I'd like to think if I was tested I would pass

This has been a busy, busy month and it's been a while since I've had the time and opportunity to post this second recent message from a service at the facility. This was recorded for the first Sunday in March.  

 Luke 4:1-13

4:1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, 4:2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. 4:3 The devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread. 4:4 Jesus answered him, It is written, One does not live by bread alone. 4:5 Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 4:6 And the devil said to him, To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 4:7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours. 4:8 Jesus answered him, It is written, Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him. 4:9 Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 4:10 for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you, 4:11 and On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. 4:12 Jesus answered him, It is said, Do not put the Lord your God to the test. 4:13 When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

 Mara Upasatha Sutra

The holy one directed his steps to that blessed Bodhi-tree beneath whose shade he was to accomplish his search. As he walked, the earth shook and a brilliant light transfigured the world. When he sat down the heavens resounded with joy and all living beings were filled with good cheer. Mara alone, lord of the five desires, bringer of death and enemy of truth, was grieved and rejoiced not. With his three daughters, Tanha, Raga and Arati, the tempters, and with his host of evil demons, he went to the place where the great Samana sat. But Shakyamuni heeded him not. Mara uttered fear-inspiring threats and raised a whirlwind so that the skies were darkened and the ocean roared and trembled. But the Blessed One under the Bodhi-tree remained calm and feared not. The Enlightened One knew that no harm could befall him. The three daughters of Mara tempted the Bodhisattva, but he paid no attention to them, and when Mara saw that he could kindle no desire in the heart of the victorious Samana, he ordered all the evil spirits at his command to attack him and overawe the great Muni. But the Blessed One watched them as one would watch the harmless games of children. All the fierce hatred of the evil spirits was of no avail. The flames of hell became wholesome breezes of perfume, and the angry thunderbolts were changed into lotus-blossoms. 

 

 I’m not telling you anything new by saying words have meaning. But when we apply it to scriptures like the Bible or the Koran or Buddhist Sutras, we often use words that have come down to us from centuries of use as meaning something they no longer mean. For instance, in this scripture we hear an important word, “devil,” that conjures up an image our parents might have given it that doesn’t quite match the original word. We think of a guy in red with a pointed tail and horns and a pitchfork. 

But that’s not what’s meant by the Greek word, “diabolos.” While it does translate as devil, diabolos meant a different creature like an accuser or a trickster, one who tests the truth of a statement. Think of the devil here as The Tester, one who is fulfilling an important job, like Coyote in Native American stories or Loki in Norse myth. Think of diabolos, not as someone against Jesus or you, but someone whose job is to make sure you’re up to whatever task is ahead of you. 

Diabolos’ job is not to make Jesus transform stone to bread but to see if he’s learned to control his wants. Similarly, when Jesus is told “You can rule everywhere and everyone and all you have to do is worship me,” he controls his greed. The Tester tells him he could rival God and his response is “Only God is God.” Finally, The Tester gives Jesus an ultimate test: “Jump off this temple roof, let yourself be saved by angels. God  has a lot riding on you, God won’t let you die.” But Jesus says, “Don’t test God. Just accept.” We don’t climb to the roof of a building and jump. We know better than that. 

 When we talk about temptation, we’re talking about an urge to do something we wouldn’t normally do. The word itself comes to us from Old French out of the Latin word temptare "to feel, try out, attempt to influence."  We’re tempted sometimes to do something that helps someone. Holding open a door suddenly for someone we see behind us struggling with a box, or picking up the tab for someone we’ve joined for a drink. 

While we obviously don’t have exactly the same temptations as in Luke’s story, to say we have temptations in today’s world is an understatement. In place of commanding stones into bread, we’re tempted to claim of one thing that it’s another. Like if we’ve insulted someone and they catch us in it we’re tempted to say, “No, it’s a joke. I didn’t mean it.” Instead of worshipping Diabolos to rule the kingdoms of the world, we’re tempted to do something we don’t like or that hurts someone to make more money. Or in place of throwing ourselves from a high spot to see if God will send angels to protect us, we might be tempted to put ourselves in danger by refusing to be vaccinated or taking precautions, certain our faith will protect us.

