Sabbatical Blog

It's Not Over 'till the Fat Lady Preaches

2006-07-07T09:24:00.000-06:00

This Blog is Over! The Sabbatical is Over! But people keep reading it. Amazing. So, since sabbatical isn't really over until I've managed to write a sermon, and writing this blog entry postpones that task for a few more minutes, I guess...sabbatical isn't over yet.

I was glad to be amongst my people last Sunday, not too unhappy to go to meetings all week, I realized how much I had missed the church staff and how good it was to have a structure of "going to work," and while I managed all my deadlines for orders of service, newsletters, and web page work all week long with no appreciable resistance, I can't seem to get started on this sermon.

There's our new iguana to play with. (yep, IxChel, of beloved memory, has a successor these days, a little fellow we're calling Ninja until he settles down. He needs a good deal of attention and taming, so he's sitting in my study window at the moment, trying to decide if the pigeons outside pose a threat. He doesn't quite "get" glass, yet.) There's a few household tasks. There are several details of the sermon which don't really need to be researched, but, well, anything to put off the actual writing.

But I will start on the sermon, it will be preached on Sunday, and sabbatical really will be over then, so...better subscribe to iMinister

Sabbatical's End

2006-07-01T10:19:00.000-06:00

122 days, 86 posts, 2,229 "hits," 9 readers, and it's all over. It's back to work tomorrow. This sabbatical has been a wonderful time to explore the internet. Blogs, MP3 players, Website design, Multi Site churches, Amazon Associates, Trauma ministry, GA, retreat' it's been quite a sabbatical. And on top of that, my "non-job" ministry to ministers took me to two retreats, several group meetings, and gave me a task for GA 's Ministry Days. Family and Friends got a little more of me than they might have otherwise, including the arranging of two huge parties (what was I thinking!....but they were both great) to honor my Dad's 80th birthday and a favorite teacher's retirement. And I was so grateful to have been around to be completely a part of our family's grieving for our dying iguana, and glad to have been able to easily take a day (yesterday!) to drive to Las Cruces and pick up a little iguana who was found in a tree by the dog catcher. He's too skittish to come out for photos yet, but he's a cute little fellow and we have high hopes for him.

So the sabbatical was not exactly lazy days, and in spite of that, it's over. I return to work eager to get going on some of the projects I've been thinking about, to see the people I missed, and to get some structure back into my life again. I am grateful for this time. It so enriches my ministry and my life.

This is the last post of this blog, so if you want to keep up with my doings, click here to go to iMinister.

Missing Sabbatical Already

2006-06-28T16:08:00.000-06:00

Because, if it weren't sabbatical, I couldn't spend an hour with my son looking at the pictures of this astounding church built all of Legos. Check it out yourself, if you're on sabbatical, here.

75,000 lego bricks, of which more than a thousand are minifigs. There's even a lovely dedication sermon. She says it cost less than her car and took her a year and a half of "tv time." Amazing.

Real Job Jitters

2006-06-27T07:50:00.000-06:00

The Newsletter came out yesterday, and it's official. I'm preaching on the 9th and the 16th. I have a sudden thought that takes me back to Seminary, "Will I have anything to say?"

I discovered at GA that my feet were out of shape for dress shoes; after 4 months of wearing them only once or twice for an hour or so at a time, that a day of walking around a convention center (not to mention the second day! Ouch!) that they had gone soft and protested the exercise by producing blisters. Am I similarly out of shape at the "passing of life through the fire of thought" that is sermon writing?

I don't remember either consequence of past sabbaticals, and this feels rather alarming. The only cure, I suppose, is to get with it and start writing, but I'm trying to keep these last Sabbatical days somewhat free. I'm tying up loose ends today; returning books to their rightful owners, enjoying friends, cleaning up, and putting finishing touches on my new blog, iMinister. Better bookmark that one...this one is about to go away!

[tagname]

Bridging Out of Sabbatical

2006-06-24T09:34:00.000-06:00

The youth and young adults of our denomination speak of their transitions, into the Hight School group, out of high school and into the Young Adult group, as Bridging, and they hold bridging ceremonies to mark the passage. Ministers, whose career passages are marked at GA at the Service of the Living Tradition, speak these days of "walking," as in "I'm walking this year! Final Fellowship at last!" This language, and the huge importance put on this ritual is new since my day. I once tried to convince the folks in charge of the SLT that we really were too big for all that walking...not that the SLT is not in a church attended by a hundreds but a convention center attended by thousands, the walking make for very dull worship. But it was made clear to me that whatever changes were made to the SLT, the final result did have to include "walking" because that word has become so iconic.

All that is to say...transitions are really important, and I'm wondering about making the transition back into active ministry after this sabbatical. I need to look into who is doing the service next week; my first week on duty, and see what I can cook up.

In the meantime, I've put sermon titles in for the next Messenger, which required some thinking about sermons, so that makes it official...I'm coming back, and soon.

This blog, therefore, is winding down. In honor of the transition, I'm writing for two blogs at the moment, so go to iMinister to continue the story.

GA06 Home Again

2006-06-22T21:04:00.000-06:00

When I'm spending $350 a day on a conference, I feel the need to go "full tilt," and I arrived at GA on Monday in the late afternoon, set up my Chapel, met friends, stayed out too late, left my hotel at 6:40 Tuesday and Wednesday and didn't get back to my room until after 10PM. But I can't do that day after day any more, so this morning, I took a break, packed slowly, read the newspaper, checked out, stashed my luggage with the bell hop of the fancy hotel I hadn't stayed at and asked the concierge to print check my plane reservation and print my boarding pass, and ambled over to the convention center. (These last moves make me feel extremely worldly and sophisticated.) I slipped into a workshop on Spiritual Direction and then went out to lunch with the UU Spiritual Directors who hung around. This emergent interest group got to know each other a bit better and got some business done. This is the sort of thing that would be so hard to do without GA that we have this expensive conference every year and most of those years, grumbling all the way, I go, at least for a while.

I returned to the Exhibit hall to load up on books, talked to one of the Skinner House editors about a book proposal that I put in a few weeks ago with my Lay Leader In Charge of Covenant Groups. (I don't think I ever mentioned that project on this blog, but the Covenant Book Project and the Covenant Groups for the Spiritual Progressives were a major part of this sabbatical.) I ran across my church president...a minor miracle....and we talked for a few minutes about the Satellite Project which will be on the next Board agenda.

I told her that the second most common question I had gotten from my colleagues these past few days, after "how are you?" was, "Tell me about your satellites?" Ken Brown has published his article and is talking up his research, which included an interview with myself and the two laymen who have spearheaded the iMinistry team in Albuquerque. He seems to have left people with the impression that we are farther along on this project than we are. They all want us to forge ahead because they are interested in following. And after all those questions, I'm eager to get back to work and get started.

The trip home was uneventful, in spite of the fact that the gate folks at the airport seemed to be in a near panic about getting us out before thunderstorms grounded us. We got shoved on to the plane and roared out of the gate, only to stop on the runway. Sigh. But it turned out to be good news. We were re-routed to avoid the storms and took off to the first drops of rain. Our spooked pilot only had the seatbelt sign off for about 30 minutes of the two and a half hour trip, which caused great squirming by my four year old row-mate, but it was actually a pretty smooth ride, and after all that, we were only 20 minutes late.

Home, now. 10 more days of sabbatical.

[tagname]

The loneliness of the Long Distance Minister

2006-06-20T21:29:00.000-06:00

So now that I'm at GA, I am glad I'm here. It is good to see people I've known for nearly 30 years now. It is good to have faces to attach to names I've known only on email screens. It is good to talk to people who are interested in the things I'm interested in. Covenant Groups. Trauma Ministry, Multi Site churches, Faith Growth. I didn't sleep well last night but enjoyed every minute of the day. It's so easy to forget how good it is to be among colleagues.

This morning's speaker, Sharon Saltzburg, a Buddhist teacher, talked about a Buddhist understanding of growth in Faith. She drew a distinction between questioning faith, which she views as an absolute essential for thinking beings, (The Buddha himself had very stern words for disciples who just swallowed everything he said without questioning, doubt, and skepticism) and "walk away doubt", where the persons attitude towards something they don't believe is not curiosity but an angry, edgy questioning that doesn't want to hear any new answers. Walk away doubt, she said, is a product of fear and hurt, not religious growth. I've certainly heard enough stories of fear and hurt...and have even felt a little myself. It's a hugely important distinction for UU's, who both have a special ministry to the skeptic and the doubter and those in faith transitions, and who are too often captured and stopped by the "walk away doubters," and their fears and religious PTSD. I've got to read Saltzberg's book....

General Assembly

2006-06-19T08:35:00.000-06:00

I have to admit that I find General Assembly difficult. Although at one time this week of meetings, workshops, and worship was one of the highlights of my year, the combination of the growth of GA (from around 500 in the 1970's to multiple thousands now) and my own changes have changed this for me. For a few years I went only every few years, and lately I've been only going to the pre-GA ministers meetings, where there are "only" 500 attendees, more useful workshops, and more people I know. Although even that, as I age in ministry and our ministry gets bigger, is changing. Once, I felt that I knew most of my colleagues. When I moved to Albuquerque (way out in the sticks, UU-wise) and had a baby, I pulled out of all of those committees and work groups at which one meets new people, and the price for that, very necessary move, is isolation. And that makes GA a nightmare of required extroversion for this introvert. GA, even minister's days, is not the time to meet people. The very best one can do is catch up with old friends. So, that is what I will do.

I have a chapel to manage...my last year of that little chore. I have several "dates" already to meet with persons and groups. I've got a knitting project to get me through the endless meetings, and the cereal bars and apples to keep me fed without spending megabucks (or any more megabucks...this, in my case, 4 day jaunt is going to cost nearly $1,000 already) or more importantly, without having to eat mega-calorie restaurant food for four days. Once I get there, I'll enjoy my week. Really, I tell myself, Really.

Sabbatical's End

2006-06-16T13:44:00.000-06:00

I have to lead a couple of services at GA, for which I need to have come chants on CD. I could have taken four CD's to GA with me, and if past experience serves, I would have left at least one of them there. But I've learned so much in this sabbatical that I made my own GA CD! Four chants from CD's one downloaded from the internet! Too Cool. Even more cool...the downloaded CD was too short. It needed to cycle the chant at least four more times to be perfect for my purposes.

My son has been editing videos using free software he found on the internet. I once watched someone edit a sound file. If there's free video software, there must be free audio software. I can do this, too!

And three hours later, so I have done it. I play the CD I made and do I feel MASTERFUL!

And also purchased a license, I'll have you know. We can use this same chant for Pet Sunday in August. (All of Us Belong at Worldmaking.net, in case you're looking for Animal Sunday music...)

And while the CD was burning, I polished off a Suduku puzzle, a part of my sabbatical which I've not mentioned on this blog.

What has been exercised on this sabbatical is the mathematical, technical side of my brain, no doubt about that. It's something I have a distinct talent for, but rarely use. (I'm the sort of person who, standing around listening to a family talk to a salesman at Home Depot, when they say, "We want 39 panels and they are $29 a piece, so how much will that be?" and the salesman says, "Sorry I don't have my calculator," and I say, "about $1200" and they all look at me, stunned. I can't help it. My brain just works that way. 39 times 29 is about the same as 40 times 30. )

Today is my last "regular" sabbatical day. The weekend cometh, GA follows, and the week after that will be catching up and transitioning. I'll be writing about that transition on this blog, but "sabbatical blogging" is about over. Check out my "regular" blog, iMinister which will take off as this one ends. It already has a test post, a Freudian slip comment, and it's first "real" post, and it's ready for email subscriptions.

[tagname]

The Conduct of War

2006-06-15T09:54:00.000-06:00

I spent an enjoyable and enlightening few days knitting and listening to Tony Hillerman's reflection on his life Seldom Disappointed a few weeks ago. Like most memoirs, it focused on his early life and in his case, on his formative experiences as a soldier in WWII. He described a lot of hurry up and wait, a lot of inefficient management, a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, a lot of hard work, and several of the images of the horror of war that still haunt his dreams. What he didn't describe was anything like this, which comes from last week's Newsweek and describes an aspect of military life in Iraq.

'The Marines know how to get psyched up for a big fight. In November 2004, before the Battle of Fallujah, the Third Battalion, First Marines, better known as the "3/1" or "Thundering Third," held a chariot race. Horses had been confiscated from suspected insurgents, and charioteers were urged to go all-out. The men of Kilo Company-honored to be first into the city on the day of the battle-wore togas and cardboard helmets, and hoisted a shield emblazoned with a large K. As speakers blasted a heavy-metal song, "Cum On Feel the Noize," the warriors of Kilo Company carried a homemade mace, and a ball-and-chain studded with M-16 bullets. A company captain intoned a line from a scene in the movie "Gladiator," in which the Romans prepare to slaughter the barbarians: "What you do here echoes in eternity."'

That there were some atrocities and dehumanization of the enemy during WWII I have no doubt. You can't have a war and the pressures of war without them. But this is what the military thinks it has to do to get soldiers to fight in Iraq.

So let's just say this out loud.

This is not war. This is sick. It's not what you have to do to psych people up to do what needs to be done. It is what you have to do to psych people up kill without cause in a war without justification which has no discernible end.

I am so ashamed to be an American today.

[Iraq]

How To Blog

2006-06-12T13:21:00.000-06:00

A couple of people have asked me lately how to get started in blogging. It's really pretty easy.

Go to www.blogger.com and follow the directions to get an account etc. (Blogger is affiliated with Google, so don't be afraid to give your real name)

Pick out a template.

Write a trial post and click on "view blog" to see how it looks!

Most templates have an "about me" section. Click on that, and you'll see the "edit" button. You can decide what you want to share about yourself, and there are instructions as to how to upload a photo. Most people don't use photos, rather they use symbols or icons of some kind. Your photo will not only appear on your blog, it will appear when you leave comments on other blogger blogs. If you want a real photo, it has to be small, because only a certain file size is allowed.

Now check out your settings by returning to the page that has the "posting" "settings" etc. tabs. Click on settings.

Add a few lines of description to your title. I suggest you click on "yes" for public...that way all kinds of folks will visit your blog. If you click no, then only people who type in your address can find your blog. Under Formatting can determine how dates and such look and set the time. Leave everything else for now. Under comments, if you want others to comment, change the setting to anyone, and put your email address at the bottom; that way you'll be notified by email whenever anyone comments on your blog.

Most bloggers just start blogging, but if you want to do a couple of more things, you'll personalize your blog. Go back to the screen that shows the posting, setting tabs and click on template. These are the instructions that make your blog look and act like it does. Every change you make can be tested by clicking on "preview" at the bottom. If you don't like what you see, click on clear edits and you're safe.

BLogger templates all have a section in the right column called "links", and you'll either want to eliminate that category or add some links that you like...to the church website, for instance. If you click on the word, "Edit Me", you'll find instructions as to how to do this. If you don't want to add links, you can eliminate the entire section.

As to how to give your blog a subscription service, so people can get it by email, for that you go to feedblitz.com, create an account, then click on "Syndicate a new feed for others to receive by email." When it asks for the url, you get it at settings/site feed. Copy the blue URL and paste it in the Feedblitz form.

Now, Feedblitz will tell you to copy about 5 lines of HTML Code and paste it into your template. I suggest you put it in the right hand column, right under your profile.

Go back to your blog template, go to the bottom and start to scroll up. YOu are looking for a line that says, among other things, 'End Profile'
Paste your Feedblitz code on the next line.
Press "preview" to see what you did. If you like it, press save. If you don't, move it around.

The Blogger Help files will talk you through the rest. Have fun!

Reptile Pets

2006-06-10T20:53:00.000-06:00

My colleague Marilyn Sewell writes about an Oregonian who is is being hassled by the city of Portland because he keeps three alligators for pets. (link) And while I have no reason to quibble with the thought that dangerous animals should not be permitted in residential areas where they might hurt someone (in which category I place pit bulls) I take firm exception to her egregious dissing of reptiles.

Our late iguana IxChel couldn't roll over and, unlike many iguanas, didn't like to go out of the house for walks. But she seemed to know her name, definitely recognized her family, (and had us well trained) came out of her cage and begged for bread crusts at dinner time (by politely scratching my leg,) and appreciated the warmth of a human chest and shoulder on a chilly day. None of those things quite qualify as emotions on her part, but they definitely did elicit feelings on our part. Her back yard burial was the saddest I've been in a long time. There is no doubt that she was connected to us, and we to her, and that is love.

