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. 

another list that tears my heart

I am becoming tired of writing about these things, these public murders that lacerate our discourse and give a lie to the belief that we can improve and we can love one another. This short essay, by Charles Pierce, appearing in the online version of a magazine I've long presumed irrelevant, says something I wish I could. I can only grieve. Again.

rethinking church

This past Sunday, for my solstice service, I had the largest audience at both boys' and girls' facilities that I've had at either before--seven at each--but I'm troubled. Two of the boys were--well, staff called them disrespectful, but I think it was more like I wasn't giving them what they expected or wanted. I'm not sure they could have articulated what either was, although both made references to "real church" and said things that smacked of traditional black worship: "Can the congregation give me an amen?" "I feel the spirit coming into me. I gotta preach." I don't think either wanted a more traditional worship service, although one asked me point-blank, "Why aren't you standing up and yelling?" becuase neither was a churchgoer in their lives outside, but that they were reacting to uncertainty by reaching for elements they had experienced.

The girls were more respectful, by which I mean more polite, but they were coloring or scribbling and occasionally chatting quietly to one another throughout the service, which wasn't distracting but did get me wondering what they were getting from those activities they were not getting from the service. (Possible answer for both: participation?) What this experience has led me to is a realization that my services need a major restructuring.

I've already reduced my order to one that is as listener-friendly and participatory as I thought necessary, but one that remains recognizable as a contemporary Christian or UU service: welcome, candle lighting, hymn, reading, message, silence for prayer or meditation, benediction (with the replacement of conversation for other prayers or hymns). On its own without dialogue the service lasts about twenty minutes, which is probably as long as I can expect any of them to sit as possible. But my point is it remains recognizable, which may be both a strength and a failure.

I've often advocated for a radical restructuring of service elements, and even with all my study and contemplation I still have a hard time imagining what that would look like without those basic elements. I've thought about replacing the message or the hymn or both with a mashup like I've done in the past, but I'm not entirely convinced it's worth the effort (although I already spend a couple hours writing my message and searching for an appropriate song and reading, so I don't think I'd be losing anything). But I'm also loathe to make another element that's just like watching TV. True, I can still have dialogue, and there would be more time for it if I reduced both the reading and message to a single three to four minute song. And true, my reading of Steven Johnson would suggest that my reaction against it being "just like watching TV" is heavily influenced by the culture and the generation I grew up in, and may not take their experiences with learning into account. After all, when I teach I use visuals to make a point or an idea better understood. Why should I assume that spiritual ideas can only be understood through words?

enlightenment is dog piss

"Being a community" is thinking small. Our ultimate goals and purpose cannot simply be about ourselves. Unitarian Universalists, like members of every other religion, are trying to change the world by encouraging people to live a different way. By word and by deed, Unitarian Universalists are trying to change people. It is time for us to acknowledge and proclaim this, and to see that building a religious community is but a means to that larger end...

What I am talking about is related to the "missional" trend in Unitarian Universalism, in which people are committing themselves to living out our values in real, embodied, particular ways in specific communities, "to love the hell out of the world"...Our purpose is to cultivate people who can feel such passion...

The contemporary understanding of Unitarian Universalism is in truth a utopian and demanding vision of community: we are trying to gather not the community that is, but the community that ought to be...The religious community to be built...[is] one that deliberately includes the formerly excluded. Our goal became to build on the experience of...people who...realized that they could be themselves in this church. It followed that everyone should have that experience: the historically marginalized and oppressed, the disabled, the mentally ill, the chemically sensitive. Even those on the margins of traditional religious community--the children--are to be brought to the center...

Inclusion has been our goal. But inclusion is about "bringing in." We should now be thinking about "going out." Now we should turn ourselves inside out to turn the world upside down.

--From "Religious Community is Not Enough" by Tom Schade in the Winter 2013 issue of UUWorld

We must turn ourselves inside out to turn the world upside down. That is, and should be, a frightening proposition. I know I'm scared. I'm scared shitless of it. I've been turning inside out the past two years (at least) and all it's brought me thus far is depression and frustration. Sometimes I see Something, Something That Is I miss and most people miss, and it's a great moment. And then the crushing reality of How Things Are--the need to make money just to live, the fact that I'm in my 50s and my time left on the earth is finite and growing smaller by the minute, and the overwhelming  effort of work like that (and the fact that it pays no money)--overtakes it and leaves me eating ice cream in the middle of the night because I need to get numb and I don't want to get drunk.

But I keep returning to it, I keep turning myself inside out because I know that it's work worth doing, maybe the only work worth doing. The Real Work Gary Snyder called it. It's tough to admit to myself I want to turn the world upside down. I don't want to rock the boat. I want people to like me. I ought to just keep my head down and get along, I got my own shit to worry about. Paying the mortgage, keeping the house warm in the winter, getting the smell of dog piss out of the carpet. There's nothing more crushing when I'm trying to meditate and get myself together than the ripe, fishy reek of dog piss.

But when I'm honest with myself that's what I want to do. Turn the world upside down. At least one small part of it, the part I'm in contact with. It's a tiny, tiny part but the recognition I came to yesterday was that working at the microcosmic level is where the real action's at. It's where real change can occur. I haven't a clue how or what the change looks like. But change is needed and it's already begun with me. And that's horrible because what it does is open my eyes to injustice and wrong all around me and know there's a better way to be. When I was in Montreal in sesshin I spoke with the abbot one day and said, "I think I've made it, I've become enlightened." And he appraised me and looked really sad and said, "I'm so sorry."

That's where the depression and frustration and anger come from, this open-eyed, frank regard of the world as it is and how it ought to be and how wide the margins between those posts are. And how much work that is and how little time I have left and how can I find meaningful work that pays me enough to help us live on and GODDAMMIT! I can still smell dog piss.

