ENTITLEMENT AND VENGEANCE

The woman in the centre is Eloise Cobell

Who sued the United States of America and won.

Where I live on the East Slope of the Rockies is right at the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation.  Because European law was largely based on genetic descent from legal marriage as a way of controlling inheritance, particularly inheritance of power as in the case of kings, the military and religious authorities addressing the remnants of the decimated indigenous people were particularly concerned about who was “married” and who was the product of an unlawful relationship and who was actually produced by a lawful relationship by a dalliance outside the marriage.

To remind us of the context of the times, among the tribal warriors there was a high likelihood of death, so men who didn’t die would accept “marriage” to their brother’s wives and children, which mostly meant taking on the burden of feeding and protecting them.  When this custom developed, there was no city hall, no paper giving permission, no one keeping records until the missionaries came.  

When the government, through the military, had killed most of the warriors, they accepted the obligation of feeding the impoverished and displaced women and children, the old and ill still suffering from white diseases, they had to first make a list of who deserved “commodities” promised in treaties as a way of ending the military expenditures that were draining government budgets.  

This grudging bunch of administrators immediately set about making lists of those who were entitled by their belonging to the tribe (or what was left of it) but there were no citizenship papers for tribes.  And tribes are not defined by boundaries, but by relationship to the center, usually a nucleus of families.  The generals fell back on provenance: who was descended from whom.  Their conscientiousness required that they determine who was “married” to whom and “marriage” by definition meant to them one man plus one woman.

So they had to explain to the polygamous chiefs, who got to be the chief by sustaining so many people, that they could only have one wife.  They would have to choose ONE woman.  One chief — some say it was Sitting Bull — finally said,  “All right.  I’ll do it.  But you have to tell the wives I don’t pick.”

Somewhat parallel, a wise person once explained to me that ministers (and other people of power) must not fuck a parishioner unless they are willing to fuck them all, not because of religious scruples but because providing for one person’s needs and ignoring the others would really screw up the social dynamics of the group, which would seriously damage the annual pledge drive.

Expectations are a huge part of human life, especially when the context is religious because religious institutions as well as individual expectations are distilled and intense, but rather unlikely to match the realities.  In the case of intimate relationships, biology is always interfering and so is the resulting economic necessity to produce and feed children.  This depended upon the fertility and gestational capacity of women and the men’s ability to capture and keep women.

1910

In those days a high proportion of women died in childbirth, so second and even third wives had to be taken.  Extended families with unmarried adults who could pick up the slack did better than those who had to settle for grudging and incompatible legal replacements.  Sometimes those children ran away; we have no idea how many simply died from neglect, misuse, and failure to thrive due to a failure to form any expectation but misery.  This continues in spite of birth control and the female ability to earn her own money.

Marriage is social, a group definition of recorded legal liabilities and advantages.  American laws at all levels are likely to embed in themselves various privileges and obligations — social expectations mostly about money (taxation, SSI) but also legal things like testifying in court.

Biology includes the phenomenon of love that some thinkers call “limerence” — “the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship.”  It’s genetic, hormonal, related to “bonding” or “attachment” and some say it usually persists about four years, if you can go by divorce statistics in a world where ending a marriage is relatively easy.

Many people, sitting in a pew closely watching a preacher for an hour every week, find themselves developing “limerence” towards that person.  They “have a crush,” the way they might feel about a movie personality or a rock star.  But it seems real and results in expectations.  Part of the reason for the huge taboo on either the minister or the parishioner acting on this is that it only lasts four years.  Maybe less.  If the minister is suddenly pitched out of the pulpit, so that his/her social status and earning capacity is ended, limerence evaporates.    For those who expect their intimate partners to be like their parents— or maybe like their parents ought to have been — the disappointment is likely to be bitter but provide income for therapists, lawyers, and UU district execs.

The crater of Mt. St. Helens

I gratefully recall a sad and bitter conversation with Emil Gudmundson, district exec, at the top of the stairs in Fleck House, back in the day when the UU’s actually owned property and provided for their ministerial students.  My granddaughter  — actually a step-grand — was being buried back in Portland as the result of what was suspected to be vehicular suicide.  I didn’t have enough money to go, though I’d been close to her.  Also, Mt. St. Helens was erupting, killing many people and changing the landscape forever.  The events seemed related.

