are evolving into molluscs, barnacles

clinging to wood and plastic, metal and smoke

while the stale and flotsam-laden tide of rhetoric

inches up the shingles and dawdles back.

This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake, 

to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck

wrestling to some momentary small agreement

like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-oyster.

I believe in this democracy as I believe

there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs

to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand

and shriek, You shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.

No more committees but only picnics and orgies

and dances.  I have spoken.  So be it forevermore.

___________________________________________________________________

NEGATIVITY
TO SING TO BEETHOVEN’S TENTH

Do on jump on ancient uncles.

Do not yell at average mice.

Do not wear a broom to breakfast.

Do not ask a snake’s advice.

Do not bathe in chocolate pudding.

Do not talk to bearded bears (!)

Do not smoke cigars on sofas.

Do not dance on velvet chairs.

Do not take a whale to visit

Russell’s mother’s cousin’s yacht.

And whatever else you do,

It is better you do not.

_______________________________________________________________________

CROWS

I like to walk

And hear the black crows talk.

I like to lie

And watch crows sail the sky.

I like the crow

That wants the wind to blow.

I like the one

That thinks the wind is fun.

I like to see

Crows spilling from a tree,

And try to find

The top crow left behind.

I like to hear

Crows caw that spring is near.

I like the great

Wild clamor of crow hate

Three farms away

When owls are out by day.

I like the slow

Tired homeward-flying crow,

I like the sight

Of crows for my good night.

-- David McCord

HOW INSTITUTIONS CAPTURE DEEP EXPERIENCE

Deep experience is not that different, I think, from Maslow’s “peak experience,” which seems to be back in public consciousness again.  The effervescence (explosion is too big a word) of the newer neurosciences -- not just the technological perception of molecular nerve function but also the patterns discovered by computer analysis of mega-statistical accumulations such as internet behavior records -- reminds me very much of the blossoming psych theories of the Seventies when I was just staggering out of a very intense relationship.  

For me, taking the Maslowian approach of looking for what makes people happy and healthy (which, after all, was only pushing forward the Menninger pattern, though the latter was concentrating on “maturity” instead of fulfillment) gave me a place to start.  Erikson’s evolution of the individual from birth to death was helpful, Perl’s counterphobic confrontations, Rogers’ value of empathy as the basis of relationship, Winnicott’s formation of self in relation to others -- all these were miles and miles beyond my undergrad psych classes, which were merciless examinations of rats in glass boxes.  Deep experience is a confirmed, valuable, manageable phenomenon, perhaps the most purely human capacity there is -- so far.

How do institutions capture deep experience?  Call it faith or call it patriotism or even call it falling in love -- all three become captured in religions, nations and marriage. These common social structures (usually built on an economic foundation) use deep experience to capture people.  Institutions are ways of capturing “territory” (actual or virtual or a combination of both) in structured, stabilized systems for the sake of safety, predictability, and therefore profit.  If deep experience dissipates, then usually habit or peer pressure or self-interest will take over, but sometimes it seems necessary to use force and punishment. 

In American society today we are kept in our places by barrages of advertising that model how we should be, what rewards and punishments will ensue, and various stories illustrating those.  Underneath this “mainstream” is always an undercurrent of counter-culture, parasitical culture, experimental individuals and small specialized groups.  These alternative “ways” are closely related to the ecology and to economic niches created by the larger stream.

To make a quick list, religions and nations (and marriage which is a merging of both to keep households orderly, solvent and contributing) use the following means of creating allegiance:

aesthetics:  is it beautiful

brain function: you can’t do what you can’t think

affiliation: with whom do you belong

individual psych patterns: what has life taught you so far

community: where is everyone going

protection: help me out here

stories:  and then what might happen

writing:  recording rules, decisions, bookkeeping

All of these means use content drawn from the ecology and the ways people relate to it.  Thus, the surface of the planet is covered by a mosaic of various human arrangements.  A religion or government developed to fit one place will not necessarily work in another -- in fact, probably not.  But the constant is the human part: if it is true of most or all humans, it will work.  Often these are family patterns, or child-raising practices.

Governing institutions merge with religion to exclude some people, punish others, control behavior with laws and criminalization, and set norms of behavior.  For a nation to function, it must submerge religious dissension, often by ruling it irrelevant.