In my best moments I know that smell of dog piss keeps me grounded but it also distracts me. My frank admission is that I know I have gifts and the urge to share them and I know how--or at least imagine some of the ways--but I'm either too timid or cowardly or caught up in my own shit to take whatever the next step may be. Some days I imagine the next step is to bake bread and take it to places where the homeless gather and share it. Some days it's to just sit down in the sun and meditate.
Some days it's to visit friends. The issue becomes recognizing all those things and not acting on any of them because it's a lot easier to surf websites while waiting for the vinegar I've soaked into the carpet to work. Turning myself inside out has led me to falling into a First World Problem: I've got the shits and I'm faced with two dozen different remedies. I know better than to think someone will come along and say, "This one," or to think that's what I want. But the varying claims and prices and dosages keep me occupied until suddenly I have to go again. I waddle off to the public toilet thinking, "Next time I'll pick one."

bringing peace to babylon

Here's my vision: Unitarian Universalism accepts a future as a tribal congregation and pioneers such a future by basing its identity on that. I envision a temple-tent with the best elements of the CALM tent at Rainbow Gatherings, thick rugs and pillows, incense, chimes, backrubs and massage. Constant music with a spiritual theme: Matisyahu, kd lang, Ray Lynch, Enigma, Sleater-Kinney, Van Morrison.  Books and other literature would be available for borrowing or for reading there.  Someone would be  available in the tent for 24 hours a day, one of two or three ministers whose job is essentially to be a presence.  Each morning, noon, and evening one would conduct a ritual (and these would be different each time, sometimes Christian, sometimes Muslim, sometimes pagan, sometimes Buddhist), and each day there would be a time set aside for guided community dialogue on a question noted on a chalkboard in front of the tent.  This tent would appear at Gatherings, Phish concerts, hobo camps, festivals, occupy events, protests:  anywhere people gather for the purpose of being together. Each person would be given something with the Unitarian Universalist Association's website address on it so they could follow up by visiting and possibly joining a local congregation wherever they settle.

Here's the hard part.  The UUA would have to fund this entirely--the cost of gas and trucking the tent to all these events around the country--as well as paying a stipend to the ministers (and yes, I envision myself as being among them) who would travel with the tent.  This is hard because of two reasons:  we don't have a tradition of missionary activity and so there is little experience to fall back on (on the other hand it means there is no tradition there against which we would need to struggle); and because most congregations, who would see no membership benefit to themselves, would balk at paying to fund this project (many already balk at the idea of paying dues to a national organization whose sole existence, in their eyes, is to collect dues).

Money will always be tight and will always be an issue.  But here's the hardest part:  these people whose experience will have been through Gatherings and such will expect the same type of experience at the local level.  In early Christian, Rasta, and Rainbow Family terms, it's bringing peace to Babylon.  Local congregations will have to learn to accept these folks, fresh off the road and smelly and dirty and sweaty who will come with their dogs and their packs and their ganja and who won't be much interested in UU history as in what UU says about them and the world today, who will come for a meal and may stay a week in the community, living in the park or sleeping on someone's couch, and may take off halfway through the service and head for the freeway with their thumbs out. But the first group will tell another group and they will tell another group.  And they will come, not all at once and not at first.  But they will come.  Their inclusion will force us away from a safe, middle class, suburban church and back into something dangerous in the best way: a fellowship made up of real experiences, few of which will be exactly alike.  I see this as the future of Unitarian Universalism.

the pastor of porn

I rarely talk on this site about personal things going on in my life, primarily because I don't think that's the business of or of interest to most readers.  Having said that, it has been a hard two years since my last full time employment, and this past week I've stepped up my applications to places that aren't in my fields.

One of these has been a place closer in on the hub, in the river town Hudson, and around the corner from one of my favorite libraries.  It's called Left of Center, and it's one of those remnants of the looser 70s and early 90s, a store that specializes in sex toys, printed and video porn, pipes and other smoking accessories, lighters, gambling equipment, and lingerie.  I'm secretly hoping, although the guy I spoke with told me they aren't hiring currently, that I'll get a call from them.  This is the sort of place I'm comfortable in and with whose people, secretive and anonymous as they often are, I'm comfortable. 

My role as a minister, albeit part time, is featured prominently on my resume, and in my imagination it's this that would encourage the owner to hire me.  What better argument at contentious zoning and ordinance meetings than that the store is so safe it has a minister working at it?  I've even played around with titles I might use in relation to there:  "Pastor of Porn;" "Preacher of Paraphernalia;" "Hierophant of Hemp;" "Lay Clergy."  (As an interesting aside, I've typed "pastor of porn" into Google Images and much of its returns (NSFW) are mugshots of preachers arrested for child pornography and publicity shots of Ron Jeremy, who famously traveled the country debating Ron Gross of Fireproof Ministries, as well as the usual crotch shots. And yes, I'm aware the image I use uptop is from XXXchurch.com, whose message is diametrically opposed to my own, but the image is too good, and too right, not to use.)

So I recognize, and wouldn't be opposed to, my being used in that way.  But it's also a valuable way to be with the people I see as my primary congregation, the people who aren't covered by most preachers:  lowlifes, addicts, the lonely, the desperate, the fearful.  My wife pointed out to me that by working outside my teaching or ministerial roles I could be ministering to people without their even knowing it, and that's exactly where I hope my road takes me.  So if you're of a mind to, pray or think good thoughts for me to find full time employment at the porn shop.

what might save u(u)s

 “What Might Save Us”

            A moment first about my background which has a lot to do with the direction my suggestions would take our movement.  I spent the last years of the 1980s homeless, partly by choice—I could have returned to my parents’ home at any time, and sometimes did when things were really tough, but preferred to live on the road and for a short while on the streets—and during that period I noticed two important things concerning religion.

            The first was that the people who were kindest and most willing to be with me, besides other homeless people, were adherents of fringe religions.  Christian fundamentalists, Hare Krishna members, Santerians, followers of Sri Chinmoy and G.I. Gurdjieff, Buddhists, and people who never told me what their religion was beyond helping other people, often fed and clothed and housed me, rarely asking for anything more than my attention in return.  They lived their spirituality as a daily practice and when they worshipped they made a joyful noise and moved a lot and then had a huge meal afterward.  They rarely missed the opportunity to eattogether.  I never asked but each one probably would have described him or herself as a minister or priest in the faith, living it out by action rather than by sermonizing.