Dickey Barrett, the singer and lyricist of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, the band playing the song I played you earlier, has a wonderful line: “I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested. I like to think if I was I would pass. Look at the tested and think, There but for the grace go I. I might be a coward, I’m afraid of what I might find out.” We test ourselves constantly and sometimes, yes, we prove to be cowards. That’s all right. If you’re tempted to take a bite out of a stone or to jump off the roof, you should be a coward. You’ll only hurt yourself that way. 

Better to test yourself in small ways. This woman’s voice bothers me. Can I be kind to her anyway? My roommate is driving me crazy; can I voluntarily go somewhere I don’t have to see or hear him? I spill juice, I forget my hat sometimes, I misplace my favorite book. Can I be patient with myself about the thousands of mistakes I make daily? It’s in passing the little tests we set for ourselves that we become better people. This is what God intends for us, to become better who we are. 

 [Lord’s Prayer]

 Benediction by Wayne Arneson

“Take courage friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. For deep down, there is another truth: you are not alone.”

258 candles-day 17

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Krishna devotees looking to help religious retirees.

I've been everywhere, man

I've been putting together a new packet application for residencies for clinical pastoral experiences and rewriting some of the essays I'd done a year ago. This is actually a revision of both that one and one I'd written originally for my admission into seminary six years ago. I'm pleased with it.

I’m like the trucker in Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere,” only on a theological rather than a geographic level.  My parents were Seventh-Day Adventist—after my mother died my dad returned to his native Methodism—and I was raised that way.  They attended one of the German denominations, which is a pretty strict sect, although they weren’t as observant as they might have been—we ignored the ban on meat, for instance, and I don’t remember ever praying over a meal except when someone from the church was there.  My sister was baptized among them but I never was.

            When I was allowed to make my own choices regarding churches I opted not to attend one.  I’d read about Thomas Jefferson being an agnostic, and since that seemed to mean he didn’t attend church, that’s what I was.  Adventist churches can be a dismal affair, or at least they were in rural New York in the 1960s.  Agnosticism was attractive:  like most young adults, I was uncertain of a lot of things, and it seemed only right to question a divine presence along with everything else.

            My first wife was Lutheran.  We attended church a few times a year with her family.  When Barbara and I split I underwent a profound questioning of the meaning of my life, what I was intended for, how I was intended to live, and where I stood in relation to everyone else.  After a brief flirtation with nihilism and atheism, denying there was a purpose to any of it, I fell into radicality.  I’d been studying Jesuit education for a class, and the intense devotion to god suddenly made sense to me and seemed right.  The ritual and drama of the mass was comforting, as was the prescription that god had to accept me in return for confessing my sins.  Like Frost said of home, heaven was where, when you went there, they had to take you in. 

            Catholicism didn’t stick beyond two intense years.  Too many questions, too many strictures, too much solidity and order.  I’d had enough of order, I wanted chaos.  But in New York, where I was, even if you weren’t Jewish you were a Jew, and I became attracted to the controlled chaos of Jewish women. I was really attracted to the symbolism and mystery of Judaism.  I lived eventually with two Jews at different times, one Reformed and the other Orthodox and a sabra, and kept a kosher house with each.  That was an interesting experience, looking to the domestic to for the order daily worldly experience denied. 

