Lionesses' Teeth

 [This is an edit of a message I originally gave at DUUC in 2013. See that post for links to information.]

         A Message Delivered to High Street

Unitarian Universalist Church 

May 10, 2026

           My contribution to Flower Communion is a freshly-plucked dandelion.  Taraxacum officinale.  We all recognize it in its omnipresence, as indestructible as love. 

          The dandelion is the cockroach of flora.  It existed long before our species rose up from the proverbial swamp and after we return to the dust they will continue to be here. 

The name “dandelion,” which I’d always assumed referred to the yellow mane of the flower and its seeming vanity, actually comes from the French dents de lion, “teeth of the lion,” and refers instead to the deeply serrated rosette of leaves that poke up from billions of lawns, in abandoned lots, between the cracks in concrete, in the clefts of mountain crags and skyscrapers, and sometimes tufting out of the useless chimneys of houses where no hearths have burned in decades.  They are perennial and rely on bees and flies to pollinate, and when they’re ready, the wind carries their seeds on tiny parachutes to new places.  Sometimes they fly as much as several hundred meters.  They do not need us at all.

          Dandelions are often used as a medicine, usually involved with blood, the liver, and gall bladder.  Its juices aids detoxification and bile flow, promotes lactation and the immune system, and helps reduce eczema and cough and asthma.  The root can be dried and ground up and added to coffee, like its close relative chicory, and the leaves are often delicious in salads (although I’ll admit I have to add a lot of butter to make them palatable).  And most of us are of an age when we have had dandelion wine.

          Had Jesus been born in, say, Kansas rather than in the Middle East, the Sermon on the Mount might have included the following: 

Consider the [dandelions,] how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 

          Now don’t mistake all this information for anything like love for the dandelion.  There is a deep, satisfying, bottom-of-the-gut joy that comes with yanking a 3 foot long dandelion root from my gardens.  Few things are as pleasurable as watching the beasts disappear under the deck of my lawnmower.  I do not love the dandelion.  I tolerate the dandelion.

          Because, try as I might to eradicate it, the dandelion remains as much a part of my life as a part of my landscape.  I cannot escape its existence.  I mow and weed and have even sprayed the lawns, and still they come back up.  That is their unique power. 

A story now, a contemporary one, about motherhood that serves to relate how people are like dandelions.  Our relationships with our mothers, with either parent actually, can be pleasant and problematic at best.  I had what I think was a pretty good relationship with my late mother and with my dad, secure at all times in the knowledge that, no matter what, they loved me and wanted nothing but the best for me.  Those among us who are mothers or parents I hope have that same assurance that they, too, love their children no matter what. 

          This is a newsstory from over a decade ago that adds a different, more complex concept to this topic.  This is a story of three girls, now three women, in Cleveland, the first of them abducted in 2001, the last of them in 2004, all three found alive and relatively healthy in the home of their kidnapper, Ariel Castro. 

          We can have only the barest inkling what Melissa Knight, Amanda Barry, and Gina DeJesus experienced in their decade of captivity.  We should be thankful for that.  Worse perhaps, we are even less capable of imagining what the now 19 year old daughter of Amanda Barry and Castro has experienced.  If she is fortunate she herself retains little memory of what her life to now has been. 

          There are so many things to be said about this situation, about Castro’s activities and what he hoped to accomplish; about the women’s years in captivity and in physical, emotional and sexual abuse; about how this situation happened in a neighborhood of a major American city and not in some Hills Have Eyes outback; about the unwillingness of police, despite multiple reports by neighbors, to investigate beyond the front door of Castro’s home; and most especially, there are things yet to say about his neighbor CharlesRamsay and his willingness to expose his own past—because in this brave new networked world there are no past sins that can’t be found—in order to do the right thing.   

          But what I’d like to talk about is Amanda Berry and her daughter.  And how what little we know suggests about motherhood and resilience.  The story as it’s come to us is that Ariel Castro, who worked as a bus driver for Cleveland Metro School District, left his home to eat at a local McDonald’s.  He did this regularly but this day was different. Castro had failed to lock the "big inside door", although the exterior storm door was bolted. Berry did not attempt to break through the outer door because. previously, he had tested the women by leaving the house partially unlocked and exits unsecured. If they attempted to escape, he beat them. But enough was different that Amanda Berry took the opportunity to scream as near the door as she could until someone responded.  Charles Ramsay did, and it’s a testament to his heroism that this man, who had partied with Castro, eaten BBQ with him, played music with him, didn’t say “It’s a domestic matter” and turn around. After listening to her story that she was being held against her will Ramsey kicked the bottom panel out of the door.  Berry, carrying her child, squeezed through the broken panel, hugged Ramsay, begged him to take her to his house to use his phone, and then called police.

          Some of us might routinely play a mental game with ourselves in which, if we were caught in a disaster and could save only one thing, what would it be.  To make it more interesting we often presume that there are no people or animals involved, to make it a specifically material question.  What thing would we save?  Amanda Berry did not have the luxury of pretending or of there being no person involved.  The material object she left with was her daughter.