            Secondly, nearly all of them were working poor.  Most of them rented apartments or trailers or property, and the few who did own their own home tended to farm (as nearly all the Santerians did) or owned it in common (as the Hare Krishnas and Gurdjieffians did).  The individuals with the least to spare often shared food and clothes and sometimes money with me.  I am aware that as a white man I am presumed less dangerous than others, but I am also an able-bodied white man in good condition, and while some people asked for work in return for what they gave me—a quid pro quo I offered—most simply helped me out with no thought of recompense, and if I mentioned it would say, “Help the next person you see.”

            One large reason for the dramatic drop in Universalism’s numbers, and in the numbers of Unitarian Universalistsin the recent past, has to do with greater acceptance by other, more mainstreamdenominations of the bulwark we built our movement around.  While it isn’t a platform of most denominations, ask anyone attending any mainstream (and many evangelical) church services if the people they know or children in other parts of the world or victims of terrorism or famine or natural disasters will be saved and the answer, especially as the question becomes more specific, will be “yes.”  This has been called the reason for the failure of Universalism but it may in fact be its greatest success. 

That isn’t to suggest we need to simplify our message or terminology.  I am an elitist of the first order from way back.  At my first UU service at Mahtomedi many years ago, I heard the words “eschatological” and “Jungian” spoken by then-minister Krista Wolf and said to myself, “I’m home!”  But in his book Letting Go, Roy Phillips writes about the divide between religion and religious education as uneasiness, as lacking a center.  It “hurts religion to associate with the kind of education that functions primarily as a way of adding to a person’s accumulating stock of information and concepts.  Religion gets to be a matter of ideas about religion rather than the living of religion.”[1]  This is probably where Unitarian Universalists sin greatest and most often, and probably the aspect we are least willing to change.  We tend to be lifelong learners and often mistake worship for an opportunity to learn something new rather than to celebrate something, even if it’s our own community.  Even I’m put off by the number of services I’ve attended (and that I’ve written) that are better described as public lectures than as sermons.  Many ministers, myself included, pad our sermons with minutia.  At least a part of this is the imposed need, following our Puritan past and our more recent attempts at being a G.I. Bill spirituality, for twenty minute sermons that seek to integrate “the humanities and religion with pragmatic debates about politics, social issues, and psychology…Unitarian [Universalism] offer[s] the opportunity to join a high-achievement, thinking elite.”[2]

Much of this is a response to the general settling over the fifty years since merger.  Given the decline in Universalism prior to the merger, the lesson we learned was that the focus ought to be more on the mind than on the heart.  The Unitarians definitely won the day in terms of their primarily intellectual view both of liberal religion and of worship.  And while “Religion for Smart People” is an accurate description of Unitarian Universalism, that slogan wouldn’t gain many adherents.  Again, that’s not to say our faith can’t be smart or that we can’t talk smartly about it.  But maybe we’re going about the conversation wrong.

A related issue probably responsible for our damnation by other denominations as a perpetually suburban congregation is our discomfort talking about money.  It is a very middle class attitude, this idea that everyone is giving his fair share and so to ask for more is to overtax her.  This is reflected in our centralization of governance, both local and national—some might argue it’s a repudiation of our polity history—for which a portion of a congregation’s tithes should go to pay for national and regional resources.  This is not a bad thing.  Too many small congregations find it too easy to see themselves as alone in a vast sea of hostility.  But a result of centralization is that we require many steps for ordination, including the results of tests of emotional fitness which come at considerable cost, culminating in two very expensive trips to either one end or the other of the continent for interviews that could, in this digital age, be as easily done by Skype.  There is a need for gatekeepers—in a movement about which others say derisively that it’ll accept anyone, it’s necessary that its representatives present consistent competence—but the costs for gatekeeping are passed onto the potential minister.  Add to this that many congregations who are willing to sponsor a potential minister during the required one year parish residency pay no or minimal compensation.  True, there is financial help for students in the form of grants and loans, but even after successful completion of the hoops a would-be UU minister must pass through there is no guarantee of full-time oreven part-time employment.  In fact, with the closing down of many congregations and the reversion of others to being lay-led because of finances, there is no guarantee of employment at all.  Can we seriously wonder at the scarcity of working class clergy in Unitarian Universalism?

What would I suggest in its place?  If I were devising a new movement intended to appeal to as many people as possible there are important aspects of Unitarian Universalism I would be sure to keep.  We pride ourselves on being an inclusive rather than an exclusive faith.  Particularly today, when many seekers look outside the traditionalspiritualities their parents brought them up on (or didn’t), a religion can be more often than not a place to land and settle for a few seasons than for life.  It’s been said that working people today are likely to have three or four careers over their lives rather than the single one their parents had.  There is no reason not to move across denominations, spiritualities, and practices so a seeker can find what she seeks.  We see it as a failure when people leave our congregations but that may be the new epitome of success.

            I would keep trained clergy and I would continue to train them in social justice issues in addition to (and maybe with greater emphasis on) theology.  As the large number of our clergy involved in the successful Minnesota same-sexmarriage legislation and nationwide ecological and immigration issues suggests, we are making tremendous strides in spreading our message.  We are a felt presence at rallies and protests and public celebrations and mourning.  In 2005 I attended Camp Wellstone in Madison, WI, and I remember the lesson brought to us by a Lutheran minister at one workshop:  Bring clergy with you and make sure they’re seen.  It’s a major reason I decided to become ordained.  Our visibility shouldn’t change. 

What is our message?  Do we have core beliefs that can be summed up in as lovely and compact a manner as the lawyer responding to Jesus’ question in Luke 10:27?  I think we do.  It can be summed up as “Love all life as if it were your own.”  This reflects many of the pre-merger beliefs that leaned heavily on Christian interpretation—some would argue persuasively it predates interpretation and goes straight to the heart of Christian religious sentiment itself. But can that be separated from any other liberal religious faith?  Can it be used to differentiate UUs from progressive Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Ba’hais, Secular Humanists, or anyone else?  Perhaps not.  But that may not be a problem.