            Eventually the desire for uncertainty moved me out of an apartment and into the streets.  I spent several months in New York City, alternating between people’s couches, some people’s beds, and the safe and relatively warm crawlspace beneath a fenced-in trailer on the Grand Central Overpass.  I visited the Hare Krishna kitchens downtown often and the Sri Chinmoy kitchens in Brooklyn, and listened to both while they filled my ears with chanting and my belly with rice.  I eventually wound up at the Krishna commune near the Newburgh airport for a month, sorting out what remained of my life and trying, unsuccessfully, to get sober.  My parents bought me a station wagon and I disappeared for three years into the US, visiting communes and churches, reservations and tiny communities.  I loved those years:  they were full of exploration, especially spiritual exploration.  I attended Rainbow Gatherings and Powwows, Festivals of Light, ashrams and intentional communities.  My consciousness expanded, as did my intake of drugs, which I saw as gatekeepers to the Absolute. Or something like that. 

            I read up on Buddhism all the time.  I tried peyote with a small Native Church congregation.  I dropped acid as often as possible, consulted Mescalito, took vision quests and Long Walks.  When I was camped for a month atop Wildcat Mountain in the Catskills I had a vision that involved Brother Blue, a storyteller I’d studied with.  I kept a milk crate in the back of the car full of books by Alan Watts, Stephen Diamond, Ram Dass, Carlos Castenada, Sun Bear, D.T. Suzuki, Krishnamurti, Robert Thurman, Robert Pirsig.  My copy of Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways is so well-thumbed I have to hold it together with a rubber band. 

            I never made my intended goal of Arcosanti in Cordes Lakes, Arizona.  Eventually, however, I found my way to sesshin at Dhammapada in Montreal where the abbot, a tiny wizened Japanese man, explained my deficiencies to me in terms even I could understand.  When I left there I was humbled, but no closer to finding some cogent spiritual sense.  I hung out with Santerians I knew back home, kept my head shaved, went to work in a health food store in Woodstock where I met up with cross-country skiing devotees of Ramtha and the community-sharing confrontational lovers of a man named Gavin who called himself Bayard Hora, and converted my upstairs two-room apartment into an electricity-less shrine to discipline.  I ran the four miles each day into work and back in the snow and cold, and eventually found my way back on the road, where I discovered I really belonged. 

            When my mother insisted I either join the Army or attend graduate school, I knew she was onto something. In Mankato, Minnesota I met my second, or as she puts it, my last wife.  Jayne was Methodist at that time, soon to return to Lutheranism and finally to settle among the UCC, and after we married and moved back to New York, she started carting me along to different churches, insisting that I ought to be grateful for the life I’d been given, even if it wasn’t everything I wanted.  I made contact with two delightful Dutch Reformed ministers who made me realize it was possible to be both clergy and relevant, and read Daniel Berrigan. 

            In 1996, returned to the Midwest, and getting a handle on both my drinking and my hitherto undiagnosed depression—I am a poster boy for the wonders of Prozac—I found the White Bear UU Church online.  I’d attended a few UU services back east in my wandering years and hadn’t been terribly impressed.  But something about the photos on the White Bear website suggested I should give this a try.  My first sermon by Christa Wolf, the interim minister, used the terms “Jungian” and “eschatological,” and hearing those I knew I was home.

            Years later I joined a different congregation in Menomonie, Wisconsin, smaller, in greater need of help, and trained as a Commissioned Lay Leader.  I became more and more involved in the ministerial aspect of the CLL position and had an affinity for it. Like Cash’s trucker intimates, Unitarian Universalism may not be where I stay.  I might continue to move on and find my journey takes me elsewhere.  The congregation I served housed Christian UUs, UU atheists, and UU devotees to Kryon, a channeled being. I came to love the difficulty of making current events relevant and comprehendible to their different sensibilities and found a calling among them. I’ve since left that congregation to serve another in the Twin Cities where the makeup is composed of secular and Christian humanists.

 

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.

spiritual homelessness 4

The final segment of my essay "Spiritual Homelessness," and again a part of which some of you may have read before.  

Part III:  What is my hope?

