I THOUGHT IT WAS ABOUT LOVE

Some around here realize that I was in the ministry for ten years.  No one in my training and no one in any congregation I served ever talked about sexual abuse, either as a present situation needing to be addressed or as a social problem.  I heard more about sexual problems when I was working earlier as an animal control officer.  Sexual abuse is about power and control which get distorted when dealing with the vulnerable, whether it’s a puppy or a child.  The American Humane Association has two formal branches, one that deals with humans and one that deals with other animals.

When all the scandal about Roman Catholic priests became public, I joked that UU ministers don’t impose themselves on children — they just seduce rich women.  There is one man who calls himself the Emerson Avenger and rails against the Sexual Revolution that dumped the rules about sexual propriety but his real gripe is about a vision he had that his minister wouldn’t support.

This is not me -- I have no tatts.

When a short list of laymen occasionally proposed that I hook up with them, my joke was “I charge a lot more to be the temple whore.”  Bitterness came from knowing that they had no idea who I was — they were after the power and control they thought I had because of being a minister.  Which shows that they knew nothing at all about being a female minister, or even a male one.  But why was I joking so much?

And why was there no formal inclusion of such matters in our training?  But wait — in my Clinical Pastoral Education group (interning in a major hospital as a chaplain) there was a small blonde man studying to be a priest who finally had the courage to tell us (the experience is in-the-wards service balanced with group consideration of what happened) about his first night at seminary after an emotional leave-taking with his girl friend, whom he truly loved.  A senior priest seduced him.  On the spectrum between flirtation to rape, it was towards the rape end.  Our colleague was consumed with guilt.  The group had to work hard to get him past that.  I don’t know that we really did.

Occasionally around here a woman will tell me she was molested in childhood, often by her biological relatives.  I hardly registered such incidents until I realized I was sequestering understanding in my own mind.  I just didn’t know what to do with it, so I denied it.  My family strategy.  

As far as I know for sure, only one male in my family — young and beautiful — had been stalked.  Assigned by the court to a dry-out residential treatment program, he had soon learned to sleep in the daytime and sit up with a book all night.  Did the court know?  Probably.

The statistics say one in six men is molested at some point and one in four women as well, though they’re a little dodgy about which demographic they mean — usually they exclude reservations from their statistics as atypical — and who would interview hardcore ghetto drug users?  Which of those would have motivation to report anything accurately?  Why investigate sexual abuse when there is no will to investigate even the murders of indigenous women?

If the incident rate of abuse is this high, it seems reasonable to assume that more than one of my nearly one hundred cousins have had to deal with sexual invasions.  I’ve never met a lot of these younger people, can’t even remember their names.  When dealing with one young step-relative, I found it almost impossible to figure out what was abuse and what was contemporary youth culture behavior.  They entwined sex, booze, and driving fast on back roads in a horrifyingly high-risk complex.  

One boy’s MOTHER bragged that her son had impregnated a dozen young women, which she considered a sign of proud virility.  He accomplished this by getting the girls drunk to the point of passing out.  Didn’t even need the extra expense of “roofies.”

Through the years my own behavior has become more and more guarded.  Since I’ve been approached by lesbians (who quickly backed off when they saw they had misunderstood), I think of this society as being one where people ache for intimacy and relationship.  And I become more determined to channel all that into words and images.  Not that I don’t have “skin hunger,” but that’s what the cats are for.

I do have a cousin involved in owning “titty bars.”  They crossed me off their list long ago.  That’s the family pattern:  exclusion and denial.  They’re very prosperous.  But in contradiction, my father offered to take me to a strip club when I turned eighteen.  My mother flattened that idea.  What was he thinking? 

The bus route to town went past the Portland skid row where I was intrigued by the burlesque houses and the gypsies, who sat on chairs in doorways.  Where is the line between exotic dancing, burlesque routines (I love that movie about the woman who taught students to develop their talents — can’t remember the name but Netflix’ algorithm took note, so I'm offered many less playful and positive films.), and just outright prostitution?  There’s no use in asking cops or anthropologists.  They don't know.

When the girl I finally had to take for two abortions (there was no one else she could ask for help and the first one was tubal, a medical emergency) turned eighteen, I asked what she would like for a gift.  She wanted to go see “Supervixens.”  So we did.  I came close to throwing up.   I think she saw it as reality -- not what she expected -- but there was no chance we could discuss it.  She was very quiet afterwards.  

In adulthood and “authorized” or at least emboldened by being ordained, I’ve looked at and read incredibly troubling stuff, looking for boundaries, but there aren’t any.  Before one gets to the boundaries of sex, one is already in the territory of torture.

When the boy got comatose girls pregnant, “my” girl was among them.  The two of them came to my office at Animal Control to announce they were getting married.  Instead, having understood what happened, I took my biology autopsy scissors out of the desk and offered to castrate him.  (I used blunt language.)  The end.  

Why didn’t I, sitting there in a uniform with a deputy sheriff badge, follow up with formal prosecution?  Why didn’t I let Social Services know what was happening?  But no, that was the second abortion.  Try to return to the past, deny and forget.  There was a third.  Then she died in a car accident.  It was many decades ago.

It could have been worse.  AIDS didn’t exist yet.