So maybe alligators, like pit bulls, are too dangerous to have in residential neighborhoods. But that doesn't mean that Mr. Brown doesn't love Chomper, Hisser, and Snapper, and that they may not, in their dim reptilian brains, love him too.

[pets, reptiles]

Goliath and Guantanamo

2006-06-10T20:27:00.000-06:00

What would you do if you were tossed in prison, perhaps after falling in with the wrong crowd, perhaps after actually doing something wrong, perhaps simply by mistake? You'd hope for release for a while, no doubt, but if you came to the conclusion that you were being held by a power that answered to no system of law or justice, that you would probably never be charged with a crime or have a trial, you might try desperate means, such as hunger strikes to bring your plight to the attention of the world. And if that failed to change your situation, you might, in the end, commit suicide.

I can imagine thinking along those lines, and empathize with the three Guantanamo Bay detainees who did just that yesterday. May they rest in peace. May their lives and deaths be not wasted.

President Bush said some words about the importance of humane and culturally sensitive treatment of these detainees, apparently forgetting that the beginning of "humane" is justice and hope. One US official dismissed this loss of life with a "they were just trying to be martyrs," line. The general in charge of the compound called these suicides "an act of asymmetric warfare." If asymmetric warfare means that there's a Goliath and there's a David, well, then I can see the general's point. Not that a man hanging by a sheet in a cell is exactly equivalent to warfare. Not that I like identifying with a Goliath so huge, mean, and out of control that only a little boy with a slingshot and the God of Justice on his side can bring him down. But that is the way it is.

I have three more weeks of sabbatical, and one of those weeks will be at GA, so the end of this time apart is near. Part of me is eager to return to my active ministry. Part of me likes working in her jeans and puttering amongst websites. And part of me dreads returning to a position in which I will be expected to comment on the state of our world, the morality of our nation, and the ethics of the lives we lead.

[tagname]

I love my ears

2006-06-09T19:54:00.000-06:00

I started out in life as a classical musician, and we were warned on all sides to take care of our hearing by staying out of rock concerts and wearing ear protection when around machinery. We protected our ears like ballet dancers protect their leg muscles. "Tiny little hairs in your ear are all that lies between you and hearing aids," we were told, "Don't blast them off."

The relatively quieter vocation of ministry reinforced this message, as I was aware of older congregants getting hearing aids and confiding that they were better than not hearing, but only by a hair. I use noise canceling headphones like I use sunscreen...for basic body care.

So I was chagrined to realize that my cute little ipod had damaged my ears. It was an accident. I was trying to walk and increase the pace of the music (something an MP3 player can do without changing the pitch of the music), and somehow, I was turning up the volume bit by bit. Then I walked for at least another half hour without even realizing how loud my music was. My ears have not been quite the same since.

My son tells me that earbud type earphones, which sit in the ear canal, are more likely to damage ears than earphones that stay outside the ear. Makes sense. And he also tells me that better quality, more expensive earphones are less likely to damage hearing because one is less likely to need to turn them up. (So we go out and buy new, better earphones for him, too. The kid knows his mom!)

I have also discovered that the duration of loud sounds is just as important as the loudness, and that the reason audiologists are alarmed about ipods etc. is not just that they are played too loud, but that they are played for hours on end. OK. The ipod is for exercise only.

The moral of the story: You only have so many little hairs in your ears, and no miracle of modern science can replace them adequately. Be Careful!

[hearing]

Church Websites

2006-06-06T19:46:00.000-06:00

I've looked at a lot of church websites, lately, collecting ideas for our new website. And after listening to the volunteer who is doing this for us (she's a pro...we're so fortunate!) I am beginning to understand what works and doesn't work about church websites.

We're redoing our website in part because we originally built it for our own internal use, thinking that volunteers would check bylaws, read the newsletter, and that sort of thing. But it has become clear that our "insiders" prefer their usual way of getting information and the people who check our website are visitors, people looking for sermons, and other "outsiders." As one who has prowled websites of churches in various denominations looking for those kinds of things, I can start with my pet peeves.

Do you know how many church websites don't give their city name? Nice website, but I have NO IDEA where you are, First XX church, St. Somebody's, etc.
Links that don't work are the scourge of the web in general. The first questions after "can we make this page," should be, "who will maintain this page?"
Nobody but you knows what UU, MYF, OWL, etc. stands for, and lots of people don't know what words like "ministries" and "stewardship" mean. I spent almost 15 minutes looking through a church website for an RE article I remembered seeing because there were no obvious menu links until I finally realized that this church uses the phrase, "family life", to mean "programs for children." Most people, especially most of the people we UU's tend to appeal to, HATE feeling stupid or not "in the know." Pay somebody not in your church to go through your website and point these things out to you. (and have them go through your order of service and listen to your announcements while they are at it.)

A few of other things I've learned.

Unless your building is a landmark in your town, you don't need lots of pictures of it. Very few people are attracted to buildings. They are attracted to people, especially people like themselves, and the easiest way to communicate to lots of different kinds of people that this is a church for people like them is to pay attention to the diversity in your pictures. But they have to be the right kind of pictures. The person who is re-doing our web page has very specific instructions for the website photographs. They must be pictures of several people doing something together, at least one of whom is looking at the camera. She found such a picture (above) to demonstrate to me how incredibly enticing it is, and since then I have gone through my church website searching cringing at the terrible pictures most churches use, which are either groups of persons doing something but you can't tell what it is or see their faces, which is off-putting, or are posed with everyone staring at the camera (something most people can't pull off), which is also offputting. My website designer says that good website photos are staged. They just don't look staged.
One of the things people are going to do is check the DIRECTIONS on your website from their CELL PHONES. So your website has to automatically resize itself, and the directions should be prominent. And if it's not completely obvious where to park and where to go once one is on the property, you need those directions, too.
Another thing people are going to do is PRINT THE MAP. My website designer has actually designed the "map" page with a street map, a campus map, the service times, phone numbers, and a "we'll be so glad to see you," message. It's designed to be printed out, and it has everything a person would need. Neat, yes?
She has also emphasized that our Ministry to Newcomers begins, not when they walk in the door, but when our site loads on their computer. She wants them to leave the site feeling like they spiritual needs, not just their informational needs, were met. Much of that will be done with a couple of paragraphs from the minister...and this minister is puzzling over that assignment. More on that tomorrow

[church websites]

Internet Connections

2006-06-04T21:59:00.000-06:00

Today my Psalms Blog was visited by a Lutheran contemporary hymn writer, I got an email from a woman from my first congregation whom I've not seen for 22 years, and corresponded with an animal shelter from a town 200 miles from here which has an adoptable iguana. He knew we wanted to adopt because I'd left a note on shelter websites in several cities. My old congregant found me experimenting with Google. I don't know how the Lutheran Hymn writer who is trying to compose contemporary versions of the Psalms found the Psalmic ruminations of a Unitarian Universalist Feminist Ecologist Blogger, even with the magic of the internet, but he did. Who knows, maybe some of my interpretations of the Psalms will inspire a new generation of Lutherans.

The magic of the internet. I first heard of it in 1991...I remember that because I had to leave the presentation of the library board to pick up my baby from day care. (he's 6'3' now!) The librarians were getting all excited about how this new fangled internet would allow people to search the catalogue from home and have books sent from branches across the city to their local branch. I could bend my mind around the networked catalogue (although I thought that their time table was wildly unrealistic) The rest sounded like sheer science fiction. If they had said that by the time the baby was in high school the internet would connect me with new pets, old friends, and fellow Psalm enthusiasts, I would have thought they had been sniffing library paste.

It all happened, and more. I don't think I've been in the downtown library since I got off the library board. I do most of my research on the internet now. I do a good deal of pastoral care by email and a lot of church administrative work. Soon we will embark on forming groups of UU's in scattered communities who will be primarily connected to their Albuquerque church by internet. The church web site has become its primary outreach to new members. Ipodding, wikki'ing, and MySpace are a dizzying reality in the ministerial world. These technologies are not time-savers, they are ministry extenders. The learning curve is steep. It's been good to have a sabbatical to really dig in.

[internet]

Life with Earphones

2006-05-29T21:51:00.000-06:00

Did I mention that I bought an MP3 player last month, to further explore modern life? Not only that, but I succeeded in downloading some music I hadn't listened to in a long time because (blush) I only had it on records. Now I have these albums in my computer. I also have copied in my entire (modest) collection of CD's, and downloaded a bunch of sermons and radio shows. Then I coied all that (all that!) to my MP3 player, which weighs about 6 ounces and is a little bigger than a bic lighter. The whole ensemble is quite a bit easier to manage than a Walkman and I can see that this is a technology that is here to stay. There are a few things my MP3 player will not do, and my son has encouraged me to upgrade and let me know that he'd be glad to soothe my "waste not want not" conscience by putting the old one to good use. (He can use it to transfer his massive graphics files from home to school.) Birthday season is comming up, so we'll see. In the meantime, I've been doing my daily rounds and exercising to the company of good music and fascinating words, and feeling, if I do say so myself, downright hip.

I have been one who has deplored the youth culture of walking around with earphones in and ipods on all the time, but I have made some interesting discoveries as I walk the world with earbuds in my ears.

Walking Albuquerque's busy, noisy, right-on-the-curb sidewalks is much nicer with earphones. I was aware of how much I didn't like walking busy streets like Wyoming and Montgomery...I hadn't realized that it was because of the noise. Listening to my music rather than to the roar of traffic makes the walking experience much nicer.
I can hear people who are talking to me perfectly well even with earphones in and music on. What I can't do is concentrate on what is being said to me. But I'm just an old lady. The younger generation probably can.
It turns out to be true that it is easy to let the volume creep up and do damage to your ears, especially with earbud type earphones. I'm living with tender ears the last couple of days, and am going to buy the earpad type of earphones next time.
Listening to music while doing errands and indoor exercising is a great enhancement of life, and so is walking to music adjusted to the right pace. If I do my whole neighborhood walk to music, I miss the sounds of the city; the birds, the children, the splashing water of backyard pools and fountains.

You may think that all this technoexploration has gone to my head and I'm hopelessly hooked on being hooked to gadets, that I've turned into a computer potato and a blogger head, so let me assure you that, while there is some truth to the computer potato accusation, I have retained my ability to discriminate between what gadgets are really useful and which ones are for show or actively detractive in one's life. Contrarian that I am, I still put the cell phone in the later category, and I don't have one.

[MP3, technology]

Boomer/GenX Ministers

2006-05-29T09:54:00.000-06:00

A month or so back, one UU blogger was concerned that GenX ministers were not getting good positions in the search process and there was a bit of a debate about the relative qualities of the two generations, with stereotypes being thrown around which wouldn't have passed P.C. muster over a racial or sexual divide but have just enough validity over a generational divide. But not enough validity for my tastes, especially as it was my generation that was being dissed in the discussion.

I commented, and one of my favorite UU Bloggers responded a few days later, and I only just found it. The whole debate was so long ago that I thought I'd try to resurrect it here. After a comment in which I had called "nonesense" the notion that it takes a young minister to minister to young people, Peacebang, a Gen X minister, said this:

've been thinking a lot about what Christine says, and it's taken me a few days to articulate why I think she makes a valid point but not an entirely persuasive one. The issue, as I see it, is not whether or not Boomers can minister to younger people (or, for that matter, whether or not Gen Xers can minister to elders!). It's more about whether or not a specific generation has the ability to bring a fresh perspective to institutional leadership, not pastoral ministry.
Some of the questions I have for Boomer ministers are,
(1) when can we stop hearkening to the 60's as the great era of social change, when it's so long ago and there's still so much change necessary? (2) When are we going to accept that the things that were spiritually thrilling for your generation are now being questioned as cultural appropriation, ahistorical and often just not my generation's cup of tea? (3)Why are UU women my age still accused of not "understanding" feminism when we reject goddess thealogies as our primary religious orientation, and "selling out to the patriarchy" when we become Theists or Christians who embrace a Father God (and this is more linguistic than conceptual: we just aren't that hot under the collar about inclusive language)? (4)
How can we all do better at realizing that when we talk about economic justice for the poor, there is an entire population of 20-somethings graduating from college with crippling amounts of educational debt unbeknownst to previous generations, astronomical housing costs unknown to us when we were that age, and the prospect of never being able to retire? How should that change our institutional leadership styles and our class assumptions? (5) Are Boomer leaders ready to hear that young adults hunger for religious *experience* rather than Conversations About Religious Experience? And that ritual, religious language and spiritual practices that an older generation(s) still vehemently reject (unless its something exotic and Eastern) are not so anathema to our young adults?

There are many more, and of course I realize that I'm making generational generalizations, but they're based on a lifetime in UUism and a fairly broad geographic experience, as well as attention to latest studies. I say this not to throw down the gauntlet but to encourage conversation.

To this, I replied:

Well, Peacebang, as a mid-boomer, I have to say that I've experienced most of what you have as a gen-x'er. I'm actually too young to have experienced the heady successful days of the 60's and am more aware of the painful and dissipated end to that era. I came to understand some of the issues of cultural appropriation some years ago and cringe at Goddess fundamentalism just as much as to any other kind. (including cultural appropriation fundamentalism which would leave every faith isolated in history and culture.) I've spent most of my career (and it's a long one, as I was a very young whippersnapper in my early ministry) trying to help spiritually skittish UU's come to embrace and speak about their spiritual experiences. And I don't think that I'm alone in many of these things in my boomer colleagues. Isolated out here as I am, I only know a few gen x ministers well, but I'm not really sure that their approaches to these issues are fundamentally different from mine.

I certainly agree with your list in the sense of the issues facing our denomination as a whole, but believe me, these issues pre-date the boomer generation. Frankly, but I think your real "adversary" in these things is not a generation of ministers but the UU Establishment Mindset, which comes in all generations. And revolutionaries (or more accurately in my case, slow and steady change agents) come in all ages, too.

And now, on reflection, I want to add two things. Firstly, that Peacebang's and my similarities from our life-long UU affiliation might outweigh our generational difference and secondly, that if there's a generational change here, perhaps it is from the ethos of the Silent Generation (which grew up during WWII), which the boomers began and the x'ers will continue, and the y's and Millenials will rail against in their middle and old age.

[Unitarian, Ministery, Generations,Boomer, GenX]

Remembering Our Beloved Dead

2006-05-28T20:21:00.000-06:00

The Mosaic on the Memorial Wall
at the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque

Today I did something a minister on sabbatical is not supposed to do....I went to my church. I went because after church there was a brief service of memory around our Memorial Wall. This wall (it's also a cinerarium and holds the mingled ashes of our deceased members) is two years old and has on it 27 names of church members and friends. Many have died during the past two years, but some names have been added from long ago. I've been here 18 years, and actually, I knew all but two of the 27.

So each Memorial Day, we pass out sheets with names and a sentence or two each of the persons whose names are on the wall, and these are read, one by one, sometimes by family members, sometimes by friends, sometimes by strangers who are still connected to them through the church. Families of the deceased often attend as well as friends, our older members who must be thinking that their names will be on this wall some day, and the curious or, most touching to me, people who have a sense that if they belong to a church, they belong to its history.

I knew I wanted to go to this short service, but I did not expect to be so moved by it. Of course, in the past, I've been the one conducting it, worrying about it, wondering if the ritual "worked" and if people were too hot in the sun. David was in charge this year. I just got to feel.

In 18 years I've buried about 100 people; that's not a lot as ministerial careers go, but I knew most of them and I felt rather overwhelmed just from hearing about 27 of them today. From still-born babies (3) to young mothers (3), to suicides and those who refused treatment for terminal illnesses (more than a dozen, two of which can still haunt me if I'm in the mood to feel guilty) to the very elderly, one national figure (a Columbia Astronaut) some people who hadn't liked me and a couple who had actively hurt me, and mostly dear and wise older members who I cared about deeply...it was a journey.

I came home and went through my memorial service files.

I've had a couple of strange Memorial Services; I remember one in particular in which ...woops, I've done four services for young mothers, and this was the third in one summer....anyway the deceased's father-in-law came to the memorial service dressed in shorts and acted generally as if he was at a family reunion, and the deceased's partner spent the entire service and reception tending to their newborn baby. Grief is singular, and people work through it in many ways.