A final story, this one about me rather than people I’ve known.  The worship experience that most resonated for me was one where I wasn’t present at first. Decades ago, while I was homeless, I was invited to take meals with a Hare Krishna group that met around Newburgh, New York, and because I was hungry I took them up on it. A part of the understanding, not uncommon among religious charities providing food for people, was that I would take part in one of their services.

A Krishna service is a misnomer. It’s more like a short, extemporaneous lecture punctuated by ecstatic dancing and chanting, similar to Sufi celebration. Individuals were invited to the house where its members communed, sat in a large room listening to one essentially tell the story of his conversion to Krishna or his recognition of Krishna’s influence on his life, then be invited to eat of the prana or gift that Krishna had for us, have short conversation for digestion, and then dance and sing to celebrate our acceptance of Krishna’s prana.

All I wanted was to eat. Having spent the previous days subsisting primarily on peanut butter and crackers, I had been lured by the promise of mounds of hot rice and raisins, dates, oranges, and of course the eyes of the shave-headed girl who’d invited me. I certainly wasn’t interested in a lecture, although the nascent anthropologist in me was open to experiencing it. Still, when the time came for the lecture/personal tribute, I managed to excuse myself to the bathroom and remained there for about 15 minutes, which seemed like the right amount of time.

It was an old house, one of those hundred year and older grand family mansions of the Hudson Valley burghers that had been subdivided and made into apartment housing over the decades and eventually remade back into spaces for family-type living. It had a large bathroom on the first floor, which was where we visitors were relegated to, with plants and guest towels and white walls (the Krishnas make a fetish of the color white) but it was also drafty and unheated. It was set up with books and pamphlets and I knew I could pass time there painlessly.

I sat on the floor and started paging through a book. Several rooms over, the personal testament of some gawky middle class suburban kid began and occasionally sounds came in under the door that I identified as his voice getting louder and then softer and then people muttering appreciatively.

The illustrations in the book were captivating. Nearly 30 years on and I wish I’d noted the title of the book or even snuck it out with me. They were old Hindu woodcuts and paintings of pilgrims and ascetics, monkeys and housewives, merchants and jaguars. I was lost among those illustrations, lingering on page after page, trying to drink in every element of every picture as if it was the dinner I was waiting for.

Eventually the murmuring outside the room grew quieter with a few scattered single loud words. I grew more transfixed by the pictures and then by the silence I experienced in the room. And it dawned on me, this was the prana I was receiving. The food was nice, the food was what I needed, but equally necessary was this silence and meditation I was allowed in the hundred year old bathroom of a Hare Krishna commune. I had been invited to share time and food with them and all they’d asked for in return was a little of my time to listen to them. I had that time to give; it wasn’t as if my life was going anywhere fast anyway.

I jumped up and put the book back on the stack next to the toilet and hurried back out to rejoin the group as the Krishna convert finished his narrative. There were appreciative mutters from people gathered in the room. The eyes of the shave-headed girl were on me as I returned to my place on the floor next to her: she had seen people hide in the bathroom before, people for whom the only prana was food and someplace warm, and my epiphany was that I wasn’t there only for that. I was also there to be given space to develop into something or someone I needed to become and the immediate path was to take me through these people.

I tried to explain that to her during the conversation after we ate. It wasn’t nearly as well-articulated as it may seem now. She smiled and nodded as if she understood but I had no doubt she’d heard something like that before too. But it was real, I assured both her and me; I wouldn’t join them but I’d like to remain near them, learning what I could. (And, I admitted, seeing her and eating on a regular basis.)

When we stood to chant I chanted and then danced with abandon. That summer I returned to the commune for days at a time, staying in my car and studying with the ascetics there. The girl, whose name I’ve forgotten, eventually left to seed another commune in New Jersey. I was asked to join the group moving there but I said no. I hadn’t found a home but I had found one of the landmarks I recognized on the way there.

In loss there is also discovery.  This last story illustrates what it was that I found when I was in need:  a place to be and people to be with.  At this time my Rule of Life was simple:  to exercise, shave, and brush my teeth every day.  That has not changed.  It is still my Rule.