            To be sure, there are problems.  To echo Reverend Egbert Brown, “I [am] surprised, disappointed, disillusioned as I [face]…that the failure or success of a religious venture [is] based on the number of members enrolled and the amount of dollars collected.”[3]  Congregations live anddie by whether they can collect enough to put on programs and hire a minister or, if unable to do so, to hire enough speakers to attract people to visit, then remain, then contribute in order to upgrade the process.  This isn’t just in our movement, of course; all faiths are experiencing this to some extent.  But in our case one rationale is that we suffer worse partly because of our smaller footprint and partly because, except for congregations in New England, we rarely benefitted from the past social expectation that members of a community would attend and contribute to a church.  It’s true we aren’t flush at the national level either, and not at many congregations, even among the larger ones.  But as Brown also argued, what is needed is “a religion of the present and the practical profoundly concerned with this world.”[4]  In seeking this we need to decide where to focus our efforts, whether it’s more important to have many small lay-led congregations or a few large, minister-led congregations.  We can have both but eventually one will drown while the other will barely keep its head above water (reinforcing the complaint against us, that we’re an elitist faith attractive to only a few metropolitans). 

            We are also too beholden to our Christian roots in our method of worship.  We meet on Sunday mornings, a time that is convenient for an increasingly diminishing population, and focus our service on the homily or sermon, putting its message at the center.  I love writing and delivering sermons and I think I do a good job of it, but fewer and fewer people are eager to sit for a twenty minute lecture even if followed by an opportunity to respond.  They can read and comment online.  Perhaps services should have an adjunct in which visitors can listen to a recorded weekly message while our actual time together in body is taken up with singing, dancing, conversing, arguing (we love arguing; we will never lose our fondness for arguing), and eating.  Such services don’t rely on a consistent day or place to meet. 

            Perhaps the time for Unitarian Universalism is past, not as an idea or a way of thinking, but for our existence as a separate movement.  Perhaps what we ought not to do is continue as an independent faith just like all the other faiths that, with one or two, admittedly, sometimes major differences, believe much the same thing we do.  Perhaps what we ought to do is join with like-minded progressive religions into one large, multi-churched, multi-service faith whose pastors are flexible enough to minister to multiple spiritual needs.  Such a denomination would look like nothing we have seen before.  But such a denomination could answer needs we have never had before. 

---

[1] Phillips, Roy.  Letting Go:  Transforming Congregations for Ministry.  Alban Institute.  1999:  80.

[2] Buehrens, John.  Universalists and Unitarians in America:  A People’s History.  Kindle ebook. 2011:  Loc 2368.

[3] Morrison-Reed, Mark.  Black Pioneers in a White Denomination.  Skinner House Books.  1994:  51.

[4] Morrison-Reed, Mark.  Black Pioneers in a White Denomination.  Skinner House Books.  1994:  84.

the secret

Liberal religion needs working-class realism.  Despite the black church's reputation for other-worldliness, it has met the needs of the present.  Child care, food and shelter, funerary matters, the cause of civil rights, and voter registration are all concerns to which the black church has responded...The situation of blacks in America has always served to make political freedom a pressing issue...

However, the primary function of the church is as a "temple," not as a "forum."  Whatever transpires needs to happen in the context of a worshiping community.  It is there that people bear witness to and celebrate their roots in Universal life.  It is in this time and space set apart that people recognize an intimacy with the world that pervades life at all times.  Here the elements of spirituality in religion draw us beyond the intellect to the felt connection with a personal God.  It was in this relationship that the slave found dignity, for it cut across all distinctions and touched one's essential humanness...[This] experience of connectedness is the essential spiritual element in religion.  This connection and consequent human dignity are inherent in life, and this inherent dignity...bestows forgiveness on the vulnerable individual who inevitably fails in an achievement-oriented society...[and] it destroys the walls of isolation around those who feel that dignity can only rest upon personal achievement.

--from Black Pioneers in a White Denomination by Mark D. Morrison-Reed

So many of us in liberal religions are looking, some might say desperately looking (and none moreso than those of us coming out of liberal seminaries), for what it is that can hope to help us reignite the spark of our congregations.  For decades, the conservative churches and the fundamentalists seemed to have the answer:  Greater personal responsibility and greater personal blame that came from a greater sense that God had imposed a certain order on humanity which, due to those religions' unwillingness to read modern changes into that order, as well as that order's own inherently self-contradictory nature, made people simultaneously blessed and sinful (Martin Luther called them "simul iustus et peccator"), self-celebratory and self-condemning, and the collection baskets ranneth over.  That has all changed.  The fundamentalists don't have the secret.  There may simply not be a secret but a constantly moving target that alights here and then there.  The late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries seemed to be liberal religion's turn, and then it was the conservative's.

Maybe what we're all missing is a sense of the best of both worlds.  Morrison-Reed makes much (not without cause) at places in his book of the tendency of Unitarian Universalism to privilege intellectual argument over what he refers to here as an experience of connection that in more conservative circles "is marked by an ecstatic event."  It is certainly true, as the old joke goes, that if the road in the afterlife is forked with a sign pointing "This way to Heaven; this way to arguing about Heaven," all the UUs will be tramping the latter way.  But it's also true, as Nas puts it, that "life is good, no matter what, life is good."

What does each of us need to know?  That we are valued and that our lives have significance.  We struggle to acquire that same sense of somebodiness that the slaves desired. But they knew that activity could not achieve this feeling.  It had to be a gift.  Yet as a gift, it undercuts activity, revealing that the source of value is Being itself...[It] is on this level that one senses or knows the ultimate connectedness of existence.  To truly value oneself is to value that which undergirds life...[and] this shatters all illusions of isolation.  One begins to experience the suffering of others as if it were one's own, and to act to alleviate it.

This experience of others can talk us off the bridge, even when we put ourselves there, loves art, cooks and enjoys good food, educates, puts others at ease, tells one another "salaam," and reminds us everything's good, everything's fine.

We listen so deeply to the stories of others that we begin to know their pain.  To open ourselves to that which we know will be painful is an act of strength.  And having done this we can act with...commitment and...conviction...