1953

Over the years, various counselors and co-workers have suggested that I have the symptoms of someone who was sexually abused as a child, maybe a toddler, but I don’t remember anything.  On the other hand, one of our early babysitters (male), hung himself in Macleay Park, which I didn’t know until I asked my mother about what bonded the mothers on the street so tightly.  It was to support that boy’s mother.  I asked her whether I’d been “interfered with” and she said absolutely not.

But there was a strange unspoken awareness of such a possibility in our household.  Not least was an unaccountable yearning for something I couldn’t describe, that wasn’t satisfied until adult marriage.  I thought it was about love.  I'm very hard to shame.  But I carry a lot of guilt.

WHAT SHALL WE DO TO BECOME RICH AND FAMOUS?

Writing is opportunistic, compensatory, advisory and voyeuristic.  It exists as the culture exists, entwined with it.  When the culture presents an opportunity, writing flows into the opening and fills it.  Sometimes it is the writing that changes the culture (culture is always changing) and that in itself is a writing opportunity.  Sometimes culture throttles writing.  Iconoclasm is always fun.

Examples.  The country is full of new immigrants, some of whom will be trying to bring their previous life along with them with as little change as possible (opportunity) while at the same time trying to present a positive front where they are trying to work and learn (opportunity) and their children are trying to develop a new life in this different place (opportunity).  They want to know about clothes, cooking and manners.

Emily Post says don't slurp.

In the heyday of soap operas, women worked at home with family.  Radio stories went with them all day, proposing strategy for relationship networks and as voyeurism.  Now the same stories are on tablets and iPods, but the content is the same.  The delivery system is able to keep the same women in daily contact with each other, making soap opera of their real lives.  The dynamics are the same advisory story telling as used to happen in kitchens or even doing laundry at a stream side.  

Suddenly there is a huge market for romances, esp those that provide a lot of information about how to establish a family or how to survive on the job or a combination of both.  The consumers listen on earphones or read on iPods while they commute.  Some of it is psychological management and some of it is how to become alluring.  For immigrants, housewives and line workers, clerks and commuters, the stream is both self-improvement how-to and consolation, mending after damage and defeat. 

"I love your hairdo, Shamus."

You already knew all this.  You know why you hunger for fiction and you know why you hunger for intimate views of other lives.  Once I was serving a congregation with a minister’s office that had been the stage in the building’s previous incarnation.  They simply put a wall where the curtain had been.  But one woman told me that she sat in the audience imagining that the wall were drawn like a curtain because she intensely wanted to see what I was doing in that office.  The door had no lock, so I installed one, which upset everyone.  What nasty thing was I doing in there that I would need a lock?  (Actually I was trying to protect my electric typewriter which I often found children pounding on.)  What secrets of my status were hidden there? 

Where do people get this sense of entitlement about access to the lives of ministers and writers?  They think such people are parents and they believe children are entitled to the lives and profits of parents.  This is cultural.  They are obsessed with the question of what one’s sexuality is.  That’s commercial.

Now we are finally getting around to taking a look behind the scenes of writing, the machinery of delivery, since we all have stories to tell (we’re told that all the time) and because the means of delivery have returned to the oral and even the ocular, which is wonderful for voyeurs, like people who watch travel documentaries and National Geographic cameras hidden in nests and burrows.  The drone of the narrator can be turned way down, but it’s necessary to support the idea that this is legitimate education.

And some people are realizing two things:  how much writing is controlled and distorted by the delivering businesses and how fantasy (a vital characteristic of writing) has provided those opportunistic businesses with an ocean of writing from people so grateful to be put into fugitive print pixels that they don’t need to be paid.  Merely having their names mentioned makes them walk tall.  

The trouble is having to sort a lot of narcissistic trash to find the worthy stuff.  And the problem with that is that the business is based on 19th century assumptions which are WEIRD —Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.  They are also urban and hope to stay college-aged forever.  And they are hopelessly bourgeois.  Wikipedia:  “bourgeoisie”:  a social class oriented to economic materialism and hedonism, and to upholding the extreme political and economic interests of the capitalist ruling class.”

Writers are all over the map economically, educationally, aspirationally — but those who control publication are inevitably as described above.  Many writers have nothing but contempt for them, which they must disguise in order to make a living.  Others think that pleasing these controllers is a confirmation that they are special, deserving, no longer merely bourgeois, and if their writing sells well enough to make money for the producers, the producers will assure them they’re right.  They’re like starlets in Hollywood, sleeping with producers and believing that makes them excellent actresses.

Gordon Lish

Alexander Nazaryan ’s article in Newsweek offers Gordon Lish as an example of the interstitial editor who buffers the publishing poseurs from the writers still entranced by their own potential. He edited the undisciplined into "brilliance" and sold his opinion of the result to the checkbook keepers.  Lish has replaced Maxwell Perkins in the mythology of the fairy godfather who can spin straw into gold.  (Female editors who try to do this will be called castrating bitches.)

