ON A COLD AND SNOWY NIGHT AT 3AM

Of the dyads that saints and mystics use to try to explain their visions, two of the most basic are cold/hot and dark/light. Too cold or too hot will kill you. Too dark or too light will not, though they tend to be parsed out as darkandcold and hotandlight. Recently there’s been talk about planets like earth that might shelter life in the sense that we know it. The most recently discovered seems to be about seventy degrees most of the time, which means there’s water -- an essential for life. The sun is fainter but the planet is closer to it than earth is to the sun and it has a nice round orbit so the seasons would be evened out. The planet is 2.4 times as big as ours, so the gravity would be a bit stronger.

The deal breaker is this: no surface. There’s no evidence that any ground has formed in what might be a planet of slush that thickens as one goes deeper. What a terrific metaphor for thought on the planet Earth! What an echo of the many creation stories that say this planet was all water until some creature (I favor the muskrat) or some God-hand, plunged to the bottom and brought up a handful of dark muck to make the first island. Then said, “Let there be light.” Or maybe the order was reversed.

"In less than 20 years, we have gone from not knowing if any other planets exist in the universe, to being able to look out at the night sky and realize that essentially any star we can see has at least one planet, and a good number of those are likely to be habitable," said Alan Boss. "That is a revelation that has not yet dawned on the general public, and even astronomers are having their minds blown when they think about it."

"This discovery shows that we Homo sapiens are straining our reach into the universe to find planets that remind us of home," Marcy said. "We are almost there." http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/planet-found-600-light-years-nasa-kepler-telescope/story?id=15094976#.TuYvnq6OhOQ

So we’re back to the moment when the Europeans’ sailing skills forced them to realize that there were other lands with other ways and their new lens making had also made them realize that they were not the center of the galaxy or the universe or anything else except the belief that THEY were the Center, the Way, the Truth. Yet it was their ability to see, to use scientific methods, that had displaced them from the center. They were beholders carrying the terrible burden of thinking they were the only beholders.

In similar fashion, humans are the death-dealers who realize that we will ALL die, regardless of our beholdings or truths or virtues. And this is an even heavier burden for some, though it removes the load from others who had been struggling with this life, much less some prolongation or return to misery. In the Christian world religion is often seen as a way of escaping death and certainly one can be careful and prudent enough to avoid it for a lifetime. Other cultures don’t worry about death so much, and maybe therefore don’t worry about avoiding it as much as we do. Just accept. Our mania for health studies and secrets squats on the news every day.

Since I was a minister for a decade, one would expect me to have come to terms with death by now. I suppose maybe I have to some degree -- certainly more than city dwellers who think chickens are extruded from some machine. But I don’t like the terms I’ve slipped into. I still very occasionally perform a memorial for someone who has no church or minister. “Perform” is the operative. There is protocol, which varies a great deal from one place to another, one class to another, one tradition to another. Mostly I seem able to say things that are helpful by using the lives and material culture of the person but I’m never secure in what the sequences and “manners” ought to be. The mortician is a good safety net, but one hates to offend even in little ways.

One of the advantages of having friends all around the planet is that someone is always awake somewhere and might chime in empathetically. My friend Aads de Gide, the Rotterdam poet and philosopher, emailing as I wrote, remarked that when he discovered a hanging suicide, he was very orderly and efficient about handling it. (He is a Taoist and psychiatric nurse.) Sliding over into that state of coping can be so marked that one can actually feel the body changing, blood going different places, mind separating into parts, body chemistry shifting. It is clearly an evolved survival advantage, and yet it leaves a residue of feeling and a lot of questions to be answered. In time, those must be dealt with in some fashion, perhaps through religion, maybe through the liturgies and litanies that are supplied by a long tradition or maybe by philosophical thrashing on paper.

I live next door to a Baptist church that has seen a lot of renewal lately. It is on a corner lot. All three other corners are occupied by empty houses, one because the occupants go south for the winter and the other because the occupants died of old age and the estates have not been settled. When I get up in the night, I check the neighborhood through the window and was surprised to see all the lights on in the church at 3:30AM. The minister’s vehicle was out front. It’s a little early to be working on a Christmas sermon and he lives sixty miles away.

If I were the sermon writer, I would remark on the Christian figure of a couple in Bethlehem managing to have a new infant in a time when soldiers could come to the door, demand a baby, and kill it -- simply because an authority had decreed it. Of course, it’s a mythological plot device repeated again and again and we suppress most of it, keeping the “cute” and decorative aspects. We don’t like thinking about what our soldiers do or -- worse -- what our predator drones do without even risking soldiers. We are a dissociated culture that searches for other planets before we have figured out how to manage this one.

With new snow on the ground and a full moon cruising the sky, this night was not so dark. The lit windows of the Baptist church throw yellow squares. But there was no congregation. The moment floats in ambiguity. Snow is not a trustworthy surface.

CAN YOU GET IT?

It’s hard to believe that I moved back to the east slope of the Rockies almost a dozen years ago. When I did, a woman from a former congregation (far away) sent me a letter announcing that now she was going to come live with me. She was NOT invited! In fact, I had not seen her for years and had no intention of living with ANYONE. But somehow, she had made this decision without even knowing what sort of life one lives here, one I’m sure would not suit her at all. When I challenged her, she said that no one who was so self-disclosing in the pulpit was entitled to turn away from freely given intimacy like hers. In the end I managed to discourage her or maybe her attention just wandered in some other direction.

I preached about my own life because I could hardly tell the secrets of the people in the congregation or previous congregation. I was nervous even about telling my animal control stories from ten years earlier. The Blackfeet have very mixed feelings about their stories being told. When it comes to fancy praising stories that ennoble them and their past, that’s okay. But if one is meaning to analyze crime on the rez, thus exposing a LOT of information that could be used in ambiguous ways, then forget it. I’ve had local white rancher’s wives threaten me with lawsuits if I EVER write about them or their children, as though it were some form of voodoo that would rob their souls.

But I have never been very friendly about ministers who are “therapeutic” and especially those who use the pulpit for their couch and confide all their deepest worries. What this misguided and needy parishioner didn’t understand was that even when I used myself as an example, I was being selective and could have told a contradictory story -- also from my life. Is it television that teaches us to be so flat and gullible? Screenwriter’s secrets? Formula writing? I find that these people are unable to resolve contradictions and therefore insist on “truth,” giving it a moral value when, in fact, it is simply a disguised need to have things explained on their own level of understanding.

Or is it that so many people live lives so simple and predictable, never exposed to other cultures or tough ideas? Certainly in the short period of time I taught in a nearby off-rez school, I found that the “good” kids were walling out everything but the safest dynamics: family, good grades, 4-H, etc. Which is not to say that family, school and organizations can’t be packed with complexities and tragedies. They’re only pretending if they think differently.

One of the reasons dry cowboy humor is so popular here -- as it is among cops, soldiers, and, well, good ministers -- is that it is a way of handling miserable situations without committing emotionally. Emergency responders of all kinds know this because it is simply not possible to take every needy person home with them. It’s not even possible to get them help every time. But it’s always possible to learn from the incident and one way to “package” it is in a little capsule story. Seems to me there are quite a few of them in the Bible.

Richard Stern, who was my writing professor at the U of Chicago, advised us make it a practice to slip in a bit of irony after every strongly emotional scene. It shows intelligence to recognize that nothing is ever pure. Otherwise one risks death by treacle. But too often people try to cut sweetness with obscenity or bitterness. I myself have a tendency to be either flip or sarcastic, which are both distancing mechanisms.

One of the best counselors I ever had was one of two working with a circle of ministers and seminarians. Someone had asked me a question which I thought I had answered. There was a silence. Then she said, “You think you have us all fooled, don’t you?” More silence. Clearly, she was the only one there who saw this. It took a while for the group to react. My own reaction was relief. I hadn’t known I was maintaining a facade. (Everyone who goes into the ministry does that because the image is so impossible.) More importantly -- I hadn’t realized how much energy was tied up in the effort. It wasn't a moral rebuke -- it was a practical observation.

Only recently someone pretty “hip” who had known me a long time said she thought I’d been free and happy all my life because I’d always made choices I really wanted. She knows that I’ve had long stretches of unemployment that forced me into jobs I didn’t want. But it doesn’t register. I’ve said over and over and over that I came back here to write, to escape all the traps of having to make a living now that I had a house and a social security check. I don’t want to do anything but write, have never wanted anything but to write. Not to be a writer, not to be one of those cute little chicks who write vampire novels, but to sit here and seriously reflect on issues the way I used to do in sermons. I don’t even care whether anyone reads the stuff, which is lucky because they don’t, mostly. One of the ironies is that in this village where everyone is endlessly curious about the neighbors they will pry and spy but not simply read what I write.