Emil entered my sadness with me.  Being a frank and brave man, he confessed that his psychological impulse was always to offer the comfort of his body.  But he never did because he knew it would bring damage to his wife and to his religious community.  He just wanted me to know that he felt badly for me.  He’s been dead a long while and no account of him betraying expectations or standards has ever surfaced.

From my side I longed for my ex-husband, the woman’s grandfather, who had called me to give me the news.  He had been generous with the consolation of his body, which didn’t agree with my expectations, but I never did get over the limerence.  He’s been dead for seventeen years and I still feel it.  So did the other wives.  

Bob Scriver, scuptor

I have never understood the vengeful intensity of peoples’ reaction to other people’s intimate relationships and missteps.  Heartache ought to be considered punishment.  Surely violations of the rules should be judged by a jury of peers (the Fellowship Committee) and be proportionately punished after confrontation by the accusers.  That’s Law 101, a matter of written social consensus in a democracy, not ideological condemnation from an emotional point of view that privileges one class of people (female parishioners) over another (clergy).  It seems to me a reversal of the claim that powerful people are entitled to take both money and services from those “beneath” them when students try to control administrators.

Lately there seems to be an insistence that laypeople must control the clergy, hold them to higher standards, but not higher esteem than those who didn’t have the privilege of a fancy education.  (We’re talking about UU clergy, learned ministry, grad school and doctoral level diplomas.)  And certain people insist that women in general are entitled to higher esteem than men.  This is represented as “equality.”  Clergy shouldn’t consider themselves “better than” anyone else, though the indignant ones seem to feel that’s not true of themselves, ordained or not.  “You are our servant,” they say.  “We pay you,” which sounds a lot like “we own you.”  

I walked.  I’m living on the greener side of the fence, though the green is not from money nor envy.  The turning point came at a workshop for ministers about understanding spouse abuse.  They drew concentric circles and put the receiver in the middle.  “It’s about limits and control,” they said.  At first the abuser is permissive.  Then they begin to impose limits: budgets, schedules; pretty soon it’s clothing standards or objections to certain friends; then your music is offensive and your cooking is inadequate;  pretty soon you call your mother too often . . .  and before long there are small violences that grow into broken bones and bruised faces. 

Now I feel a certain obligation to stand up for those that accusers are still trying to control.  But I also see that the larger society is in witch hunt mode.  If you were amused about the story of Blackfeet and monogamy, you need to hear the bitterness and violence of the present generation as they struggle to divide entitlement to the wealth of the corporate tribe.  Now blood draws to prove parentage confront traditional accounts of whose baby you are.  The U.S. government dodged the bullet by passing a law that tribes define their membership.

The old warriors of the UU community are unable to protect the young ones entering the ministry or those of their cohort caught in the Sexual Revolution and the suddenly changed rules.  Emil and I sat at the top of the stairs in Fleck House, looking through the tall window across the street at the imitation cathedral that is First Unitarian of Chicago, while the sadness and loss of being human enfolded us quietly in the twilight.

SNAGGING MINISTERS

Forrester Church, who divorced his wife in order to marry a parishioner

To have my next example of Dunning-Kruger come from the Unitarian Universalist Ministerial Association is not just unsurprising but hilarious.  Here you go:  https://uuma.site-ym.com/mpage/BSE2016  It may have been taken down by now.  Free speech be damned.

I’m not going to name this year’s Berry Street Essay author because she will need the anonymity more than the notoriety.  (Probably not her choice.) This feminist minister had been raped in the past (before becoming a minister), says she suffers from PTSD, and has been active in confessional women’s groups.  She talks “health” and testimony.  Somehow, evidently through a friendship contact, she was asked to deliver the Berry Street Essay at General Assembly, which is historical, prestigious, and independently commissioned.  Normally the topic is broadly “religious” but this woman launched a reform movement against what she considered sexually predatory ministers.  She names one minister specifically in a targeting takedown.  She speaks with the fervour of a pedophile hunter.  Or maybe one of those Nazi war criminal hunters.

First Unitarian Church in Portland, OR

I’ve known this man since 1975, right after the single episode of ill-advised choice for which he paid a high price.  Soon after he interned in Portland he married the woman to whom he is still married with no scandal.  They are a highly respected couple and he has continued his life with what I would consider a secular ministry, working with conciliation arbitrators, classes, addiction counselling.  Though this Berry Street woman was educated for the ministry at Harvard, the whole lecture is very much like the kind of accusation that broke open Starr King Theological School over racist issues: in that case someone incensed that her friend was passed over for president by someone she thought was a less-qualified black woman.