“Gordon Lish is a traveler from a country no longer extant, a country where editors were princes and writers kings. A country where the publishing fiefdoms of Manhattan were proud castles in the sky, where the desperate flailings of The Real Housewives of Pittsburgh never made the gossip pages, but the seating arrangements at Elaine’s always did.”  http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/27/angry-flash-gordon-255491.html

A contrasting phenomenon of the now tech-dominated publishing is the idea of “cloud editing.”  That is, one posts one’s writing publicly, complete or not, and all the readers out there are welcome to advise, edit, and inevitably "improve" the work.  It’s the MFA seminar gone global.  What could go wrong?

First of all, no one who writes cares about what other writers are writing.  Second of all, there is such a huge crowd of wanna-be writers than any attempt to read a fraction of it is soon overwhelmed.  Let’s look at Medium, a platform of this sort.  Their answer to the first problem was to salt the gold mine with work by professional writers, which meant paying them.  No one paid the wannabes, who all innocently assumed they were on their way up and soon would earn money.

Their answer to the second problem was to subdivide the territory into types run by sub-editors who might actually act as the Lish/Perkins who created geniuses, a fantasy almost as potent as being writers.  Of course, they could publish their own work, too.  Actually, this worked rather well until the same two problems cropped up: the only writers who cared about other writers were the ones who had a focus in common, and there was just too much stuff.  Now as cyber code instead of ink on paper.

From the faraway safety of small-town prairie, I see this as part of the shift from individualism back to group.  The Post-War Fifties glamorization of the lone creative genius is fading. (Thoreau is their saint, though he never really was what they imagine.  But then, no one is.)  Consider that JFK’s son died with his wife and friend, flying alone in fog.  Suddenly the Truman/Eisenhower years of conformity and infrastructure seem a lot wiser.  No need to rehearse the Bush/Cheney paranoia.  It is still upon us.

So now we’ve got to figure out a cloud/fog that is actually a popularity contest like the ones that controlled high school.  Comments are no longer insightful analysis, but only the sums of cutsey thumbs and hearts.  I don’t care but the producers realize that numbers are economic.  The tech strategy is always to create a gimmicky startup, get a lot of people involved, then sell out to those producers who have the real venture capital — except that it’s turning out that the capital is not real at all --  it’s debt and stock options.  So Esquire “made” Gordon Lish and Gordon Lish “made” Raymond Carver.  That’s no reason to write "Walmart minimalism", as Nazaryan nails it.  Unless it's all you know.

I only put my stuff online because I compose on a keyboard and once the stuff is composed, it’s easy to post.  What happens then is fate.  And culture.  My part is done.

DUNBAR'S NUMBER

Class Notes

Thinking about Dunbar’s number (150), which is about the number of people who can really know each other on a supportive basis, connects with a lot of thinking from my past.  One is Alban Institute’s work on church size.   They persisted a long time but are now gone.  Their work was trying to understand what made congregations survive or fail.  At the time I knew about Alban, in the Seventies, 150 people was about the number it took to maintain a viable church with a building and a professional minister.  Now it would take three times that number but many congregations have shrunk to one-third that number.

Ranchers and wildlife experts are familiar with the idea of “carrying capacity,” the number of animals who can occupy an ecology without destroying it.  Environments have the ability to rebound from overgrazing or drought and can increase their carrying capacity by complexifying or when conditions improve.  Conversely, some exotic plant or animal can crowd into the ecology and tear the relationships apart.  Drought and floods throw off the balance of everything, but some ecologies — like the bottom of the Grand Canyon where regular periodic floods in spring are necessary to replant the cottonwoods — need that disruption to drive the systems.

When I did the three-year extension ministry for the UUA, which meant circuit riding among four groups who probably added up to 150 people, it was interpreted by most people as a “salesmanship” problem.  Make UU sound wonderful, promise it will be profitable, and all will be well.  No one thought of it as an ecology, not even me.   (Well, I did a little bit.)  We did use the Alban Institute’s figures for “carrying capacity” which they estimated to be about 2 potential UU’s per 1,000 population.  That means that in Valier, there should only be about one-third of a UU person.  That must be me.  Thirty-five years later, only one of the groups has died — it was Great Falls where the town is also struggling to keep its people.  The one that flared and grew was in Whitefish/

Kalispell, glamourous, growing, the banana belt of Montana.  This group was not part of the program.   For success, the economy means far more than preaching.

My preaching gown

My seminary finally adapted to its tiny student population by converting to a mail-order low-residence school in leased offices.  They're living off the profit from selling the building originally created for them.  They haven’t quite resorted to the strategy of a minister in the midwest who used to destroy all graphs by claiming thousands of church members.  It turned out he had a radio ministry and claimed everyone in the listening area.

These problems of exceeding or diminishing, as related to economic carrying capacity, are affecting everyone across the Montana Highline.  It’s hard enough to gather and organize people to create a town, but then when the economy collapses, it’s even harder to cut back.  Schools must combine, ministers must travel, and roads don’t get repaired.  The local/state/federal balance is distorted — or at least changed.  As new sources of income are developed and old ones disappear, the kind of population changes.  If no new sources of income are found, the existing population ages in place, creating new needs while destroying old supplies. 

Sometimes you're the cheetah,

And sometimes you're the baboons.