To quote the great and sainted Lou Reed, "Life's good, but not fair at all."  It's the unfairness that one day convinces us there's no reason to even bother getting out of bed, and the next day forces us up because something has to be done.

How do we reignite the fire under congregations?  Nobody knows.  Perhaps we are looking for something that doesn't exist.  Perhaps we're looking for something the best of liberal (and conservative) religion already has in abundance:  The willingness to listen to others and share their pain.  Not to wring our hands and identify our guilt in their pain because that will always be there--there will never be an end to the involvement of those of us who are privileged, however you want to define privilege, in the pain of others.  But we can acknowledge our role in their stories.  Mia McKenziei, in a recent blogpost I have really enjoyed (inasmuch as someone can enjoy having his blindness pointed out), echoes Morrison-Reed's definition and reminds us we can make some things better.

For a dozen years we have watched as the mainstream media has ignored the deaths of so many brown children, day after year after decade. I mean, they were ignoring the deaths of Black children all over the world, including here, way before that, but we didn’t have to see them ignoring it so blatantly every morning and afternoon and evening and night on TV (that 24-hour news cycle is a bitch; they have time for everything except our stories). Also, before the internet, and specifically before bloggers, the killing of black children by police officers had much less chance of even being known about outside of the community in which it happened. So, you know, you could at least feign ignorance. But now we know how often these things are happening...Why don’t our children get to be children? Why don’t they ever get to be innocent?...The only way to stop this is for you to stop ignoring our lives and our deaths and our stories. For you to put the names and faces of those Black and brown children in your news and on your Facebook pages. It is not enough for you to say, when confronted, that you care. You need to act like it. 

Perhaps the secret is this:  Treat everyone as if he or she is your child, your parent, or your sibling.  It should be simple but of course as with so much else it seems not to be.  Making it happen is reason enough to get anyone out of bed.

homily on leadership

In connection with the post I added earlier this weekend this is the order of service I wrote up for an opening worship I conducted last Tuesday for my course in Unitarian Universalist Polity, specifically on leadership and (yes, the need for) meetings.  All numbered references are to the hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.

Welcome
Chalice Lighting (#473--James Vila Blake)
Hymn (#318--"We Would Be One")
Homily:

I always thought of myself as comfortable in chaos.  As most of you are aware, I was homeless for three years and that is often the epitome of becoming comfortable with chaos.  I sympathize with anarchists, understanding the pull for tearing down a corrupt order to be reconfigured by new, more humane means.

But even within my chaos I’ve sought regularity.  While I was homeless I had two fixed acts:  I had to shave every morning and I had to brush my teeth twice a day.  These were unalterable.  I never knew who I might meet.  While protesting the 2008 Republican National Convention with the anarchists I got into a screaming match with a black mask over his upending a newspaper kiosk into the street, insisting, “This is not what we do!”

And I have dogs and cats.  There is little more appealing to allowing chaos to reign than dogs and cats.  Everyone knows the iconic figure of the crazy cat lady.  Less well known perhaps but similar is the dog hoarder.  We read stories about these people—dozens of cats, many of them dead, removed from a house reeking with ammonia; packs of dogs kept in a basement whose floor is inches deep in feces.  Both of these accept or maybe give in to the call of chaos but there is nothing healthy about either them or the animals they presume to help.

I understand the large hearts of people who would let their animals “just be.”  Just be a pack, just be alive, just be animals.  But imagine feeding time, even among animals who have among themselves created their own effective way of governing themselves as a body, because unless they’re free to roam outside at will there must be someone who provides them with food.  Imagine letting them outside, because unless there is a flap allowing them instant access to the outdoors at all times there will be a constant stream of ins and outs and a Three Stooges-like pileup of several trying to get through the door together.  Imagine when one gets sick, because unless there is someone to minister to that animal or take him to the vet it is very likely that the animal will die.  Or if he has standing in the pack torn to pieces by the other members sensing weakness and a chance to move up.

Within chaos there must still be order.  There must be agreement, there must be rationale, there must be a sense that someone is in charge.  While there is great disorder in the universe—we don’t know that anyone is in charge in the larger scheme, and many days it seems that if anyone is she has a nasty streak a mile wide—there are also pockets of certainty.  When we come together as one body we know that someone will greet us with a smile and a kind word.  When we confess our fear or weakness we know we will receive an open ear and a hug.  From the chaos of congregational life a group will come together to make certain the lights come on when we flip the switch, the heat comes on in the winter, the floors get swept, the dishes get washed, the grass cut, children given something to learn, an ad appears in the local paper, sick people are visited,  injustice is addressed.  To make certain that when we come together as one body there will be someone there to stand and lead us and who we will listen to and whether we agree with her or not whose wisdom we consent to.  For the sake of something greater than ourselves we come together.  We would be one, dwelling together, seeking truth, helping one another.  Within the chaos order is struck. 

Silent Meditation

Responsive Reading (#591)

Benediction (#698)  

"Our service together is at an end.  May your individual services continue."

mine is a farflung congregation

a friend of mine, someone I've been close to for about a dozen years, has had a hard month.  her mother died in the past few weeks and she has to put down two of her dogs, so I drove into the hub to spend a few hours listening to her.

the past few weeks I've been considering the word community and what it means in a religious or spiritual context, mostly because of classes I'm currently taking, but also because I'm thinking about what the future holds for religion in the near future.  it seems likely that, as more churches go under and decommission, what slack will need to be taken up will be by small homechurches similar to the kind the newer testament writes about.  tiny congregations of fewer than 50 people meeting for worship, discussion and eating together.

this strikes me as having great potential--I can't be the first person to think one of the greatest failures of codified religion has been its success (in terms of growth)--as the idea of tiny, neighborhood-based, interconnected groups of people who see one another on an almost daily basis appeals to the communitarian spirit in me.  but what struck me in my reflection this afternoon on the drive was the large and spreadout character of the tribe I've come to consider mine.

that I identify with the homeless and people on the fringe is nothing new, but it was the realization of the tremendous distances between people who I check in with regularly that set me aback.  aside from the congregation I'm currently serving near the hub, there are a number of individuals I stay in close contact with, and who tell me they still think of me as their minister, here on the rim, as well as people in the hub who are unaffiliated with any congregation and others spread across the country, from the east coast to the west and who, when they post or admit to something that makes them catch their breath as if drawing another may make them choke, I would jump in the car and visit if it was feasible.  (I contact them any way I can, which has to be the way it's done now.)

during my time with my friend today we spoke for a while about my decision to move from teaching to ministry and my use of the talent I have in caring about people.  she had developed a dog tarot--it was gorgeous--and we took turns reading the cards.  I hadn't read cards in years and was rusty but fell right in with her interpretation.  what I was reminded of, more than anything else, was the fragility of our psyches, how easily the thin skin of our calm can be pierced, and the necessity for having someone there to witness it and tell us it's all right.