At the root of both is basic turf protection, the impulse of all living beings to survive by protecting their environment and claiming whatever they need.  Not every living being is driven to expand, to claim more land, more followers, more profit, more domination, but many are.  When it comes to institutions, the drive to dominate seems far more powerful than the drive to submit, though they always go together.  A general cannot dominate the battle without the voluntary obedience and submission of his subordinates.  Though there is a sense in which governing institutions (nations, cities, the securities exchange, the United Nations) have a virtual element (waving flags, brass bands, statues of idealized personification, images of heaven and hell) they tend to be pretty much earthly.

Religion can trump anything of this real world by claiming an imaginary virtual world that seems so powerful as to cause a change of heart: the promise of a better place or the threat of everlasting punishment.  If a religion can use the eight elements listed above to make this happen, it can overpower governments.  The trouble is that then there is chaos, unless the church has an infrastructure capable of taking on the functions of a nation.  Most of them are not able to deal with matters outside their own turf, and their method of keeping order inside the nation might be simply elimination of all competition and difference.  

This, of course, causes something they cannot see because of the smallness of their vision. It makes them vulnerable to the capacity of every other nation to generate prosperity by providing options and a rich inspirational life.  Violence, fear, and threats -- all demand huge economic resources while diminishing the impulse to experiment, reach out and grow.  All force-based nations must fail, particularly if they are rooted in punishment-based religions.

I come from a mildly progressive background that believed in cooperatives, pluralism, and democracy -- not just in the sense of being guided by majority vote but also in the sense of protecting dissent as a valuable growing edge.  To an authoritarian government this “reads” as weakness and confusion.  Indian reservations are a good example of a population where three-handed institutional power (tribe, BIA, state) and multiple styles and goals full of exploitable gradients have been both the strength (because no one can grab the snake by the throat -- there are too many of them) and the weakness (they go off in every unpredictable direction).  This is not necessarily negative.

Deep experience, when described as Native American spirituality, is ascribed to reservation lands and religious practices.  People come hoping to find a guide to achieving something life-changing, but it is a circle.  Deep experience is not in a place or a protocol: it is in the perceiving human.  If those people would simply change their own lives -- perhaps using the Ericson steps, the Perls confrontation, the Winnicott tenderness, the Rogers empathy, and so on -- then deep experience would come to them.  As AA recommends, the first step is surrender of the craving for power.

What may trump all our games of “Let’s You and Him Fight,” (Eric Byrne’s “Games People Play” from that same favorite era) is the great glory of the cosmos and the devastating endangerment of this little planet.  These are pushing the realignment of both government and religion, human by human.

If one’s culture is based on guarding resources, claiming turf, excluding intruders, then it becomes important to preserve one’s literal life along with everything else.  Then immortality is just another form of hoarding, wanting to have bigger, higher, more, even after death and to be deserving of it.

If one’s culture is based on relationship with everything else -- other people, other creatures, other lands to the extent that you can know them -- then the feeling that everything is going on, an enduring process that includes your influence on them, your attachment to them, then a view of death that is a dispersal through the cosmos, dissolving into it, a generosity, is satisfying.  

CHAINSAW MASSACRE

Silver leaf cottonwood is a particularly lovely tree with long limbs extended as if for dancing.  I bought my little Valier house in part because of the trees around it, particularly the big cottonwood on the south side that makes shade all summer and branch patterns all winter, sometimes lined with snow cotton.   The growth pattern is a dome of leaves reaching down to the ground, so as to offer shelter to resting animals.  Mostly cats here. The kind of birds in it vary with the seasons: downy woodpeckers running up and down the trunk in winter and small transient birds I don’t recognize in spring and fall.  The doves in the blue spruce seem to eat something they find in the cottonwood.  Neither the cottonwood nor the blue spruce are native to the high Montana prairie though there a lot of them in our yards.  Most were planted about the same time at the urging of state agriculture people promoting woodlots and windbreaks.  Most of them are aging out, including mine, but so am I.

The cottonwood is on the boundary between my property and an empty lot that belongs to the First (and Only) Baptist Church in Valier.  When I first moved here, there were no meters on the water system, so it didn’t matter which of us watered the lot.  These trees are riparian and need a lot of water, but in early days when Lake Francis was formed as a reservoir for the Pondera Canal Company -- there was no problem.   More recently we have worried about drought.  The congregation was small and elderly with the grandson of one family acting as pastor.  The building was aging, though not disintegrating like the previous church up the street.  Two blue spruces were sentinels on either side of the front door and a cluster was at the back door.  A hedge of lilac grows along the alley in back and some smaller trees are on the parking strip where a song sparrow builds his nest every spring and stages his mini-opera all about sex and raising babies.