It’s strange to think about hominins, about how they came down out of the trees.  How many individuals must have been lost due to the new conditions without trees -- no place to be safe -- and yet whole new ways of living on the land appeared.  They had to overwhelm their own biologically rooted desire to stay in one place, do the same things, even when that didn’t work.  What finally made them change?  A drought?  A dream? A mutation?

Just as more new converts are needed, the churches empty out — all the different kinds from prosperity mega-operations to little remnant rural groups of grannies and grandpas.  The denominations used to grow, inventing new names to identify themselves and their splinters, just like the expanding economy that demanded new forms.  But now the Walmarts are closing down and no one knows what’s next.  Well, they do — they just don’t want to admit it.  Amazon.  Infinite numbers of people?  Maybe.  Growth as a marker of success?  Being challenged.  Maybe "Small IS Beautiful."  What's after Amazon?

New product?  We’re sort of on the cusp of development.  VERY expensive hightech breakthroughs, but at the same time cheap cell phones and computers for everyone. An interesting development is the realization that while many were rushing around with their salesmanship ideas, there was a whole layer of society that was quietly and persistently developing “organic food,” “counter-cultures,”  "heritage seeds," “co-operatives,” off the grid.

My money, my stockbroker.

One of the interesting things about the economics of art is that on the edge are always very rich people who buy, sustain, found major institutions like museums and so on.  These are the 1 or 2% of people who control, er, “own” the great majority of the wealth in the world.  Artists are part of their infrastructure of prestige and so we visit them, sell to them, get to know them.  

What I am just now realizing is that a really rich person is not at all what we ordinary plodders think.  They are NOT individuals who can do what they want.  Instead they are managed by all sorts of people who tell them what to do.  They have the same problems of expansion and contraction in their Dunbar’s number (friends and family), and often have losses in that context, particularly if they’re not good at “grooming,” (meaning the innocent maintenance of relationships) or pervert friendship grooming into the acquisition of people as though they were bought.  Very wealthy individuals may have a lot of family, but because of English-originating law over inheritance, that can be a serious disruption.  It drives many a BBC plot.

Disney Studios

The truth is that very wealthy people, particularly those who come into a lot of money suddenly, like movie stars and rock singers, are almost immediately converted into being corporations, a business machine with its members intent on keeping their jobs and expanding their control and remuneration.  When someone like Walt Disney dies, it’s barely noticeable because he goes on as a franchise, still keeping all those folks on the payroll, adding lawyers searching contracts for more profit.  He’s just a trade name now.  

Organizational design was another way I came to understanding the importance of these arrangements that are NOT REAL.  They’re like money — it’s only paper that stands for profit.  Who supervises whom, the chain of accountability, divisions and assignments, all that seemingly boring stuff can make a major difference.  Management today is a crippling problem, a failure of producing people who have the skills.

The receding tide of “religion” -- which to the media and most citizens is some set of beliefs and the machinery of an organization -- is not serving the core "carrying capacity" of spirituality.  Rather they are shrinking the spirit.  It hasn’t got anything to do with “theism” or any of the other tent poles of the world’s systems.  It’s about human beings and their 150 friends, neighbors, and relatives, who no longer sing together unless they’re drunk or pushing a political agenda. 

I have no trust that any present venue will increase the spiritual carrying capacity of the country.  But I’m very intrigued by experiments like the one that recorded people all over the world singing the same song and then blended them into one giant chorus.  The “flash choirs” around Christmas always make me cry.  Spiritual content is not the words of the songs, nor even their familiarity, but the human voices — no matter the number.

"The Chorus" about a boys' school.

Here's a link to a terrific French film called "The Chorus" about how the unity of song can redeem misguided morality.

http://www.netflix.com/watch/70019005?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C03dc472065f5306cd985db4d73dc8a3f469a0603%3A5adfb04c3165f7d026977f96b0413bc7975bcec2

DAVIDSON LOEHR'S PITCH FOR BILL GATES MONEY

While I’m off doing laundry and shopping, after a scare when my SSI check was late arriving at the bank, maybe you’d like to watch this YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEhQBAVX9hQ

Davidson Loehr was in the class admitted to Meadville/Lombard and the U of C Div School just after mine.  We were both "retreads" hitting our forties.  The M/L classes were very small, 6 or 4 or maybe 10.  The faculty was only 3.  It was easy to get into M/L if you had a good patron (both Dave and I did) but, once in M/L, as part of the “cluster” of seminaries of many denominations, we had access to all of them.  We earned an MA at the U of C as a part of our D.Min.  An MA meant 3 rigorous tests (meant to filter good Ph.D. candidates) and passing a French exam.

The dirty little secret was that fewer and fewer M/L people could handle the U of C MA, and they began to fight the requirements.   Not only that, they got stuck before they qualified for the in-house D.Min., which were finally just commuted down to M.Div.   This and economic realities have gradually led to the sale of the ML building and separation into a Chicago Loop “address” with no campus.  Quality of preparation for ministry is a separate issue, because it goes not to only how rigorous content should be for “learned ministers” (as opposed to “inspired ministers”) but also brings in what is sometimes called “formation,” which is really more like being “psychologically sound.”  It gets called “spiritual.” 