           To put this decision in perspective, consider what myriad complications must have been involved over the past six years.  Berry was just under seventeen when she was abducted.  After years of sex with her abductor she is pregnant at twenty and delivers a daughter into the dark, airless, sunless existence she’s come to figure will be her future.  We don’t know if she wanted this girl or feared for her existence, born into the same situation she’d been held captive in, and it’s likely it was a combination of both sensations and any number of others.  She may have wanted to abort the fetus, although we have heard suggestions from DeJesus and Knight that Castro beat them when they were pregnant to spontaneously abort their pregnancies.  So what we are left to guess at is that either Amanda fought vigorously to have this child or that Ariel had a change of heart over this pregnancy and allowed it to be brought to term. 

          This girl, born into a situation her mother was abducted into, and raised only in the company of the other two abducted women and Castro—what can be going through her head?  At the time of her rescue she is six years old, she has known only these 4 people in her life.  Two of them are her parents.  One of them carried her out of her world into the unknown, into what she couldn’t possibly know.  So while we can’t know what Michelle, Gina or Amanda has gone through we can, with some certainty, know what Amanda’s daughter was experiencing: Absolute, unqualified, quaking fear.

            It seems to me, as an outsider looking in on parenthood, that this is one extreme part of what it means to be a mother:  To deliver your child into great uncertainty and, when the time comes, to help her escape into greater uncertainty.  But that is what you must do.  As a coda to this story, Jocelyn Berry, as near as I can find, is doing well for someone with this experience. Ariel Castro completed suicide a little over a month into his own captivity.

          It’s well known that among lions it’s the female, the lioness, who hunts and who is really the fiercer of the species so it may be that the distinctive feature about dandelions—their serrated leaves, the dents de lion—may more accurately be termed the dents de lioness.  Perhaps the natural reaction as mothers, as parents, even as proponents of religious liberalism, is to emulate the dandelion—stubbornly resistive to any attempt to root us out, to burn us out, and even to the natural tendency by entropy to crumble us from within. 

          Our message, the message of religious liberalism, the message of people who see great complexity to parenthood—that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that to treat anyone as less than the glorious being that he or she is is itself an evil, that children and the people we’re responsible for need safe food and safe water and safe places to live, and that these are not starry-eyed ideals but necessities—must be heard.  We must endure for these messages to be heard.  We must become ubiquitous and obnoxious, unwilling to be pressed from our perch.  We must be willing to grow quietly beside the more beautiful and cozened strawberry and rose and lily so to suck up some of their excess nutrient and water until we can elbow those more popular petals aside to take the place we’ve earned.  To endure as a faith and as a people we need to be as tough, as resilient, and as uncompromising as the common dandelion. 

 

 

You matter

 

WITNESSED IN MILWAUKEE

A little girl, handholding

Two possible mothers, sometimes lifted

By them off the street, shouting,

Louder and louder, “Black Lives Matter!”

Joyous, the way it ought to be shouted.

And a guy turning around, smiling,

Showing her his makeshift sign,

That reads, “You Matter!”

Street debate

 

DEBATE ON THE STREET DURING A MILWAUKEE PROTEST

Indignant, she
Demands of me, “Well,
Six years later, can you show me what you were afraid
Would come to pass?” I look around,
Seeing in the street moving beside us like foam on the river
Signs about children sepa
Rated from families and encaged; poor
Women in Texas traveling hundreds of miles
For a legal procedure; violence against
Any number of citizens whose only offense is
Being neither white nor straight nor having documents,
 
Finally at her and so many others who would put him right back, and I answer,
“No, I can’t show you anything at all.”

We will not be forgiven

 I want to focus on one paragraph in this essay: "These are desperate people who have been waiting for an opportunity to migrate for a long time, so it’s not clear whether that kind of messaging ['don't come to the US, stay and apply for asylum in the future in your home country'] actually resonates." 

When many of us voted for Joe Biden it was in the clear knowledge that, distinct from The Former Guy, he would be amenable to doing the correct, humane thing when it was pointed out his policies were harming people. I continue to believe this. At the very least, the policies mentioned in this article, Biden's sweeping aside building a wall and reuniting separated families, point at a recognition of the basic dignity of asylum seekers. 

But troubling elements remain. No matter how you phrase it, "reports of children in the facilities sleeping on gym mats with nothing but mylar blankets to keep them warm and not being permitted to go outside or take a shower for days at a time" is indefensible. We opposed it under trump. It is wrong no matter who it happens under.

I don't have a solution to what's happening on the border with Mexico. I don't know much about the region or its history, and I don't even speak Spanish. But I recognize wrong and separating families, whether it's done by our government, another government, even by desperate people hoping the sight of a lone child on a bus or with other kids will give that child a better chance at being accepted, is wrong. People in desperation to leave a place where they and their children are at risk will do desperate things. They can be forgiven their desparation. We can't allow their desperation to allow us to do wrong so we look like we are doing something. We will not be forgiven.

Jeremiad in a gentle voice

I've written in the past of the probability that future churches will need new, more secular hymns, and while this is too specific to be one of them, it is a very good one. It's a Jeremiad in a gentle voice, a reminder to our opponents that we love them and they believe better than they practice.