Suddenly the Baptist Church struck gold.  They cut down all their trees, re-sided, installed new windows, built a porch/ramp on the front, and applied a new metal roof.  And they acquired a minister, who drove up from Choteau where he was previously retired.  In winter he goes south.  At first it was his name that attracted my attention:  John A. Brubaker, who goes by “Pastor Bru.”  There was a man named James Brubaker who lived in Choteau and who was convicted of book theft.  He went into libraries, checked out rare and precious books, and razored pages from them which he sold on the Internet.  http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/11/books-stolen-by-brubaker-returned.html  He also dealt in Indian artifacts and occasionally stopped at the Scriver Studio, which was a kind of social hub for history, art, antiques and hunters.  By now he has served his time in prison.  Pastor Bru says he is no relation.  I don’t know where “James” lives now.

The function of ministers towards their churches is often defined in terms of a pastoral versus a prophetic role.  In the pastoral role the religious leader is meant to comfort and care for people and in the prophetic role the same person is meant to preach morality.  There is a third role which is proselytizing, which means developing the organization itself by converting others.   Ministers are also expected to be humble while their congregations are expected to lift them up and admire them.  The clearest public example of the two styles is Pope Benedict versus Pope Frances.  I speak from the inside -- since I was myself a minister for ten years -- when I say this situation is full of pitfalls.  Pastor Bru is clearly a believer in a literal God, a man dedicated to a Right Wing point of view.  Order, control, domination, self-righteousness.

It entertained me, since we both attended the University of Chicago Divinity School and I’m so far on the Left of the political spectrum that I’m nearly falling off.  But Pastor Bru did not like to have anything in common with a tubby old lady who doesn’t cut her grass often enough.  On Sunday he came over to say that he wanted to cut branches off my cottonwood because it was “impossible” to cut the grass under it. The grass has been cut under that tree for the fourteen years -- since I moved here and probably for a long time before that.  Lately grass-cutting in Valier means sitting on a big riding mower, which puts a person up high enough to be slapped by the lower branches.  It’s unpleasant but not impossible.  Some mowers have jack-knifed off the lower switches.  I thought he was asking to do that.

But he had no intention of discussing anything.  When I balked and stalled, he became angry, pointing out that the tree was on the boundary between properties and therefore he had a right to do what he wanted on “his side.”  This man is elderly and has had a stroke.  He does not manage emotion well.  Neither do I, but I don’t have an excuse since my red hair has turned white.  However, he has the advantage in a nurturing little wife who smooths things over when she can.  Not this time.

Pastor Bru does not see a tree as a living creature to be praised, or even as the work of God.  He does not see boundaries as an opportunity for cooperation but rather as a way of excluding infidels.  I suspect he is aligned with what many have begun calling the American Taliban, those who want to deny schools and hospitals to illegal immigrants; keep all people convicted of sex offenses in jail for the rest of their lives no matter the circumstances or the sentences; deny any murderer from receiving any kind of food aid ever (they just attached an amendment to the ag subsidies to block felons from food stamps); force the young, the pregnant, the old, the disabled, the mentally challenged to live under their control; to do nothing to cure AIDS or any other problem that has a moral dimension; and to make sure we fight every war that protects our national corporate interests.  They are gutting our country, doing to today’s settled Americans what they previously did to the Native inhabitants of the continent, which is to say, take their property and demand homage.  It’s a return to medieval times.  This is not a tree -- it’s a symbol.  Talk me out of it.

So Tuesday when I came back from Great Falls (they waited until I was gone), there was a man chain-sawing the limbs off the cottonwood on the church side.  I wept and lamented without restraint.  To me it was like seeing a human being amputated.  Pastor Bru was safely back in Choteau.  He had instructed a lawn maintenance man to do this.  I do not hold that man responsible.  

When a deceased member of this church left money to install an electronic imitation of a bell carillon that played hymns from 9AM to 8PM, I didn’t object -- though they had it turned up to the highest volume possible.  After all, I knew the tunes, though the UU’s sing quite different words.  And at least I always knew what time it was.  Lately the racket has been quiet.  They say there are mechanical problems.  Last summer the church was struck by lightning:  I saw it and heard the explosion.  With no trees to act as lightning rods. . .

PNWD-UUA LEADERSHIP SCHOOL: Narrative of The Third Year

THIRD YEAR

(It’s my understanding that a third year was never offered again anywhere. I don’t know about second years.)