When the Catholics were agonizing over pedophilia, I used to quip:  “UU ministers don’t fool around with kids.  They go for rich women.”  And I would provide examples.  But not in print.  It appears that the Emerson Avenger is gaining converts.  The Emerson Avenger runs a website that attacks ministers he thinks are immoral.  No one I know of ever fingers lay people.  Except privately.

One of my Montana fellowships was powered by what I called “the demi-mondaine.”  Smart, employed, divorced, middle-aged women who seduced ministers — or anyone else with a little shine on them — and who explained candidly that the reason they became UU’s was because there were no sexual taboos.  (Usually meaning divorced, which most of them were.)  These were my first ministries, though I was over forty, and I was taken aback when one woman informed me — as a helpful service — which men in the four congregations would sleep with me.  One man asked me frankly to go to bed with him because he wanted “to see what I had.”  He was a school superintendent.  I don’t think this is a denominational problem — I think it’s a cultural problem.

These women were often vengeful, esp. when they found out I wouldn’t do what they told me to do.  They were like drunks who wanted everyone to get drunk with them.  In every church I’ve served or joined, they have been present, sometimes in small numbers and covert.  

Mary Scriver, 1998

In Canada I twice ran into laymen who propositioned me, though I am the very epitome of a tubby English teacher with spectacles.  I am NOT a sexy woman.  I told them,  “You know, I charge a lot more to be the Temple Whore.”  They were undeterred.  They were after POWER.  They thought ministers had power.  No minister ever came on to me.

In my experience UU ministers (and other denominations as well) were vulnerable to supportive intimacy from either men or women because they felt POWERLESS.  The pastor knows a lot, is held responsible for everything, and must beg a committee for any change.  Being in a pulpit is having one’s hands tied behind one’s back, even for the big traditional men.  Probably less so among the gay men because people don’t know the rules.  Lesbian women ministers are a mystery to me because normally I run like hell.  (My bad.)  As soon as the UUA accepted gay/lesbian ministers, they were possibly accepting polyamorous people who did not conform to traditional marriage assumptions, attracted because the whole schtick of the denomination is accepting people according to their own personal ethics. (UU’s purport not to believe in fencing the communion.)

Of course, courting minorities who are looking for respectability means a certain level of prudery in order to guard that reputation, esp. in a time when right-wing religious people are so rigidly predatory.  It seems that the UUA, in order to grow, is discarding some of their free-wheeling past, growing more cautious and guarded.  The phrase “neo-Puritan” comes up.  There’s a callousness to it.

My home district as a parishioner (1975-78) was the Pacific Northwest, which at that time was international, including BC, Alberta, and Alaska.  The ministers were charismatic, high-achieving, and broad-minded.  A few were deplorable, including a gay hustler of young men and a “counselor” whose idea was to “demonstrate” true love to troubled women in their own marital beds.  When he was found out, he cost that church a LOT of money for recompense and re-counselling.  Luckily, they had malpractice insurance.

A saintly senior minister had a lover who later joined my faraway congregation where she clung to the notion that since she considered herself that very respected minister’s consort-for-life, she therefore controlled me.  Another guy was an active member of the Venusian church whose members disrobed and were stroked with feathers by chanting women.  I don’t suppose this righteous female minister ever imagined such things.  She strikes me as willfully but unknowingly unconscious, as Dunning-Kruger would predict.  Therefore I have a hard time with my feelings about such a person being in a ministry that has always claimed to serve every human being.  

I will say, mildly, that this person is old-fashioned and naive.  It appears to me that her gripe is really about ignoring marital vows, esp. in terms of multiple repeat marriages.  She says that people who are repeatedly married to parishioners should be asked to leave the ministry.  She is conservative mainstream American and probably ought to return to a Christian denomination.  The sexual revolution has only offended her, not enlightened her.  What I don’t understand is how this rant got into the UU World, where it was linked by an endorsing editor.  Has she been having coffee with the Emerson Avenger?  How could the Berry Street Essay committee choose such a vengeful person?