I learned long ago to pay no attention to an out-of-town family's estimate of how many people would come to a service; I learned that for the last time when a family told me, "He was bi-polar, never married, had no job, no friends, totally sad and wasted life, so it will be just us." But the Funeral Home parking lot was full; the entire chapter of the Albuquerque Bi-Polar Society showed up and after listening to the family's depressed eulogies came to the podium one by long-winded one and told that family that their son had been a cherished and valued member of a very valuable group. I felt like the family needed to hear this, and the Bi-Polar folks needed to say it, and let the service go on for two hours. At the end the flumoxed Funeral Home Fellow said, "I've uh...never done a Unitarian service before. Are they uh all this long?"

They're mostly under an hour. And I, having listened to the stories of family and friends to prepare, often listen to family and friends give prepared or extemporaneous eulogies, and think, "I wish I had known him better, I wish I had known her longer." And then (since Memorial services are almost always added to an already full week,) must move on to the next task of my days. It was good to remember.

The Great Transformation

2006-05-27T22:01:00.000-06:00

My next reading project will be Karen Armstrong's "The Great Transformation". (see the sidebar)The transformation in question is the birth and development of several of the world's great religions during just a few centuries of human history, and the near contemporaneous lives of some of the greatest religious figures in history in the middle and far East. I listened to Armstrong's "Buddha" on tape last month, and she mentioned this work over and over, so...
here goes. Want to read it with me? We could have a little book group right on this Blog!

[Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation]

Federal Marriage Amendment

2006-05-27T15:42:00.000-06:00

Last year, attempts in the congress to ban Gay Marriage failed miserably. Public Opinion Polls show increasing acceptance of same sex realtionship, which is what one might expect in our "live and let live" society. None-the-less, it seems that the Rebublicans think that it is to their benefit to fight this one out in congress again this year. Not only do I think that they are incorrect, I think that they are wrong.

I'm not worried. It's not easy to ammend the Constitution, even when the tide of public opinion is favorable (remember the Equal Rights Ammendment?) The Federal Marriage Ammendment is another diversionary tactic.

One of these days, this nation's conservatives are going to wake up to how they have been used, and that will be a bitter day for them and the rest of us will have very short toungues and blood-stained teeth.

It would be too much to hope that someone could make lemonade from all these lemons and go back to the Founders vision of separation of Church and State on this issue. Right now religion and state are uncomfortably twined in the marriage issue.

But what I really want is for a separation of Church and State on the Marriage issue. I want the religious aspects of who qualifies to be married to be left to the different faiths. (opposite sex? non divorced? virgin? of the same faith? Only after 6 months of counselling? My own qualification is that there has to be a congregation present...my own little theological ideocyncracy). In these days of proliferating ministries and churches, the couple could shop 'till they dropped if they wanted a religious wedding.

As to the state's interest in family formation, for identity, tax, and child protection issues, for the state's interest, you get family change form and register as a couple. That way, it is always a state official and not a minister, who checks identities and signs the thing to make it legal. The 19th century notion that all ordained persons could be trusted to be agents of the state and know who they were marrying is, let's just say, out of date.

Registered Couples could unregister with the same legal protections for children and both partners which are now in place for divorce, but divorce, too, would be considered a religious word and divorce granted, or not, by those religious bodies which wanted to be involved.

Some protections, responsibilities, and benefits would be given to legally registered couples, for instance, the right to make medical decisions for the other person, tax liabilities, etc. Other protections and benefits would be offered, perhaps, only to "married" couples, for instance, some companies might decide to only offer family benefits to "married" persons and not to those who are simply "registered." It's already clear that many large companies are seeing the benefit to themselves of honorong their employee family obligations and are alreay offering benefits to non-married couples. They have the difficulty of dealing with the distinction between committed relationships and casual ones....a state registration procedure would be of assistance to these employers.

Now, we'd still have to fuss with the fundamentalists who don't want Gays to have any official sanction of their relationships but that would be easier without the word "marriage" in the way.

[Marriage Ammendment, Progressive Politics,Gay Marriage,Unitarian]

God, Bless America

2006-05-24T15:54:00.000-06:00

I've always loved the patriotic hymn, "God Bless America." Written quickly at the outbreak of WWII, it's not a brilliant poem, but it is a simple, heartfelt prayer for God's blessing in a frightening time.

Note, it is a request for blessing, not a statement of fact, something that is lost in the "God Bless America" bumper stickers which should read, "God, bless America" In asking for a blessing the petitioner is making a humble request for something desired, deserved, rather than demanding a boon that is one's by right. Unfortunately, the phrase is often used exactly that way, which is a theological and cultural travesty. But that's not what Irving Berlin meant it to be. He meant it to be a real prayer, addressed to God, not about God's work.

The subject of fright was a straightforwardly dangerous world in 1943, whereas today the subject of our fright is our own runaway national executive, our national disinclination to curb our lifestyle to deal with debt or climate warming, and whiffs of globalizing change. None the less, this prayer for blessing and guidance in this time in which, by the measure of any of the world's faiths, especially Christianity, we are seriously astray, is just as pertinent as it was 60 years ago. It will be my prayer on this Memorial Day weekend.

(Dear) God,

(Please)
Bless America, land that I love,
(although I know that we're not living up to our ideals right now and for that I ask pardon, but this request for a blessing is not for our current messy reality, but for the ideal and promise of America.)
Stand beside her, and guide her (for we need all the guidance we can get)
through the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies
to the oceans white with foam,
God Bless America, our home (and the home of what is best in our hearts) sweet home.
May it be So

[Memorial Day, Patriotism, Unitarian, prayer]

Encouraging Ministry

2006-05-21T09:52:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, I further entered the blog world by hooking up with Technorati, a service which provides a number of tools for bloggers, for instance, the "search this blog" function you might have noticed a the bottom of the sidebar, tag names which somehow help blog publicity, and the ability to search the world of blogs. With no real intent, I set things up to tell me whenever anyone in the world of blogs uses the word Unitarian in their blog. Everytime I log on, I get a list of about 20 new blogs with "unitarian" mentioned.

About half of the blogs are from Unitarian Universalists and their institutions, but only half. The other half are the ones that interest me. Most of the remaining are from people commenting that they have taken a wildly popular Beliefnet "What's your religion Quiz" which gives results in percentages (77% Unitarian Universalists, 20% Buddhist, 3% Christian), and therefore really gets our name out. So these bloggers are commenting, not always positiviely, but usually with curiosity, on their "religious results". There are a few others. Yesterday, a young man who is the president of his senior class in a small town in Kentucky, was agonizing over the fair way to handle the traditional graduation prayer now that the class has a Muslem student. An exceedingly thoughtful young man whose Blog will make us all hopeful about the coming generation.

If you check out the blog, you'll see that I left an encouraging comment. I've been doing that on several blogs a day these past few days. Most blogs are written by young people, and it appears to me that they could use some encouraging and guiding words as they go about their religious quest. Would anyone care to join me in this interesting little ministry? If you're internet savvy enough to read this blog and follow the links elsewhere, you can do it, too!

[unitarian]

Unitarian Jihad

2006-05-21T09:36:00.000-06:00

A year ago, a column appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle which set off an internet storm of publicity for Unitarian Universalism which we old fogies are still struggling to assimilate. Jon Carroll's "Unitarian Jihad" column generated more internet interest in Unitarianism than all the advertising dollars spent in the history of the Association. In the column, Carroll gently spoofs our earnest and not always very savvy effectiveness while lambasting the Fundamentalist values which are undermining the civic values on which we all still base our national identity. He's one angry, hopeful, man.

So get out your hankies and have a listen to a speech he gave to a UU group in the Bay area, in which he reads and comments on his column. Get ready to gird on your sword of moderation and save the world at the end. (Thanks to Philocrates not only for this latest link, but for using last year's internet buzz to quickly place some Google adds and demonstrate that a very small amount of money can produce results on the internet.)

[Unitarian, Unitarian Jihad, liberal religion]

Da Vinci's Mary Magdaline

2006-05-18T11:36:00.000-06:00

II was asked on Tuesday if I'd be willing to speak to a reporter working on a big special on the Da Vinci Code and said sure...but one never called. I learned a long time ago to have a prepared speech for reporters to give no matter what silly question they asked, so, since I won't be quoted in the Journal, here are my sound bites and answers to the questions I thought I might get:

Did you read the book?

Sure did! Great Fiction. Couldn't put it down. Very entertaining piece of FICTION.

What do you think of his assertion that Jesus and Mary were married?

That Jesus, like virtually every Jewish male of his day, was probably married is not something that shocks Unitarian Universalists (though I think it more likely that he married a local girl at age 17 and that she had died, probably in childbirth, by the time he began his ministry some 15 years later.) That the church as an institution would have had its own philosophical and doctrinal reasons for suppressing this doesn't surprise UU's either. But Brown did just what he accuses the church of doing, which is truncating what we know of Mary Magdalene to fit a worldview. In the church's case, the world view is anti-sex. In Brown's, the world view is "women as vessel of man's seed." What we know of Mary Magdalene is that she was not a prostitute (he got that right) and that she was a RELIGIOUS LEADER in the early church, one of the first apostles. That's why she is an important and interesting figure. Brown truncates what we know from Biblical and extra-biblical sources --Mary Magdalene’s power and vision, and concentrates, not even on her personal relationship with Jesus, but on her womb. She's promoted from prostitute to vessel of Jesus' seed. And that's pretty disappointing.

Why do you think some religious people are boycotting the movie and do you approve of that?

I approve 100% of people spending their money in accordance with their values and urging others to do the same. And I do understand why some people are offended by this movie. Not only does it shock traditional religious sensibilities, it fictionally accuses the church of lack of integrity and murderous corruption.

Are you going to see the movie?

Not until it gets to the dollar theater

LiveStrong Day

2006-05-17T08:39:00.000-06:00

Lizard Eater writes in her blog that today is LiveStrong Day, a day for those living with Cancer to celebrate their strength. Lizard Eater, whose year old daughter was diagnosed with kidney cancer and has been blogging about her journey with her daughter, suggests that we all blog about our cancer story today.

I don't remember quite when it occurred to me that I wasn't "living with cancer" any more. It was probably about three years out, since I had a kind of cancer that, if it was going to come back would evidence itself within two years. So once the two years was over, I was able to relax. (It took a year or so to practice "relaxing.") And by that time, I had gotten on with new adventures in my life, some difficult, some wonderful, and there seemed to be only a few "cancer knots" left to untie. I remember lamenting that that great gift of survivors, of valuing every day and every relationship had faded and I was "back to normal," which is to say, back to taking it all for granted. I was distressed about that until I decided that the gifts of life-threatening episodes are bound to fade, that one can't ask for the gifts of death until one is actually, really facing it.

With that said, I also have to say that my journey with Cancer, mild as it was in the realm of possible journeys with cancer, changed me in such profound ways that I really have no idea who I would be now if I had not had that trial and all that came with it. It was, in the end, one of those terrible learning experiences which we can try to make the most of, and if we do, they will soften into blessings.

That's how it seems now. But I note that the sermon I wrote on my first Sunday back after my second surgery, that I once had much deeper feelings. In honor of the day, here's the ending of that sermon.

There’s a popular saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” That’s good advice for picnics but too simple by half for real life. It doesn’t often happen that life gives you sour stuff and you are able to make a treat out of it. There’s not enough sugar in Jamaica to make a treat out of war, surgery, rape, the death of a beloved parent or the shooting of children. So forget making lemonade out of life’s lemons. Sometimes you can do that but mostly when you get lemons you just get lemons and so you experience "sour".

"Sour", is, after all a part of all that is our life. Life is not of a perpetual picnic but a perpetual opportunity to make the best of what we're given, lemons and oranges and pomegranates and strawberries together; the good and the bad. It’s a matter of finding grace and growing a soul in the midst of it all, of finding, even within adversity, a way to do something meaningful for oneself and something helpful to others; in short, of learning, waiting, and returning to work on what remains.

--The maker moves
in the unmade, stirring the water until
it clouds, dark beneath the surface,
stirring and darkening the soul until pain
perceives new possibility. There is nothing
to do but learn and wait, return to work
on what remains. Seeds will sprout in the scar.
Though death is in the healing, it will heal. -Wendell Berry

The creative force that we all believe is within us--in our hearts and in our minds, and I believe is without as well, the creative force some think of as God, or goddess, or Spirit or maker, stirs in unmade things, in crisis times, in darkness, in moments of death and rebirth and long healings and grave possibility. The stirring of this force is what brings the new into our lives, and it is not without pain. The difficult, terrible, things that eventually happen to all of us are not put there to make us change, but if we can learn from them or find new possibility in them, the seeds will sprout in our scars, and even the small and large deaths in our lives will be healing.

[LiveStrong Day, Cancer]

Blogging for Books

2006-05-15T21:31:00.000-06:00

A lifetime ago, (8 years!) when I was recovering from surgery, I got a get-well card from my church's group of trendy young adults who included an on-line gift certificate to Amazon.com. Thus, I made the first internet purchase of my life. It was definitely the highlight of my recovery period, and the start of a whole new lifestyle.

Although I've enjoyed or endured many retail websites since then, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Amazon, which has added a fascinating array of ways to make shopping for books on line better and better and has seemingly been willing to share it's expertice in many ways.

And now I find that persons with websites such as this one can put links to the Amazon books they recommend on their page and if someone clicks that link and buys that book, (or anything else, for that matter) the website owner (me!) gets a commission. So after writing this morning about my friend Alexander Shaia's book, I thought that some people might want to buy it (I'm just being a good friend here!) and one thing led to another and now I'm an official Amazon Associate. If you want to know more about Alexander's book (which I'm preaching on next Fall, by the way) just click the link! If you buy it, or anything else that day, I get an Amazon gift certificate, (better than real money to a bookaphile like myself) and my friend sells a book!

So, it won't be a lot of money, (go ahead...just prove me wrong!) but the church's website could avail itself of this same offer. We UU's buy a lot of books, and I imagine I'm not the only person who buys books on line. (humm...I wonder if I get a commission if I buy books off of my website? That would amount to a tidy discount!) Anyway, I'm a happy guenea pig for this technology.

So, while I'm on a roll, Becoming Human, the other Amazon link, is a book by friend the rector of St. Michaels and All Angels here in Albuquerque. It's that "Religion OF Jesus, not the religion ABOUT Jesus" that we UU's say we respect and follow.

[books, internet commerce]

The Begats

2006-05-15T09:27:00.000-06:00

I'm reading a fascinating book by my Santa Fe friend, Alexander Shaia, Beyond the Biography of Jesus: The Journey of Quadratos

Here's the review I wrote for Amazon:

"Shaia believes that the four gospels were chosen of the many available to the early church because their writers address and give significant guidance to the four universal stages of spiritual (and indeed, all human) growth, because the gospel writers were not simply writing a biography, but were instead giving the communities for which they were writing guidance, metaphors, and comfort for their situation. The four stages are, first, the beginnings necessitated by the collapse of crucial aspects of our life and characterized by feelings of loss and fear, (Matthew, written for the Christians after the destruction of the Temple), Second, a time of feeling around in the dark for a new path, a time which could be characterized as stormy and difficult (Mark, written for persecuted Christians of the Roman Empire), Times of illumination, spiritual highs, and new insights which fuel our resolution to continue (John), and Fourth, the time of building a new life (a new church) based on the foregoing. (Luke and Acts) This first of two books goes into fascinating and motivating detail about the first two legs of the journey; an upcoming (August 06) book will deal with the second two. It's all very readable and applicable to all kinds of life journeys."

For instance, Shaia writes that the Book of Matthew was written for Christians (who still thought of themselves as a part of the Jewish community) reeling at the destruction of the Temple which had been the center of Jewish life. This kind of feeling of utter shipwreck of one's ideals and centers of value is a common starting place for a spiritual journey.

Matthew's gospel, as you might remember, begins with the often skipped "begats" section; an interminable genealogy which is mostly incomprehensible to moderns. Because I'm one of those moderns it had slipped my notice (this in spite of a seminary course in New Testament) that this is one oddball genealogy. Instead of recording the first sons of the first sons of the great ancestors of Judaism, as might have been expected, it is instead a record of unexpected turns in history, younger sons who were heirs, ner-do-wells that made good, even (gasp) a few women. For instance, one of the ancestors mentioned "David, the Father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah."

How's that, again? Matthew's audience would know the story vividly. Their hero King David once became besotted by the wife of his general Uriah, and not only had an affair with her while Uriah was away fighting David's war, but David gave orders to put him in a situation in which he would surely be killed. God was Not Pleased. None the less, Solomon was born. And here the whole story shows up in the Genealogy of Jesus.