Evangelical Singer Calls Out Trump's Christian Supporters In Scathing New Song
Ed Mazza HuffPost
January 29, 2020

An evangelical Christian musician is calling out his fellow members of the faith for their widespread support of President Donald Trump in a new song titled: “Hymn For The 81%.”

“This song might ruffle some feathers, but maybe some feathers need to be ruffled,” Daniel Deitrich told Religion News Service, adding: 

Maybe some tables need to be turned over. Hear me on this, though: It is because I was taught to take the words of Jesus and the prophets seriously that I cannot stay silent.

The song’s title refers to the 81% of evangelicals who voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, they’ve remained one of his most consistent group of supporters despite the chasm between core biblical tenets and the president’s behavior and policies.

“Even after enacting deliberately cruel policies to rip families apart and put children in cages at the southern border, evangelical support is as fervent as ever,” Deitrich, who is listed as the pastor for arts and worship at South Bend City Church in Indiana, wrote on YouTube.

Deitrich also noted that he was raised on Christian values.

“I learned to take the words of Jesus seriously ― love God, love your neighbor, feed the hungry, fight for justice for the oppressed. I thought that things like love, kindness, gentleness, and self-control MATTERED,” he wrote. “I have been so confused and deeply saddened by the unflinching loyalty to a man who so clearly embodies the opposite of these values.”

Deitrich told RNS that while the song was a rebuke, it “comes from a deep well of love.”

Indeed, one line of the song is: “You said to love the lost, so I’m loving you now.” But the next line puts evangelical Christians who support Trump on notice:

You said speak the truth
I’m calling you out
Why don’t you live the words
That you put in my mouth

Deitrich said the song’s bridge originally was “an angry middle finger to the listener” that he found cathartic, but he toned it down in the final version.

“I remember gearing up for that angry bridge but being hit with a wave of sadness instead,” he told RNS. ”‘Come home, you taught me better than this’ came out. That’s the take in the finished recordin

The Red-Monster

I certainly wasn't his best friend. And although I knew him for a long time and we stayed in touch as well as we could, I couldn't call him a close friend. But he saw me, in his wife's words, as "a good shit." I would have said the same, and for a lot of us, that's about as good as it gets.

We were in grad school together, his first time and my second. He was part of what another friend described as "the Raymond Carver crew," writers in the 90s who felt the power of the word lay in saying things plainly, without flowers, without elaboration. Back then he only wrote fiction, so that when I found out years later he'd published a chapbook, I wondered when he'd started writing poetry.

He married, had kids, found steady work that was meaningful and often frustrating. If I hadn't kept in touch with him on Facebook, I wouldn't have known him if I'd passed him on the street. He went from a Marky Ramone shaggy mullet to a hairline rivaling Patrick Stewart's for brevity. When he died a couple weeks ago, it was a shock. He hadn't been sick, had stopped drinking a long time before, didn't even smoke or eat much fried food. I heard it was his heart and I like to think it surprised him too, so he didn't feel anything more than the snap of an artery.

He was the kind of good shit that, when a lot of us got together last Saturday to remember him, the words said more often than any others were, "I'm gonna miss him." We told a lot of stories about him, and I wrote this one down for his wife and kids. He might have told them, but maybe it's mine to tell.

This was back before I knew him, back when he was still drinking and living the sort of life he would write about. "I was in jail in St. Peter, on a DUI charge. The judge gave me a choice, I could stay in my cell during the day or go to college. I chose school because I'd been in cells before. There was a school in St. Peter but I couldn't afford that, and Mankato is about 12 miles south, and they accepted me.

"They took away my license and my car, so I had to bike the distance. I took classes every day so I didn't have to stay in my cell. It was dead winter, and there I was biking there every morning and back every afternoon. I did that my whole sentence. I was about 7 weeks in when I realized I must be getting something out of it."

Some don't need to ask

I was having lunch at New Paltz's Gay 90s Bistro with a friend who lived in the same community house I had. After, we noticed a mutual friend was working the grill in the kitchen and he called her out. She stood behind the counter and he said, "Give us a hug."

She leaned across and, dutifully, did so. Then she leaned over and pulled me into one of her own. I said,"Oh, I get one too?" She said, "Of course you do. And you, you don't need to ask."

Decades later that's something that sticks with me. That there are people who need to demand hugs and those of us who get them without asking. Donald Trump, we know from his own admissions, is one of the former. Barack Obama, as we have seen for a decade, is the latter.

We Were Never Meant to Survive

This is the text of a sermon I gave yesterday at my congregation. The title is taken from a line in the poem "A Litany of Survival" by Audre Lorde. If you were there, the bracketed sections were ones I excised in the interest of time.  

We Were Never 

Meant to Survive

A Sermon Delivered to Unitarian Church North October 7, 2018

          [To be a good sermon writer you need to pay attention to what happens around you and bend it to make sense in a sermon. To be a great sermon writer you just need to pay attention and write it down, whether it makes sense or not.]