It’s a little weird that one of my most understanding readers is a middle-aged poet in the Netherlands who has a twin, but then, not many people around here are into Deleuze-guattarian social theory and we are. It’s not a matter of having information or being elite. Rather it’s about a secure and hard-won point of view that really works. When I try to explain it, nothing registers for people here because they are so deeply invested in the ideas the theory system is meant to destroy.

At the Christmas Stroll last week I finally had a chance to visit with the local Methodist minister. (She lives in the country miles away and serves multiple towns.) After a couple of duds who interpreted ministry as an elegant profession done mostly in an office or in a pulpit, this woman is impressive. She “gets it” and goes after it. Her preaching is learned, dense, very Biblical and right on the money, but done without a manuscript and down on the floor, walking in front of the pews. She used to be an Air Force officer and now lives on a ranch. Should I make it a point to acquire her as a friend? She’s beautiful without being pretentious, a joy and probably an inspiration. If you think I should, you’re not hearing me. And for “God’s sake” (God will appreciate it) don’t friend me, give me a thumbs up, or invite me into your social media circle. Just read the damned blogs. Comments always welcome.

THE ABYSS, THE EMBRACE

When I was circuit-riding in my van (1982-85) below zero snowy nights like this week in Valier meant that I stayed in someone’s guest bedroom. That was always an adventure. But if the temp were above ten degrees, I slept in the van. A different kind of adventure, and despite the cold -- I have never been so cold, not even snow-camping while hunting -- I preferred it. I had a space blanket for a mattress pad which was pretty effective. Or I had a little heater and would park behind a mini-office-strip and run an extension cord out the window to the outlet where they plugged in the headbolt heaters on their cars. I would lie very still with legs out straight and arms at my sides, like an Egyptian mummy in a sarcophagus. It didn’t take long to warm up my body space and then I slept surprisingly well. Without moving. Sometimes now I dream I’m sleeping there again.

“Kenosis” is a religious concept based on the idea of emptying out. It recurs in many cultures and religious systems. Maybe because the ministry and probably in all of the Abramic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) but -- most intensely -- Protestant denominations that closely associate prosperity with salvation, I was supposed to be in a growth and expansion mode. More people, more money, more influence, more status, more political power -- you get the idea. The contrast might be Quakers or Catholic religious orders like the Poor Clares. (They have a new retreat in Great Falls now, so what does that mean?) Anyway, “acquisition” to me doesn’t mean what it means to mainstream Americans. I acquire ideas and only pack around too many books because until the Internet, that’s how you got at ideas unless you were on a campus.

The concept of kenosis had a lot of popularity in the 16th century when capitalism and the very beginnings of the middle class were forming so that “stuff” began to mean more than just enough to eat and a shelter. I am not surprised that in these overloaded days of “stuff,” kenosis has come back in our modern way: through music. Three examples: "The French black metal band Deathspell Omega have a 2005 EP named Kénôse, whose lyrics reference theological themes of emptiness and more. The American post-rock band Hammock released an album in 2005 named Kenotic. The American post-hardcore band Designer released an album in October 2010 entitled Kenosis, which addresses spiritual themes such as this, amongst other things." I haven’t heard any of them. Yet. (I got the references off Wikipedia -- forgive me.)

In practical terms, my ministerial van life was simply transportation and bedroom, but in spiritual terms it was my Kenosis, especially in winter. The high prairie is “high” because it is north so it's high on the map page; because it is where the continent subtly folds and slants down from the Rockies to the Mississippi; and because it is a place with such extremes that one’s mind can be “high” in the sense of intoxicated. Driving a hundred miles (roughly the distances between my four fellowships: Bozeman, Great Falls, Helena and Missoula) was my “high church” experience as I shuttled from ragged mountains to sheltered valleys and flat land. My mantra has been “geology is almost theology” and this is where I learned it.

The role of minister is dualistic, not in terms of good/evil, but in terms of being the “primate” (the authority) versus being very aware of one’s limitations, ignorance, and weakness. I think of a Wallace Stegner quote (he grew up on the prairie not far away) about how even a person standing upright has the humility of being on one’s knees, and yet the very fact of being vertical in so much horizon means standing out. The nights in the van were my times of Kenosis, emptying out, becoming one with a huge night sky and taut endless land. They were the heart of my idea of being a minister, never addressed in seminary.

I did not know how to explain that to my parishioners. To them the congregation was an occasion of gathering. Only Missoula had a building where I stayed in the basement bedroom I have now learned was where Dirck Van Sickle wrote “Montana Gothic,” which could usefully be analyzed in terms of horror as Kenosis. Or maybe Kenosis as horror. Certainly, Missoula folks were the most into acquisition and status of any of the groups. They wanted me there, on-call, and significant in the community, which is a college town. Great Falls probably came the closest to being Kenotic since they were mostly scattered grain ranchers, accustomed to long long hours alone on the land. Bozeman was a mountain-climbing town as well as a university. In spite of being the state capital, Helena didn’t have many politicians. They were and are (I think) mostly professionals: shrinks, teachers, fish and game, ag regulators. But they saw themselves as a “get together.”

A bit of my thinking from those years is in my book of prairie sermons:“Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” published by the Edmonton Unitarian Church and now only available as remaindered copies through Driftwillow Press. http://www.driftwillowpress.com/

Kenosis is bottomless. How deeply you go depends on your courage -- or maybe it’s recklessness. It requires the faith that however much you abandon, however much you let go, however much you fall, in the end there are forces that will gather you up and restore you, renewed. What you call those forces depends upon your culture, your experience.

Now this flimsy little old house, built in the BIG Depression, and plumbed, electrified and insulated haphazardly as afterthoughts, is the same as my van, is my anchorite refuge. Now the sky brings the humility down on me from the north or from the mountains. Now the wind pounds it into me. Now the sun and the blooming prairie lift me back, rising in grandeur like summer thunderheads. It’s not an intellectual sort of experience, though I insist on pursuing it that way. These concepts -- abyss, embrace -- are FELT concepts, whole body. And yes, probably best expressed in music and dance. Tim understands, way off on the blue ridges with the black bears and the red wolves. Seafarers have always understood. The Blackfeet know.

A GARAGE FULL OF SPIDERS

This cool damp weather in Valier is a godsend [sic] since I’ve been promising myself for quite a while that I would sort and edit my multiple file cabinets of Unitarian Universalist ministry archives. Since my seminary (Meadville/Lombard) is selling the building and disbanding, though it pretends it isn’t, the time seems right. Even my denomination is in enough trouble that my major urban home church in Portland, Oregon, had to close for a month last summer to catch up on finances.

My files are out in the attached garage. It’s a little spidery, in honor of Jonathan Edwards, who said we are all sinners in the hands of an angry god who dangles us over the open flames of a cookstove by our own slender threads, threatening to dispose of us. Of course, after church he and his wife went for long walks across the New England countryside, feeling that god shone through nature like the sun striking through a stained glass window, so beautiful that they held hands and wept.

Actually, much of what I’m sorting through is from the University of Chicago Divinity School and I discard very little of that. I save all the UU history as well, both about the denominational movement and about the small Montana fellowships I served for three years in the old-fashioned circuit-rider style with a van instead of a horse and breakfast bars in a backpack instead of dates in a “wallet.” Part of the reason for sorting is to begin work on a book called “Circuit-Riding” which will match some of the major theological circling (if God is good, why does he tolerate evil?) with human phases of organizing and disbanding.

Much of what I’m throwing out -- I’m impressed by how much -- is schemes for growth: how to give the people what they want. We don’t proselytize like those lower class Christians, you see. But we were out there looking for growth formulas before there was a word for “algorithm.” For a long time the thought was that the minister was the key. Charismatic leaders, THAT’s the ticket. For a little while there was a movement to encourage leadership among lay people, but they didn’t always lead the way the Important People wanted them to, so that became obsolete.

I keep finding “self-analysis,” “self-improvement,” “self-evaluation,” as well as evaluations of my progress and my evaluations of the seminary or the internship or Clinical Pastoral Education. UU’s are forever evaluating because the scope of achievement, the scale of goals achieved, is forever moving. We are pluralistic. We can’t seem to find either the top or the bottom of the mountain, so we circle. This is not cause for blame. It may be the best human condition: looking for the path, “nomadism.” Too many people want to play king of the mountain while all the time standing on a common boulder.