The message: You are a noble people, descended from noble people who have in the past endured strange twists of fate, sinned and were forgiven, and who generally stumbled around in a most human way but continued to be the chosen people. It would be as if one wrote to an American Audience,

You are a noble people descended from the Puritans of New England and the adventurous immigrants from many nations. You are descended from George Washington who held slaves and Thomas Jefferson who had a slave mistress, but who were the framers of a constitution which extended freedom to all people. You are descendents of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age and of the sturdy Union movement which persevered through great persecution. You have inherited the strengths and weaknesses of the Greatest Generation who fought World War II and who sent Japanese Americans to internment camps...and then let them go.

In other words, it would be a quick telling of history emphasizing the sins and repentances, twists and turns, ambiguities and ambivalences, to the end of motivating people living through a terrible time to persevere.

Ok, so here's the question of the day, to which I hope you American History fans will all help me out.

If you were writing such a quick history, what would it include?

[bible]

Spiritual Direction

2006-05-11T16:08:00.000-06:00

Sometimes great ideas come already packaged with dreadful names, and "Spiritual Direction" and "Spiritual Director" are near the top of my list. The great idea under the dreadful names is that our spiritual life is often confusing, our spiritual growth is often so subtle that we don't see it, and our spirituality is not something most of us talk about with just anybody. Therefore it is a good thing to have a special relationship with someone who will act as our sounding board, guide, and cheering section, and perhaps offer an occasional caution if we're about take off on that well paved road to hell.

Most religions have a name for this kind of one-on-one relationship. Guru, teacher, and soul friend are three, but the most common in this Christian world is Spiritual Director. This is a well established role in the Catholic and Anglican worlds. The rest of Protestantism is slowly catching on, and the secular world has just discovered Spiritual Direction with the best seller status of a book called, Father Joe, The man who saved my soul, by Tony Hedra. Tony is an agnostic who has a life-long relationship with an extraordinary spiritual director. It's a true story.

But soul saving isn't really what spiritual directors do, any more than they direct anyone. They are at most guides, and generally listeners, suggesters, and fellow companions on the spiritual journey.

UU's are beginning to be interested in Spiritual Direction and a directory has just been published of UU's who have ministerial or specialized training in spiritual direction. It's not a licensed or certified area of practice, and very few people make their living at it. Fees are usually considerably less than, say, therapy, and sometimes are a matter of gifts rather than fees.

I came into this field through the novels of Susan Howatch, myself, which are even more intense than Father Joe, and are about spiritual direction of the old school (authoritarian and touched with psychic powers) in the Church of England. It took some time to realize that this kind of relationship might do me good (new school style), find such a mentor for myself, and then realize that I was sometimes being called on to be a mentor for others or to guide situations in which groups were mentoring each other. One of these days, I'll probably get some real training. One of my sabbatical treats was to go with a friend to the conference of Spiritual Directors International and hang out for three days with 500 Spiritual Directors. It was remarkably comfortable. The Spiritual Directors who belong to this group are a warm, inclusive, and spiritually adventurous bunch, no strangers to doubt, ambiguity, atheism, or syncretistic spiritual journeys such as UU's tend to take. If one thing that keeps you from finding a Spiritual Director is fear that you will be dreadfully mis-matched with a rigid religionist, than getting a referral through Spiritual DIrectors International might ease the process. Of if you're lucky, one of the 50 UU's offering spiritual direction will be in your locale.

Ministers and Ministry

2006-05-08T10:55:00.000-06:00

In several places lately, both UU and Interfaith, home and away, I've been noticing that the word "minister" is undergoing change in our society. Specifically, more people are beginning to call themselves ministers without any or much schooling, mentoring, certification, or commissioning by a religious body. You can get ordained to the Universal life church with no qualifications over the internet. There are several "Interfaith Seminaries" which, for a variety of payments and coursework, ranging from a few weekends to a few three week courses, "qualify" a person to be ordained to the "Interfaith Ministry."

When an (excuse me) bona fide, ordained, educated and certified minister like myself grits her teeth over this new trend, or shows in any way that she doesn't consider these persons to be qualified colleagues, the answer is some version of "I have a ministry, just like you do, and that makes me a minister."

So this puts me in mind of a story I heard a while back. There was woman who had a gift for nursing, which she discovered in nursing her father and then a neighbor through their last months of life. She loved the role, and she was good at it. She observed how the various medical professionals she came in contact with worked and learned a great deal. She felt truly called and gifted in nursing. So she applied for a job as a nurse in a hospital. And because she had not been truthful in her application and the hospital had not been careful in their hiring practices and because there is always and everywhere a need for nurses, she got pretty close to getting a job.

But when the whole tale was told, the verdict was harsh. Gift and experience in nursing two dying persons aside, she was not "a nurse," and she could have done terrible harm if she had been hired to be one.

Ministers don't calculate drug dosages, but they, too, can do harm, both to individual souls and to religious institutions, when they use the title and authority of "minister" in spite of not having the requisite training or having gone through good certification processes. We "real" ministers actually learned quite a bit in our three years of seminary, summer of hospital chaplaincy, and 9 months of internship. We learned even more reading the stack of books and preparing ourselves for the certification process which is called, in the UU ministry "Fellowshipping". And some went through all that and were in the end, told that we didn't make the cut.

It's my understanding that it is actually against the law to call yourself a doctor or a nurse or a chiropractor or a lawyer if you are not in fact, qualified and certified to be one. Tenderness over separation of church and state keeps the law from defining what a minister is. But social pressure can be applied to persons who are calling themselves ministers (as opposed to working in ministries) If this trend keeps up, the "real" ministers are going to have to start distinguishing their training with the dreary practice of listing degrees and certifications after their names. And that will be a pity, don't you think?

Christine Robinson, M.div, IFUUA (in fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association)

Talking about Trauma

2006-05-06T10:33:00.000-06:00

I spent two days at a Critical Incident Stress Management seminar, learning to do brief group debriefings after traumatic events, such as bank robberies, employee suicide, shooting sprees, etc. Part of that training was showing a lot of videos of REALLY traumatic events, like the Oklahoma City bombing, a plane crash, a drowning of three children, and a wild fire that destroyed an entire neighborhood and killed 25 people.

Before this particular technology was developed, people mostly dealt with trauma by just going on with their lives. The result was PTSD, often undiagnosed, physical stress, and "burn out." For instance, we were told that of the 5 Air Traffic Controllers and one dispatcher involved in a plane crash which we listened to in agonizing detail; a crash in which several hundred people died, two never returned to work, two died and one developed cancer within the year. That was 20 years ago; a lot has been learned since then about helping people through trauma.

Talking helps...we all know that, even if we find it hard to do. Learning that the symptoms we're having, like bad dreams, sleep and appetite disruptions, and so on are normal and will diminish, helps too. It turns out that in a group of five or six people, just hearing each other's stories and telling their own (what was your role, what happened, what was hardest for you, what symptoms are you experiencing) gives most people in most situations enough control of their emotions back that they can move on with their lives. No deep therapy necessary, usually. This process can happen years later and be beneficial; they showed us footage of a group of survivors of a 1947 school explosion that killed (in a small town) 400 of their classmates. Until someone staged a 40 year reunion, many had never spoken of their experiences, and they felt that it had helped a lot.

Although I took this training so that I could volunteer to be of assistance in public disasters like 9/11, I realize that there have been several times in the ordinary course of my ministry that it could have been useful. I definitely recommend this training to my colleagues...indeed, to anyone who has an interest.

Short Takes

2006-05-03T20:46:00.000-06:00

There's a sadness in the house, now bereft of it's lizard occupant. But life goes on. On Monday, the busses were free, courtesy of the high gas prices, so I took the bus around to my errands. It was a beautiful day, warm and bright, but no so warm and bright that walking across parking lots or standing on street corners seemed life-threatening, which will be the case a month from now. I missed one bus through careless chart-reading, but waited with a young man who had just completed EMT training and regaled me with tales of ambulances and emergency rooms. I felt not only virtuous at the end of the day, I felt better connected to my city.

I could ride the bus to work in my non-sabbatical life. The service is very nearly door-to-door. And there are days when I don't need my car once I get to work. I could plan my work to take the bus to work one day a week, most weeks. I should do that.

Yesterday's sabbatical adventure was to purchase an MP3 player so that I, too, can walk the world with earbuds in my ear listening to my favorite tunes and downloaded sermons and podcasts. Turns out you can load your current cd's into the thing, a process I quickly mastered. Podcasting itself turns out to be more complicated. But I have to admit, I love it already. It makes walking along streets with high speed traffic much more pleasant, for instance.

Today's adventure was new glasses, something I dreaded, not so much because of the eye drops or the expense, but because I knew I needed new frames. The last time I bought new frames I wandered around a superstore completely stymied by the vast number of choices and the conundrum of how to choose from among them. I finally gave up and brought my husband back with me...an anxiety-ridden shopping experience of several hours time. Today's experience was so much nicer. My friendly local eye doctor now has a small shop for dispensing glasses. The optician informed me that the "in look" was for glasses smaller than my current pair, showed me two or three examples and was free with her advice about the pair that looked the best. The whole process took 15 minutes. What a relief!

Tomorrow's adventure (and Friday's): Critical Incident Stress Management Training. This feels like a very busy week; probably just as well.

Life is a Mystery

2006-05-03T20:29:00.000-06:00

Our deceased iguana, IxChel, had a sister born from the same clutch of eggs. She was also named for a Mayan goddess with a difficult name; in her case so difficult that she was always called Q. The two sisters hadn't seen each other for 4 years, and had lived most of their first five years in different classrooms, and as far as anyone knows, Q had never eaten a nail. They were middle-aged as captive iguanas go, and well cared for. None the less, we learned today that Q died three days after IxChel, after a short and not apparently severe illness.

You hear of that happening to human spouses, married for 60 years. But iguana siblings who were mostly separated? It's too strange to be a coincidence and yet what else it could be is ...a mystery.

But here's to Q and IxChel, two gifted iguanas, who brightened the lives of special ed students in two classrooms over ten years (and our home and the home of their teacher-owners where they spent weekends and summers). And here's to the two dedicated teachers who made a space for them in their lives and classrooms.

Ode to IxChel

2006-04-30T15:13:00.000-06:00

Our Green Iguana, named for the Mayan Moon Goddess, beloved member of the family for four years, died today after surgery to remove a nail she ate…probably two years ago during a remodeling project. Why did she eat the nail? Who knows. She never ate anything else she wasn’t supposed to and, indeed, I thought of her as our anorexic iguana because she had eating issues all her life. The only thing she ate with relish was bread, which was bad for her, and monkey chow, which she could only have once a week. It was when she didn’t eat her monkey chow that we knew something was wrong.

The nail came home from surgery with her. If I hadn’t seen the x-ray myself, I would have not believed that such a little animal could even have ingested, much less lived with such an object in her gut. That she lived two years with it…we’re talking a bent, four inch nail, here, and she, although 3 feet long, was only about three inches across…is a miracle. For a day after her surgery, it looked like she might make it, which made her death all the harder.

We brought her home from the vet, even had an impromptu viewing, told all her funny stories…how she used to hide in the top of Kevin’s bunk bed, how she once jumped from the top of a book case, (trying to be a dragon, said Kevin) how she got out a window once, spent the night in a bush, and ran across the street at the speed of light when we shook the bush. We remembered how offended she was at the sight of anything that looked remotely like her, including her reflection in the mirror and some of the many dragons which Kevin has collected and which, it seemed, she took great pleasure in knocking over. When we called her first owner, she reminisced about how IxChel had nearly died from impacted eggs as a youthful iguana. The animal definitely had 9 interesting lives.

IxChel taught our son, allergic to anything with fur, the joys of pet ownership, and even in death is teaching him and us her last lessons about grief. He has loved her and cared for her very responsibly. When I discovered that she might live through Kevin’s college years, (read; that we would probably have to care for her for at least four years after he’d left home) I decided to make friends with her, and I’ve loved her dearly, too. So has William. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to love a critter with a brain the size of a pea and no feelings except anxiety, but you’d be wrong.

We buried her in the back yard with a piece of the monkey chow she was so extraordinarily fond of. William and I both thought of words from our church’s pet blessing service: “We give thanks for our childhood pets, who taught us to love and to cry. We give thanks for our children's pets, who help us to teach them responsibility and relationship, and we give thanks for the pets who brighten our days and comfort our nights.

Thanks, IxChel, for brightening our days. In our hearts, you were our little dragon, and now you fly.

Albuquerque Fix Finds Moi!

2006-04-29T11:30:00.000-06:00

Duke City Fix, the "inside line on Albuquerque" reviewed my Blog last week. (read it here, and just kind of ignore how it implies that it's a thrill to see an old foggy doing something hip like blogging....)

This was no doubt the cause of the startling surge in hits on my hit counter last week...159 hits one day, a 50% increase over my next best day. Even more startling; I discovered this when a church youth mentioned it to my son.

This blogging business is quite a kick, I must say.

Retreating

2006-04-27T20:21:00.000-06:00

Just returned from a three day retreat, most of it a silent retreat. The retreat leader reminded us of how it is with a duck, who must go under the water to eat from the bottom of the stream, and then come up for air. The duck who never ducks starves, the duck who never comes up drowns.

A three day retreat is one way to really duck down and feed from the depths of the pond, and this nourishment strengthens one for the work of the world. Daily and weekly practices of "ducking out" and down are also the part of a healthy life, especially the healthy life of a minister.

I did nearly this same retreat during my last sabbatical, and that retreat solidified a contemplative mood which then characterized the next four years. This week's retreat solidified something else, a sense of urgency to be more outwardly focused. It's been coming for a while. All signs pointed to the temporary nature of the stepping stone that was my contemplative phase...it started crumbling away nearly the moment I landed on it. Still, it was a stepping stone which held me up for a good long time, and I am deeply appreciative of all that I learned and experienced there, all of which I take with me. Now the time has come to leap to the new stepping stone which has become visible in the running stream of my life. And that reminds me of a poem.

Crossing a creek requires three things:
A certain serenity of mind, bare feet,
And a sure trust
That the snake we know
Slides silently underwater
Just beyond our vision
Will choose to ignore
The flesh
That cuts through its territory,
And we will pass through.

Some people think crossing a creek
Is easy,
But I say this--
All crossings are hard,
Whether creeks, mountains,
Or into other lives.
And we must always believe
In the snakes at our feet
Just out of our vision
And we must practice believing
We will come through.
-by Martha Courtot

Visiting a Multi-site, Multi Venue

2006-04-23T13:50:00.000-06:00

I took a morning off from the Spiritual Directors International conference, in which I couldn't have felt more religiously or socially comfortable, to visit the North Coast Church in Oceanside, where I steeled myself to be a Stranger. But I wanted to see how they did their four campus, four venue, four service time video worship. Their congregation has more than 10 times our membership, but there are things to be learned.

This multi-site, multi venue church rocks in more ways than one.

It's current site is one of those semi-industrial office park sites off an exurban highway about 10 miles inland. Here's what I experienced.

I'd checked over the website for directions. The website pointed me to visitor parking and to the visitor welcome booth I'd find in the plaza. I found that booth, and was greeted by an extremely personable young man, who, upon discovering that I was interested in multi-site for my church offered to show me around the whole campus, asked about my role and church, took my answers in stride in spite of the fact that they lay outside the bounds of his communion, and answered all my questions. I noted an extremely well organized and well appointed children's ministry, which includes a Special Needs class. He presently delivered me to my chosen venue (the video cafe) and pointed out the coffee and rolls.

There were signs and clues everywhere. Necessary in part because this campus didn't look like a church, but also calming for the first timer. I could see the options as to where to go, where I might have taken my children, where the restrooms were, and so on. I discovered that a donation was expected for the drinks (coffee, tea, water bottles, and cokes at this site. Just coffee in the "main sanctuary" and "traditional" sites, and coffee and Mountain Dew in "The Edge", which resembled a rock concert stage. I didn't have to ask anybody anything, which would have been nice if I'd not been in "find out everything I can" work mode.

The worship folder had no order of worship, but it listed dozens of small groups, retreats, classes, and service projects.

So with my coffee and roll, I go sit in a plastic lawn chair set in rows facing a stage full of warming-up musicians. The rows are far enough apart that little plastic coffee tables are also in the rows. The band leader informs us that the tables are there so we can put our coffee down and raise our arms in praise, which he makes us practice. This plain Jane space has been made comfortable for lots of people with a minimum amount of money, but everything is clean and comfortable. The audio and video equipment looks state of the art and performs flawlessly. There's an extremely well constructed set in the main venue, which we'll all appreciate as the background to the preacher. There are no flowers, no windows, no kneelers, no crosses, no swaths of cloth adding color, no art, no vestments. The only thing you’d call beautiful are the people around you. But the audio is perfect.