In raw practical terms, it meant “don’t rock the boat” and “don’t challenge the faculty.”  I had a friendship with David that was based at least partly on boat-rocking.  He was troublesome enough that the faculty asked him to leave.  (Not a formal expulsion, I think.)  He had impressive academic chops and a strong mentor, Langdon Gilkey (a truly fabulous man, gone now), so he just transferred over to U of C on their terms and got his degree there.  He’s a member of the Jesus seminar.  http://virtualreligion.net/forum/ and others.

David arrived at M/L with a total woodshop (he made double-digit hourly wages building counters and bookshelves while I made $8 an hour transcribing at the Law School) and a piano.  He was also an excellent photographer, a fine singer, a good cook, and a divorcee.  As a minister he was charming and contentious and got fired from his church for claiming the WTT catastrophe was a CIA plot of some kind.  It’s amazing to see him here on video, the wise old man, saying things I suppose he supposes will please the judges for a big prize contributed by Bill Gates.

See what you think.

__________________________

I've had a few hours of smoky drive time suitable for thinking while I pass the combines going round and round and smell the newly cut alfalfa, nearly overwhelming.  I'm much harsher than David.
I still can't find online any offer from Bill Gates about predictions, esp. about religion.

1.  Gates and Jimmy Carter have proven with solid evidence that if enough money is provided, things like malaria or ebola can be prevented.  IF the adults can be prevented from taking the mosquito nets off the childrens' beds so as to catch fish with them.  IF the ebola patients can be provided with care that is ordinary in the better US hospitals, the death rate goes down from near universal to something like 60% and a vaccine was soon at hand.  It just takes money and determination.   The reason it isn't done, or is done in a way that puts thousands of people on a leash, is that keeping people needy can control them.

2.  The climate is already shifting.  In a few hundred years the patterns and intensities will be entirely different.  Every coast city will be destroyed unless it can survive partially submerged.  Every vegetation growing pattern will change.  Every insect population will move around, mostly north, and the birds will go with them.

3.  Natural resources are close to used up.  That includes exotic metals.  We will soon be sifting through the trash piles to recover them.  Fertile soil is a natural resource we are also using up.  We can replenish the minerals but not the microlife biotics which are part of the fertility.  Combine with changing water resources, and we will probably lose much of the major grain resources that have made population expansion possible.  This means famine and displaced populations.

4.  The travel and transmission resources across the planet are inadequate and collapsing.  Even the satellite systems are meeting their end-of-life projections.

5.  Capitalism is 500 years old and wearing out.  We need new ways to mediate the whole with the individual.  That includes a transformation of what we think of as nations, which are no longer nimble or fluid enough.

This means that the world -- not just the Western world or the developed world -- is going to lose population and quality of life both abruptly and more drastically than we are imagining.  I expect the population to be at least halved.  Maybe down to ten per cent.  There will be MUCH trauma, but I don't think it will be like the dramatic dystopian movies.  More of a quiet withering.

The religion problem is that we are limited fleshware trying to get our minds around what is by definition without any limits.  As the rude saying goes, we keep trying to eff the ineffable.  But we aren't taking advantage of what we have.  Thinking is done with a whole body, and as well with a body of other people.

The practical solutions we will develop will mean cooperation instead of competition, solar and vegetable energy, maybe abandonment of parts of the planet, and surprising new developments that come out of what looks like chaos.  We already have more genders than we can understand, race is a dissolving concept, skills we once valued are now useless and others need to be invented.

More of all this is already with us than we realize.  Those who educate themselves through experience are closer to the truth than the school-goers.

SEMINARY IS A GAUNTLET

If God is dead, are ministers and priests out of a job?  I mean, no CEO, no corporation -- right?  In our times religious leaders are struck by lightning over and over.  

1.  The Middle Eastern Big Three triangle -- Judaism, Christian, Islam -- is both broken (having been claimed by warring identities) and exceeded (even religion is globalized now).  The rigid and seemingly permanent categories have shattered on one end (we are surprised to see how many sub-groups there are “inside” each of the three) and unified on the other (science-based worldview with the Cosmos as the mediating icon).

2.  In the Western world, gender-assigned identities have also discovered that female ministers will evoke images that prompt behaviors.  If you think they are nuns, that’s one thing.  If you think they are moms, that’s another.  If you think they are bitches, the devil will wear a blue dress.  Mostly Protestants think of female clergy as low-pay workhorses, like nurses and teachers.  Nice ladies, of course.  In the meantime, some women themselves think they are Joan of Arc, sleeping in the straw with warriors.  A few confuse female clergy with temple whores, a very old pattern.

3.  Our understanding of community has shifted from the “silo” of people who know each other as like-minded and face-to-face, to the “laminated” horizontal communities of affinity on the Internet.  We can’t take for granted the foundation of our formation and still turn to marketing which pursues popularity.  If “religion” is going to be a matter of “product,” then money will always be the index.  Commentators will always be aware of the mean income level of the congregation.  The smaller the congregation, the less money.  The larger the congregation the more they will separate from the denomination or dominate it.

4.  The secret work of the seminary, which they never admit, is job-chasing for their graduates.  They are lousy at it.  The market changes, the supply of students changes, the pressures keeping down the uproar change, and the world context changes.  