Here’s a list of leadership qualities I found.

1.  A person must come to that place where he knows that the real issue is always an internal one.  (A willingness to be out alone in a strange land.)

2.  The capacity to take hostility.

3.  The capacity to accept another person where he is.

4.  Perspective which enables us to sort the little issues from the big ones.

5.  A willingness to fail and to let other fail.

6.  A deep caring for people.

This is not a list that Big Shots fancy. It is a list that separates Jim Jones (bad) from Cecil Williams (good) (http://www.glide.org/Leadership.aspx) I was not all that good at it. (See #5)

Today in the NYTimes there is an editorial by a disillusioned United Church of Christ minister reacting to the mass exodus of peoples from the Big Box Prosperity Churches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/opinion/08macdonald.html?_r=1&th&emc=th The headline is “Congregations Gone Wild.” He thinks “The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them.” In other words, he’s angry and despairing because he knows what they should do and he tells them, but they don’t do it. He accuses them of being at fault, only wanting “soothing and entertaining.” He says, “The advisory committee of my small congregation in Massachusetts told me to keep my sermons to 10 minutes, tell funny stories and leave people feeling great about themselves.” Right. You don’t do that? The congregation walks. No pledges. No minister. Quite true. Seen it. Done it.

We’ve come to a strange time when the political leaders who can get elected are not the ones who can run the country (we won’t let them!) and ministers cannot do their job within a congregation (they won’t let them). So what does such a knowitall do for a job? BLOG!!! http://gjeffreymacdonald.tumblr.com/ He’ll just get on the Net to scold us. (Of course, there’s a book.) His current post recommends that cynics never be chosen as leaders, so I guess that’s “self-insight.” I laughed and laughed.

I’d love to see the algorithm Google has assigned MacDonald’s blog. I don’t care how they define mine: I love disrupting algorithms. Anyway, what I consider to be my continuation of ministry is local, practical, by request -- there is a little overlap with blogging when I post a memorial piece. Because ministry is only a dimension of being human and Christian ministry is only cultural, historical, familiar because of that.

Seminary is supposed to (and I think did in my case) “break open your soul” and find the kernel within it that burns in every human being, joining us each to each. This can destroy one’s vocation in ministry since it is against status elevation. But the only responsible reason for a denomination to subsidize and indenture future ministers is to support them in the work of doing the same “breaking open” for others. Isn’t it? But a denomination is chiefly invested in keeping itself afloat and MacDonald is right -- people don’t necessarily like being broken open. Denominations (religious organizations with names) are based on dogma/economic status/ethnic/prestige. So it’s lucky that the UU ASSOCIATION is actually an association of FREE congregations with VOLUNTARY leadership, even as those are probably the seeds of their destruction. We can expect from them nothing but change.

And yet I love the small congregations where I sometimes go, like the Blackfeet Methodist Church in Browning with the pulpit and communion table that Al Racine carved, the stained glass windows that Brent Warburton made, the people that I’ve known so long, the history and struggles and simple persistence of the members and clergy there. My affiliation is local and human.

Jonathan Edwards had a special calling to minister to Native Americans, you know. Edwards himself was not Alpha Clergy as he is often portrayed. He knew well this little leadership list. Denominational leaders were not fond of him. Back to the garage. I’ll spare the spiders.

A WRITING LIFE

I am quite confident that many people who follow my blog will recognize that this blog -- www.365sunsets365.blogspot.com -- is a “narrative.” It’s by a new friend of mine in NW Manitoba where my father’s nuclear family homesteaded in the Twenties. There is no explanation or “about” -- just a Steichen-type repetitive photo every day. It’s a journal, a diary. A sidereal Muybridge of horizon.

Certainly I recognize it as a naturalist’s, a gardener’s, interest in sequential developments. I once had a rancher friend with a kitchen paneled in plywood. With a pencil he daily traced the edge of the shadow from the noon sun and noted the date. On the door frame he registered the heights of his children. They say that the 19th century popularity of keeping records on calendars as well as in diary books provides invaluable information for those trying to understand the new worries over climate change. And I once attended a lecture where it was explained that in annual records, like those kept by the church, it was the years of omission where nothing was written that were often eloquent, for instance, the lack of entries during the Black Plague.

Anyway, I was already primed by Richard Stern’s little anthology called “Honey & Wax: Pleasures & Powers of Narrative” which was the text for his class at the U of Chicago when I was there. He suggested music as narrative and surely it is. What distinguishes sequence from narrative? Art, certainly. (It was published by the U of Chicago Press, 1966, and would probably have to be sought in used book sources now.)

Classically, one marks the hours with prayer, not just in the Islamic world but across Christianity and probably other traditions. The sunset photographer suggests that his photos are a daily benediction. Then this clergyman/farmer asks:

So how long have you been writing? WHY do you write? What does it do to you when you put down words? What's happening in your guts?

What I've been trying to get at from the beginning is the universal human "felt concepts" under the words and images. I connect it to religion through a little epigram to which I've lost the attribution. In fact, the original was in French which I can't even get straight for sure. "Man is an animal both inconsolable and gay." Of course, that's out-of-date in several different ways. But it is these polarities and their management in consciousness that seem so vital to me in worship. (We’re ALL bipolar.) For decades I've been working towards a "poetics of liturgy" that is not Christian. Not that it would contradict Christianity, but that the Christian "names" are not the only ones.

Another strong concept is that we arise from the earth, are somehow able to move around on its crust and even make minor alterations, but we always go back to the earth. We are as grass. Every time the sun kisses the horizon, either coming or going, we acknowledge that.

My morality is not commandment-based. Rather I go with “natural theology” which suggests that beings should do as well as they can what they are created able to do. A cow should go about being the best cow it can be, not grieve that it’s not a kangaroo. A human being should go about “observing creation and praising it.” But I find that because of my constant reading and writing I’m sometimes chided for not “doing good works”. (I’m not very good at good works.)

Blogging is like preaching. I'm retired. I can do anything I want to all day long, so I ignore the housekeeping and just write, only pausing to make the cats stop nagging me for more cat muck. My head chatters constantly. At night it slips over into images and maybe slides down into the felt concepts (gut feelings). But it doesn't stop. Some people would think this is an affliction. I see it as a gift. I don't care whether it gets published. This is what I was created to do and that I have the capacity to do well if I pay attention.

When I walked away from the Unitarians so I could come back to the Blackfeet, the Methodist pulpit needed a minister on an emergency basis. I'd once been a member there. They knew me. I needed a place to live and if they had rented the place to someone not ordained, they would have had to pay taxes. So I took their pulpit as an interim with the parsonage as my salary. (The woman who suggested it was Anne Pilgrim. Can’t get more explicit than that!) Methodists use a lectionary, so I took it as a kind of discipline to write a sermon every Sunday that combined ALL the lectionary suggestions. Easier than one might expect, since they were organized to fit issues and calendar. (A lectionary recommends specific texts from the Bible for each Sunday, usually a psalm, an old testament, a new testament and a gospel.)

But for the liturgical elements: call to worship, prayer, confession of sins, assurance of pardon, and benediction, I felt I was on my own. I could and sometimes did use a prescribed order of service, but most of the time my other "discipline" was composing those elements on Sunday morning as I drove to my first "charge," Babb, up in the mountains. What does call us to worship this morning? What sins -- land abuse, animal neglect, something from history, the news? What pardons us with grace? Then I returned to Browning for the second sermon.

Thus, the liturgical elements were natural history observed on the way into the mountains, which was often pretty exalting. One morning I drove into the hearts of THREE concentric rainbows at once! I noted the animals, the weather, the crops and all that. The people loved it. Hard-headed and (some of them) hard-hearted old ranchers and tourist industry folks, mostly white in Babb, mostly mixed-blood in Browning, I'd look out and they'd be smiling or crying. They knew what I was talking about.

So I suppose I was leading worship and they were following. But since the leader must be the "unmoved mover" I was also watching the art of the thing: timing, pace, emphasis, movement, etc. People always wanted to take me out to eat afterwards, but it was risky because I always came off the services a little manic, like a mild drunk.

As I post this, it's 5AM. The cats are fed and it's still as dark as the inside of a cow. I'm going back to bed to delve a little deeper.