But her worst offense was not simply failing to understand that there are many standards of sexual relationship that are far beyond her experience.  She didn’t pick out the more egregious and offensive examples she knew, but rather the admired and politically potent.  To those of us whose ministries included knowing what went on privately, she comes off as childish and ridiculous.

I’m even more baffled that the editor who signed off on this story — I assume it’s Elaine McArdle, a UU World editor — but there are only the initials E.M. — is living in Portland where David has been well-known and respected since 1975 — a third of a century.  Why attack him now?  The facts of this essay have not been checked — they are evidently gossip from therapeutic groups in Nashville about events decades earlier than this minister’s tenure. 

William Schulz

Bill Schulz, a major UU figure, added a note saying that what she reported him saying to her was untrue, that he had never met her at the point she claims.  David Maynard says that the “facts” she told about him are also untrue.  I’m told that this woman checked with the head of the UUA (now voted out) and a UU lawyer.  I think she would have done better to consult someone outside the UU circle.  It looks like they going to have to scramble to avoid being named as co-defendants in a lawsuit as sensational as the one starring Forrester Church whom she also accuses.  Luckily for this twisted sister, he’s dead since his connections were far larger than the UU context.  I hope she has malpractice insurance.

Retired from ministry, living in a village in Montana, a free-lance writer on “religious” issues (U of Chicago Div School MA and Meadville/Lombard MDiv) of anthropological sorts rather than doctrinal allegiance, I see the world in broad brush terms.  My sexual orientation is the most shocking of all:  celibate.  From where I am, the UUA, as represented by this incompletely healed wounded woman, looks to have abandoned its inclusiveness in order to imply virtue.  Stumped as to where to go with theology, some have resorted to prudery.  I thought we were better than that.  Or at least more grown-up.

Sweet revenge?

MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM

Back in the Eighties when I first entered the Unitarian Universalist ministry, the PNWD ministers had organized a study group for themselves which they called “Humptulips” because it sounds naughty and because it was held in a little town on the Washington coast with that name.  Actually it was a Native American name that meant a cold and rainy place, which it was.  Part of the mild “hazing” that this bunch imposed was assigning new ministers a topic for a scholarly paper that was meant to challenge the person.  So they assigned me the problem of defining the difference between male and female based religions.  It was the time of goddesses and all that, but I didn’t go there, and they knew it.  They were curious about how I would react.

When I looked at both the literature and at personal experience, especially with small experimental groups like the PNWD UU Leadership School group, I decided that the main difference was that the women wanted emotional fusion -- what I called a “hot tub” -- while the men wanted rationality -- what I called a glass phone booth.  (This is not new.)  In practical terms it meant that when it was time to cross the threshold into liminal space, the women went too quickly while the men held back.  (Suddenly they had to make a phone call.) but when it was time to end, the women dawdled in their seats while the men rushed out to pack the car for the drive home.

This matches up somewhat with Simon Baron-Cohen’s studies on the hormone called testosterone, which is often joked about, even unscientifically defined as a poison.  The general scientific indication -- with MANY qualifications about the variations and the impact of culture or personal experience -- is that high testosterone IN THE WOMB for whatever reason generally means high testosterone in the infant, regardless of whether it’s XX/female or XY/male.  (YY babies cannot survive.)  There are at least twenty-five genes that influence the production of testosterone, and it’s estimated that the molecule accounts for maybe forty per cent of the differences between male and female babies as they grow up.  The most salient difference between high and low testosterone babies (regardless of whether they were formally female or male) is that the high testosterone babies better understand systems like math and “hard” science but the low testosterone babies have more empathy and eye contact with humans.  (Given the usual bell-curves, of course.)

The wild card is one of Baron-Cohen’s primary interests:  is there something about testosterone that encourages autism?  More boys than girls have it.  Autism is a spectrum disease, meaning that you can have it a “little bit” or a lot, but it tends to affect boys more than girls.  It is diagnosed by behavior rather than any lab test, and behavior is always much affected by environment and personal experience, so there is nothing very “hard science” about this.  The study I’m drawing on is discussed at:  http://edge.org/conversation/testosterone-on-my-mind    The situation is complex because even if a body is drenched in testosterone, the molecule can’t do anything unless there are testosterone receptors in the body.   (I’ve always understood that high adrenaline in a mother who is carrying a baby will cause a female baby to have higher testosterone than usual but can discourage the development of testosterone in male babies.  I followed the issue when tests years ago showed that I was high androgen.  But I was also high cortisol, which can be a result of trauma, and I got more interested in that.  Especially in the city one often sees low-income, overweight women with male pattern baldness -- the results of stress cortisol.)