Because I was a UU minister for a decade (the Eighties) and sometimes write about it, I get occasional emails from people asking about ministry, usually young men.  A few years ago it was an English teacher who wanted to know about seminary, but his questions showed that he thought it would be something like the army: he would be guided, assigned, made safe, so long as he was obedient.  And yet he was a UU, the most free-form of denominations. 

This young man, educated and probably a little seasoned, since he’d been teaching for a few years, sounded like an excellent prospect to everyone he had talked to until he found me.   When he read my rather negative remarks, he was smart enough to call me up.  After we visited a bit, I wasn’t hearing a “call,” as the pressing need to be a minister is described.  It was March.  I asked whether his teaching contract had been renewed.  Not.  I see.  Ministry as default.

The seminaries love older retreads who will cash in their houses, their savings, and the time they have left in order to do something idealistic and “meaningful.”  Which leads us to a more recent contact from a man who faced the dark side of idealism.  I had described a built-in ordeal faced by the students who had now done the bulk of classwork and practicuums (internship, Clinical Pastoral Education) and had been around long enough to settle into the assumption that they were ready to write a thesis and get a job.  

The seminary in question had three professors (M/L), though students also had access to a major university divinity school.  The number of students was small, but their interests were both scattered and specialized, far exceeding the expertise on the payroll of the seminary.  Anyway, the three were all middle-aged white men with limited world experience.  They didn’t like challenge and aborted all troublesome prospects.  

This second contact had been deeply scarred by the experience and had not realized it was structural rather than personal.  He thought he was the only one.  He thought there was only one route to the ministry, though there were a dozen other seminaries in the cluster and a myriad of denominations, to say nothing of world religions.   He thought ministry was a combination of honor and certification that would defeat all the criticism from those he had offended over the years.  Me, too.  But seminary is a gauntlet.  And ought to be.

https://www.academia.edu/8698037/Making_the_implicit_explicit_exploring_the_role_of_Learning_Design_in_improving_formational_learning_outcomes

Despite the amount of jargon in this Australian article, it bravely addresses the problem of educating “theology” people who then must serve congregations who have little or no interest in formal theology.  They want help with soul-searching, with facing down evil, with power-wrestling for political justice, and how to get their own personal fishhooks out of their livers.  In my experience lay people are not in the least interested in the curricula prospective ministers learn at seminary.  They want comfort, reassurance, and the feeling that they are right as right can be.

The point the article makes is that “formation” for the kind of person we want ministers to be usually happens informally around the coffee table in the seminary or maybe down the street with a beer.   It’s a face-to-face feedback sort of thing to do and the more intense and personal the conversation is, the better it works.   So in a “low-residence” seminary which they vehemently defend as NOT a correspondence school what's going to supply that?

The wise men approach GTS

Recently General Theological School, an Episcopalian seminary located in Chelsea, NYC,  a neighborhood that is artsy and avant garde, including gender role experiments, hit a hurricane when the new president, a former hotshot lawyer brought in from Florida where he had been considered the dynamic (and conservative) newly theologized leader and growth factor for a major church.  The board called him in to save the sinking seminary, which he did by selling property.  (Its origins very early in the history of New York meant that it was extremely well-endowed.)  

Then he turned to the faculty.  In the belief that the failing economics of student-based income was due to overly liberal professors, he began a program of change that was supposed to return to the past.  He did small and simple things like changing the early prayer that traditionally started the day to a mid-morning event that would accommodate late night society but not intense study.  He did not understand a liturgically conservative but theologically liberal faculty.  He would not listen to them.  So they went on strike, so he fired them en masse, so all the denominational and Christian diaspora Big Shots were divided between being aghast and amused, so finally the faculty was reinstated.  What happens next will happen in March when the teaching contracts are signed.  That will not be the end.

Starr King Student Body

That’s at the traditional structured conservative end of the seminary scale.  In Berkeley the problem that developed over the hiring of a new President was quite different.  The committee chose a black woman with fine credentials.  At least two students wanted their familiar beloved interim to be permanent.  These students were battle-scarred social activists with a conviction that conscience rules.  THEIR conscience demanded their values, so they broke the confidentiality of the search process in order to get support, equivalent to a strike.  The seminary reacted with the equivalent of firing: they refused to award diplomas to the troublemakers.

When seminaries this different end up in the same predicaments, it’s coming from the larger society, the same forces that paralyze the US legislative bodies on every level, even the little old town council of Valier.  Partly a matter of income inequality, partly a matter of fear as Big Three religionists become a minority, partly a matter of the mind-blowing ability to land rockets on comets, and partly fallout from the wild and leveling Sixties and Seventies, it’s a time of experiment and hope.  

Change cannot be prevented.  Want to be a minister?  Start a church!  Heck, start a denomination.  Found a religion.  What’s your message?  Want a nice comfy job where everyone will admire you and your wonderful sermons?  It didn’t work for Jesus, who was a rabbi.

RAW NARCISSISM

I don’t sign up for RSS on many blogs but one I’ve kept up with since I was reading 2blowhards years ago is “the rawness.” (http://therawness.com) As I understand it -- and I may be way off base because I don’t really know -- this is written in New York City by a half-Haitian (black, I guess) man addressing the many many young and youngish men trying to make it in the city. They are obsessed with “game” and though they seem on the surface to mean by that scoring with women, in fact this guy (who signs himself “T” or Ricky Raw) gives advice about “human nature” and how to be a better person. He’s pretty damn solid.