          Friday morning, just after my wife left for work and I was settling in with a book, she called me to say, One of the cats got outside and there are a couple people in front of our house trying to change a tire. I popped my head out and let the cat inside and saw a pair of young women.  I said Hi and they said, Please, do you know anything about changing a tire, because we don’t. They were practically crying. I said, Yes, I do know how to change a tire, because that’s something my mother taught me many years ago, saying If you’re going to drive, you need to know how to do this. [Now, in a good sermon I would tell you that] I changed their tire and they went happily on their way and I’d say something about how we all need to help strangers in need and that would be that.

          But [I’m going for a great sermon, which means I need to tell you,] try as we might, we could not get that flat tire off. We just didn’t have the right tools to take the lugs off the flat. They called friends and came back later to fix it.

          Kinda anticlimactic. But what makes this worth telling you about is why they stopped at my place with the flat tire. They weren’t sure what kind of reception two early-20s Hispanic single mothers with a flat tire, a trunkful of their kids’ clothes, and the wrong tools on the street of a mostly-retired white neighborhood would get at 8 in the morning. Then, they said they saw this sign [holds up “We’re glad you’re our neighbor” sign] on our front lawn.

          We live in a nation—and probably a lot of you knew this already, and for some of you this may have always been the case—where we have to advertise our willingness to help strangers. In the last two years we’ve developed other, sometimes subtler (shows safety on shirt) ways, sometimes not (pulls out pink pussy hat) of showing strangers we’re on their side, or at least willing to listen to them.

          Fred Rogers famously said in an interview, When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

·        "Separations from their parents, especially in moments of extreme distress and displacement, has a very negative impact on a child’s wellbeing, mental health, and development…And I don't think that we want to be a society that does that to children." Dr. Lisa Fortuna, director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Boston Medical Center

There are a lot of scary things in the news nowadays, and a lot of it scares adults. One thing is called Zero Tolerance and it refers to the program put into practice by the current president and his administration to prosecute everyone entering the United States illegally. Now, this type of program isn’t new itself—it’s long been a staple of Republican and Democratic administrations that, when families entered the country illegally and were caught, they were detained or returned to their origin country or paroled into this country. But the difference is that they remained together throughout the ordeal. The Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy of separating parents and children, something very costly in time and money and considered by previous administrations as “unnecessarily harsh”, was begun earlier this year. Its stated purpose was providing a greater deterrent against people trying to enter the country illegally.

This sort of news leaves adults looking for the helpers too. You realize one day that If you can’t find the helpers, then you have to be the helper.

·        [“Separating children from their parents contradicts everything we stand for as pediatricians…So many of these parents are fleeing for their lives…So many of these children know no other adult than the parent who brought them here.” Dr. Colleen Kraft, president, American Academy of Pediatrics]

As we’re here in a Unitarian Universalist church I think we can count on everyone’s beliefs in the first and second UU principles: That is, there is inherent dignity in everyone and a commitment to justice and compassion in human relations. The Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy promotes neither. If anything, it promotes the idea that some people are more worthwhile than others, with immigrant children at the bottom of whatever list someone might create.

     It is, at bottom, an evil policy that does evil to the people least able to defend themselves.

·        “The food was often expired, the milk was spoiled, and we weren’t provided with snacks for our children between meals. When we saved food for snacks, it was taken from us and thrown out because of concerns about rats in the dorms. Children went to bed hungry. And we could get water between meals only by asking the officers. Sometimes they wouldn’t bring any. The water we did have made us sick… When our children were sick, we waited days for medical attention. When one mother whose daughter had asthma informed the officers that her child needed medical care, she was told that she should have thought about that before she came to the United States. Another mother asked for medical assistance for her son, but it never came. She was deported, and her son died just a few months later.” Anonymous woman at a family immigration center, New Mexico

Shame on them. Evil is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere, so much that we sometimes are blind to it. You know it when you see it. Evil is hurting other people or animals when you don’t need to. Evil is treating other creatures as if they don’t exist, or if they do exist, they don’t matter. Evil is treating other people like they’re means to an end. Evil is pretending they don’t have people who love them.

·         “The expectation [of officials in the Trump administration] was that the kids would go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, that the parents would get deported, and that no one would care.” Anonymous immigration official quoted by Jonathon Blitzer

As an example, those two girls I mentioned at the start, the one’s with the flat tire. Would it have been evil, given that I feel we all are connected whether we know it or not, not to have put out that sign that led them to believe they were safe if they stopped? I don’t know. But I can tell you it would have been evil for me to have that sign up and then to look out the window, see them struggling with their tire, and pretended they weren’t there. That would have been to pretend they weren’t us.

·        [“I was forced to flee my country because of violence and threats of violence against me and my family. When I was a teenager, my father and I witnessed a murder by local gang members. In 2005, my father was murdered for having testified. The gangs threatened me as well, but since the murder case got dropped, I was able to continue my life and found a job in law enforcement. However, several years later, they threatened to kill me too. That’s when I decided I had to leave and bring my son and my 16-year-old sister with me. If we had stayed, they could’ve killed us all.”  Anonymous woman at a family immigration center, New Mexico]

Evil is knowing this is happening to people, and when they tell us about it, to pretend maybe they’re not telling the truth, or worse, if they are telling the truth, that it doesn’t matter because they don’t look like us, they don’t sound like us, they don’t eat the same things we do, they don’t care about each other the way we do. It’s okay to separate them because, well, if they really loved their kids they never would have taken them on such a long, dangerous journey. They’re not like us.