This church is affiliated with the Evangelical Free Churches of America. I've come the Sunday after Easter. The subject, it is clear from the worship folder, will be the empty tomb. No communion, however. I've been told already that communion is only served in the Traditional venue, but that the majority of the congregation (85%) belong to small groups which celebrate communion together on a monthly basis. I can't help but think that Jesus would approve of that.

So we sing and praise (mostly with arms at our side.) The music is simple and the words are projected on the screen, and does seem to be producing better singing. I've never heard any of these songs before but I catch on and join in. The band leader is an infectious worship leader and he has everyone singing along. The crowd is mostly folks like me. Suburban. Jeans. (I'm overdressed in Chinos and a jacket.) Some younger, some older, most but not all Anglo. More African Americans and fewer Orientals than I've been seeing in Southern California all week, but perhaps that is because the gifted band leader is a young African American. (the rest of the band includes a two “California Blond Beauties”, one of whom was a dwarf, and a middle aged bass player who projected a strange lack of affect.

There were no children in this sugar and caffeine haven. There is a short note to parents in the bulletin. "All of our worship venues are designed for adults. We believe that your child will get the most out of their North Coast experience if they are with their age group. We will notify you by buzzer if your child needs you. If you feel that your child needs to sit with you, please sit at the end of a row so if they become distressed or playful, you can quickly move out to the family area, where you can follow the service on video. Your fellow worshippers will thank you."

Even before I found out that the typical North Coast sermon is 45-55 minutes long, I thought that that was a good idea.

Yep. 47 minutes yesterday. And all on video. After about 20 minutes of singing, there were some very brief announcements given by a fellow watching a clock count down, and from then on it was video. It was an amazing performance. This preacher used his notes about three times during the 47 minutes, and used a variety of techniques to keep our attention. We followed along in our worship folder, where there were some questions and reflection opportunities. In spite of the fact that this was very much NOT my theology, I learned something and had a chance to think about an aspect of my life. Those folders become the discussion outline for the small groups that will meet during the week.

The band reappeared, there were a few more announcements, another song, and the video came back on for the benediction. An offering was taken, and an invitation to greet those around us as we left.

In spite of the foreign theology, I left feeling good. And the fellow behind me and I exchanged a warm greeting. As I passed the greeters booth, I waved to my tour guide, and he walked me to my car talking about the Multi Site conference to be held in Chicago next month and asked for my card so he could give it to their staff person in charge of resourcing other churches. I had a feeling that this young fellow didn't know what a Unitarian was, and it will be interesting to see if I hear from them.

When I return to my car, someone has left a leaflet on it thanking me for visiting and and inviting me to follow the maps to park in the main parking lots next time I come. These folks have thought of everything.

SDI/GA

2006-04-23T13:48:00.000-06:00

My sabbatical treat to myself was to attend the Spiritual Directors
International convention with a friend and hear my colleague Jeremy Taylor
speak about dreamwork and the spiritual life. Jeremy is being very good,
and the rest of the conference is fabulous. Here are some reflections.

UU's who go to GA often start in the airport saying to each other, "That
one's a UU, that couple is going to GA for sure, there's another one." We
get into hotel vans and confirm with the other UU's that we recognized them
from afar. We think that UU's all look alike.

Oddly, this group of Spiritual Directors looks almost like UU's. The group
lacks the blocks of youth and persons of color who come to GA, although
there is a scattering of younger adults and persons of color. There is
also a scatting of religious headgear not seen at GA; Jewish, nuns, and one Muslim
headscarf in the crowd of 500. Another difference; of the 500, at least 400 are women. Also, there are no t-shirts with slogans on them. But the same well-heeled simple dressing and comfortable bodies with open faces make me feel right at home. The inclusive worship offered would work in any UU church that didn't cater to the religiously allergic. The political climate is
distinctively leftist when the subject comes up, which is surprisingly
often, though only in passing, and with a mood of distress, not fury. This is a group of people who believes in praying for their enemies, not denigrating them.

Going to a "GA" where I only know my roommate and am not constantly
(desperately?) on the lookout for old friends is much more relaxing, I must
say. And going to the meetings of an institution which I have not come to
care about particularly is even more relaxing. The issues of growth,
diversity, credentialing, and the future of this particular discipline are
of interest to me but they don't make me anxious. I can take the occasional
silliness I notice in stride. It seems like a healthy and centered group,
which I can't say is how I feel about UU's at GA. But even if there was an
issue in the crowd, it wouldn't be my pain. It's nice to have the distance.

Also unlike GA, this is not a business meeting with religious window
dressing, this is a spiritual meeting where some business is done. The day
is bracketed not just with worship, but with prayer. The workshop
presenters are not only introduced by someone from the governing board, they
are blessed. Every workshop I've taken has included not only sharing, but
silence and a benediction. It's all inclusive of a variety of religious
paths, respectful of difference, and non-sexist. And I've been blessed.

TV

2006-04-19T22:12:00.000-06:00

I just saw my cousin get murdered on TV tonight. Even though I knew it was going to happen it was a bit of a shock. He's an actor, and was murdered on CSI-New York. Stabbed with an Oyster knife. Very messy. Even worse than watching him be killed was watching him be so revoltingly nasty to the man who (quite understandably) finally hauled off and murdered him. My cousin is a fundamentally good man. I wonder what he does to wash the nastiness away when he's done with a scene like that. When you throw yourself into acting a scene, how do you keep from absorbing it into your being, for better or (in this case) for worse?

He's spent most of his career acting on stages far from here, so I'd never actually seen him act before. He was the understudy to the Lion King in New York for several years, dying every night, but our visits east never quite matched up with with his performances. But he's a family man now, and lately switched to TV work.

We saw him and his wife and baby at my dad's 80th birthday party, and made him promise to let us know when we could see him on TV. Today was the day. I hooked the antenna up to what has here-to-fore been a DVD player for the occasion, and our little family watched a broadcast TV drama together for the first time ever. We get our entertainment from little plastic discs and news from the radio except for the Olympics and 9/11 magnitude events. It was a good experience. Network TV and advertising is better than I remembered it. Though I doubt that we'll become a TV family (unless cousin Martin makes it big, particularly in a Science Fiction show like Firefly,) it was a nice family evening.

Starting Small Churches to Thrive

2006-04-19T14:55:00.000-06:00

One of the axioms of church-size theory (the idea that churches of different sizes are not simply larger and larger versions of the same "animal" but are completely different "critters" with very different characteristics) is that you can't kill a small church. (small being fewer than 50 adults and children present on an average Sunday.) Small churches, like the cats they are often compared to, seem to have nine lives. They also have an independent streak, and usually appear aloof to people who don't know them. But even the largest cat only gets so big; and it is actually quite rare for a cat to change itself into a dog...or even want to. So, while our "cat" Fellowships usually stay alive for many, many years, very few of them are the thriving, vibrant religious communities that the towns they reside in need them to be, and often they are not the thriving, vibrant religious communities that their own members wish they were.

The many small congregations in our movement, stated in hope and promise, which have never managed to fulfill their potential in spite of all the work and good intentions of their members, has caused the UUA to stop supporting the formation of small groups and put its efforts into a vision of starting large churches which start with 300 of so people, skipping "cat" and "dog" and going straight to "Farm". Instead of independent cats which will never get over 20 pounds, the UUA wants to start a small farm, by procuring enough land, hiring a farmer, and supplying the plow. The first such farm (Pathways Church in the Dallas area) is struggling, but farms are not developed overnight, so we'll see. The second such farm will have its first season next year. (Philadelphia).

I applaud the vision and courage of the people working on those projects, but none apply to New Mexico, where I am, where there's only one even medium sized city, which already has a large church. So that keeps me wondering how to help groups start in small towns that won't fall into the "cat church" syndromes. Here's my idea. Instead of plunking a little cat out in SmallTownville, how about we try puppies? Puppies take a lot of care at first and a good bit of looking after for the first year (7 years) of their life, but at the end of that time, they are not cats. They are dogs. And dog churches (usually called collies by the inventor of this metaphor, Lyle Schaller) are much more likely to be noticed, attractive, and therefore healthy and serving in their communities. I've been involved in two new church starts in my career; one in a small town in South Carolina (which failed within the year, although I note that there's a church there 20 years later), and a church in suburban Albuquerque, which entered the Extension Program right away and has had a minister and a building for some years, but has failed to thrive in its booming neighborhood. In both cases, the groups were independent from the get go (good training for cat-hood) The "help" supplied by the "mother church" was negligible in one case and confined to money and a bit of moral support in the other case.

What would the puppy model be like, let's say, in the growing rural towns east of Albuquerque? The group would begin as a subset of the mother church (embryo stage?), a neighborhood social group, and a covenant group. If this group wanted to proceed further, they would begin to offer Sunday programming, in a public place, led by a trained worship leader and using a video feed from Mother Church for the sermon. These folks would continue to be members of Mother church, and the expenses of rental fees etc. would be absorbed by the church budget. (They would be a part of Mother Church's pledge drive, too, thus bypassing one of the most difficult "cat" problems which is that too many cats like to live on the cheap.) Ministerial services would be available to these folks when problems arose, when their was a death in the congregation, and for other rites of passage. Mother Church's RE director would invite their RE teachers to trainings, supply materials, and help them troubleshoot their programs for children. Covenant Group leaders would use the same materials as were used in Mother Church. Freed of having to resort to secular speakers to fill the pulpit, and regularly hearing UU sermons, these groups will be more likely to remain religious communities. As the growing puppy attracted new members to their site, those members would become members of the Mother Church. There might be some cases where the puppy graduated to adult dog status and went off on its own, but by that time it would be a sturdy group, large enough to own land and have its own professional leadership. Let's just say, in the best cases, 7 years. And in many cases, the puppy grows up to be such a small dog that it remains under the protection of Mother Church by choice...perhaps one of the "pack" of UU congregations which run together in a state like New Mexico, all (including Mother church) stronger, more visible, and better serving together than they could ever be apart.

New Purposes and Principles...O My!

2006-04-18T22:55:00.000-06:00

Or, Oh, no!

As Philocrites reports, the UUA Board has asked the Commission on Appraisal to review our current Purposes and Principles (the statements about affirming and promoting the worth and dignity of persons, and the sources of our Living Tradition) to see if they need revising.

The fact that our contentious and divided bunch ever came up with a statement we agreed on in the first place is one of the reasons I believe in God, and I don't think that we're likely to see that particular miracle again. So I'm stumping for the Commission to give the situation a look and decide that the Purpose and Principles are ok the way they are.

But as I commented on Philocrites, I do think that we need some of those short and snappy mission phrases which I see on the church websites I've been reading. For instance, the mission of the Northcoast Church which I'm planning to visit next Sunday in Oceanside, California, is, "Making Disciples in a Healthy Church Environment" Much better, in my opinion, is the mission of the Community Christian Church, "Helping People Find their Way Back to God."

These would probably not be our statements, but I'm sure you can imagine how centering and useful it would be to have such a thing of our own. In my own mind (I'm not sure my church even knows this, but it's powerful for me) the church's mission statement is "fostering spiritual growth in a diverse religious community"

Actually, this being the UUA, I'm advocating that we have five of them. Not only will more people find at least one of them appealing, but having five statements rather than one is walking our talk about diversity and freedom. I commented some more about this on the above Philocrites blog.

So...either for the UUA or for your local church, what would your mission statement be like? Leave a comment! (You can sign in as anonymous to avoid the hassle if you want, although this is a very safe Google-run blog).

Good Friday Faith

2006-04-14T20:56:00.000-06:00

I went to a Good Friday service at my local, friendly Episcopal Church this evening. The priest, just returned from a sabbatical time in Mexico, said that in Mexico Holy Week is a very big deal, with processions in the street and church services every day. It all culminates Friday night when the whole town processes through the streets and crowds into the church. On Easter morning, on the other hand, the streets are deserted and the churches hold small combined services for the daily worshippers. Everyone else has a quiet morning at home with the family.

In America, it's the other way around. Churches are packed on Easter morning with folks dressed in their finest clothes, for the big triumphal day of light and gladness, while on Good Friday only a fraction of Christians are in church.

We, the fraction, had a moment's pleasure of smugness.

I wanted to go to church on Thursday, rather than Friday, because Thursday in the Psychology of Holy Week fits my general mood. Nothing too bad has happened, but there's the sense of coming change, perhaps doom, and yet we enjoy food and friends and the holiday in spite of our foreboding, and move through our assigned parts in faith that things will work out. That's the general mood I'm in lately. But the only Christian Church in town that I really trust was doing footwashing and Eucharist last night, and Eucharist is restricted to "any baptized person", which they mean to be extremely inclusive but doesn't include me. So I went tonight, guessing that there would be no Eucharist, and there wasn't.

The Priest's theory about Mexican Holy Week is that the Mexican people are so often ground down by the difficulties of their lives and they can really identify with Jesus' suffering and with the dignified and faith-filled way he went to his death. "Into Your hands, I commend my spirit,". The priest commended this surrendered attitude to us all, wondering if we could go through our lives, not with "faith in" (being rescued from whatever trouble we're in), but simply with faith.

So I got my sermon for my general mood anyway, and it spoke to my condition, as my Baptist friends used to say. So, Global Warming, Iranian Crisis, Population Bomb, these things will come and we will cope as best we can, in faith and with love, and perhaps even, with purpose and joy.

And for those who will speak words of hope on the day of light and gladness to the well-dressed throngs, Blessings!

Miss Manners on Joys and Concerns

2006-04-13T20:50:00.000-06:00

In the Chicago Tribune, Judith Martin (Miss Manners) pontificated on Joys and Concerns. Linguistic analysis suggests that her questioner was a UU, since other churches tend to call this problematic time "prayer requests." As usual she has her own interesting slant in her advice. "Don't give the microphone to habitual abusers," she says, and "The minister should put aside sharing given to (ahem) him if it is frivolous."

Well, the second is a possiblity. The first probably is not. But I do like her general statement that it is rude to mix the serious and the frivolous even in party conversation, much less in church. Now we can at least give our habitual offenders a copy of the column!

Molly Ivins Mentions Us!

2006-04-12T18:53:00.000-06:00

Today's Albuquerque Tribune carried a column from Molly Ivins which mentioned her sister's participation in the Green Sanctuary Committee of "the Unitarian church in Albuquerque."

Hey, there's a thrill! I wonder if we'll get any hits on our website because of it?

I've always appreciated Molly's wit and wisdom, and the fact that she was one of the few famous liberals who have kept both their cool and their edge during this dark night of our collective liberal souls. I would have appreciated her even if I didn't know her sister, and that's added to the fun. But most liberals either started suffering from brain draining anxiety after the last election, or they seemed demoralized and wandered around trying to figure out where to plant their feet. (The democratic party at large still seems to be in the later state.) Not Molly!

Today's column remarks that until we know for sure what the climate tipping point is (was), we'd better just do what we can do. She highlights changing to more efficient lighting something she rightly commends our Green Sanctuary Committee for doing. And we've got more hybrid cars, too!) I've got another suggestion. Let's turn off some refrigerators or freezers.

It's not uncommon for busy families to have two refrigerators and a freezer in their homes. Now, that's a LOT of power. Refrigerators, especially old refrigerators, are the biggest power hogs in the house. Do we really need all that food storage? How about simplifying our lives by shopping for and eating and drinking what one refrigerator holds, and then filling it again? If your life and organizational abilities are anything like mine, I can't even properly use before I loose the contents of one freezer, much less two.

Just a thought for those of us who want to do our bit for the earth but have already replaced our lightbulbs, combined our trips, and are not ready for hybreds or bicycles.

In the meantime, Thanks, Molly, and best wishes from your sister's church!

Coercing "Discussion"

2006-04-11T21:35:00.000-06:00

I’m the kind of person who likes to buy light bulbs or cookies or whatever the kids are selling door to door. Really. It’s good for kids to earn some cash to support their activities, and activities help kids grow up to be happy, productive citizens. So I buy cookies. But would I buy cookies from a kid who said, “Buy my cookies or you’ll be sorry?” I would not. Even though I probably would be sorry.