Servetus' holy human spirit

Through all of [his travails], [Michael] Servetus' thought was permeated by a profound sense that the new life in Christ is a life in which men and women live, not their own life,but one in which God, through God's spirit, lives in them.

This brief quote from Charles Howe's For Faith and Freedom references a major shift in the emphasis of a theistic to a more humanistic faith.  If people no longer live for God's pleasure but as a representation of God or as a necessary part of God, then they are inherently dignified.  This dignity remains whether we look at people as individuals or as a community:  as individuals, each person is God's method for experiencing life; and as a collection of individuals, each community is God's method for experiencing life together.

In his On the Errors of the Trinity, quoted in David Parkes' Epic of Unitarianism, Servetus writes:

[Of the Holy Spirit I say] that our spirit dwelling in us is God his very self; and that this is the Holy Spirit in us...And he who contemns us contemns God, because he put his spirit in us; and he who lies to the Holy Spirit lies not to men but to God.  And herein we bear witness to a certain heavenly feeling, and a hidden divine something...

suggesting that humans, far from being wretched, sinful vessels, are imbued with a divinity, elsewhere in Servetus named as the same divinity imbued in the Christ, that elevates their status among the rest of God's creation.  There is no denying people commit evil but it's not in their nature to do so.  Evil acts--genocide, extortion, purposeful maiming--are something we create and choose to do ourselves.  That evil isn't imbued with the Holy Spirit is proved because not everyone does it; it's true, some choose not to, but most simply never act on whatever impulse they might feel (and some don't even feel or identify the impulse).

This is not a proof that people are inherently good only that they aren't inherently bad.  Michael Servetus' still-Christian Holy Spirit, which over the centuries has become an agnostic humanism, which is put into them is, at worst, neutral, open to all experiences. 

you are the eyes of the world

I've never been a deadhead.  I've worn my share of tiedye.  I've taken more--more!--than my share of recreational drugs.  I've listened, stoned and enraptured, to songs and recordings of the band and cover artists and dipped and nodded my head over and over again.  I know the lineup from any given period, from pigpen  and the godchaux to bruce hornsby and joan osborne.  my wife renews my sirius xm subscription every year so I can listen to the dead channel.  but I never followed them, never been part of a tourpposse.  I don't have all their albums or any tapes.  I only ever attended one--one!--show, in medford, massachussets, in 86.  or 87.  or 88.  but I'm certain it was medford.

so it wouldn't be out of place to wonder why I went along with spending $25 last night to watch the grateful dead movie from 77 rereleased for what would have been jerry garcia's 70th birthday.  and I might have balked at it too had I been as certain that it was the same movie I'd seen 2ce before, in the late 80s and the early 90s, and if I'd known that my wife and I would be only 2 among 10 people in the theater.  but then I would have missed out on something special in a small, personal way.

my wife had called in the middle of the day a couple weeks ago telling me she'd received an email about the  event and an offer for early tickets, and did I want to go, and I said, "sure, why not?"  it promised to be a fun evening, maybe jammed in with hundreds, a thousand, sweaty, patchouli-soaked, bongaddled now-grandparents, ripped free from the usual wednesday night babysitting for their adult children's date night.  when we got to the theater, however, it was dark and empty, and in the hallway we met with an older woman with her adult kids in tiedye, who told me there had only been 8 tickets sold for the event.  we ticked off the people as they arrived, every one of us wearing something tiedyed.  by the end, another 2 people had wandered in, but I never got a look at them to see if they were wearing the colors.

but we settled in.  no one had anything to smoke.  of all of us, only 1 guy, in his late 20s, may have had an idea where even to score in downtown minneapolis on a wednesday early evening, and he wasn't saying.  my wife said several times we should have brought a beach ball.  the lights went down and the opening advertisements started--the rerelease was coinciding with a boxed set of dead concert material whose pricetag made it pretty certain to whom it was being marketed--those of us Of A Certain Age and whose credit hadn't been maxed out.  then bob weir came on and chatted about the recording studio he'd built in jerry's honor.  it was meant as someplace to play, he said.

and then the movie itself, the feature presentation, began, and for a few minutes I was a little putoff.  I recognized the opening animation and I was a trifle peeved I'd plunked down $25 for something I'd seen previously and in the company of less than a dozen other celebrants.

but after a while I got into the groove and realized I was watching something that, no matter how often I'd seen it, I hadn't seen with quite the same eyes.  for instance, I'd only watched it on tape, and on drugs, and here it was on a screen, as it was made for, and straight.  and the number of people, or the lack of people, that mattered not at all either.  name me another band, outside perhaps the stones or the who, for whom even a dozen people will show up a decade after they stop touring to watch a 40 year old movie about them.    I don't anticipate a 2050 rerelease of hannah montana the movie.

but what I was seeing in this old, old concert film was a time that I once lived, when camping out for 5 days for tickets was something one did if one really, really wanted to be there (and not spending 15 minutes online only to find the show was sold out in the 1st 3 minutes).  when a community grew up, for better and worse, around the idea of a band and the measure of its output and what it gave to its fans.  where attending a concert was an experience of communion, the music a kind of aural wafer offered to the suppliant by guitarslingling priests.

so we danced and swung and nodded and shimmied in our seats to the sounds barreling out of the big screen and it didn't matter that the images were grainy and sometimes skipped and that there were only a few other people experiencing this with you.  it only mattered there were other people, you weren't alone, and they felt the same.  and it all felt really, really good.

our origin in origen

[this is last sunday's sermon which is a revision of 1 I did 5 years ago.]