Now you may think the “us” of Audre Lorde’s poem we read earlier includes us, and it does, but only if we use that second principle, justice and compassion. Compassion. Looking at situations or events as if we are living it too. For most of us, certainly for me, living on the shoreline is a good thing. I hear Lake Michigan in my dreams, see it even as I step out the front door for work. But this shoreline is metaphorical, it’s a line where on one side there is solid ground and on the other is deep, unfathomable unknown. To treat someone like he’s not us is evil. Because ultimately there is only us. Evil is pretending not to know it’s because immigrant parents love their children like we do that they were desperate enough to take them on such a long, dangerous journey.

·        [“There were people there who only spoke English, and they always said to us, ‘No touch, No touch’…You always had to be ‘an arm’s length’ from everyone. Un brazo de distancia. Un brazo de distancia.” Leidy Veliz, 9, from Guatemala. “No touch, no touch” is a phrase repeated by nearly every former child detainee]

·        "I couldn't hug my mom because the official didn't allow us to touch. Physical contact wasn't permitted…They took us to another cell, and we were talking there, whispering, because they didn't permit us to speak.to one another. They put ankle monitors on us and were going to drop us off at the bus stop. All I want is to live with my mom, go to school, get an education, and when tomorrow comes, be somebody…I know everything in life costs something. Nothing is easy. And whatever is easy isn't worth it." Alejandro, 13, on being reunited with his mother after 2 months separation

·         “Just take me back to jail. You’re not my mom anymore.” Jenri, 5, after being reunited with his mother Anita after a month’s separation

Evil is hearing these reactions from kids and pretending we don’t have anything to do with it. Or that there’s nothing we can do. Or that it just plain doesn’t matter.

     Evil, see, isn’t just doing something bad, it’s also not doing something when it’s possible for us to do. It’s dumping a kid’s lunch into the trash at school because he doesn’t have enough to pay for it. It’s delivering a pizza and seeing a woman with a black eye mouthing, Help me!, and not calling the police as soon as you’re able to. It’s seeing a guy on the street asking for your change, and even though you have some, not only pretending you don’t but pretending you don’t even see him. Evil is not doing anything when you could do anything.

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

Every once in a while, we get a glimpse of that peace and tranquility. That Anne Frank, one of a swiftly vanishing handful of people who could legitimately tell God that She had messed up mightily, could still say this about Hitler, a man whose policies killed so many people including Anne that we refer to him only by one name, like Voldemort, as if that will keep him from returning.

Hitler’s policies and practices were evil. But there were still helpers. People like Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who, after the family was arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland where all but Anne’s father died, returned to the hidden rooms and retrieved, among other things, Anne’s diary. I will share a secret with you. In spite of everything, while they did evil, the Germans were not evil. The Nazis, even when they were sifting through the ashes that had once been people, looking for gold teeth, were not evil. What they did was evil and what they believed was evil. But if our first principle is to mean anything, it means Nazis had dignity too.

There are evil acts, evil ideas, evil practices, and I am convinced that the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy is among them. But do I believe that anyone who takes a child away from his mother and father because of where they come from, from agents to supervisors to administrators to cabinet secretaries, is, in spite of everything, good at heart? Yes, I do. Does that mean I believe that Stephen Miller, who has argued most successfully for the implementation of Zero Tolerance and who has overseen its practice, is, in spite of everything, good at heart? Yes, I do. Do I believe that Donald Trump, in spite of everything, is good at heart? Yes, I do.

If our principles mean anything, they mean that we have compassion for the people we know are doing evil things, even if they don’t see it that way, and we afford them the dignity they deny others. Most of you know that I work with people who are dying, and you might be surprised at this, but in their last days or hours they don’t ask me where I think they’re going, either heaven or hell. I couldn’t answer that anyway. But the question they ask me is as hard to answer. They ask, in one way or another, if what they did in their lives was the right thing.

Boy, if that isn’t the hardest thing for anyone to answer. Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about the end of life. At the end of it all, we must face our parents and our spouse and our children and our friends and ask them, Did I do the right thing? Now, if those are the only people we ask, maybe we can say, Sure, for them I did the right thing. But we also have to turn to other people’s parents, other people’s spouses, other people’s children and the friends of strangers, and ask of them, Did I do the right thing?

This is maybe the best test of whether we have done the right thing, because helpers can answer, even if it’s only tentative, humble, or a whisper, I did the right thing. In the absence of helpers, in the face of someone hurting, us are the helpers. (Touch chest) Us. (Indicate congregation) Us. (Indicate the world)

Always be the helpers

I'm not generally one who reads advice columns, but this one, aimed at parents, nudged at me, making me want to share it.