ORDAINED IN HELENA, MONTANA

Being ordained is a little like getting married. I like to joke that I was ordained on the set of “Death of a Saleman,” which is true. The Grand Street Theatre in Helena was staging that sturdy old tragedy and the set required that there be no front drop curtain. The ordination was there because the building was originally the First Unitarian Church of Helena and we borrowed it back. The Tiffany glass window is there as a memorial to the original minister’s wife, who started the first kindergarten classes in Helena besides running a friendly little theological discussion group in the couple’s quarters. They were said to include the rabbi, since Helena had a synagogue in those days. Kind, ecumenical, dynamic and devoted, she died young of cancer.

The church was paid for when her husband, discovering that several of his parishioners were copper moguls being prosecuted for this and that, made it his business as their respected religious leader to go sit by them during the trial as a sort of testimony to their church-going. Then, of course, they were obligated to write checks to help pay off the building, which -- like several Helena landmarks -- arrived in town via railroad as pre-cut stone to be assembled like Leggos.

The laypeople worried that they didn’t know “how” to do an ordination but I told them all they had to do was to show up with their fellowship banners and as many column candles as they could find, so they did that. We hung the banners down the sides and put the candles where footlights would go. The rest was fairly predetermined and predictable except that no one had been ordained for a circuit-riding ministry of four fellowships until then. Nevertheless, the “old bulls” gathered: Russ Lockwood who was the district exec and the person who had invented the whole project and raided a little cache of hidden Universalist money to pay for it; Peter Raible who must have been the president of the Pacific Northwest Ministers’ organization and who was in any case the organizer of the Leadership School that got me all fired up in the first place; and Alan Deale, my home minister.

At that time Alan was the head of the Fellowship Committee, which decides who gets into fellowship with the UU ministry and who does not. At least that’s the way everyone thought of it. In fact, our denomination has congregational polity and a congregation is welcome to look foolish by installing someone uncertified. People who knew he was my home minister were very cautious around me, even Meadville profs. There were a few close squeaks where I probably would have been jettisoned if it hadn’t been for “belonging” to him. I was not above taking advantage of that.

So imagine me walking around Helena with these three scarred and wise old guys (not so old, looking back), all history buffs and all doing their favorite thing anyway: being ministers among ministers instead of ministers among parishioners. We walked up the hill to the cathedral and the irrepressible Alan spotted the holy water inside the huge doors. “Come over here, Mary. I’ve always wanted to do this!” And he dipped into the water to invent a ceremony, halfway between Baptism and Ordination, sounding a lot like the beginning to “Ulysses” by James Joyce. (He started out to get a lit degree.) The light was streaming in the stained glass windows and I felt quite transformed and exalted. Alan has yearned after Catholic charisma ever since a priest friend got him out of a Boston traffic ticket by loaning him a reverse collar outfit. “Oh, father!” exclaimed the civil servant at the fine-paying wicket, “There must have been some mistake!”

But then in Helena a priest, not from Boston (more likely Butte), affronted, came bursting out of the confessional to see what on earth was going on and we burst back out through the heavy doors and scattered down the stairs like kids. I don’t think the cathedral had to be reconsecrated, but it was lucky that priest hadn’t been invited to the Ordination -- which meant something quite different to him anyway. When a Catholic priest is ordained, he becomes an Instrument of God and is acted through by Him. The four of we Unitarians barely believed in God, if at all, and were certainly well aware that we had no magic powers.

The Grand Street Theatre is quite nervous about letting Unitarians use the building. The First Unitarian Church of Helena crashed in the Thirties Depression. It is leased to the City of Helena for some symbolic amount with the proviso that if it is used improperly, it can be taken back. Don Marble had to invoke that clause when the City was being pressed to sell it to a restaurant chain.

We ministers may sound as though we were being frivolous, since God for us had been reduced to being an onlooker, but in fact we were deadly serious. It was our solidarity in defending the ideals of the institution that were at stake. The ideals. NOT the institution itself, which is necessarily transient as are all things earthly. In 1982 ministerial fellowship was all for one and one for all in a way that has itself probably passed now. This will sound crude, but guys are dogs and gals are cats. The UU ministry is now more than half female. You can get dogs to run in a pack, but not cats. I don’t know what proportion of the ministers are second-career people, but quite a few. That also dilutes commitment -- it is no longer a lifelong dedication but a backup choice.

I believe in vows and struggle to keep them, but in this case I did not swear fealty to the UUA. A ministry vow, unlike a wedding vow, does not mean exclusive allegiance to one partner, and so I was and am free to minister to whomever may need it, quite apart from their label, only according to their needs. Sometimes I use the “Reverend” tag but more often not.

CAN A MINISTER BE AN EMERGENCY RESPONDER?

Why isn’t a minister considered an emergency responder? It appears that Catholic priests still are called when someone is dying -- at least they were called when the Last Rites were considered important as a ceremony for a person crossing over into the dark and unknown land after death. In fact, part of the reason the liturgy was reassigned the title of “Sacrament for the Ill” was that “Last Rites” -- at least partly because of Hollywood -- had acquired so much magical power that if someone truly ill received the Last Rites as a precaution, it might actually “scare them to death.” On the other hand, if someone died without the Last Rites, relatives might be distressed by the idea that the person was liable to go to hell, or at least purgatory. Sticklers pointed out that "Last Rites" were often given AFTER death, which means they aren't "last" but "post."

So it’s mostly Protestant ministers who aren’t called in the event of impending death. In fact, my experience was that people didn’t even want their minister to call on them in the hospital, evidently because they have the idea that one should dress up, present oneself well, put on a front for the clergyperson. One should not throw up, bleed, moan, stink or otherwise make a mess when such an important person comes. This must be a Victorian idea.

Surely it has nothing to do with army chaplains, who are out in the fox hole mud (or sand) with the soldiers, praying for the souls of all present (aren’t they? even the enemy?) and trying to comfort those who are suffering. Or police chaplains who listen to tales of evil that shade back and forth between what is good and right and what is forgivable but also deplorable in the reactions of law-enforcers. Have these situations become so morally ambiguous that no one really wants to address them “in the raw?” Could this have something to do with our discomfort about battle trauma?

I surely don’t have any answers, but it seems to me that in the mainstream denominations that are supposed to be losing members, there aren’t even many good questions being asked. We’ve turned from sacredness to psychology, from the nature of virtue to the nature of propriety, and -- driving it all -- the way to the “good life,” meaning prosperity rather than right action. (Ready for Last Rites, that idea!)

Like physicians, ministers respond to the public (media invented) image, which particularly affects the people who aspire to join the ranks. So if you want to be a rich golfer, the stereotype says, be a specializing dermatologist. And if you want to just hang around a nice office looking friendly, with an easy speaking engagement on Sunday morning, become a minister. Plus, when there’s a potluck you won’t have to bring anything and you’ll get to lead the food line. You’ll only have to associate with nice people, the kind who come to church.

In the case of Unitarian Universalists, that will mean nice people who are well-educated and like to hike in beautiful places. If you have a congregation in Texas or Oklahoma, where people tend to be truly rich, you will receive lovely gifts. One minister even received a sports car! Of course, if you preach against plutocrats you will soon be out on the street. In a strange double image, when I was circuit-riding in Montana in the Eighties, denominational insiders considered me a great pioneer and hero in one context and a total fool, a loser, in another. If I’d had any value, I’d have a big coastal city church -- that was the criterion.

What IS the role of a minister anyway? A PRIEST, now, a priest is in a direct relationship to God that cannot be broken after sacramental vows are taken. It’s MAGIC. A priest is like those wizards in Tolkien or Harry Potter movies. If he (always he) goes bad, he’s REALLY bad, because he’s effective. He changes things and he’s not afraid to deal with death and evil. He has magic potions and incantations, even animal messengers. The Blackfeet understood all this right off, though they didn’t really “get” congregations and denominations. But then, Jesus had neither of those either. There were assemblies of people but there were no exhortations to create a new religion -- Jesus asked people to do what they were already supposed to do according to the existing teaching, pushing back out all that vengeful punishment they had managed to smuggle in. It was later that the magic was added, including tales of miracles.

Today a Protestant congregation is a sort of NGO devoted to networking and maybe doing some good in the world, mostly by lobbying and listening to talks, but also by occasionally serving breakfast at the local shelter for the homeless. So the minister is a kind of CEO of the NGO, not that different from the heads of a national humane society or the ACLU or Amnesty International or the Sierra Club -- in fact, those kinds of organizations are often headed by trained ministers. Not that most ministers are trained in such matters, despite the efforts of the Alban Institute.