I once met up with a fellow on the trail that runs by my house. My dogs and I had been out for about an hour and were heading back home when coming from the opposite direction I saw someone I took at first to be a farmer who lives down the road who I sometimes run into. But as he got closer I saw this fellow was a good deal younger than the farmer and a little shorter and walked with a different, swinging gait.

I put the dogs on leash until he got up to us and told him they wouldn’t bite but would bark and sniff him all over. He said he had dogs too and that that was all right, so I let them loose again. We got to talking. He’d moved into the area recently and was in school, and so was his wife, and he just liked to walk heedless on the trail at this time of the morning. This was earlier than I generally walked the dogs, so I said that was likely why we hadn’t met up previously. I pointed out the direction of our house and mentioned the trail was part of the reason we’d decided on moving here.

At first I figured he’d keep on walking past once he’d met up with the dogs and we’d head on home, but he kept talking and the conversation was pretty good, so I stayed there and the dogs romped around and we talked some more. We swapped names—his is Jeremy—and eventually I asked him what school he attended, expecting to hear Stout since it was nearby, although I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Chippewa Valley Tech or Indianhead. But he said, “Well, actually I’m getting a degree in ministry at Northwestern.” I said, “I’m at United Theological.”

So there we were, two seminarians in the middle of the woods—it almost sounds like the setup to a joke: “two seminarians, a Christian and a heathen, walk into the woods…” Naturally we got to talking about religion. Now, I was familiar with his seminary—Northwestern College is one of the more conservative evangelical colleges in the Twin Cities. Their website says their vision is to “light the way” as Christ-honoring education, business and community leaders. Alumni tend to work in what they call media ministry—Christian broadcasting (including those evangelical stations I like to listen to) and with fundamentalist newsgroups like The Religion Desk and Skylight.

Now, I was familiar with his seminary, but he wasn’t so with mine, so he asked a lot of questions about United and about liberal religion in general. He had come to Christianity after decades of alcoholism and drug abuse and found a refuge in it, a position I understand if not entirely endorse, and I said I’d come to much the same conclusions except they involved Unitarian Universalism. We’d been walking together for a while by then, and I wasn’t surprised when he turned to me and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about your—Unitarianism, did you say? What’s that?”

Being a good UU I had my 10 second elevator speech ready—“what matters most is how we treat one another in the here and now”—and he took that in, and I should have been expecting it, but I guess I really wasn’t, when he followed that up with, “Why do you believe that?”

Understand, this wasn’t a hostile reaction or something aggressive. This was an example of two religious people who both took their beliefs seriously and wanted to take the other person’s beliefs seriously, so he was asking for something he could latch onto and say, “I understand that. I can fit that into my experience whether I agree with it or not.” I said, “Well, the divine inside us seems to call out for love and compassion, not only for ourselves and our own but for as many as we can help.” He digested that and then he said, “The divine?”

“Yeah,” I said. “God, the Higher Spirit, the Connective Force, the Great Unknown. We call it a lot of different names.”

“Why not just call him ‘God’?”

“Some of us do,” I said. “But a lot of Unitarian Universalists are uncomfortable with that language so we use what we’re comfortable with.”

He took that in and we talked some more, and then he said, “But you don’t believe in the reality of the Triune God?”

“Some of us do,” I admitted. “Most of us don’t. The Unitarian in our names is all about the unity we see around us, the spark that connects us with one another and with other beings.”

He nodded and then started explicating his belief in a supernatural and personally involved god that was a very articulate theological understanding of his experience and there was much of it with which I could agree. With one exception, and I pointed that out to him—I said, “You presuppose god is separate from us.”

“Of course. He created us and we have to accept him.”

I said, “Unitarians are more like Buddhists in seeing a continuity between us and other things.”

And he said, “Why’s that?” And the truth is, I could answer that for myself using my own experiences to explicate it, but I was unable then to trace the history of thought that evolved into present-day Unitarian Universalism.

We parted at the trailhead by the road that leads to my house with a hearty handshake and a shared decision that we really needed to get together to talk again sometime. And I came home and started to look more closely into the history of why we think the way we think.

I think it’s safe to assume that most of us aren’t too proficient in knowing how Unitarian Universalism started or where its ideas came from. That we are Christian heretics is a notion all of us have at least a passing familiarity with. I want to focus for a moment on the heretic part of that equation. Heretic, Jack Mendelsohn says, is a Greek term meaning, literally, “the ability to choose.” He writes

Heretics are persons of independent mind who…do not simply accept beliefs because they happen to be dominant in the society or because they are taught by their churches, but they accept them on the basis of their own testing, their own independent choice. They consider different possibilities and are able to choose.

I start out by talking about heresy because our origin begins with one. Origen, an early Christian church father who lived in the later Second and early Third centuries, was eventually outed by authorities 600 years later as a heretic. From Karen Armstrong:

Neither Origen [as the leader of the catechetical school in Alexandria] nor [his predecessor] Clement believed that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilio), which would later become orthodox Christian doctrine. Origen’s views of the divinity of Jesus and the salvation of humanity certainly did not conform to later official Christian teaching: he did not believe that we had been ‘saved’ by the death of Chris, but that we ascended to God under our own steam.

Armstrong points out that the important thing to remember is that at the time Origen and Clement lived and taught, there was no official Christian doctrine. It was not for a hundred years after Origen’s death that Christianity began to attain its codified status with the Council of Nicea in 325, and it was several hundred years after that that the mossyness and rigor mortis set in.