Too often, it strikes me that the person writing in for advice is asking for something specific to him or her, a response to a problem that's unique to him and him alone. But this mother's plaint is common, and not just to parents. I struggle, too, with the question of how to effect optimism with friends and others without, as she puts it, "overloading" them.

Carvell Wallace puts it plainly: "To be a child in 2018 is to know that the adults have completely abdicated our collective responsibility to make a decent world for our kids." Game, set, and match. Abdicated is the polite way to put it; the truth is we have, as a species, gone out of our way to fuck this world up with a passion.

Her suggestion, taken from a now-famous Fred Rogers' quote, is spot-on: In order for our children to find the helpers, we must be he helpers. What good does it do them if we're all behaving like chickens with our heads lopped off or, worse, as if the issue doesn't matter? America claims it hates a bully, and goes out of its way to elect one. We say children are our future and are important to us, and defund and beggar the very schools and programs meant to help them grow into that future.  We insist school be a safe place for them, and offer nothing more than thoughts and prayers to keep guns out of them. 

Everyone knows kids aren't stupid and we all like to brag about how intelligent ours are, but then we behave as if they're not only dim but blind and deaf too. The note that little ones have big ears and eyes is so common it's trite, but it's not only their own parents they're listening and watching. It's what we mean by having compassion: When you're outside your home, act like there's a kid watching and mimicking you. I do this myself. I feel better for it. Because there often is one somewhere. And they will eventually treat me the same as they see me treating others 

We won't leave

There aren't too many people, at least not that I know of or have heard of, who are seriously considering leaving the country because of trump and his policies, but I speculate about it sometimes. In a time when humanitarian advances in voting rights, women's rights, abortion rights, immigrant rights, gay rights, trans~ rights, worker rights, minority religious rights, and the rights of nearly anyone who isn't white and wealthy and self-described Christian are under fire when not in downright retrograde, it's an exercise in both pleasant self-deception and potential self-defense to daydream about it. 

But I won't. I don't think many will. Most of us, I suspect, will take our cue from this drawing. Many Americans may follow a bully, some Americans may be bullies. But most Americans hate bullying and know the proper response to a bully is protecting the bullied. It's what the angels of our better nature demand. 

where the horror in Surabaya lies

This is a horrible event, and the horror goes beyond the targeting of people on their way to worship. The horror is that a family, including a 9 year old child, are the ones responsible for the horror.

For Americans, I suspect at least a part of the horror will be (perhaps should be) that the attack by an as-yet unnamed family on three Christian churches occurs on Mother's Day. While Indonesians celebrate Mother's Day in December, so the date isn't an intentional horror, Americans are wont to see every world event through our own lens. There may be several last-minute additions to church homilies mentioning the significance of the day in making their congregations more aware (read: afraid) of international terrorism.

But let's keep this in Indonesia, where the horror is enough without the symbolism. A family consisting of parents, sons in their late teens, and daughters ages 9 and 12, divided into three groups targeting three different churches, one Catholic, one Pentecostal, and a third that sounds like a generic Protestant congregation. That the family was Muslim, or at least saw themselves as Muslim (because many Muslims would argue that by doing such a thing the family gave in to apostasy), is probable since the Islamic State claims responsibility. And the targeting of a populous public space by suicide bombing is a well-known IS tactic, while researchers have noted the rise of intolerance by majority Muslims against other religions. 

But the horror, as I've suggested, lies in this otherwise bland statement in the BBC's report: Women "have become increasingly active in terrorist cells in Indonesia but this would be the first time children have been used."

Not discounting the mid-millenium Christian Children's Crusade, some of whose leaders may have been younger than their early teens, does the active use of children in violent anonymous attacks suggest a surety in the rightness of the groups' cause? Or a sense of desperation in the leadership encouraging them? 

a little hope

I have, as some might imagine, much to say about the burning dumpster fire which is the situation in Charlottesville, VA, and I will say it. But today, as I've been reacting and texting, I came across a short ad that fills me with hope.

I say an ad because it's a trailer for a BBC show. Amazing Humans, and the episode is subtitled "Every Child Deserves the Right to Play." It chronicles a group of people who had an idea to help, tried it, were absolutely stunned at the realization they had no clue how they were going to accomplish it, and discovered that being there is sometimes all the planning you need. Watch it.

Should the president be a role model?

Short answer: Absolutely.
Slightly longer answer: Abso-fucking-lutely.

Much longer answer: Since he's assumed office, Trump has gone out of his way to rudely respond to anyone registering the slightest grievance with his policies, his choices for officials, his use of his weekends, even the tweets with which he communicates with the country (and apparently with his staff, since he often announces new and different opinions daily).

But even within his large list of offensive tweets, it's understood that his most recent offensive message heralds a new low point, and probably a new difficulty for those Republicans foolish enough to continue trying to negotiate a channel by which they might actually govern.

In trying to defend his ever-increasing nastiness, his deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested Americans might be better off looking to God for behavior modeling than to the POTUS.