I’m the kind of person who likes discussions about values. I think that one of the roles a church plays in society and in the lives of its members is to offer opportunities for people to talk about their values. Values like when, if ever, it is right to go to war, for instance. I’m all for discussions like that. But do I participate in discussions that start, “If you don’t talk about this with me, you’ll be sorry?” I don’t. Even though I probably will be sorry.

That’s why I hope my congregation will vote “NO” on the Study-Action Issue submitted for this year’s GA agenda called “Peacemaking”. Not that I’m against peace or the discussions of peace that the authors of this resolution apparently want. What I am against is the extreme lopsidedness of the discussion starter, which is, (I kid you not) “Should the Unitarian Universalist Association reject the use of any and all kinds of violence and war to resolve disputes between peoples and nations and adopt a principle of seeking just peace through nonviolent means?

The authors admit that this extreme kind of pacificism has never been a part of UU life, and that by and large, UU’s have taken a Just War position, often using Just War precepts to protest particular wars. And their suggestions for study questions range from the astounding, “Should we, the member congregations of the UUA reject violence in any form?” to the ho hum global, “What are the hallmarks of a peaceful culture?” to the interesting but unresolvable by discussion, “To what extent do gun control and gun possession reduce violence?”

What’s painfully clear is that the no doubt good-hearted UU’s who submitted this proposal don’t really know what makes for a good discussion, but they wanted to have one so badly that they threw out the most extreme statement anyone could think of on the general topic to, they would no doubt say, “stimulate discussion.” And if you don’t get your tail in gear to go to their discussion, and they decide that you have to reject violence in all forms then it’s your own fault for not participating. So There.

It is also painfully clear that the process by which these proposals are proposed does not have enough mentoring in it.

That’s where I don’t buy any cookies.

Invite me to a discussion by offering me a chance to reflect on my values and hear yours, I’d like to come. Force me to a discussion by intimating that you’ll change the direction of my denomination to fit your theology or philosophy or social theory if I don’t, I might feel like I have to come, but if I do, I’ll come mad.

Which doesn’t make for good discussions.
We have until April 15th to vote this one down. If we don’t, the GA delegates will have to debate this in a body of 2,000. (Also not a good discussion.)

Technology in Church

2006-04-10T09:14:00.000-06:00

On Friday, an unsolicited copy of "REV" magazine appeared in my mailbox at home...an oddity, as I rigorously separate my professional and personal address. Maybe this is the result of playing footsie with Evangelical Blogs. At any rate, it appears to be a magazine for "Pastors" (mostly male) and...it was pretty interesting. One article hit me where I was at, an article about technology in churches, complete with seven guidelines. They are mostly aimed at computer issues, but they're good points for us to think about in our video foray, too.

Create a Tech Team, which should not just be the tech's who have a clue about all this, but some folks who can see the big picture of the congregation and help with implementation, training, evaluation of new programs, and such. (even if, like myself, they don't understand much of the lingo flying around meetings and emails)
Pay professionals when you don't have volunteer professionals to advise amateur volunteers. It's worth the money. (we're so lucky to have a pro on our team! Thanks, Chris Paul!)
Budget for training, more than you think you'll need. (hummm....)
Talk with other congregations who are already doing what you are planning to do, and talk to more than one person. The pastor may be far more enthusiastic about a new piece of technology than an administrator or volunteer. (such a good point!)
Only buy what you need. Technology marches on. Budget for upgrades and maintenance. (hummmmm.....)
Back up Data (We started a culture of back up a long time ago in the office. As long as recordings get put on church computors we should be ok. If recordings are going straight to NMIA, we might want to ask them about their backup.)
Make Tech Planning a part of your culture. (hummmmm....)

Multi-Site Multi Venue

2006-04-07T13:43:00.000-06:00

This exciting development in church life was pioneered in the 1950's and 60's by All Souls Church in Washington DC, and resulted in the founding of Unitarian Churches throughout the suburbs. (Odd that it has never been tried since, don't you think?) Lately, the evangelicals have taken the lead with this stratgy of providing video feeds or DVD's of an earlier service to groups meeting off campus.

Here are some websites about this phenomena:
An Article from Christianity Today
A blog of a Multi-Site RE Director
Multi Site Website
A Blog Entry from Monday Morning Insights, with comments critical of Multi-site.
Wikopedia Entry on "Multi-Site Church"

Most of these authors are writing about mega churches (main campus services serving several thousand persons per weekend). What I have in mind for New Mexico is slightly different: our modestly large church in Albuquerque serving house groups in outlying small towns too far away for folks to come in to Albuquerque regularly but close enough that they could come in for training, RE, and celebrations. In particular, I have in mind Grants, Edgewood, Belen, and Socorro. We might also take the edge off of our space problems by starting groups in Tijeras, Bernalillo, or the SouthWest part of the city.

We could use the same technology to serve small groups farther away: Portales, Roswell, Gallup, and Las Vegas are all places which we know have UU's, or even groups meeting. These groups could subscribe to a series of sermons and have the opportunity to be better connected to Unitarian Universalism and be able to concentrate on other aspects of worship and church life

Proud Member of the Religious Left

2006-04-06T17:27:00.000-06:00

Here's an exciting little paragraph from the Seattle Times:

Fault Lines Widen Between Evangelicals and the GOP The Seattle TimesThe fractures between some leading evangelicals and the Republican Party occur in a context of reawakening of what some call the Religious Left. Mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, Reform Jews, progressive Muslims and Unitarian Universalists came alive politically in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and further mobilized in the 2004 electoral campaign. The best-selling books of Jim Wallis ("God's Politics") and Michael Lerner ("The Left Hand of God") show that religious progressive voices have a sizable, national following.

Michael Learner spoke at my church on Sunday, and I slipped in to hear him. He's a powerful speaker with powerful, workable ideas. I'm reading his book now. As one who has often felt dissed by the political left, not because of my political views but because I view myself as a religious person, his passion on that point especially speaks to me. Last year Jim Wallis excited me; Rabbi Learner excites me even more.

Moderates in the UUA

2006-04-05T10:52:00.000-06:00

Philocrates, a UU Blogger, has been holding a discussion about a book called "Knocking On Heaven's Door" which is devoted to studying how the "60's" (Really 1955-1975) changed the culture of the religious mainstream. There's considerable time devoted to Unitarian Universalism in this book; a whole chapter on Gay Rights within our denomination, and lots of side comments, some of which are startling. (Oh, to see ourselves as others see us!) I procured the book and read large chunks of it yesterday, and posted some comments on that Blog. The discussion had turned to why it is that our GA resolutions are all so radical, and why the many moderates we know belong to UU churches don't speak up in the discussions. That lead me to reflect on what "Moderate" really is and means and why "Moderates" don't participate much in UU discussion. Here's the link; you can read it there; and while you are there, check out this excellent blog!
"Moderates" on Philocrates

Blogging 101

2006-04-04T10:32:00.000-06:00

There are three ways to read blogs. The first is to go to the website whenever you think of it. The second is to use the Feed service. (Notice "Get a Feed" under "links" on the sidebar?) If you use an aggrigator or just want the link on your home page, that's how to get a link to the current post automatically. If all that is Greek to you, here's an easy way: Get all new posts by email. You sign up for that service at the bottom of the side bar, where it says subscribe me! Enter your email, confirm your address, and every night that there's been a new post on this blog, you'll get it by eamil. It's a free service, unless you want your email every hour, then it's (believe it or not) $1.59 a month.

This appears to me to be a safe and secure service, and a big time saver for regular readers.

Have fun!

Bumper Stickers

2006-04-03T20:53:00.000-06:00

Someone who regularly parks in my church parking lot (an employee of the child care center, I think) has a bumper sticker that says, "I support the Separation of Church and Hate."

It's almost too cute not to like, but I don't like it.

I assume that it refers to the issue of Gay Rights (as in another bumper sticker, which I did like, "Hate is not a Family Value." ) And while I'm all for Gay Rights, and against Hate Crimes and Hateful behavior, there's an important distinction to be drawn between being hateful and not agreeing. It is possible to be "not with the program" of Gay Rights, as many traditional religious people are not, without hating anyone. This bumper sticker is a "liberal" version of "If you're not for us, you're against us," and "America, Love it or Leave it." It's polarized thinking, and that's not liberal at all.

The Red Triangle

2006-04-02T14:12:00.000-06:00

Most of us are aware that the Nazis required Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their sleve, both as they were tightening restrictions on Jews and later in the concentration camps. And many of us know that a pink triangle was the designation for homosexuals sent to the labor and death camps. There were other colors of triangles for other prisoners; purple for Roma (Gypsies) and Red for politicians and troublesome clergy.

Both the Jews and the Gays have taken their Nazi-given badge as a badge of honor, and perhaps we clergy who are inclined to be troublesome to the status quo (that should be all of us) or to the government (that would be many of us) should do the same.

Science and Prayers

2006-04-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's news was that a well-designed (from the scientific point of view) study has determined that specific prayers (may he go through surgery and have no complications) of strangers for cardiac bypass patients have no effect on outcome, and if the patients are told they are being prayed for, they actually have a slightly higher liklihood of a worse outcome.

This study does not prove that prayers for one's own loved ones are ineffective, but that's a much harder scientific study to design, since it is impossible to know who is being prayed for. It also contradicts some other studies, which show a net positive effect of prayer on patient outcomes...but which established that a general prayer of holding a person in one's heart and praying for a good outcome, or "Thy will be done" is more effective than a prayer for specific outcomes like no complications. It is curious to me that the researchers in this last study were so directive, given previous studies.

No one in touch with reality will claim that a prayer like "may she come through surgery and have no complications," is particularly "effective". After all, everyone dies eventually and many who do die in spite of the prayers of their loved ones, and their own prayers. Obviously biological processes, not to mention the "will of God" regularly trumps prayers. That doesn't mean praying is useless, only that it is not magic. Surprisingly, many people who are thoroughly in touch with reality pray anyway. Their intuitive wisdom is that prayer helps the patient and their experience is that their prayer helps them to wait and hope.

That's why I'm this morning praying for the baby of a UU blogger. "Little Warior" underwent surgery yesterday for kidney cancer. I hold them both in my heart and pray that whatever is best might come to be.

Holocaust Museum

2006-03-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful museum, and an incredibly well done educational experience which draws one in to the times and place and people and the horror of the holocaust. I had avoided this museum for some years, afriad it would be overwhelming, but it was not overwhelming, just sad, and sobering. And it has me thinking about my theory of why people do such evil deeds...deeds not, by any means, confined to a decade of German history. Our own nation has its share of major atrocities with genocidal intent against native americans and more than a few shameful breeches of human rights against persons percieved to be aliens or subhuman, from African Americans to Japaneese to Irish to illegal immigrants. And there are genocides going on today, notibly in the Sudan, and genocides in the past.

What allows otherwise decent human beings to kill, torture, and mutilate, and how do we guard against this? The first is that in order to engage in this behavior, most people have to be convinced that the ones they are killing and mutilating and torturing are not human beings. Therefore the first price of civilization is eternal vigilance against de-humanizing humans. It's not at all a small step between allowing sick illegal aliens in your nation to die from lack of care, turning them away from feeding sites, and shooting them at your boarder to killing them outright. The people who have done the shooting and turning away need, to justify their actions, to harden their hearts and dehumanize their victims. That begins a cycle which, history plainly tells us, can easily get out of hand.

The Catholic Church is right to threaten civil disobedience against laws which would require them to harden their hearts against illegal aliens requesting their aid. Not only is Biblical law unequivocal on this matter "You shall not oppress the alien in your land," but their psychology is right, too.

Immigrant Reform

2006-03-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

Here in Washington DC...Probably everywhere else...The big topic is Immigration Reform. In this matter, it is abundantly clear that nobody has a handle on reality.

The people who want to put a fence up have obviously never been to the boarder. We New Mexicans know that nothing short of the Trillion dollars that we just spent in Iraq has a prayer of creating an unbreachable boarder between the US and Mexico. The only way to keep illegals out of the nation (even this would only keep most illegals out, not all of them) is to make it impossible for them to make money here and take away their incentive.

The people who just want to get the illegals out of the nation have not studied or considered work force economics. 12 million people have managed to fit themselves into the American economy in one way or another, and it stands to reason that even if they were all taken up in the Rapture...the only way to get them all out quickly...the American economy would take a massive hit. 12 million people is, for instance, about 15 cities the size of Albuquerque. That many people are not just people, they're needed people.

The people who want to make it felony to employ illegals need to think about the problems of #2 above, and a second massive problem, which is that the only way to make sure that everyone employed is legit (either as a legal resident, citizen, or a guest worker in whatever program is devised), is for everyone...that includes you and me and our kids... to have a worker id card with a bar code and a picture and a variety of invasions of our precious privacy. That project would be cheaper than building a fence by a long shot, but it's not a freebe, either monetarily or politically.

How much do we REALLY want to stop immigration? So far, I note, not enough for anyone to propose a solution that would actually work.

Vacation

2006-03-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

I'm off today for a week of family reunion, occasioned by my father's 80th birthday. We'll be having it at the River Road Unitarian Church, as he was on the building committee of that church in the mid 1960's, and its beauty is one of the proud achievements of his life. Using the wonders of computers, the internet, and all the nifty computer-ready forms available at the office supply store, I created name tags for the 50 guests, each with a graphic and color coded based on what part of my father's life the person came from. He's had a rich life. Besides his wife, children, and their families, all of whom will be present, his elder brother and a part of that family will be there, including a new-born great niece. Also, work friends, other Traffic Engineers, at least one neighbor going back 50 years, some current neighbors, and two friends made in the course of the political work he's done in his county since he retired. That's the way to have a good old age, I thought...be involved and keep making friends. It's something I plan to remember.

UU's and the Rapture

2006-03-21T03:06:00.000-07:00

If you didn't hear Garrison Keiller last weekend, spoofing UU's and everybody else with his description of a "rapture" which took the UU's and left a variety of religious and political figures "behind," check out this link to the script, the sound file, and a comment.

http://patrickmurfin.livejournal.com/13452.html

Quiet Day

2006-03-21T02:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to the first Clergy Quiet Day at the Norbertine Center, and it was a great blessing. In our opening songs, we were singing about "Fill Me Up, Lord,", and I was thinking, "Empty me Out, Lord!" A poem was shared that spoke to me:

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can squelch a fire.
Can douse the flames
almsot as surely
as a pail of water can. ("Fire" by Judy Brown)

All so true. And while at home there is dinner to start and a load of laundry to put in and fruit trees to prune, in this quiet space there is not much to do except watch the clouds and stare at the tree outside my window. Which is what I did for hours on end, and it was very good.

Feast Day at Laguna Pueblo

2006-03-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

My 15 and a half year old son and I went to the Feast Day at Laguna Pueblo today instead of churches and youth group. His girlfriend of 18 months (gulp!) is from the Laguna tribe, and we watched her dance, ate the traditional meal with friends of her family, browsed the booths, and, minus the Pendleton blankets that were keeping others warm, endured the blustery day. Ah, March in New Mexico!

Of all the unexpected ways that Kevin has enriched our lives, certainly this lovely girlfriend has been one of the best. (for all the anxieties it has also brought!). Aside from being a neat young woman and a joy to have around, she has made us, at least in part, a multi-cultural family.

Pueblo Feast Days are part religious ritual, part family reunion, and part small town fair.
I need to ask how the Laguna’s view their dance, but I know that at least some Pueblo Indians believe that they dance for the continuation of the world. So the non-tribe onlookers who are welcome (if they behave themselves) are not just invited, they are essential to the ritual. The dances are line dances, accompanied by drumbeat, and they include tribal members from the eldest to the pre-schoolers, dancing in age order, with the smallest children at the end, always attended by adults who help them keep their shoes tied and their costumes organized. "How did you learn these dances?" we asked Rachel, who never lived at the Pueblo. She doesn't remember. It's something she's always known, something you learn by doing, and something that she thinks she doesn't do very well, for lack of specific training. But I thought she was doing as well as anyone. Most of the dancers don't live at the Pueblo any more. And a few people dancing are not members of the Laguna tribe. (I learned this at lunch). They might be married to Laguna’s, or they might be members of other tribes who have some reason for honoring the Tribe's patron saint (Joseph), by dancing for him. These pagan dances for Catholic Saints is a scene not often seen in the world. In New Mexico's pueblos, the Catholic Church exists in peace with Native American Faith.