There are really two kinds of education for ministers, which don’t appeal to the same kinds of people. One kind is the theologian, what was originally called a “learned minister” and which is probably the source of our idea that ministers live in an ivory tower and never get soiled or shocked by real contact. A big church might support such a person. Some folks think that’s a good role for a genius who is slightly antisocial.

The other kind is the CEO, the maintainer of the organization, who tries to teach the laypersons how to run a decent committee system and pledge drive, who can keep the Religious Education people under control and the Music Program from making Sunday morning into a concert. This sort of person could run the Boy Scouts or an Organic Ag group -- whatever. They tend to have a pretty good grip on psychology and so their sermons tend be be on counseling issues or maybe politics. A small church loves such people and counts on them livening up all the parties with their sparkling personalities. The denomination loves them. The community loves them and wants them on boards.

My original models for ministry were nothing like these. Neither really works for me. The idea that has been sticking in my mind lately is from the Westerns: the mountain man who comes to the camp of his peers or possibly his enemies, and quietly takes a seat in the campfire circle. Doesn’t have much to say, but sees a lot and knows a lot about the world out there in the dark behind everyone’s backs. The question is how much such a person can be or ought to be “magic.” That is, efficacious in emergencies. And please define emergency.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE?

The following came in as a comment. I edited it a little.

The reality that I am facing now is going through Div School for UU ordination. To be quite honest I am terrified of the financial burden this is taking on my very new one year old marriage. My husband is extremely supportive but it weighs on me. I love school and I love the challenge but I simply cannot decide if it is still worth it, and not even just financially. I am hoping to do hospice chaplaincy and it seems that that is an even more difficult field to pursue with many more years of "internship" status and CPE hours than parish ministry. I wish someone could just give me a YES- it's worth it, or a NO- get out! I know you can't provide me with that answer but I find myself writing you none the less. Maybe it is your frankness I am drawn to?

Okay, then I’ll go right on being frank. I’m a harsh counselor.

First, at Meadville we had an ongoing debate about whether seminary was a place where one went to discover whether one had a “vocation,” as the traditionalists call it, or whether one should go to seminary only AFTER becoming fully resolved and totally dedicated. Neither side ever won. Maybe you’ll recognize that in the earliest day of Christianity the question was whether the people should be allowed to take Communion only AFTER they were fully converted and convinced or whether the experience of taking Communion might bring them into the fold. Neither side ever won. In short, it’s a human dilemma. Ya gotta accept that, though the people around you might not.

If you are married one year and your husband is supportive, he knows what he’s getting into and is sharing the experience. You need to talk to him a LOT. Is part of the worry that if you decide NOT to be a minister, he won’t love you? Some guys love being the Consort of the Queen and that’s how they interpret the husband of the minister. Be sure you keep him aware of how much the Queen is likely to have to do very unqueenly exhausting things. Or might he be thinking that he can sort of be a minister-by-proximity without the struggle of ministerial credentialling? (This is a common female pattern.) Hard, hard questions. What DOES he do? I pray you never have to make a choice, but do not dump ministry in order to save marriage or vice versa. Negotiate. Find the boundaries. Think of trade-offs. Share good times to “put in the bank.”

A “hospice minister” I take to be something like a Clinical Pastoral Care chaplain. They WILL pay you a pittance after you get started, or they did when I took beginners CPE. In terms of jobs, there will be MUCH need as the population ages and becomes more and more afflicted by the environment, but the truth is that when budgets crash religion is the first to go (after the arts), which they are. It’s mostly hospitals and government that would fund a chaplaincy. In my experience both institutions (ANY institution) like chaplains because they keep order. They frame things in terms of conscience and rectitude (works on you, doesn’t it?) to put people on their best behavior. This can pressure patients hard, so you might have to fight the institution. That means risk being fired. The good news is that by the time you graduate, the world economics may be in much better order and include national health care in the USA.

The best way to find out the most about CPE is to sign up for CPE as early in the project as possible -- like now. Look around, investigate, enlist your counselor and upper classmen for advice. You can be a natural hospice counselor, completely suited, but stumble into a bad situation and get curdled. On the other hand, it can be such a break-through experience in such an exceptional context that nothing will ever match it in the future. Eyes open. No shame in a do-over.

You don’t have to do everything at once in a tight three-year schedule. Take a leave of absence to earn money for a year. Or if I were aiming at hospice chaplaincy and doing it all over again, I’d take a Certified Nursing Assistant job for a year or so. They are hungry for help, offer courses that are only months or weeks long, and give you a VERY true picture of what it will be like. If you are imagining yourself on downy wings, softly cruising from bed to bed, sprinkling comfort at you go, it will be a revelation. Death is about physical bodies. True grit in dealing with defiant, filthy, demented, unintelligible, terrified, fragile people might be exactly what suits you and precisely where you are effective.

Talk to people. Go visit hospices, as many as you can find, as different as you can get access to. Collect the stories. The bitter ones might be more help than the uplifting bliss tales. Talk to rabbis. Talk to Buddhists. Talk to militant atheists. Talk to the parents of dying children. Talk to old people -- or maybe listening is better. Most of all, talk to nurses. Forget doctors. They live in their own world. And search through the denominational people -- not all are wonderful but some are.

You need to look around for ministers, esp. among the Unitarians and esp. the female ones. See what you can find that’s written by Judy Urquhart, whose name changes and who sometimes serves English Unitarians. I recall a famous essay about a terrible week when a teen attempted suicide with Tylenol, causing a ghastly long coma and freaked-out parents, there were a couple of other serious illnesses or traumas, and then trouble in her own family. She just about went under and certainly learned about herself.

Money is a problem. Do the Obama: talk to people, negotiate, don’t let it paralyze you, find options. Find options. Money is only money.

Classical ministry is a congregation-based pursuit. That’s who validates and supports you because they believe in you. If you don’t have a congregation already, go find one even if it’s not Unitarian. But ministry, esp. hospice ministry, is not limited by denomination or institution. I’ve got two dying neighbors at the moment, a couple of friends with major health decisions to make, and my own old-lady-hood to manage. Ministry is something we also do in our everyday lives, not just done by ordained persons.

So is seminary worth it on that level? Hell, yes. Erm, heavens, yes!

THE INGMAR BERGMAN OF IT ALL!

When I had decided I wanted to be a Unitarian minister -- which was a decision based mostly on my own minister -- whom I “saw” only partially but took to be sophisticated, wise, and disciplined which was what I wanted to be -- I had three choices of seminary. This was the late 1970’s before the UUA accepted the idea of educating ministers at Christian seminaries fortified with some correspondence and summer courses on things like UU history. The three choices were Harvard, which totally intimidated me but which might have actually been the best fit, Meadville/Lombard (attached to the University of Chicago) which many thought was so frozen and politically entangled as to be unsurvivable, and Starr King in Berkeley. My minister thought that’s where I should go. He made a pitch about the beautiful weather, the wonderful food, the easy life -- all qualities that HE enjoyed but that put me off. I was into self-sacrifice. I ended up in Chicago again. (My BS is from NU.)

Now, looking back, I see what my minister really ought to have made more plain to me, though he would probably have had to hit me over the head to get me to see it. I was uptight, socially inept, and totally defended. To me, Starr King was a place where the seminary students Slept Around and Took Drugs, which was exactly and incredibly what my minister thought would be good for me. To him it meant something along the lines of the lover who pulls out the hairpins and takes off the glasses of the librarian, revealing her to be a lovely sweet woman. But I WANTED to be a formidable librarian. Er, minister. There are plenty of other lovely sweet women and they never have any fun, really. They get used.

We “insiders” rather nastily called Starr King “Tuna U.”, punning on Star Kist. My minister was the head of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee that decided who finally was admitted to the club, and we were aware that he went many a go-round with the Starr King leaders to try to convince them that being a Free Spirit was not the same as being a qualified minister. So to me, a recommendation that I go to Tuna U. meant he thought I was a lightweight.

Two of the Portland intern ministers had come from Berzerkley. The first was a lovely sweet young man we all dearly loved but who turned out to be, well, a lightweight. Once coming home from a dinner party I passed the church at 3AM and saw his office light was on. On impulse I went in and found him practically in tears. He could NOT write a sermon. He didn’t have a backlog to draw on. It was Saturday night. Using English teacher skills, I tried to walk him through an outline and mostly succeeded. But eventually he gave up the ministry idea and went into personnel where he has been a big success.