Setting aside that God's behavior, unlike Trump's, can't be articulated (some people get long, painful, lingering deaths, others quick ones; some places receive wave after wave of decimating environmental and economic disasters, others simply do not; there is no theology that explains that, only several suggesting we get used to it), there's also the important command, imperative to Christianity, that all adherents try their best to emulate Jesus. Trump claims and has had claimed for him that he is a Christian. Perhaps Huckabee Sanders can explain to us: What aspect of Christ's behavior is he modeling in this most recent tweet?

I don't want to be in charge

I've spent the week in The Thick visiting my dad at his nursing facility, and while I'm here my wife has been having difficulty dealing with the Tall Kid, our foster son. According to her, one of the things he's told her several times has been, "Well, Bobby lets us [whatever it might be he wants to do and she doesn't want him to]. He doesn't have an issue with it."

So naturally relationships between fathers and sons has been on my mind.

She's right when she suggests I'm inconsistent in disciplining him. This is a part of why I've never wanted kids: I can be quite consistent when I'm working, say, with teenage boys and girls because it's only for a number of hours a day, and then I go home and I don't have to care about them. When I'm home, I don't want to be in charge, I want to drink a couple beers and read a book and go to bed. In my defense, I knew going into this situation that could not be how things happened, but I didn't really think much about it.

But I can't be like my dad who, for all his plusses, was not much of a disciplinarian or involved in my day to day life when I was a kid. My mother was easily the primary fount of good and bad behavior, punishment and praise, in the lives of my sister and I. When she was disappointed or angry, or proud or happy, we were aware of it. She was a larger-than-life personality, a Mama Rose without the pathetic demands for attention or the murder accusation. I think I was, somewhere in the back of my brainpan, under the impression I could count on the same happening as a foster dad.

Since my mom died my dad has played a larger role in my life than ever before. One of the things he's done of which I'm proudest is to have been the priary caretaker for my mom the last decade and a half of her life. A favorite memory from those years is his gently tugging a scarf around her neck and making certain her shirt collar was comfortably inside the scarf, reminiscent of my own actions readying residents of group homes where I worked for winter walks. After his retirement as a banker, my dad spent several years volunteering at the same sort of group homes, often doing overnights, work he has since said he wished had been his career.

The Tall Kid lives for basketball and I am watching a WNBA game, part of my determination to watch as many games as I can because I want to appreciate his playing and I want to share that appreciation with him in his language. This is another difference between me and my dad, who never tried to be a part of my life outside (or, so far as I could see, inside) our home. I don't know this will make me a better dad than him, I don't think about it that way. I like to think, since I'm not his father, this will make a difference as the Tall Kid matures.

We Have a Kid

I think a month and a half break from publishing is long enough. During that time, much has happened. Trump's first hundred days have come and gone, numerous scandals relating to said 100 days and earlier have been discovered or uncovered, members of a family were murdered during an argument between a woman and her "bully[ing,] ticking time bomb" of a husband who nonetheless had access to a gun, people were killed by van and knife in London, and a lot of people naturally were killed between May 1 and May 31 around the world in various terrorist attacks. And during this period, we finally took in a foster son.

It was a long process, begun last year. Since, over the years, we have housed up many of my homeless and traveling friends, my wife said, "I think I'm getting the hang of this. Maybe we can have a kid come live with us." We'd talked for years, mostly in the theoretical language we appreciate, of having a teen come to live with us, but now we decided we had crossed the Rubicon between theory and practice and were ready to give ourselves in place of lectures or a little charity. So we began what was, in retrospect, not so bad a process but at the time seemed a huge burden to carry, essentially explaining the way we'd decided to live our lives in such a way that people for whom anything much outside the lines was a line too far (and they begrudged us that, oh yes, they did, keeping us on tenterhooks down to the wire as to whether they would even accept us or not) to be satisfied that we would not assault or eat any teenage children they threw our way. We knew, from the beginning, we would prefer teens as that age is very hard to place, but is the age group with which we were most comfortable.

The Tall Kid is a good kid, 6'4" of opportunity and issues. Like any of us are. Without getting into his history, I will say he's in foster care for the first time, having been placed with different members of his family and being rejected in each case. He behaves well around home, and while there are missteps, they aren't major ones (well, except using my wife's still-working credit card information on her former phone he uses to order sneakers, but we caught that fast and dealt quickly with it. One of the major elements I insist on is that, once a situation has been corrected, that's the last he hears about it, unless he does it again); it's been different at school. There, he's an authority-confronting, teacher-defying frequent user of their In-School Suspension Room, and the day before the end of school his principal called to tell me he had worn out his welcome there and was now suspended for the rest of the school year (which meant, of course, a day and a half).

We are hoping he makes the changes he wants to over the summer before starting high school. We suspect many of the problems at school are attributible to his past behavior and the fact, as someone new to the foster system, and as a Tall Black Kid, he's a focus of attention. At least high school offers  a place for new behaviors. I'm not so naive to assue he suddenly straightens up and flies right. I remember my own teens too well. But I am hoping the new place makes him want to be a different, better person.

I'm reading a book that's 20 years out of date, but is nonetheless one I'm learning a lot from: A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, by Patricia Hersch. If nothing else, it gives me an insight into the way his parents might have grown up and why they treated him in the ways they did. Color me hopeful.