The big recent topic? Narcissism. Both in terms of those alpha guys who elbow a milder man away from the bar and in terms of the histrionic female vampires who can eat a man alive and unpeeled. The main argument of the moment is that people learn narcissism from narcissistic parents -- too busy, too self-absorbed, too incompetent -- to raise the children they have been too narcissistic to prevent having. What this teaches the kids is to look out for themselves (replicating narcissism), although sometimes with a crippled, needy parent, they end up being sucked into taking care of them. Then they are a “parentified child” or “co-dependent,” always more comfortable when taking care of someone. Narcissism and codependence are reciprocal, often playing off against each other and leading to grandiosity, control issues, and other miserable stuff like borderline personality disorders. But when a narcissist finds a codependent and they’re a good fit -- hey, it’s intense. And some people really want that. Others do not.

This blogger-man reads book after book and is shrewd and dependable in his opinions of them. He’s not the male equivalent of a Helen Gurley Brown “Sex in the City” game player, but rather someone looking for the real thing: trustworthy and lasting relationships that support a meaningful life. I have three responses.

One of my tests is whether these ideas work with same sex relationships. I think that narcissism/codependency dysfunctions do indeed work as useful concepts in that context and I can think of examples among the people I know. Another of my tests is whether these ideas are a useful way to think in terms of ministry relationships and, again, I find that they are. A third context is in parent/child relationships and in this case the dynamics of identity formation are very relevant. The whole point of the generational boundary -- that the party with greater power and control be careful to protect the vulnerable instead of using them for their own ends -- is illuminated clearly.

Going back to the first context, let’s look at Yves St. Laurent (the Paris fashion designer) and Pierre Bergé (his partner in business and at home), so I can talk about same-sex relationships without getting into trouble. (When you look up Valier on one of those community analysis websites, they will tell you there are NO gay or lesbian couples here. How do they know??) So -- in terms of the Paris fashion world, this was a long and productive partnership. The two men were not “equal” -- one could argue that St. Laurent was a child while Bergé was the adult, but it was equally true that St. Laurent was creative in a way that Bergé was not. They had an asymmetrical but reciprocal relationship. Probably you could say that St. Laurent was a narcissist and Bergé was co-dependent, an enabler. It worked because it WAS about work and I believe that’s a key stabilizer. In all these discussions of “game” there is never a hint of the people involved collaborating to do something they feel passionately about. Everything is devoted to the two people’s relationship. Everything is face-to-face instead of side-by-side. Each other is the only thing they feel passionately about. A major and consuming mistake IMHO.

In the best of conventional worlds, the “something” the two adults would feel passionately about protecting and growing would be children. Conservatives feel this is the point of sexual relationship. But two adults could also join in other enterprises, like business, arts, a cause of some kind, a garden, military life, a ranch, or public service. The goal needs to be something compelling enough to supply the discipline capable of curbing the excesses of grandiose narcissism and toxic enabling. In my experience, men are better at finding this uberprinciple than women are, but only slightly. And it is a mistake to let the guiding cause justify excesses of power. A complexification in the case of two same-sex people is the stigma. If there is enough money or fame, the stigma is erased, but not the curiosity, unless people have seen enough, as in a liberal community.

Next we get into the accepted stereotype of the charismatic and admired church leader and his little supporting hen of a preacher’s wife, uncomplainingly raising the children alone and overlooking insults and trespasses for the sake of the greater good. Female ministers walk into a confusing mix of requirements based on gender stereotypes instead of practical roles. (Is she Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, or Ingrid Bergman playing a nun?) Ministers attract codependent people in droves, both genders, not always based on sex. If these needy people are frustrated, they can be vengeful. If the religious conviction is strong enough to be a governing discipline, that helps.

Back to the parent/child cathexis: how does one wean a child from the natural dependence of babyhood in an emotionally healthy way? First of all, attention must be paid to the child. Second, a child is not a puppet and must be trusted to do his or her own growing in his or her own way but without letting him or her play in traffic. Third, listen to the stories. The great strength of “The Rawness” is that he offers story after story. Mostly, in resilient families, the members go in and out of narcissism and co-dependence, learning as they go where the balance is and how to feel it. Every kid is different, times are different, unexpected things happen. Either it’s fascinating and increases the amount of love, or everyone goes into lockdown and gets drunk, or there’s some variation in between. Hopefully without violence.

And hopefully these ideas are interesting and useful enough to avoid all the pointless obsessing about “stress.” There’s too much “game” in stress, mostly coming from pharmaceutical companies. It gets very boring.

A FIRESIDE CHAT

This post is going to be on the edge of indiscreet.  That means it’s about things that many people are curious about BECAUSE you aren’t supposed to talk about them, because they raise questions that are hard to answer.  I’m going to talk about the ministry; actually, the Unitarian Universalist ministry, which has as much scope for indiscretion as the Roman Catholic church but in quite a different way.  UU ministers don’t go in for little boys -- they prefer rich women, which is much more practical.  Of course, having a lot of female ministers sort of interferes, especially since many are women in declared same-sex relationships.