This Edge discussion was particularly interesting because it did NOT link testosterone to aggression or violence or sexual potency -- only to high comprehension of systems and lower empathy.   Though there was an interesting observation about the possibility of a “high system” person being able to figure out social patterns well enough to seem empathetic.  This would be an advantage for, say, a lawyer.  Another interesting question was whether a person could have too much empathy -- the expert opinion was that a person could feel what everyone else is feeling to such a great degree that they would neglect themselves.  No one noted that highly empathetic people can seem invasive. 

It’s quite usual for liturgies in many cultures to separate male from female.  No doubt there are many different reasons, depending on the circumstances.  For instance, the women will have the children with them and so be likely to be distracted or even to have to leave.  But also, when religion is defined as systems, reasoning about the gods or ethics, then those “superior” professorial types are likely to run headlong into the more emotional, elastic and case-by-case approach of the women if there is no separation.  Often the reason given for even curtaining off the women is that they are an erotic distraction.  This sounds like men’s self-congratulation to me.  Are they so easily aroused?

During the feminist movement among the UU’s, it became the fashion to perform liturgies restricted to women.  They were often patterned around merging, like pouring water together, and emotional attachment, like bringing the water from some beloved place.  When this ceremony was performed with the whole congregation in Bozeman, one man managed to evade emotion by bringing water from his kitchen tap and -- when it came time to testify about his connection -- explaining the city water system.  But it was a young boy who brought his jar of water with a living creature in it.

The Humptulips study group fell apart when braininess was valued less than it had been earlier and possibly also because there were more and more women ministers.  The earliest ordained females tended to be from the congregations of those ministers, to be older women, divorced (though not as many times as the male ministers), and to have had to work through some major challenges.  The men tended to have come to the ministry young, to have had wives who supported rather than competed, and so on.  But in the days when the ministers were all male, they took the occasion of “study groups” to become emotional, usually with the help of alcohol, and did a lot of ad hoc counseling with each other.  They dropped their testosterone curtain, one might say.  Even got into actual hot tubs.  It’s the thing to do in a cold and rainy place.

BUBBLE GUM CIGARS, REAL BRANDY

This photo was a spoof of male ministers that was staged by the women of University Unitarian Universalist church in Seattle, I think about 1986. By that time there were this many female UU ministers in the vicinity. The cigars were bubble gum but the brandy was real. I’m not sure I could name everyone, so I’ll leave them anonymous to avoid hurting the feelings of those I can’t recall. By now some of them are retired, since they embarked on ministry as a second career. If you need to be told, I’m seated -- second from the right. Directly behind me is Annie Foerster. Prompted by this photo, I went looking for Annie last night and found her on Facebook. She’s still in the ministry.

Annie and I were at Meadville/Lombard at the same time and then both in the Pacific Northwest District when it extended into Canada. We’re about the same age and about the same speed. At ministers’ meetings the youngsters tried not to room next to us because we woke up at dawn and laid in bed telling jokes and laughing -- they claimed it kept them from sleeping in.

This was the era when feminism was still on its “anything you can do, I can do better” platform, so it was natural to mock male-based ministry. We thought. Actually the laywomen of the church had the assumptions and we went along with them. Ministry has never been what the lay people thought it was because no two ministers are the same. Come to that, no two congregations, no two denominations, no two religions -- well, by the time you get to that level people realize that there are differences. It’s just that they see the differences through the lens of their own religion. To a Christian, every hero looks like Jesus -- even the women.

We came in just as the old WWII-era men were beginning to retire -- or die. Their doctors put an end to the uproarious events in the old days when ministers on retreat had gotten drunk to blow off steam. For quite a while there were only one or two female ministers, who tended to be attached somehow to a male minister, often romantically. They were treated like princesses, although some were more like Simone de Beauvoir than like Lady Di. The demand of the religious education ministers (who were mostly women) to be included as equals was only beginning. But none of the women in this photo -- at least to my faulty memory -- were the warm fuzzy therapeutic kind of minister that both genders seem to be nowadays. Neither did we spare ourselves any rigor or goal. We were a hardcore bunch. But not tough -- just sharp thinkers and self-disciplined. Mostly.