To recognize the fragility in each of us

In my last post I made reference to a developing story out of Oklahoma, that of Ron Robinson, a UU minister outside Tulsa. I say "developing" because there have been no reports since his initial arrest on March 30, and I can't imagine there haven't been additional developments.

I don't know him or heard of him, but friends of mine have either been mentored by him or worked with him on projects. His past accomplishments are impressive: co-founder of a UU congregation, university professor, youth pastor, ordained minister, director of a local foundation and its food pantry. Would that all of us had this sort of spirit.

Almost hidden in that list is a damning title: youth pastor. Because Ron Robinson has been arrested on "federal charges for distribution or receipt of child pornography and possession of and access with intent to view child pornography." Hence my certainty there have been more developments since his arrest. 

Now, I'm not going to talk about his guilt or innocence because aside from the stuff noted above, I don't know anything about it. But I've seen enough Law & Order: SVU episodes to know that there is a high bar for prosecutors to meet to start a potentially costly federal case while the air is full of states and the government crying austerity. So I'm presuming at least some guilt. 

I don't have any experience or insight to bring to Robinson's case. What I have mostly is a couple questions. Why do so many people later charged with child endangerment of any kind seek positions in the clergy? And what is the UU response to it happening in our denomination?

That clerical malfeasance includes sexual abuse of kids isn't new. Like teachers, foster parents, police, social workers, every position that has some measure of authority over them, there are many, many examples among religious leaders of every faith of taking advantage of children in some way. And while prosecution of these cases may be new, it's certain that the practice is very old, in some faiths may even be codified. (This link is included, not for its authority, but for its examples from multiple faiths.) But some practices continue now. Not only, of course, in Catholicism, but among  Protestant groups, among Jews, Hindus, Buddhists even among Animists. 

Religious leaders are perhaps most susceptible to the delusion that their position of power is a role assigned by God and that, if they want something, God must want it too. I don't think it's putting too fine a point on it that, while I'm sure few contemporary religious abusers would put this in such a straightforward way, what it often comes down to is they feel authorized, by their position and respect and the tendency of congregations and individuals to defer to them, to rationalize their abusive behavior (or in the case of child porn, their viewing someone else getting away with it) as being something they have the imprimatur of the group to do (or in the case of viewers, the thrill of watching someone else do it). You feel a powerful tingle when you get away with something you know you shouldn't do; I've felt that with theft. 

So we know it happens. What do UUs do when it happens among us?

The first thing, obviously, is to remove the abuser from that position, and that was done. As I understand the news, Robinson was brought to the cops' attention by his use of a website they were monitoring, but I like to think anyone who caught wind of his behavior among his congregation would have reported him. I don't know if I would have talked with him first. 

But I think the attitude displayed by friends and co-workers of Robinson, The UU Missional Cohort, is one we should mimic. They remain dismayed, they grieve. And they gather and weep and recognize the fragility in each of us. They assert that "Missio Dei—The Mission of God—even for those of us who quibble about the definition of 'God,' is bigger than any one person, or movement, or religion...The mission of oneness, that we are here to serve each other, to create a Beloved Community that is nothing less than a heaven on earth...We believe in a larger truth—that we are here to abet and witness to the wonder of existence, that we are here to serve each other and to realize Shalom—that each and every one of us is a minister, a servant of that creative, sustaining and transformative power." That Shalom, that Beloved Community, is, must be inclusive even of people like Ron Robinson. 

Whether we recognize the Ron Robinson in ourselves or in others, my time teaching in prisons taught me that he is our brother, our dad, our cousin, our friend. He's transgressed the law of the tribe and he'll be punished for it. If hell is separation from God, then a part of that is separation from your tribe. But once he has served his sentence, we must let him, and others like him, back in. With watching, with certain agreements, with monitoring; but if he will do that then we have to do that. We are a justice-seeking people, and it is just to accept one another's deep criminal flaws and behave, not as if those flaws don't matter, but because criminally flawed is still human. 

258 candles-days 137-142

At the risk of inappropriate partisanship, the sort this project is meant to reflect against, I want to celebrate this project. Since the early 90s, Spencer Tunick has focused on large-scale nude photos, explaining "individuals en masse, without their clothing, grouped together, metamorphose into a new shape. The bodies extend into and upon the landscape like a substance." It's in this light that he's gathered one hundred women in a field adjacent to the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland before the start of today's Republican National Convention as part of his project, "Everything She Says Means Everything." What Tunick does by massing dozens and sometimes hundreds of naked bodies in juxtaposition to landscapes and architecture is to decentralize the nude body into a feature rather than a focus. It's possible to differentiate between bodies in a Tunick photo, to tell this one is male, this one is tattooed, this one pregnant, this one old, but it takes time and effort. The effect is like looking at photographs of large herds of deer or stones on a beach. The subject loses its specificity and thus, in the case of nude humans, our usual reasons for looking at them. In this instance, Tunick says his impetus for locating the shoot at the RNC "is for my daughters, for their future, for them not to grow up in a society with hate, for them to grow up in a world with less violence toward women and more opportunities for them."