The group I belong to now is technically “former UU ministers,” because ministers are defined as specifically trained and certified persons serving a specific constituency, normally a congregation but sometimes a hospital, a school, or a prison.  I left voluntarily and in good order and actually -- after stepping away -- served as an informal interim Methodist minister for a year.  I just wanted to come back to this place.  I would love to see a list of former UU ministers, both those who left voluntarily and those who were thrown out and door locked behind them.  The UUA is very secretive about it.  In denial.  We have no union or organization: most of us were anti-institutional anyway.

So I was a little surprised to get inquiries about two different cases of men not quite in ministry.  One was a young man, a high school English teacher who attended a church that had a female UU minister.  At least he attended a UU church -- some aspirants don’t.  They have no idea what they’re getting into.  He said he was considering which seminary he should approach and, cleverly, saw that my blog posts were the only comments about Meadville/Lombard that were at least in part negative, so he contacted me directly to discuss the situation, with the idea that I’d be more realistic.  

The trouble is that Meadville/Lombard as I knew it no longer exists.  They have sold their capital assets and are now operating as a sort of distance-learning program.  That’s not so fatal as the fact that they have severed their connection to the University of Chicago Divinity School which used to be the real core and rigor of an M/L education.  Evidently the original founding concept of M/L was that they would start at the top by hiring geniuses and then work their way down -- a process hastened by the contentious nature of the geniuses.  The assumption seems to have been rather like that pop psych book going the rounds, claiming that crazy people make the best leaders and therefore all the people we revere as having saved the country, etc., are in retrospect crazy.  I think one could argue the other way:  that since so many of our historically finest leaders would not qualify as models of mental health we use today (mostly a matter of conformity and prosperity) then the models must be trash.  That may be the covert idea of the book.

So I began to quiz this prospective minister.  What books did he teach, what was his childhood religious experience, had he made contact with anyone besides his own home minister?  It became clear that he was a “good boy” with a happily employed wife, a philosopher brother to whom he was close, and that he was happy to have abandoned his childhood fundamentalist assumptions.  It also became clear that his teaching contract might not be renewed -- not because he was a bad teacher but because the district was strapped and cutting deeply into faculty.  He needed a new profession.

The weak point was in his understanding of the nature of the UU ministry.  There are three “polities” in the organization of churches: the Roman Catholic hierachical model with top-down one-authority;  the free-standing congregation that is entirely self-governed; and the presbyterian model, which is kind of a compromise between the two.  This young man kept thinking in terms of a hierarchy which would both restrain and direct him.  He might be happier as a Lutheran or a Methodist, who keep that structure though far more loosely than Catholicism. 

The other man I want to mention is somewhere in Montana which is the only reason his friend appealed to me to make contact with him in order to help him.  He is near retirement age, has an MFA and a life as a writer, and just blew out of his little church (not a UU church) with congregational polity -- no outside authority.  In fact, he explodes in the face of authority, even the minimal amount of conformity necessary to be certified in the UU context.  His friend called him “self-destructive.”  But lovable.  He blew out of a long marriage not too long ago but remains friends with his ex-wife.  In short, he is exactly the sort of “leader” described as gifted and necessary in this book that asserts madness is a qualification for leadership.  

Sam Keen, Robert Fulghum and Ralph Waldo Emerson might be examples of other former UU ministers with proven accomplishments, though their madness was only preoccupation and maybe passion.  Note that this “leadership and madness” notion doesn’t include women.  To be a raving prophet, you have to grow a long beard.

Thinking about these issues, I cruised the UU Internet presence.  I don’t recognize it.  Kind, energetic, bright, politically correct and very bland, most of these ministers and congregations would not tempt me out of my self-imposed solitude.  (I would argue that my solitude is not a madness, but a meditation.)  It was not until I got to the “retired” ministers that I began to find photos of ministers I once knew and still admire.  There were not many madmen among them, though some turned out to be far more invested in prestige and prosperity than I had hoped.  Many were benign and cheerful presences, quite quite sane.  Never the nose of the plow.

When I was aspiring to the ministry and considering Meadville/Lombard, my own minister, Alan Deale (who is now, with the able assistance of his femme fatale wife, serving the organization of retired UU ministers) said I should consider two things.  First, Unitarianism is an urban denomination.  Only where population density is high are there enough people of that inclination to support an affinity group.  Second, much as I loved UU ministers and wanted to be like them, being actually IN the ministry meant rarely keeping company with them.

And Alan was right.  When I look back with nostalgia, it is not to preaching brilliant sermons or deftly guiding committees (if I ever managed to achieve either), but to the ministers’ meetings before all the woman entered the ministry.  The small PNW District group -- still international in those days before Canada went off in a huff -- would choose some conference center at the beach or in the mountains (defying the big-church people with big budgets who wanted to stay at luxury resorts).  Their main meeting room usually had a fireplace.  At first light one or two of us would be up and building a fire.  Those moments of quiet togetherness and chatting about big ideas or trivial politics or even telling terrible jokes were what I cherished.  (The women always slept in.)

I guess my question to these two problematic men would be,  “Can you build a fire?  And keep it going?  And share the moment?”