Anyway, that friendship went so well that I assumed the next intern would be similar. He was not. I had talked my mother into letting him stay in her house for two weeks while she went to Mexico. He could protect it, I suggested. Instead, he took her bed apart so he could put the mattress on the floor, he broke her coffeepot and didn’t replace it, and he borrowed my van, disappearing for 48 hours. The church ladies’ club was upset because he went swimming daily and left his jock strap drying on their radiator. They didn’t think it was offensive because of its intimacy -- rather they argued it was unaesthetic. He was barely this side of whacko and my minister flunked him. So much for Tuna U.

But I’ve since speculated on what might have happened if I had indeed gone to Berkeley, possibly to Pacific which is the large reputable seminary to which Starr King is attached. Would I have entirely lost my boundaries, given up the ministry idea, and run wild with the artists, poets, and nature children of the coast? What if I had? Would I be so very different now? Might I not be in a much warmer place with a cheerful partner? Wouldn’t that be GOOD???

When I got to the familiar territory of Chicago, the student rep on the M/L admissions committee, a competitive woman who purported to be a feminist, confided to me during a group session that the admissions committee had judged me to be an hysteric, just this side of a psycho, and they would not have admitted me without the recommendation of my minister, which had been glowing. Of course, she sneered, you know we have to please HIM. That was the first of a whole series of slaps in the face. All the rumors about Meadville/Lombard were right. Luckily, so was the reputation of the U of Chicago Div School, which compensated for everything as far as I was concerned.

None of it really got to me until after I’d been in the ministry long enough to see my minister more realistically. He was, in the end, yearning for security, status, and prosperity in a way that I had been trying very hard to discard, partly because no single woman changing professions late in life is likely to have any of the three without making some pretty heavy duty compromises in order to become a creature of the denomination. He on the other hand WAS a creature of the institution. He would rather have been a brain surgeon but couldn’t handle the math, so the UU ministry was the next best thing. Anyway, I learned a lot from him. I read every book he did, including some impenetrable stuff by Ellul and the entire works of Ernie Gann which were great fun.

If I’d gone to Tuna U., I’d have made quite a different set of contacts and maybe returned to my old theatre skills and habits instead of getting the scholarly edge I really wanted and could only achieve in approximation. Not that I got them from Meadville, but I DID finally get access to the University of Chicago in a way that paid my tuition and let my GRE scores scrape through. I felt rather sly about it.

And now? What about all those irreversible choices and their consequences? No regrets. And that’s the truth.

"HEARTS OF MEN"

For a day or so I’ve been rereading Barbara Ehrenreich’s early book, “Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment.” Copyright 1983. That’s the year I left seminary in Chicago to fulfill a three year grant supporting the Unitarian Universalist Montana Ministry by “riding circuit” among four small fellowships. I can’t remember preaching about Ehrenreich’s book, which is an account of the unraveling of the nuclear family after WWII. She pointed out that jobs that would support a family (Mother, Father, Dick, Jane, Puff and Spot) were NOT the norm, but only a useful illusion. Hanging the economic well-being of the family on the necks of the men made some into zombies and some into runaways, but we pretended it didn’t happen. Some men turned out to have very dark hearts, the kind that destroys human health. It’s a short book, but I paid close attention. In those days and for a few more short years (I stepped out of the ministry in 1988), men were my colleagues, my mentors, and my role models. Everything Ehrenreich said was illustrated around me in various ways.

She describes sequentially what was really more of an interacting mosaic which had as its changing core the relationship between economics and family patterns. Recent progressive thinking about the family is not about which two people should fall in love and “marry” but how a family can be a “firm,” a “franchise” that protects and supports all involved, as well as the contextual society. Such an approach is much more in keeping with the major paradigm shift science has given us by “verbing” the world, in the way we used to fancy that Hopi language did. No more chairs, but chairing; no more god, but godding; no more family but familying. Too big to consider in this blog post.

Gore Vidal supplies the epigram for “The Gray Flannel Dissidents.” “The thing that makes an economic system like ours work is to maintain control over people and make them do jobs they hate. To do this, you fill their heads with biblical nonsense about fornication of every variety. Make sure they marry young, make sure they have a wife and children very early. Once a man has a wife and two young children, he will do what you tell him to. He will obey you. And that is the aim of the entire masculine role.”

Hating the role was part of the change -- for a WWII soldier that same role of family and quiet job must have seemed a refuge -- but the next part is the Playboy revolution: the single man who was defiantly, promiscuously heterosexual, because the accusation of being “a fairy” and wearing yellow on Thursday (enforced by taunts from elementary school forward) kept a lot of men at least pretending to be happy while they slumped in front of the TV, obviously alcoholic or comatose as Dagwood. The Playboy owned a hi-fi, knew all about cocktails, wore silk pajamas, and lay around discussing “Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex” with a compliant female youngster on the pill. There was a LOT of talk about sex. (Those who don’t do, talk about it.)

Then there were the “beats,” quickly diminished to “beatniks,” but clearly anti-family, except for mom. No wife, no kiddies, no home, they seemed from the outside to be a combination of Thoreau and Byron: reckless, on the road, and hip enough to con the psychologists (male) who tried to diagnose them. Think Kerouac. Women LOVED them. Black leather jacket, road hog and attitude -- the movies loved them, too. No need to name the stars.

Dark-hearted Type A men were maybe the scariest category: the hard-driving CEO’s who ate like lumberjacks but sat at desks, simmering with rage and competition, and keeled over with heart attacks at inopportune moments. Ehrenreich’s chapter epigram is from Ivan Illich: “Medicine is a moral enterprise and therefore inevitably gives content to good and evil. In every society, medicine, like law and religion, defines what is normal, proper or desirable.” This is how medicine joins the economy and the family.

So no wonder when the hippie movement came along it attracted the women as much as the men. Sort of Beat-lite, the point here was “why not?” and the focus was on growing people and other living things, which seemed to be mostly a matter of freedom and peace. The territory of Rousseau and the idealized Native American, this movement tried to pull away from the commodification of America but didn’t quite manage until “Third Force” psychology (Maslow, Perls, Rogers, et al) joined the melee and demonstrated how to get money out of hot tubs and growth groups. Now it was okay to choose your lifestyle, so long as you had a good MMPI score. (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.)

Ehrenreich also recognizes that the path to legitimacy for homosexuality -- which once caused “real men” to go into frothing and violent attacks -- was becoming a recognizable community, which could be redefined as a marketing opportunity. Now one wasn’t just “gay,” but strove to the be the right “kind” of gay with commercial lifestyle markers, just like straights. And women.

These categories linger on, and other demographic forces have come into play by now: globalization, the drug underculture, the prison underculture, immigration, the rise of the tech economy, urbanization, empowerment of minorities, green power. Some have pushed towards the re-valorization of the traditional family, like the Catholic South Americans. Others are patterns we’ve never seen, like the National Guard unisex army that includes gays. What will come of their confrontation with violently separated gender roles in the Middle East, the cradle of the Abramic religions? Some Americans claim they want to reinstate them: early Christianity, for instance, but with Old Testament suppression of women and re-empowerment of patriarchy.

It is in this sweeping panopticon of factors that I reflect on Tim Barrus life and my own life, trying to understand whether we have gone our own ways for worthy reasons as seekers, or as unworthy push-outs who just don’t fit. Whichever it is, Puff and Spot, ever faithful, have come along with us to our very different households.

In search of a good epigram, I went to Ehrenreich’s website and discovered, not a quote, but crossed trails. Born in Butte in 1941, she is two years younger than myself. We are about a decade younger than Barrus’ parents. She took her undergrad degree from Reed College in Portland where I grew up. We are in sympathy.

ME 'N BARRUS

How dare I take on such a project as this one? What hubris to think I could keep my balance while acting as interocutor for Tim Barrus, who dwells somewhere between devil and savior, not even wearing underwear? How do I, an over-scrupulous old woman in a decrepit small house in Montana just off the Blackfeet Reservation, pretend to know anything about boys at risk, risky boys, fighting to stay sane, alive and creative? What use am I to boys who have survived by themselves in the street for years -- in whatever ways they had to?

Because there’s no escape from holocausts. On this prairie it was smallpox and massacre. As soon as Columbus and his sailors put one foot on the American continent, the micro-organisms they carried jumped to the indigenous people. Nine months later, the first mixed-blood babies were born. The Blackfeet were among the last resisters but Time cannot be resisted. For every smallpox-infected blanket and for every peace chief shot at dawn while waving his treaty (as at the Baker Massacre), Washington D.C. has indirectly killed a thousand Blackfeet by diverting the money they were supposed to live on and by canceling special funds promised for food, health care and education. Genocide is not always so dramatic as gas ovens and atomic bombs.