There were a few women who found their new attractiveness to men hard to handle. Certain kinds of parishioners (both genders) look for strong personalities in powerful positions and attach to them with flattery and emotional support. God [sic] knows ministers often need emotional support. When there’s a pile-up of church fights, denominational politics, national controversy, deaths or serious illness in the congregation or the same in one’s own family, ministers are dead center. The ideal is ministers who step in to help each other and every district has a Good Offices minister.

The role of minister was once much more in terms of the scholar, the ivory tower and carrier of the heritage. Ministers were expected to have formidable personal libraries and a thorough knowledge of philosophy and history. With the shift to female ministers came a switch to organizational leadership, counseling, and a sort of wedding-cake liturgical taste. Formidable old patriarchs were out -- Mom was in. I doubt that anyone has reflected much on what that did to those of us who joined the ministry in an attempt to escape from Mom.

I know that was part of my agenda in part because aspiring to and entering the ministry enraged my own mother. She refused to help in any way whatsoever. “Why can’t you marry a nice Presbyterian minister?” she demanded. She wanted me to be all the things she aspired to: a nice, well-dressed lady of status protected by a dependable man, everything her own mother didn’t have. I think somehow I was imprinted by WWII Life magazine photos of combat chaplains. I wanted to walk with danger and console soldiers with an assurance of pardon. The culture interprets that as a lesbian wish, but it was nothing of the kind. I just wanted to be a tough person who mattered. And I don’t like the games women play. Men are dogs; women are cats.

I was thinking along the lines of coyotes. Tricksters. But also, the quote over my computer says, “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Woe to those who confuse the message. All regular and orderly all the time is as deadly as all violent and original all the time. Several of the men were violent and original in their lives but regular and orderly in their work, which forced them into some degree of covert behavior -- always risky when serving a congregation, because congregations go everywhere and secrets are impossible to keep.

In the days of this photo the feminists of the churches would meet after the service to go through the hymnals, crossing out all the male references and writing above them either inclusive or female grammar. Of course it was silly and of course it made no immediate difference except for those who hated the defacing of books. It was a little bonding ceremony for the women, I guess.

The female ministers were always saying, “We should get organized,” though we weren’t quite sure for what purpose. Once we met -- at Annie’s church, actually -- a couple of hours earlier than the all-clergy regular meeting. It was a morning meeting so we had sweet rolls (in those days diabetes never crossed our minds but I think it was already affecting my metabolism) and lots and lots of coffee. In fact, by the time the men trickled in, we were high as kites on coffee and politics. I think the kite reference might better be to the birds than to paper sails on strings.

The men were intimidated. We had all the best seats already and they had to sit away from the table. They had thought of us as allies rather than equals, and had not expected rivals. It was very funny because we were simply a little less cloaked, not different. I wonder whether Annie remembers all this.

WHO CAN GO THERE?

The listservs to which I subscribe are often preoccupied with boundaries, frontiers, borders, and other this-side/that-side or inclusion/exclusion phenomena. I’m going to make a little typology.

First: WHO CAN GO THERE? Into which places are some people are excluded and others allowed to cross? What might the qualifications be?

Doctors (healing)
Soldiers (power)
Scholars (education)
Religious figures (mission)
Old people (experience)
Rich people (resources)
Writers (testifying)
Explorers (discovery)
Emergency responders (firemen, EMT’s, civil officers)
Inspectors (conformity to standards)

Second, can you have power, education, mission, experience and resources without anyone telling you whether you can enter or not? How do you do that?

By paying attention.
Service to others.
Trying it and accumulating experience.
Thinking hard.

What about writing? Oh, that’s something you DO. You don’t have to ask permission to simply write -- the same as painting, sculpture, dancing, singing or cooking. And yet some will try to control, to impose a barrier or boundary.

Third: Some defined edges are natural, like a river or a mountain range or the beach of a sea. But others are socially created, like a school or a nation or an economic class. The latter may use the former as an indicator, the way age combines with skill level to create a school class. Or a national boundary created by an island creates an economic boundary by controlling who can bring desirable materials to it -- either by exporting or importing. This always becomes a political border.