At last Fall's Feast Day, it was hot and bright, and Rachel, who inherited her amazing long dark hair and her almond eyes from her tribe and her light skin from an Anglo ancestor, had a sunburn for a week. And while she was one of the lighter skinned dancers of the tribe, she was not, by any means, the only one who showed multi-ethnic ancestry. Among the dancers were persons whose African American, Oriental, Irish, Spanish, and Anglo Ancestors all registered on their features. What a post-modern picture of humanity in this tiny town in New Mexico, I thought. Somebody ought to paint this, I thought, although taking pictures and sketching are two of the misbehaviors which will get you escorted away from the dances. I had to be content with the memory, and it's a good one.

Language of reverence

2006-03-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

I've been studying up on podcasting these past few days, since we're about to go into the podcasting business ourselves. I've been listening to my colleagues' sermons which are currently available. Many of the podcasters are our younger ministers; people whose names I've never heard and whose youthful voices suggest a GenX or GenY heritage. It's been a pleasure to hear my young colleagues; it's not something an old lady minister gets to do very often. (If you want to hear a few, go to the directory of UU Podcasters at: http://www.geocities.com/scarcrest/uu_podcasts.html)

Several sermons have discussed or alluded to the flurry of a few years ago about using a Language of Reverence in UU'ism. I'm a big fan of this movement, as I discovered in the 1990's that my assumptions about the faith and practices of my congregation were in error. Having come 10 years previous to a congregation that had always been Humanist and Atheist, but in which the younger people who comprised the search committee wanted to explore "spirituality", I had endured the slings and arrows that many young ministers endure when they accept such an invitation. In the end, we'd settled into a truce, where I sometimes mentioned God from the pulpit and nobody walked out, and they (most of them) were willing to use "spiritual" words in hymns and affirmations. Then I came down with cancer, and went abruptly on sick leave. I got tons of cards, which was wonderful; cards from members, cards from people in my old church, cards from colleagues and people in the community. I got a new respect for the healing power of cards. But the shocker was this: In a sizable minority of those cards the senders promised to pray for me. And a lot of those pray-ers came from my church. Some of them were people I had assumed were Atheists and Humanists, since they had belonged to the church for decades. oops. (But they'd never mentioned prayer before!) It was a somewhat prolonged but ultimately positive drama in my life, and I returned to ministry changed in a number of ways. One of them was that I wanted to check my assumptions about where people were theologically and "language" wise. I started experimenting with prayer, with longer meditation, with more specifically theological sermons, with suggesting that we give thanks before meals. I began telling them about my prayer. I didn't find any of this easy. As a born UU, I've never spent much time around languages of reverence or groups that routinely use them. I had to go "take lessons" from interfaith colleagues. I felt self conscious, "pious", and awkward. As a career veteran of the "spirituality" wars, I found that I had some PTSD to deal with from old battles...PTSD that was silencing even the most authentic and comfortable spirituality I possessed. It all felt very risky. Generally speaking, however, the response was positive. My church has grown, and I believe that it has more to offer more people than it did 2o years ago because of those risks. Now, when people light candles at sharing, they are likely to ask for the congregation's prayers. The Atheists and Humanists (and Buddhists) are still with us. It's clear that you don't have to believe in prayer or God or be sure of anything to be a part of the congregation. But we do use the language. And it has been a very good thing.

Starting Small Churches to Thrive

2006-03-17T13:06:00.000-07:00

One of the axioms of church-size theory (the idea that churches of different sizes are not simply larger and larger versions of the same "animal" but are completely different "critters" with very different characteristics) is that you can't kill a small church. (small being fewer than 50 adults and children present on an average Sunday.) Small churches, like the cats they are often compared to, seem to have nine lives. They also have an independent streak, and usually appear aloof to people who don't know them. But even the largest cat only gets so big; and it is actually quite rare for a cat to change itself into a dog...or even want to.

So, while our "cat" Fellowships usually stay alive for many, many years, very few of them are the thriving, vibrant religious communities that the towns they reside in need them to be, and often they are not the thriving, vibrant religious communities that their own members wish they were.

The many small congregations in our movement, stated in hope and promise, which have never managed to fulfill their potential in spite of all the work and good intentions of their members, has caused the UUA to stop supporting the formation of small groups and put its efforts into a vision of starting large churches which start with 300 of so people, skipping "cat" and "dog" and going straight to "Farm". Instead of independant cats which will never get over 20 pounds, the UUA wants to start a small farm, by procuring enough land, hiring a farmer, and supplying the plow. The first such farm (Pathways Church in the Dallas area) is struggling, but farms are not developed overnight, so we'll see. The second surch farm will have its first season next year. (Philadelphia).

I applaud the vision and courage of the people working on those projects, but none apply to New Mexico, where I am, where there's only one even medium sized city, which already has a large church. So that keeps me wondering how to help groups start in small towns that won't fall into the "cat church" syndromes.

Here's my idea. Instead of plunking a little cat out in SmallTownville, how about we try puppies?

Puppies take a lot of care at first and a good bit of looking after for the first year (7 years) of their life, but at the end of that time, they are not cats. They are dogs. And dog churches (usually called collies by the inventer of this metaphor, Lyle Schaller) are much more likely to be noticied, attractive, and therefore healthy and serving in their communities.

I've been involved in two new church starts in my career; one in a small town in South Carolina (which failed within the year, although I note that there's a church there 20 years later), and a church in suburban Albuquerque, which entered the Extension Program right away and has had a minister and a building for some years, but has failed to thrive in its booming neighborhood. In both cases, the groups were independant from the get go (goood training for cat-hood) The "help" supplied by the "mother church" was negligable in one case and confined to money and a bit of moral support in the other case.

What would the puppy model be like, let's say, in the growing rural developments east of Albuquerque? The group would begin as a subset of the mother church (embrio stage?), a neighborhood social group, and a covenant group, If this group wanted to proceed further, they would begin to offer Sunday programing, in a public place, led by a trained worship leader and using a video feed from Mother Church. These folks would continue to be members of Mother church, and the expenses of rental fees etc. would be absorbed by the church budget. (They would be a part of Mother Church's pledge drive, too, thus bypassing one of the most difficult "cat" problems which is that too many cats like to live on the cheap.) Ministerial services would be available to these folks when problems arose, when their was a death in the congregation, and for other rites of passage. Mother Church's RE director invite their RE teachers to trainings, supply materials, and help them troubleshoot their programs for children. Covenant Group leaders would use the same materials as were used in Mother Church. Freed of having to resort to secular speakers to fill the pulpit, the puppy congregation would be much less likely to As the growing puppy attracted new members to their site, those members would become members of the Mother Church. There might be some cases where the puppy graduated to adult dog status and went off on its own, but by that time it would be a sturdy group, large enough to own land and have its own professional leadership. Let's just say, in the best cases, 7 years. And in many cases, the puppy grows up to be such a small dog that it remains under the protection of Mother Church by choice...perhaps one of the "pack" of UU congregations which run together in a state like New Mexico, all (including Mother church) stronger, more visible, and better serving together than they could ever be apart.

A New Strategy for Extending Unitarian Universalism

2006-03-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

How to serve the UU's (there are a few!) in New Mexico's small towns? How to serve the potential UU's (there are even more of those!) in New Mexico's small towns? How to capitalize on the fact that many internet connected cultural creatives are heading with their cell phones and lap tops to smaller towns and rural areas to work away from the big city?

Even all these together only make, say, 25 people in towns like Portales, Roswell, Socorro, or Gallup. And a congregation of 25 is a struggle to maintain. It's just not big enough to provide good worship, children's programs, and spiritual growth.

But what if a large church like First Unitarian could gather its members in those areas around a big screen TV in a home or public meeting place. Those small groups could, under the direction of a trained worship leader, sing simple, unaccompanied songs if there was no piano, tell a story to their children, meditate, share, and take an offering, sing the children off to play or have an RE lesson, and then hear the morning's sermon, from the early service at First Unitarian, downloadedto someone's laptop computer. Week after week, (except for a few services a year which featured live speakers), this would be the format.

Now, these 25 people, instead of focusing on getting speakers week after week, could focus on good worship practices, community, RE, and spiritual growth. These members of First Unitarian/xtown would have ministerial services when deaths occurred or weddings needed to be celebrated, they would have worship leaders who could be helped to develop child dedication materials and other rituals, their youth would be connected to a larger group for, say, a weekend coming of age retreat or summer camp, their covenant group leaders would have an opportunity for training and use of materials from First Church, their bookkeeping would be taken care of, their children's RE teachers supported by our RE department (and their pledges supporting all of this, of course, but no amount of money can buy these services for 25 people, so it would be a very good deal for them.)

This would turn First Unitarian into a Multi Site Church. It would be a new experiment; it's barely even been talked about, much less tired in UU circles. And while it's the "in thing" in Evangelical circles at the moment, they are doing this on a much larger scale that we, here in New Mexico, would.

Your comments?

Global Warming

2006-03-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

The news about global warming and arctic melting has begun to be a steady drumbeat of anxiety in the back of my brain. Will civilization have time to muddle through this mess we've created with our addictions to energy and travel and stuff? What should I be doing, saying, suggesting, about this?

There are no easy answers, in part because this is clearly one of those problems where the facts are only evident in retrospect. Scientists can take guesses about what will happen next, but they are only guesses, and it's hard to make tough choices on the basis of guesses. That's where we've been for some years now, it seems to me; we know that what we're doing is damaging the ecosystem, but we don't know how much, or for how long we can get away with it, or who will be hurt. I believe that one thing fueling this sudden, unseemly greed on the part of those who can get away with it is a sense that they'd better do their getting while the getting is good, and that only wealth will bring a person in comfort through the coming crisis.

That's yet to be seen, of course. It may well be that none of us will get through the coming crisis comfortably, but the only ones who will survive with their spirits intact are the ones who have, not wealth, but a rich enough family, community, and inner life that they can quit running around so much and using so much stuff.

It may also be that the projections are sort of right but sort of wrong, like the population projections of the 1960's that had us all starved to death by 1980.

It may also be that the projections are sort of right but sort of wrong, in the other direction, and we'll discover the hard way that the tipping points of global warming are far lower or the effects far more devastating to us than we had imagined they would be. Some people think that has happened with CO2 in the thawing Tundra. That seems to be the origin of this month's anxiety.

It could be that there's going to be a lot of trouble and change but it won't mostly be here. It will be island nations and Africans and the people who have foolishly built their houses on sand at the seacoast who will suffer, and not Americans, or New Mexicans. Then we'll have hard ethical decisions to make as a people, and may very well gain the whole world and loose our souls in the process.

Tonight I'm going to plant my tomato seeds. A tomato plant is not as effective as a tree in harvesting co2 from the air but it's better than bark mulch, and the tomatoes I eat from my plants won't have to be trucked from California or Mexico. I've pumped up my bicycle tires. Perhaps there are a few errands I can do on two wheels instead of four, at least while I'm on sabbatical. And I find myself thinking very hard about whether I really need to go to GA this year. These are small, almost symbolic tweaks of a very energy consumptive lifestyle. I'm under no illusion that they're effective or sufficient, but that's all that is available to me at the moment.

Sabbatical Fun

2006-03-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

During my first Sabbatical, I studied Spanish, and among the benefits of that study was a sense that I was using a part of my brain that didn't otherwise get much exercise in the ordinary course of my ministry. A minister is necessarily focused on people, big pictures, long range plans, and the meanings of things, not on memorizing vocabulary or grammar. I really enjoyed a sojourn in that "concrete" territory.

Blogging seems to be offering me a similar change of brain-pace. I notice as I scroll through people's blogs, both UU and otherwise, that most people just grab a template and start writing, but I've spent, so far, at least three times as much energy on my template as I have on my writing. I figured out how to make links work, how to change the colors, and how to add toys, like the visit counter at the bottom of the right column, and, today, the word cloud at the top. This has involved me in learning elementary programming and allowed me to be the perfectionist that I am by nature but can't be in the rush of ministry.

I've had so much fun with this blog that I've started another one: A post-modern, feminist, agnostic, universalist adaptation of the book of Psalms. I'm planning to post a new psalm each day. (The writing of these, I hasten to add, was done over several years, several years ago. I had planned to review one each day in my morning quiet time; now I'm going to review and post. I realize that the Psalms are not ordinary fare for most UU's, but you can check them out if you want to! www.doubterpsalms.blogspot.com

It's been great fun!

UU's Visit Famous MegaChurches

2006-03-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

My colleagues, Kathleen Rolnez and Wayne Arneson from Cleveland, spent their sabbatical last Fall in search of transformative worship, and their blog of their travels offers some interesting ideas. For instance, at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, the offering is accompanied, not by music, but by a testimony of some sort.
I like this idea. Ever since we instituted the offering of change, and thereby invited everyone at worship to put money in the baskets, the offering has been much noisier and more distracted than before, and therefore, it's been harder to focus on the music. I've sometimes thought of just asking Alan to play a little something during the offering, and save the guest musicians for a time when people will be paying attention to them. This might be a better idea, as it is a lot easier to attend to words than music when distracted by the mechanics of the offering.

Here's another idea: at another church, regular after church tours were conducted by members of the congregation. Great idea! A very non-threatening way to get new folks together and give them some initial orientation, meet each other, and at least one guide!

Here's the link to the blog: http://www.wsuuc.org/blog/churches.html

Church Websites

2006-03-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

No church shopping today...my allergies drained all my extroverted energy. Although I had planned to go to St. Michaels, where I have several friends and feel very comfortable...I just didn't do it.

Instead, I've been surfing through church websites, and I've noticed a few things I want to remember to suggest for our website.

First of all, much as we love our Cottonwood tree, (and nobody loves it better than the one, me, who watered it all Winter!) it is not a very welcoming picture for the website. We need a picture of people with smiles walking on to our patio.

Secondly, I think we need staff pictures on the front page. I think that people trust people more than they trust words. And the fact that we have a female senior minister is still, to many of our first time guests, an amazing and wonderful thing.

Thirdly, lots of websites have a "What to expect if I'm new" section which covers what we cover about our service, adds how early to come if you are dropping off children, what to wear, that the service only lasts an hour, and what the service is like. Also that one can park in neighboring lots. As someone who is newly aware of how hard it is to take the plunge into a new church, I like this idea.

Multi Site Multi Venue Church

2006-03-11T19:39:00.000-07:00

I've been reading church websites today...specifically, websites of churches which are multi-venue (two worship services going on on the same property at the same time using a video feed-usually one is a traditional sanctuary service and one a video cafe) or mult-site churches using a video feed (or tepe). In all these situations, there's a worship leader at each site, leading the liturgy and the singing, but when it comes time for the message, on goes the tv screen and worshippers get either a live or taped version of the morning's readings and sermon.

So...if some people want to sip their starbucks and eat pastries (and toy with their blackberries) while listening to the sermon, they can do that in the video cafe. In one church, there was a venu especially for "life long Christians", where old fashioned hymns were the music of the morning. Iin that church, the "regular" worship had gone to contemporary music only.

If we can get our iministry project going (the audio is well on the way, and video is next) I can see all sorts of possibilities for this technology. Not only could our teens tune into the sermon from the privacy of their comfy den, and the parents of restless children or persons who can't sit for an hour see the service from the side lounges, but we could have our own cyber cafe in the Social Hall during the service the Forum doesn't use. And....we can imagine satellite groups of First UU'ers in Roswell, Portales, Gallup, Socorro, Moriarity, Grants, Clovis, Las Vegas. And we could sell videotapes to Fellowships to use when they can't get programming locally. And... how about a cybercafe on campus somewhere?

I found it all very exciting. There are websites such as http://www.multisiterevolution.com/, a book coming out next month, and some possible training opportunities. Amazing!

Abortion 3

2006-03-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

And what would I do about the problem of unwanted pregnancy?

First of all, I would mandate comprehensive sex education for every 9th grader...a program which gave students the knowledge and skills they need to postpone intercourse for some years and be safe and healthy when they do engage in it. Just like we all have a disaster plan for a terrorist attack we're likely to never need, so 9th graders need to know about all forms of birth control (including the fairly effective type approved by the Catholic Church). Included in that sex education would be symptoms of pregnancy and the importance of confirming a pregnancy quickly when one misses a period. We have every reason to believe that this alone would eliminate half of the unwanted pregnancies and abortions performed in this country.