The early years of Christianity were a fervid time of idealism that, frankly, proved to be a pain to the later authorities. I keep track of these –isms by means of an acronym, like the HOMES that reminds us of the Great Lakes. I call it LiP-THAND. This stands for Liberal Christians, who don’t necessarily believe in the divinity of Jesus but believe in the teachings of Jesus; Pagans, who celebrate the interconnectedness of life and whose adherents may believe in gods or goddesses that are themselves facets of larger divine sources representing life-affirming qualitative; Theism, a belief in a single god who may be personal and supernatural; Humanists, who represent the “functional ulitimacy” of the many flavors; Agnosticism, in which religion and spirituality are intrinsically unknowable since evidence is inconclusive. There are also Naturalists, who believe that nature is all there is, and which breaks down further into Atheism, an active disbelief in the existence of a supernatural god, Religious Naturalism, for which sacredness and good and evil are a part of nature and a way of experiencing the world, Pantheism, in which all things taken together are god, and Panantheists, for whom all things are in god. The final letter stands for Deism, the belief that a so-called intelligent clockmaker has set the clockwork in motion and then stepped away. By the time of the turn of the First Millennium, all but the most conservative definition of Theism had been declared heretical.

Before we get too excited about our connection with Origen, we need to keep in mind a particularly uncomfortable example of the messiness of the way people live their lives. During his particularly zealous youth, Origen took as his own teaching Matthew 19:12, which states:

For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.

Some scholars have given Origen’s self-castration an interesting twist, saying that he did so in order to be able to teach women without hint of scandal, and Armstrong goes to pains to remind us that

Castration was quite a common operation in late antiquity; Origen did not rush at himself with a knife, nor was his decision inspired by the kind of neurotic loathing of sexuality…[It] may have been an attempt to demonstrate his doctrine of indeterminacy of the human condition, which the soul must soon transcend. Apparently immutable factors such as gender would be left behind in the long process of divination, since in god there was neither male nor female.

I’m sure Origen had his reasons and I don’t see much reason not to give him the benefit of the doubt. Still, it’s also worth noting that later he wrote an exegesis of the Gospels in which he fervently advocated against literal readings, specifically of Matthew 19:12. Received opinion has it that this was a part and parcel of his ascetic insistence against literal interpretation of most of the words of Jesus, but I’ve got to believe that there also has to be some niggling bit of buyer’s remorse in his strong condemnation.

Origen also introduced the notion that evil and suffering, far from being the result of the machinations of a supernatural agent—Satan—was rather the abuse of human freedom which was necessary for the achievement of good. This was seconded later by Thomas Aquinas and, a millennium and a half later, by philosopher G.W. Leibnitz, who coined the term Theodicy (theos die, literally “the justice of god”) to describe the existence of evil in the best of all possible worlds; its shadow is necessary to highlight the attractions of the world.

More importantly for our consideration, though, is the other notion Origen came up with. In the work On First Principles, Origen noted that, “One could pity but not censure a being totally deprived of all capacity for recognizing goodness and doing what is right.” Origen saw god as apophatic, that is,

perfect unity, invisible and incorporeal, transcending all things material, and therefore inconceivable and incomprehensible. He is likewise unchangeable, and transcends space and time. But his power is limited by his goodness, justice, and wisdom; and, though entirely free from necessity, his goodness and omnipotence constrained him to reveal himself.

Origen concluded that, if god is pure love and his divine punishments therapeutic rather than retributive, and if all creatures are freed by god to act on their own decisions, then everyone is redemptive, up to and including the bugaboo Satan. This is the doctrine of universalism in its earliest form. The ultimate act of Christ will be to deliver the kingdom to God and then god will be in all. This universal reconciliation or universal salvation holds that a god who is all good cannot withhold her—remember the indeterminacy of the human condition and god’s lack of gender—her benevolence from one willing to accept it, which it is the Christ’s duty to provide to all souls.

This is a fundamental of Unitarian Universalism. Everyone is capable of redemption, however you want to consider redemption to be. For me, it’s the notion that each of us can, in some sense, make up for past harmful acts, preferably to the person or being we harmed, but where that’s impossible then in some connected way. Let me give you an example. When I was living in my car people were often good to me, giving me money when I needed it, rides when I needed them, shelter when I needed it. These things didn’t manifest themselves when the need arose, nothing like that, but happened eventually and randomly. As my form of payback, I help others when I can. For instance, I once ran across a car stalled on the ramp off I-94 and a couple rummaging around in the trunk. I stopped and asked if they were all right. The man, a tall, strapping truck driver, told me they were on their way to Chicago and a belt in the engine had split and the car stopped. I said, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that, but I can take you to find another belt.”

Well, what with one thing and another, it took a while and three different stores for us to find the proper belt. It took me about an hour and half to get these folks back to their car. I don’t offer this as an example that I am doing things better than anyone else, although I do doubt that Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum would have pulled over. The woman offered me money for gas, for helping them, but I said, “No, you may be likely to need that before you’re finished with your trip.” They said, “God must have put you in our path,” and at one point the man, who rode beside me, did one of those little half-Catholic, half-charismatic crossing-and-delivering-oneself gestures I’ve seen among evangelicals. They shook my hands time and again on getting out. Later, on my way home, I drove by to make certain the car was gone, and it was.

This is my Universalism in action. It is because I believe in the redemptive quality, if not necessarily in other people but in myself at least, that I am willing to put myself out a little for their benefit. I told the couple, whose names were Richard and Dardonel, that it was my pleasure to help them, and it genuinely was. This is my heaven. Conversely, if there is a hell, it is also one of our own making. A Buddhist teaching holds that Heaven and Hell are exactly alike, two long tables heaped with food and with six-foot long utensils. In Hell everyone is frustrated at the impossibility of feeding themselves, while in Heaven everyone feeds the person across the table.

I haven’t run across Jeremy on the trail since that time which is too bad. He’s the sort of thinking evangelical charismatic I often argue that the bulk of the movement relies on. Perhaps it’s a part of my Universalist history to look for points of concord between me and people who might otherwise disagree with me, but I think that if we were to articulate where our beliefs merge, and they certainly do, it would be at this point: we both envision a point at which even Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum happily and willingly feed the haggard homeless and the aimless alcoholics sitting across from them. And in so doing they find themselves equally nourished.