The two images that haunt me from WWII are both from newsreels, not still photos. One is a bulldozer moving a huge pile of stripped bodies towards a mass grave. Their arms flop over and their heads nod, but not with life. The other is the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima: a man has finally managed to push his way up through the debris and he rises up through the remains of his roof. He stands, only emerged from the waist up, and he is insane. He doesn’t know anything. His eyes roll, his mouth gapes.

More recently there is the little girl, napalmed and running with soldiers behind her. Or the small emaciated child in Africa, crouched in the dirt while a patient vulture waits nearby. Or maybe it’s today's news stories of the eight-year-old Mexican boy kidnapped for ransom and, after the money was delivered, killed by battery acid injected into his heart. Or maybe the eight-year-old boy so tormented by his father and his “friend” that he simply shot them to death. His step-mother would not help. His mother says she knew nothing about it. What about the internalized holocaust of the young Blackfeet mother here who killed her toddler son, probably in rage, put his body in the trunk of her car, and went on with her life for months and months before the body was found, all the time on supervised parole.

And you want me to be shocked by young boys who might be gay, HIV, thieves, violent, whores, and all that? You want me to scoff at the idea of them magnetized into groups, guided by an outrageous old writer and artist with a small energetic dog and a small fiery wife? No permission. No certification.

I’ve never met Tim Barrus but I’ve read his books, both the trilogy he wrote as Nasdijj (shocking SHOCKING behavior) and the earlier “Anywhere, Anywhere” and “Genocide.” I was just curious. More importantly, for the past two years we’ve been in email communication almost daily and I’ve read the death threats his little group gets. I’ve emailed back and forth with the two young Irishmen who manage the Internet connections and who think they’ve almost figured out how to completely block the death threats so that the younger children, already traumatized by torture and war, don’t see them. The authorities know about all this. They just give it a low priority.

Barrus and I share quite a few traits apart from being neatly opposite, him always on the move through airports while I refuse to go any farther than the grocery store; him living like Jesse James with his adolescent renegades while I spend my days alone, sometimes only speaking to the postmaster. Barrus plunged into the counter-culture of San Francisco in the Seventies and reveled in it. I carefully took the train to the Blackfeet Reservation in 1961 and attached to a protector twice my age.

Bob Scriver was a sculptor and I had come from the theatre department of Northwestern University. We believed in art. Barrus believes in art. One of his earliest salvific communities as a kid was the art department at Michigan State University. In San Francisco Barrus did theatre, soliloquies from a stage. He wrote porn. He worked with disabled kids. He met his wife. I taught on the rez until 1973. Then I left in the middle of a recession and ended up becoming an animal control officer in the days when they were usually all men. Going door-to-door in Portland, Oregon, I saw how people live -- all kinds of people.

Both Barrus and I wanted to know other people from the inside, the way a good psychotherapist might inhabit a client without violation. Barrus, living in a real closet in a hippie Victorian house, welcomed sex of any kind. I was besotted with one man, wanting him and only him all the time.

Things went tumbling after that. In 1988 Barrus was writing “Genocide” in that Florentine library and I was stepping out of the Unitarian Universalist ministry so I could return to the Blackfeet Reservation, where I served as the Methodist interim for a year. At that point we both had discarded all safety.

By 1999 Barrus had had life-endangering pneumonia that was treated with steroids so strong that they triggered avascular necrosis, which causes one’s bones to crumble. He was in a wheelchair, needing hip replacement. The Nasdijj trilogy was written to pay those bills, but they were also from the heart. “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams” was displaced, reorganized, disguised, reassigned, until it became a “memoir” but it was really the story of a whole category of children he knew from working with them on the Navajo reservation as a special education teacher. Barrus has no brother but he did have a Demon Father. And he claimed his mother, whom he loved very much though she couldn’t defend him, was half-Navajo, a compliment. This is politically incorrect and brought a firestorm down on his head, led by Sherman Alexie who was once exactly the sort of kid Barrus had helped all his life. Who owns the story?

The first triptych book is the one that Barrus’ wife likes best, but Barrus himself feels “Genocide” is the key. I came to this writer through “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping,” an account of trying to save a boy dying of AIDS, not from death but from humiliation, pain and abandonment including that of supposedly well-meaning institutions. This story is essentially true -- it happened. It is the devotion and deeply involved care that attracts me to Barrus. Aside from all the theory and reflection, he does his best to save those he loves. If his granddaughter is ill in Bolivia, he goes directly there. Later, when there is rioting in Bolivia, he again goes directly there. When one of the Irishmen kicks heroin, it is Barrus who walks him semi-comatose, puking and shitting, into the shower and washes him. When Barrus’ faithful dog, the helper dog in the book I love, dies of old age, the whole team -- who all love her -- do their best to give her a little more time. When that is ended, Barrus immediately gets another dog. Crashed? Then begin again.

If every cocaine addict in North America and Europe stopped using tomorrow, the result would be that all Middle Eastern and Central American and much African war would stop the next day. Cocaine finances wars. It is the individual small decisions of many “civilized” people that control much of the tragedy in the world. Doubt me? Consider what the collapse of the global financial world is showing us. Many small consumer decisions mount up to a debt that exceeds the capacity of the planet to produce profit.

I used to have a poster that said: “Faithfulness in small things is a big thing.” St. Francis.

So Barrus and I are trying this small thing: a sort of writing partnership. We’ll see where it goes. I’m hoping my University of Chicago School of Divinity big-time education will be a can-opener, a lantern, a compass. While I was at the Div School, Jonestown happened in the Guyanas. So many said they hadn’t seen it coming. What Barrus and I see is not “coming” -- it’s been here all along.

INGATHERING

Unitarian Universalist Leadership School is supposed to be organized around the idea of Organizational Design (now called something like “community building” -- UU’s can’t resist tinkering with everything) but it’s actually three or more strands braided together. It was the worship strand that called to my heart.

Do you know that sweetgrass is usually sold as a braid to be used as a holy smudge? Circumpolar -- Russia, North America, Mongolia, Scandinavia. My own worship “braid” was some kind of attempt to reconcile my earnest Presbyterian baby self with my Sixties Blackfeet ceremonial experience. This is what I went to seminary to find out and didn’t. But I had clues enough from Leadership School that with my U of Chicago MA I could figure it out.

Consider “in-gathering.” About 1976 I was at the Pacific Northwest UU District’s leadership school, the second of the early attempts. The OD guy was Ord Eliot and the minister was Peter Raible from University Unitarian Church in Seattle. The first summer this “school” or camp was offered, it bombed. Since it was Peter’s idea, which came from talking with Ord, the two of them stepped in to do the second one. The stakes were high. Peter could save anything, except maybe himself, and he knew to get this event off to a good start. He also had the services of a group of powerful and competent women I sometimes privately called “a demi-monde” and other times “a Greek chorus.” (They sometimes saved Peter.) He asked them to design (that’s DESIGN, not PERFORM) an ingathering service for the first night. We would all have driven a long way to Fort Worden on the edge of the Pacific coast, arriving in time for supper -- a little stunned, road-weary, and maybe (like me) terrified.

So this is what happened. At supper we found index cards by our plates and were asked to write on them a few sentences about a precious, maybe transforming, moment in our lives that we would like to share. We handed them in before we ate, then those women disappeared. We figured they were going out to the kitchen or something.

After supper it was dark. We joined hands, not knowing where we were going, and were led over the lawn, hearing the sea, to a free-standing building that was a gymnasium. Inside it was dark except for a pool of light in the middle. In the pool of light, which was created by dozens of lit pillar candles standing on a carpet of paper, we could just see that there was writing spaced out on the paper. We were instructed to sit on one of the sections of large writing and discovered they were what we had put on our index cards, but we weren’t to sit on our own writing. Then we were asked to read aloud what we were sitting on. It was a communion of words.

There wasn’t much more. Must’ve been music. Maybe we sang. Kumbahyah hadn’t become a joke yet. Pachelbel’s Canon was everybody’s favorite. It was the Seventies. Afterwards we returned in silence to the ordinary bright auditorium where we sat in chairs properly and looked at the schedule, asked questions -- all that stuff. But sharing that small in-gathering had begun to bond us into, you know, a Beloved Community. Not because we’d done something familiar, prescribed or even enforced by an institution, but because we’d shared. Not showed-off -- we each read someone else’s moment.