The third summer was almost painful because we all knew this was our last summer, including Ord and Peter. By now we’d seen people changing over time: some divorced, some married, all older, a few health issues. I knew I was going to seminary in the fall and wouldn’t be back to the Northwest for a long time.

This time we bunked on the officers’ side of the compound and contracted with some Unitarians to cook for us, which meant we had exceedingly healthy and delicious food and also that we had some kitchen chores to do. Not that it was a hardship. I particularly remember one dishwashing session with us singing “Summertime” in harmony.

This time the idea was for us to form an “ideal community” -- to use all the skills we’d been taught and the desires we’d brought with us to design a way of life for a few days. We could do anything so long as it wasn’t illegal or destructive. It was a little surprising how conservative we turned out to be.

The planning structure was quite rigid. There were two givens: every day started out with half an hour of meditation which Peter began with a short thought and ended by shaking the hand of the person next to him. Each evening ended in our Odyssey groups (which served the same purpose as Credo or Journal groups) where each of us sketched out our spiritual growth and development and explained why we came to the UU churches. Even on the days we were doing the model community, no one wanted to change those two basics that bracketed the day.

On the first evening Ord laid out an outline for the plan of the week. There was no textbook, custom or otherwise. The biggest problem was that everyone wanted to leap into action immediately without doing the basic groundwork. We had to be pulled back over and over.

Next morning we began with a long painful struggle to define our needs, which were inchoate. The following list is what we finally came up with after “pyramiding” to get consensus:

1. Private space and time.
2. Balance in pacing and activities.
3. Opportunity to share leadership and experience new roles.
4. Celebration, inspiration, ritual and spiritual development.
5. Giving and receiving, nurturing, gentleness, trust, acceptance and intimacy.
6. Opportunities for individual growth and learning.
7. Experience collective energy, purpose and unity.
8. Open communication, integration and feedback.
9. Permission for spontaneity, risk and failure.
10. Boundaries/structure (i.e. role clarification and worth)
11. Creative and aesthetic opportunities.
12. Relationship to the environment (sensitivity to and integration with)
13. Respect and integrity.

(These were not ranked.)

In the afternoon we designed our purpose: “to enhance our personhood and UU religious questing in a covenanted, participatory community, by designing, living and evaluating experiences which attempt to nurture the creative, spiritual and human needs of the its members with recognition and acceptance of the differences among individuals.”

Every word and phrase of that purpose was argued over, fought for, compromised, and semantically rotisseried until we had consensus, which meant that when all the rest of the week everything was matched back against that purpose, the congruence or discrepancy had real force. This purpose was our Constitution. We were our own Supreme Court.

The next meeting was to design the leadership and set their relationships. We had a basic decision to make as to whether the Odyssey groups, which were our only small groups so far, should also be the management groups. We finally decided against that on the grounds that if the management groups had tough times, we would have the Odyssey groups in which to take refuge. This turned out to be a mistake, since our management groups proved not to spend enough time together to get any commitment or identity. We should not have trusted our Odyssey groups to be able to be supportive and critical at the same time. I don’t quite know why we lost our nerve when we had learned in previous years how to do that, but I think it may have had something to do with several disruptive personalities coming into the group without having been through the very critical second year process. We who had been through that scalding knew we could survive anything. Except the uninitiated.


Anyway, the management design came out like this:

Stage 1: All Odyssey groups take talent inventory of what people are able and willing to lead or contribute.

Stage 2: Put up signs for the task groups and let each person walk to that group he or she likes. Persons can then “eyeball” their decisions on the basis of who is in the group, how many people are needed, and what the task is.

Stage 3: Each management or task group would choose one representative to be on a central council which would be responsible for coordination and arbitration.

Stage 4: The council would meet, decide on their own structure (whether to have a chair, divide authority among them, appoint persons to oversee specific things like cleanliness or refreshments, etc.), make up the final calendar and decide on their future meeting schedule.

At the next meeting (by now we were on the third night) we discussed rewards and why a leader would want to go through a lot of hassle. We talked about built-in rewards (money, privileges, extra time, titles) versus natural rewards (pride, power, etc.) and so on.

The next morning we checked back over our plans to see whether we had forgotten anything and to see if our leadership design fit our ideological purposes and tasks. Looking back, I think our UU tradition of individual choice encouraged us to be too loose in our design, so that too much had to be invented as we went along. The council met, a calendar was produced, and we started out.

That night the calendar called for field games, some silly time and some child-type games. I can’t remember the field games. (Not my thing anyway. I might have taken a nap instead.)