Secondly I would balance society's interest in protecting human life with society's interest in protecting human freedom in something like the following way: An unwillingly pregnant woman can obtain an abortion up through the 12th week of pregnancy without giving a reason. Abortions would be performed on minors but their parents would be notified. Girls who feared abuse by parents would be offered the safety that all youth who fear abuse are offered. (which is not much, I realize, but there is no reason to give sexually active girls more protection from their parents than non-sexually active girls get.) The parents could not countermand the girl's decision to abort but could attempt to influence her decision. Between the 12th week of pregnancy and the age of viability (a changing target), a woman could only obtain an abortion by showing that the circumstances which caused her to initially accept her pregnancy had changed. (ie, a change in her health or serious fetal defects). After the age of viability, abortions could only be obtained in the most serious of circumstances; the discovery that the fetus is doing inalterable damage to the mother's health or is itself doomed to death or intractable pain. In other words; a woman has the right to decline to carry a fetus, but this right must be exercised within two months of her becoming pregnant, except in unusual and tragic circumstances.

One final note, In my opinion, the right to abortion is the right to decline to support an uninvited intruder in one's body. It is not the right to "do whatever one likes with one's body," which is absurd. This way of formulating the right to abortion has two implications. First of all, the right to abortion is the right to remove the intruder, not the right to kill. At this point in technology, that removal results in death, of course, and this is not to be glossed over. When the time comes that it is possible to save the lives of very young fetuses with fetal transplants to a willing donor, for instance, or to an artificial womb, I believe that the woman having an abortion must opt for those solutions. Secondly, I believe that it is cavalier to the point of immoral to deliberately conceive a new life and then discard it because it does not conform to exacting standards such as desired sex, blood type to give a family member a donation, just to name two current possibilities. I know of no way to make abortions of "disappointing" fetuses illegal without making all abortions illegal. This is where the moral force of churches and society must be exercised.

Abortion, Part 2

2006-03-09T09:07:00.000-07:00

Why is it so patently obvious that requiring a father to donate bone marrow to his dying five year old is a violation of his most precious human liberty (this has happened; in a court case about 10 years ago, and the child lost and presumably died) but not obvious that requiring a woman to share her body with a growing fetus for nine months is not a violation of her most precious human liberty? Firstly, because women have been getting pregnant and bearing babies since the beginning, but donor technology is quite new in the human repetoire. We take for granted that women "are supposed" to have babies. We assume that making a tissue or organ donation is "extraordinary". But in actuality, a pregnancy is nothing like giving blood or bone marrow. It's a life-changing event more akin to a kidney or (partial) liver donation.

The other reason that women are "supposed" to go through with unwanted pregnancies while no parent would ever be required to donate a kidney to their child, is that pregnancy is linked in our minds and hearts to sex, and unwanted pregnancy is mostly experienced by people who are not "supposed" to be having sex. So pregnancy is seen as a "bad girl's Just Desserts".

There are several problems with that theory. The first is that married women experience unwanted pregnancies, too. An abortion ban would force the mother of a year old baby to remain pregnant, at the cost of her health and ability to care for her baby. An abortion ban would force the 45 year old mother of teens and caregiver to her elderly parents, to go through a pregnancy and give birth. Such a woman will not feel she has the option to give up the baby for adoption.

The second problem with the theory of pregnancy as just deserts is that it took two to make the baby, but only one is being forced to make a significant sacrifice. The father in question may have to pay child support...though it's not likely he will actually do that. And as previously mentioned, he can not be asked for so much as a drop of his blood to keep the baby healthy.

The third problem is that legislating slavery as the punishment for sexual activity (married or unmarried) is ludicrous. We don't legislate any kind of slavery for any crime (which sex isn't). The only analogy that can be made in our society is the military draft.

When the nation is at risk, we draft young men to serve their nation. They have no choice about this; their lives are commandeered for the common good. The unwillingly drafted man may feel that he is serving a kind of slavery. However, he will be paid for his time and history suggests that if he is honored for his service, he will pick up his life and move on. (History also suggests that some men, if not honored for their service, will have mental health difficulties for the rest of their lives.)

There are some whose passion about avoiding the killing of fetuses is strong enough that they believe that the nation is at risk with the practice of abortion. Perhaps all unwillingly pregnant women should be "drafted" to serve their nation by carrying their pregnancy to term. They would be paid for their time, supported in their endeavor, honored for their sacrifice. What do you think?

Abortion Again

2006-03-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

The Governor of South Dakota said, as he signed a bill outlawing nearly all abortions, that fetuses are the most vulnerable life around and therefore he thinks that his state needs to protect it. He's been given those line by 30 years of rhetoric from Right to Lifers. It makes a very neat sentence, but it's only half of the equation. It's as if he said, "I feel the need to sign this bill because 2+2." If he said, that, we'd all say, "2+2= what? What's the other half of the equation?"

A fetus can not, at this stage of human knowledge, continue to live and grow without using another person's body. That is why it is vulnerable. And the other side of the equation is that when someone's very body is commandeered by another person, we call it slavery. If the Governor of North Dakota had given us the whole equation, he would have said, that because fetuses are vulnerable, he feels the need to legislate slavery.

Here's another class of vulnerable citizens; those who are dying because they need kidney and liver transplants. Like fetuses, they can only continue to live and thrive if they can have the use of someone else's body. To my mind, they are even more vulnerable than fetuses; not only because they are aware of their dying and are all too often leaving responsibilities, joys, and loves, they are more vulnerable because there is no chance that mandatory kidney and liver donations will be legislated in order to save their lives.

If you put both of these stories together, you get this. A woman who is unwillingly pregnant in North Dakota can (if courts go their way) be forced to donate her body to this growing fetus. She will, if she is a responsible person...or perhaps she will be forced by law to do this, too, cease to smoke or drink alcohol, watch her weight gain, loose her figure, go to repeated doctors appointments, endure morning sickness, take insulin if she needs it, go on bedrest if prescribed, deal with backaches, peeing in the middle of the night, high blood pressure, and eventually, labor and delivery, a natural occurrence, but one with no small amount of pain, danger, drama, and damage to her body. She will be required to go through this by law, to save the life of the fetus, and give birth to the baby. And if the baby is born needing so much as a drop of blood, neither she nor the baby's father can be forced by law to give it, even if the baby will die for the lack.

The reason the baby's father (or any other relative, including the mother) will never be forced to donate a part of their body, even an easily accessed and replaced part like blood or bone marrow to that baby is because in this nation, we value human freedom. And we understand that if one is not free to give or not give of one's own body, one is not free.

If abortion is murder, than mandatory motherhood is slavery. Most of us would decline to enslave another, even at the cost of our lives, and this would be a proper ethical decision. We can't use the bodies of others to save our lives, we must count on them to give freely of their most precious possession, their life, their body, their suffering. It makes us vulnerable to have to count on the love and goodness of others. There's nothing about a fetus which gives it more rights than a baby, child or adult.

[abortion rights]

Podcasting

2006-03-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Iministry group has just had it's first triumph; a couple of sermon CD's have been converted to sound files and posted on our website! If you go to WWW.uuabq.org, and click on sermons, you'll find a little icon for audio files. If you click on the link, you can hear the sermon (and in the case of the Sr. Lawrensa sermon, the abundant laughter of the congregation) through your computer. Step one of their very ambitious plans has been accomplished! Now...if you want to help with this project, give Dan Small a holler!

I don't often listen to recordings of myself preaching, and it was sobering to listen to these two sermons. I need to take the advice I give to nearly everyone who speaks from that pulpit and SLOW DOWN!

Church Shopping Revisited

2006-03-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

I did trundle myself off to a contemporary worship service yesterday. Their church band played, the ministers were dressed informally, and there was a lot of applause. It was clear that the announcements, sermon, and Communion service (first Sunday of the month...how quickly we forget!) were all the same as the traditional service.

It's a big, corporate-style church, and what makes it feel welcoming to newcomers...to everybody...is the pastor, who welcomes everyone at the beginning of the service with such evident joy and caring that it makes up for the fact that there are no name tags, yellow cups, invitations to coffee hour, instructions for how to join...all the stuff we think we have to do week after week to make people feel welcome. Exactly what a person would do who wanted to affiliate with that congregation, I'm not sure, but it's a growing, thriving church, so they are obviously doing a lot right, and I wonder about the power of that kind of heart-felt greeting. It must feel better than the same old announcements read week after week.

I don't like applause any better in someone else's church than I like it in mine. And I noticed that they were having the same difficulty making space for their band that we do. They're about to build a "band loft" to go with their Choir loft and dedicated organ space. We need to do that, too.

And once again, I was reminded of the spirit of adventure/raw courage it takes to go church shopping, and I'm appreciative of every person who has found their way to First Unitarian. Church Shopping is Hard Work!

Church Shopping

2006-03-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

One of the great joys of sabbaticals is it's opportunity to visit other congregations and see other clergy work. Ministry is a strange occupation in this matter; most people watch others do jobs similar to theirs all the time. I look forward to this opportunity.

So William and Kevin have gone off to First U, and I'm awaiting 11 am to go to the contemporary service at a neighborhood church where I know the pastor. I've never been to a contemporary style service before, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm also acutely aware of what hard work church shopping is. Will I fit in? Will the pastor I know be there? Will the message (it's the first Sunday of Lent, after all) be too far from my theology to be useful at all? It really would be easier to stay home! *** (pause to check this church's website)
My friend will be there. The message is likely to be challenging. I'm going for the style, the music, the experience. Following up on the Google leads, I discover that this church has user ratings from a variety of websites. My church doesn't, and I think it should. It would hardly be seemly for me to review my own church (hint hint).

Making Comments

2006-03-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm having trouble with this, and it's frustrating. I want there to be a little icon at the end of each post linking to the comment form, and I can't seem to get it. At the moment, if you want to comment, you have to click on "0 comments". There's a comment form at the end of that page.

Critical Incidents

2006-03-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

Ever since 9/11, when the heroism of the fire fighters burned my soul, I have thought that I should hone a talent which might be useful to persons in crisis, so that I too, might go where I was needed. I'll never be a fire fighter, I thought, but I am a decent listener, and people who have experienced trauma need listeners. Eventually I came across "Critical Incident Stress Management," a kind of emergency counseling protocol, taught in two day courses and the like, and which is supposed to help prevent Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Taking one of those courses has been on my to-do list for nearly five years now, and I periodically checked the web site to see if the courses they offered (usually in Baltimore) could ever coincide with a trip to see my family or another conference. They never did. I didn't exactly pursue this; for starters, there's a self-protective part of me that would like to continue to hide behind lack of training when disaster strikes and the call for volunteers goes out. But that's just an excuse. My work has several times put me in the place of listening while someone talks out their feelings about a traumatic experience, and I know that I can make do with the training I have. If the call came, I'd go. It would be best to get this specific training. Money and time got in the way.

During a sabbatical, one has time, so I started to think about this goal once again. My prayer has been for a productive sabbatical, however that might happen, and some would say that my prayer was answered. One casual inquiry of a friend produced the news that Presbyterian Hospital was holding just such a course in May for its employees, and there were enough openings that they'd consider having a non-employee join the group.

Some would call this syncronicity; I think of it as going with the flow; Taoist style. I have a friend who would, I think, call it a coincidence. "Coincidences happen," he says, with a twinkle in his eye, "But I find that when I pray, they happen more often." I don't have any way to process that thought; a God who makes it easy for me to take a little course but leaves the rest of the world in such a mess just doesn't compute. Still I have to agree; that's been my experience, too. It has also been my experience that following up on these striking coincidences/answers to prayer is a good thing.

So I sent in my fee; such a modest $30 that I will be forever beholden to use the certification I get for the good of my fellow human beings. I did it quickly so I wouldn't chicken out. And now two days in May are booked for this Sabbatical. Hopefully there will be no national disasters on which to practice what I learn.

What I've Learned about Blogs

2006-03-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

I have spent most of the afternoon surfing through the world of Blogging.

Blogs are basically personal websites which are set up to be interactive. They generally consist of posts and comments, with some personal information about the blogger, favorite links, and so on. But the heart of it all is the posts and the comments.

They are hosted by the internet biggies...Blogspot, for instance, which hosts this one is good old google. I think that we can trust them to keep our email addresses secret; they ask for it when you comment to keep the spam down.

So what I now need to make my sabbatical life complete is some comments! You comment by clicking on the little picture of a pencil, registering with Google, and commenting away. If you do that, you'll feel as hip as I do right now!

Christine

Multi Site Churches

2006-03-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of members of the iministry team are going to go to a media conference next month, and in the brochure was a workshop for "multi-site churches". I googled that today and got a plethora of sites; turns out that what I thought was my little idea for spreading UU'ism in New Mexico is the darling of Evangelical Mega churches. I suppose that that validates the idea, but I do so like being an original thinker!

There's lots of help available, although no on so far seems to be imagining multi site, lay lead groups. So perhaps there will be something for us to invent after all.

As an interesting sideline, this blogger had such utterly sensible comments about our local church fiasco, Calvery Chapel, that I signed up on his web site. That led to the question of RSS feeds...the newest in thing for getting updates from websites without having to browse your favorites. I'm trying that on my blog...if you click on "get a feed" in the link bar, you could get this blog automatically updated. (if I did everything right, that is...)

What a profound change all this is from the old "look it up in the encyclopedia" days!

Lent

2006-02-27T20:19:00.000-07:00

I realized some months ago that my Sabbatical will begin on Ash Wednesday...The first day of Lent. Lent is a period of preparation for Easter.

I'm not a big fan of Easter. There are some spiritual lessons available in the Christian story of the Resurrection, but overall, Easter is a struggle, and my taking a sabbatical over Easter is not an accident. But I do rather like Lent, and its sister season, Advent, and I've often undertaken projects, special meditations, and sometimes, fastings during those seasons. It's good to take a rest from one's usual addictions and to try new things for a defined period.

This Lent, my fast is going to be a fast from Computer Games. In "normal times" computer games are a source of relaxation for me. Not only do I get away from whatever I was thinking about when I play them, but I enjoy the feeling of mastery. When I play computer games, I feel in control of my world. This little habit takes more time out of my life than I wish it did. I'd really rather be quilting. Unfortunately, quilting is too often an exercise in letting things be out of control, so while I enjoy the results, the process isn't always a source of relaxation.

With a little less stress in my overall life, I think I will have less need for veging out in the world of Luxor, Suduku, Arcade Lines, and Troyis. I have bought a book of Suduku puzzles to do on paper and am looking forward to the very challenging Math puzzle in the daily paper. That should keep my mathematical mind exercised for the duration.

Sabbatical To-Be List

2006-02-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

My colleague Robert Fulgum wrote a lovely Christmas essay about turning his holiday "things to do" list into a holiday "Ways to Be" list. Looking at my sabbatical to do list, I think I had better do the same.

How do I want to be on this sabbatical? The words that come to minds are quiet, attentive, open, calm, appreciative, awaiting, contemplative.

I am struck by the protective gear that the Olympians are using; all manner of helmets and high-tech shiny, stremline suits and who knows what else. This gear, though often ugly, is made necessary by their high speed sports and carefully honed competitive edges.

My own life competes only with the clock and my expectations, but it has enough speed to it that I, too, have developed a bit of a hard shell to cope, and its that shell that I hope will soften in this four month break from "regular" work. The only way for the shell to soften is for me to slow down, calm down, and listen up.

Is my "To Do" list compatable with my "to be" list? That will be the challenge!

Sabbatical To-Do List

2006-02-23T19:34:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the things I plan to do this sabbatical

Spiritual Life

NM Spiritual Directors Meeting
Clergy Quiet Days in March, April, and May
Spiritual directors International Conference on Dream Work
Called Back to the Well Retreat
Pastor's Group in May and June

UU Networking

MDD UUMA Meeting April 21-22
MDD-NM Clergy Meeting May 31-June 2
GA June 19-24

Prepare for New Church Challenges

Spend a few days in Madison WI, to study how they do their third service, campus ministry, and TV stuff.
Go to several local services to observe "contemporary worship"
Take an on line course
Publish a blog
Visit Portales, Pagosa Springs, and perhaps Roswell and Gallup
Critical Incident stress management course
Look into getting a grant for this satellite church project

And....Work on the Absence of God book and check with Skinner House Books about publishing the Covenant Group Materials which Alicia and I have created over the past two years.

Not to mention the quilt, the garden, my father's 80th birthday party, and watching the birds....

Is that enough for four months? :)

Ready, Set, Go...

2006-02-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

2/22/06
One thing I've realized...it takes a sabbatical to plan a sabbatical. I can see that my first week of sabbatical is going to be spent making the plans and arrangements that I need to make to complete the sabbatical.

But I have my blog set up! Yeah!