People who approach Christian Communion theologically talk about how the bread stands for the body of Christ and the wine stands for the blood of Christ. Kinda cannibalistic. Also kinda funky. What’s next? Licking off the sweat of Christ? Okay, okay -- we get it. The idea is that Jesus is human and we get that he’s sort of echoing the sacrificial lamb because lambs were sacrificed a lot in that time and place. But the human impulse to make everything fancy and “special” (in the sarcastic sense) has encouraged us to leave behind the plain fact that bread and wine (actually more like vinegar, but safer than water) was what there was to eat in the days when the ceremony was invented. Now there are little round wafers to be kept safe on the altar and pretty-good wine that the priest must finish off to keep from pouring it down the drain. They represent a budget item for the church.

But in the beginning the people brought the bread and wine with them when they came to the worship service. It was an ingathering. There’s a time in the mass when orderlies used to go to the back to get it where it had been left next to the door. In those days no one imagined that the communion wafer had turned into Jesus on their tongue so they worried about accidentally biting Him. It was just a kind of potluck at the end of the service, a communal breaking of bread. In fact, those first early worship services were Jewish services -- really book clubs: the study of scripture preceded and followed by prayers. The writing was read out loud because not everyone could read and books or scrolls were too precious for people to own. The rabbi would comment on what was read. Commentary is a major part of the Jewish tradition.

So book club, prayer (Even now, as the senate convenes...), and communion. At this point they still thought of themselves as Jewish and ritual bathing is a big part of Jewish tradition. In the earliest days, only the baptized people, who’d been dunked in the river, were allowed to take communion. To keep from making the unbaptized leave, the baptized went someplace else for their sharing. This was called “fencing the Communion.” Keeping out the people who hadn’t sworn commitment. (There’s still a little fence at the front of many churches.) This human need to make a boundary always presents problems sooner or later. For the early people it came first when the children who were too young to be confessing Christians were not strictly entitled to go to the Communion. Hmmm. A big split -- that continues today -- between those who wanted to just baptize the infants and take them along, and those who thought the experience of conversion was too important to the act of baptism to be jumped over. Anyway, what if the kid turned out to be a hellion?

Another problem arose later and had to be confronted by Saint Paul. Did all Christians have to be converted from Jews? Or could some guy from sub-Saharan Africa or way up north in that tangle of barbarians walk in and join? One of the little (ahem) sticking points was whether converting to Judaism as a kind of pre-Christianity would mean they had to be circumcised. Saint Paul could see he had a marketing problem if he wanted to grow the Beloved Community. A fleshy problem. Personal. Male-centered.

People have a tendency to forget that a symbol is just a symbol. But the best symbols, as Paul Tillich said, are the ones that are “found,” that arise in our lives from what is natural and just THERE. Like sharing a meal or talking about something we read. The sight of our planet from the moon is one of the most powerful modern symbols we have. At the same time the power of Stonehenge has never flagged.

These UU women knew how to design an ingathering because they had organized so many supper parties: they knew to think through who would be there, what their day would have been like, what needed to be supplied, how people would know what to do, and how to guide people in and out. Social ingathering was their well-known template.

What would have happened if someone had crashed the party? I was at a very arty and humanistic UU fellowship once (their idea of a fine sermon was a guy who brought his hawks and flew them over the heads of the congregation) when a rather drunk man stumbled in, believing he was in a different kind of church. He wove his way up the aisle, took the microphone from the suprised leader, and began to testify and repent. Evidently he'd just come through a major and traumatic event. Everyone sat and listened politely for what seemed a long time while he praised Jesus. Then the leader announced that due to lack of time, this man was invited to attend the coffee and cookies sharing directly after the service. A woman rose, took the man’s elbow, disengaged the mike and handed it back to the leader, then gently guided the intruder back up the aisle.

Ingatherings are meant for those there “for the purpose of the meeting” (as Robert’s Rules of Order puts it), but the quality of those who gather has a lot to do with the way the Communion is fenced.


This book was one of my most useful references and a pleasure to read!

BELOVED COMMUNITY or SAVING REMNANT?

(This one's for Eavan.)

Sometimes the topics for these blogs just jump out and grab me! Today I was waylaid by two phrases which, when I googled them, came up opposed to each other in subtle ways. They’re both phrases out of the Abramic tribal context, meaning the OT Bible. One is “the beloved community” and the other is “the saving remnant.”

Consider this:
“Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Beloved Community: Theme for the 2008 Festival
The theme for the 2008 Carolina Mountains Literary Festival is "The Beloved Community," a phrase made famous by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as expanded by the distinguished Georgia novelist and short story writer Anthony Grooms. Writers and artists, Grooms believes, can and should play a vital role in advancing understanding, reconciliation and redemption among the nation’s many racial, ethnic and cultural interests.”

As it happens, my attention has been very much on part of a small “beloved community” (which includes a little dog they are fighting to keep alive) in the Carolina Mountains.

"The beloved community is not a utopia, but a place where the barriers between people gradually come down and where the citizens make a constant effort to address even the most difficult problems of ordinary people. It is above all else an idealistic community."
- Jim Lawson
(Thankx to “The Inclusion Press” at www.inclusion.com.)

The other phrase was “The Saving Remnant.” I’ll quote at length from a website Google brought up:

"In an essay on this subject, 11 Albert Jay Nock identified the few who understand this problem as members of what he, following the Book of Isaiah, called the Saving Remnant, in which he placed Plato and Marcus Aurelius along with the Hebrew prophet. To structure his analysis, Nock rendered Isaiah into modern English. (The time of Isaiah was after the rule of King Uzziah of Israel, who reigned for fifty-two years (808-756 B.C.), a period of notable prosperity.) Nock relates:

'In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are," He said. "Tell them what is wrong, and why, and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong, and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.

'Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job; in fact, he had asked for it; but this prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question why, if all that were so, if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start, was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society, and meanwhile your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.'" 12

Unlike Isaiah's concept of the saving remnant as the "obscure, unorganized, inarticulate" residue that happens to survive catastrophe, our concept of a transformative, enlightening group in this essay refers to a deliberately created, carefully developed grouping with advanced knowledge and capability that will enable them to create a higher social order.

The only viable way for this to occur is for an advanced group to constitute itself as a "saving remnant" that will leaven the larger culture with its higher knowledge and power, creating a commonwealth.

And there you have it: the root of fascism: hatred of “the obscure, unorganized, inarticulate" residue and deadly fear that they might be a part of it. The self-defined "enlightened group" will take over for God. They'll kill the "mud-bloods." (Did I say I've just watched all the Harry Potter movies?)

The true Beloved Community tries to bring everyone into the tent. The non-Biblical saving remnant appoints themselves judge, jury and executioner. They push all but themselves into the tent and set it on fire. Scary stuff. Elections put the spotlight on these two warring ideas, one based on tolerance and inclusion (which is what the US is supposed to be about) and the other based on elitism and control. (I needn't tell you who they are.)

Maybe an illustration from my past as a minister is useful. I once did a lot of pulpit supply and one of my favorite congregations was a small town bunch of older folks with pioneer roots who hadn’t left their New Testament Christian roots. (No Isaiah.) Another one was a brand new group of young, aggressive, secular, computer techies determined to show the world they were better than anyone else. Though they wanted a church building of their own, they could only afford to rent a school. When a nonconformist argued with him, they held their meetings upstairs because this rebel was in a wheelchair and there was no elevator. But the rebel went up the stairs on his backside and crawled to the meeting -- I saw him. This second group, to get a building of their own (probably so they could lock people out!), made a predatory coup on the older congregation with the historic church. They simply joined, ran for leadership, and took over. I thought they would destroy everything in that quiet little beloved community

The motto of that older church was symbolized by a mobile that hung in the sanctuary. It was an illustration of a quote from an Edwin Markham poem:
“He drew a circle that shut me out --
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.”

So what happened? The pioneer congregation lived out their quote. They accepted the energy and know-how of the young techies, put their arms around them and calmed them down. They were BOTH the Beloved Community and the true Saving Remnant. You might say that it was BECAUSE they were a true Beloved Community that they were a true Saving Remnant.

I hope it works on small dogs who are very old. Going to the dogs is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the original Isaiah is the one that says the "wolf shall live with the sheep, and the leopard lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall grow up together, and a little child shall lead them." (Ch.11, v.6-7) The little dog has been doing it for quite a while.