The silly time went evil. It was supposed to be a take-off on a beauty contest with men dressed as women. (Cross-dressing is a common preoccupation in prairie culture, Blackfeet culture, and modern culture. But it was crossing the threshold into liminal time and space about sex that had evidently still not been resolved by this group.) Somehow it turned malevolent in a very sexist way. What was meant to be clever had sharp edges. The men were naive about athletic supporters and were revealed in embarrassing ways when display turned out to be obviously stimulating.

Everyone was unhappy and no one could turn it back into a good experience though some people tried. (Always the “fixers.”) No one wanted to just blow the whistle and call the game. Finally we struggled to a conclusion, which came off somewhat better when one “contestant” arrived draped in seaweed as the Monster from the Black Lagoon, pushing the fear-based witticisms into slapstick.

Next we played “Sardines” for a while, which was pretty exciting with three big empty Victorian houses and lots of grounds for hiding. No one got the instructions straight so we never did figure out who won. No one cared. At one point there were fifteen people huddled under my van!

Then we danced and sang for a while until the Park Rangers came to quiet us down. (The noise problem was back.) It was interesting that as soon as outside authority showed up, the model community dissolved and Peter was left to meet the badges and make excuses. On the other side, I suspect the Rangers were mostly curious. We weren’t THAT noisy, but they may have thought we might be a cult or something. All in all, we got off to a bad beginning.

The next morning, we had agreed, was to be silent until after lunch. We silently, ate silently, and went for a long silent hike together, off through the woods and along the beach. We were so quiet that rabbits sat beside the trail, watching us, and birds didn’t stop singing when we passed. When we got back, some people played volleyball, some played a silent child’s game about things in paper sacks, and some of the women went off together to massage each other with fragrant oils. By this time some people were desperate to communicate and doing a lot of gesturing. Finally we joined together with a worship service to break the silence slowly and gracefully. This was one of thge best parts of the community. We all expressed great hunger for spiritual discipline and low-key intimacy.

In the afternoon early we played “New Games:” Pruii, Skinning the Snake, and handing people overhead, mosh-pit-style. This was very threatening to me and I don’t know whether I could have done it without the reassurance of the morning’s experience, but I really liked it in the end.

Then we had formal classes. I led one on the Progoff formal Journal-Keeping (based on Jungian principles). Peter did one on Bible study. Joan Goodwin did one on materials for fellowships.

That evening the shit really hit the fan! All our design flubs showed up in spades and when it was time to “reconsider and adjust” everyone wanted to blame all the trouble on Ord. Mutiny was in the air and everyone was mad at everyone. It wasn’t clear whether Ord and Peter were in charge of the evening or whether the council we had empowered was in charge of the evening.

Finally, the council took hold. In fact, Donalda Regehr, as authorized head of the council and voted “most trusted person present,” took hold of the entire group (including Ord and Peter), restored order, and made up a plan of action. This was a heady experience for her, as she doesn’t usually end up as the leader.

The council was directed to divide up, go outside and take complaints from individuals, meet to compare stories, and develop suggestions for the total group. Instead, some rebels lingered inside, resenting the fact that the group had been divided up, and formed their own separate power group. When the council returned and started to put through the rest of their plan, the rebels refused to accept their authority and burst out with all sorts of objections. No one knew what to do. Peter and Ord were both swearing. It seemed as though everyone might pack and go home. Utopia was in flames.

Finally, it began to filter through that no one was angry about the community as such. They were mostly angry about the abstract question of who had the power. (The reality was that Donalda had it.) Therefore, in order to go on, we had only to agree on where the power should lie. We resorted to parliamentary procedure (much to Peter’s disgust), moved and seconded that Donalda should be in power, voted the same, easily dispensed with the complaints, and went on with the original game plan.

The next morning all was calm. Peter dressed up in his seersucker suit and we went up to the classroom for a formal sermon on “Raible’s Ultimate Theology.” The basic gist goes as follows. (I justify including it because it was the entire pre-existing theology that prompted the leadership school operation -- which the initiated call “theogamy.”)

From the very first lecture we’d been working with a series of concentric circles with one’s self at the center, opening out to intimates, community, country, world, universe, and finally folding around to self again, as the conceiver of the universe. (This meant so much to me that it has been my basic theological pattern ever since, with much benefit. Eliade confirmed it.)

Peter “concentrated” on just five circles: self, intimates, communities, causes and the Ultimate. Then he designed a sort of stairstep of interactions that go like this. (Blog format will destroy the format but preserve the words. Imagine that each set is indented.)