Which immediately creates a class of people who specialize in crossing that boundary: pirates or entrepreneurs with special permission. The best opportunities are when there is a steep gradient between the inside and the outside of the delineation, like the artifacts so common in the SW that are precious to people far away from them. Such a boundary can be abruptly changed by imposing laws, or if the laws were already there, by suddenly beginning to enforce them. A latent law is always an opportunity for someone aware of the boundary it can create, especially if there are people who don’t give the law any moral force, like rum runners during prohibition or the underground railroad when slavery was still practiced in the South of the US.

Writers deal with boundaries all the time: different languages, national allegiances, affiliation with social groups they write about, crossing gradients like those who pretend human behavior is one way by vividly describing human behavior that is another way or by revealing a world that had been unknown or denied. Maybe transgressing a moral line.

A writer might not understand that there is a boundary or, knowing it is there, know how to cross it. This has been true of Native Americans, who can feel the boundary, can feel that it keeps them out, and think it is because of racial prejudices when actually it is because of economic barriers: not knowing how to approach publishing. Not knowing how to get into the “in-group.”

A border can simply be adjacency, that is, one place next to another, with or without a gradient. One is a cliff, one is a talus slope or foothills. Each creates a different ecology, which is a sort of economics. The Blackfeet Reservation is a long slope from mountains to prairie. It turned out that outsiders highly valued the mountains, enough to pay for them and put a boundary around them, creating Glacier National Park. (Which many early native hunters disregarded.) The difference in ways of making a living (game and livestock in the higher country, agriculture on the prairie) also sorted the tribe into high-quantum (old-timey) and low-quantum (progressive) which keyed into economic advantage. (Skewed to small grain ag.) Which became emotional differences. I once remarked on a Saskatchewan panel that livestock people have it hard in winter because of having to feed their animals, but grain people can go to Florida for the winter. The son of a grain farmer (white) came up afterwards and said he would punch me out if I were a man, because I had implied that his father was lazy, less deserving.

In the Seventies I became aware of a circumscribed vocational category, the ministry. Such a group will look different from the inside than it does from the outside. It can be imposed on the unwilling, or it can be meant as a protection for those inside. “Professional” groups have their root in “professing,” in the sense of believing in some faith stance, faithfulness to the goal. They were meant to denote people who had “higher” motives than others, who had committed hard to a “calling” rather than a job. In the case of the religious ministry, most denominations (circumscribed social groups often originating in historical ethnic or educational conditions) defined this calling as subscribing to a specific set of beliefs: dogma. Unitarian Universalists did not -- at least not overtly.

On June 23- 27 in Minneapolis the denomination will stage its General Assembly. Much of the agenda will be about reducing gradients of “prejudice” like those against immigrants or people of color. The ministers of the denomination will meet a few days earlier and their focus will be increasing the skills of their sub-group, steepening the gradient against those in the denomination who resent any sort of privilege or elitism. The UUMA calls the strengthening of their in-group “professional development” and “increasing collegiality” as well as the establishment of “best practices.” The natural development is the sharing of news (gossip) about each other and shielding the group, which sometimes leads the lay people to think something taboo is going on.

From the very first creation of a “priest” class far back in eohistory, there has been a belief that the boundary around this category means special powers and status for those inside. Therefore, there are always iconoclasts who want to break open the group (transparency) and others who wish to be initiated, part of the group. There are some in the group who enjoy the idea of having supernatural powers.

Once at a big denominational “do” of some sort (an installation or minister’s conference) we were in a big church of complex design. (Some people think that cleanliness is next to godliness but UU’s think architecture is next to theology.) I blundered into the men’s bathroom. (My eyesight isn’t too good, and anyway I get preoccupied with ideas instead of practicalities.) Talk about a sanctum sanctorium. This place has become valorized by the media, which likes to portray public restrooms as places where secret things happen. Because they are gender-separated, there is seductive secrecy both ways.

But it was ordinary. The men were laughing and talking, kidding around the same way they did everywhere else. The socially imposed boundary had no particularly high gradient after all. They called out, “Wrong side, Scriver!” I realized my mistake and left, blushing. In fact, years later I left the ministry. I was on the wrong side of the boundary after all. Or maybe the boundary didn’t really matter very much.

There are other boundaries that are more important to me now. What difference does difference make? Which differences really matter? Where are the lines drawn?