The self gives the self knowledge.
The self gives the intimates commitment.
The self gives the community binding.
The self gives the ultimate questing.

The ultimate grants the cause creativity.
The ultimate grants the community purpose.
The ultimate grants the intimates meaning.
The ultimate grants the self transcendence.

The cause grants the community outreach.
The cause grants the intimates altruism.
The cause grants the self empowerment.

The community grants the intimates acceptance.
The community grants the self inclusion.

The intimates grant the self enfoldment.

Peter used this framework to evaluate the UU churches. Has our community stayed involved with the world? He says he’d give us an A to a C, depending upon the issue. Has our community attempted the new? Peter would give us an A. Has the community “articulated religious values?” Peter thinks we deserve a C. Have we built religious community? Peter would give us a D.

This lecture (for which I was on the sponsoring committee) was followed by a formal exercise for an hour. People were asked to form triads at first with people not from our church and then to re-group with all the people from their own church. In both groups we were to address four questions.

How does one give oneself knowledge and how are YOU doing it?
How does one give one’s intimates commitment and how are YOU doing it?
How does one bind community together and how are YOU doing it?
How does one quest for the Ultimate and how are YOU doing it?

We spent the rest of the morning preparing for gifts that night, massaging each other in the sunshine, and visiting quietly. That afternoon we presented gifts to the community. As individuals each of us gave something by putting it on the table with a few words about it and then took something according to fancy, as in a flower communion. Objects ranged from a beach pebble to a cherished book. One group of us had written a poem in unison, which we read. A giant mural had been constructed from old New Yorker cartoons, in-jokes, original art, and bits of the environment. That was presented to the community. Later it was cut up in pieces and hauled home by several different churches with the idea of reassembling it at a PNWD annual meeting. I don’t know whether this ever happened.

Then we had the second silly time, which turned out to be REALLY silly. We were instructed to appear wearing old clothes and holding a dollar and a cup. We were told to stand in a line. The committee came by in a VW van, jumped out, took our dollars, got back in and disappeared! We were left gaping and gasping, utterly abandoned with no instructions. The only member of that committee left was Juanita Russell, so we took her hostage and tied her to the porch. But just as we tied the final knot, the van returned with a garbage can of ice and champagne! That’s what the cups were for!

Once we’d killed the champagne, our instructions were to play “Alice the Camel,” except instead of being in a circle and smashing the central person, the idea was to smash Peter against a building, which we did with glee. But just as we were enjoying flattening poor Peter, someone glanced up and screamed! Overhead on the roof was Ord with a whole box of water balloons! The revenge of the leaders! His aim was good! The committee brought up boxes and boxes of water balloons that had been in the nearby basement -- evidently they’d been filling them all afternoon -- and we had the world’s all-time most satisfactory waterfight. Rebels against leaders.

After supper we evaluated the model community. Most of our problems centered on our management design. Our purpose was okay and our task design was okay and, as usual with UU’s we survived on good will and ingenuity -- with some cost in terms of tempers. It was quite a pointed lesson.

On the last morning we evaluated the whole leadership program. [This document doesn’t include that formal evaluation.]

We knew that it would be very hard for all of us to end this school. Therefore, we made a special effort to design a graduation/worship sequence that would channel our emotions into something constructive. The graduation came first with all those who had attended three years receiving certification which we had designed and xeroxed in town instead of dittoing them on our own indispensable machine. (We had used boxes of purple masters and reams of paper in this one week.)

The worship was rather formal and simple. (This was true of all our worships that summer. They were at suppertime and had a sort of vespers quality.) We played the entire first band of the Pachelbel Canon while the group meditated. There were opening words by Peggy Woods. Joy McKim led us in a responsive reading. Virginia Lane led a meditation quoting Clarke Wells: “Some day you’ll have forgotten all about this summer and then you’ll open an old suitcase and out will jump a jaguar and yards and yards of coloured silk.” Ord played Spanish guitar softlyu and classically in the background. Janet May directed everyone to come up and light a candle, and while the group held their candles in front of them, I read a piece I’d written comparing the school to a phoenix.

Peter had supplied the candle on the first day at the first meeting. He’d blown it out when the second year class dispersed and lit it again to begin the third year. We’d used the symbol several times during the week. Now the idea was to carry our candles out into the world and not to worry when they went out, because we knew how to light them again. I led the way out the door and everyone carried their lights along behind me -- this time we didn’t leave anyone sitting there, unwilling to recross the threshold!