But what do I want to do, if it is not being in a traditional church setting with traditional church people?  I’ve often been most comfortable with people on the edge of civilization, people whose transgressions have put them there or who have put themselves there, liars, cheaters, thieves, the lame and the halt.  My service, if I can design it, would be this:  I would spend my days walking around and talking with street people, listening to their problems and their joys, laughing over coffee, crying over injustice, holding hands.  One of the things that appeals to me about Unitarian Universalism is that it’s not evangelical, so I would not be bringing the Good News of it to people, but would use it to listen to people tell me their good and their bad news.

My problem, of course, lies in the fact that I don’t know anyone who will pay me to do this.  From the Krishnas I have learned such service is often gratis.  My problem is that I have also learned I like being married and having a home to return to each day.  Toward this end I’ve made the decision recently to seek licensure as a chaplain as well as ordination because that is essentially the sort of work I want to do, only on a larger scale than a facility or even an area.  In my dreams I would even do this nation-wide.

It is my calling to be with other people.  While I’ve never seen myself as a chaplain, and I’m still not certain that’s how I see myself, I find I am very comfortable being together with people who need someone there.  I’ve worked for a long time to create what Murray Bowen and Rabbi Edwin Friedman called a “non anxious presence”—Buddhism would call it nonattachment, the Krishnas would call it Krishna-consciousness—in which anxiety over a result is accepted and released. It’s a concept I’d only begun to comprehend when I ate Krishna’s prana, but I know now it’s my gift to present that to others.  I continue, of course, to work on using it on myself.  In my imagination I characterize it as being like a duck, placidly floating above the water, below it peddling like crazy.   It is in this wobbling tension where I find my hope.

prana

The worship experience that most resonated for me was one in which I wasn’t present, at first. Decades ago, while I was homeless, I was invited to take meals with a Hare Krishna group that met around Newburgh, New York, and because I was hungry I took them up on it. A part of the understanding, not uncommon among religious charities that provide food for people, was that I would take part in one of their services.

A Krishna service is a misnomer. It’s more like a short, extemporaneous lecture punctuated by ecstatic dancing and chanting, very similar to Sufi celebration. The way this particular group operated was that individuals were invited to the house its members communed in, sat in a large room listening to one essentially tell the story of his conversion to Krishna or his recognition of Krishna’s influence on his life, then be invited to eat of the prana or gift that Krishna had for us, have short conversation for digestion, and then dance and sing to celebrate our acceptance of Krishna’s prana.

All I wanted was to eat. Having spent the previous days subsisting primarily on peanut butter and crackers, I had been lured by the promise of mounds of hot rice and raisins, dates, oranges, and of course the eyes of the shave-headed girl who’d invited me. I certainly wasn’t interested in a lecture, although the nascent anthropologist in me was open to experiencing it. Still, when the time came for the lecture/personal tribute, I managed to excuse myself to the bathroom and remained there for about 15 minutes, which seemed like the right amount of time.

It was an old house, one of those hundred year and older grand family mansions of the Hudson Valley burghers that had been subdivided and made into apartment housing over the decades and eventually remade back into spaces for family-type living. It had a large bathroom on the first floor, which was where we visitors were relegated to, with plants and guest towels and white walls (the Krishnas fetishize the color white) but it was also drafty and unheated. It was set up with books and pamphlets and I knew I could pass time there painlessly.

I sat on the floor and started paging through a book. Several rooms over, the personal testament of some gawky middle class suburban kid began and occasionally sounds came in under the door that I identified as his voice getting louder and then softer and then people muttering appreciatively.

The illustrations in the book were captivating. Nearly 30 years on and I wish I’d noted the title of the book or even snuck it out with me. They were old Hindu woodcuts and paintings of pilgrims and ascetics, monkeys and housewives, merchants and jaguars. I was lost among those illustrations, lingering on page after page, trying to drink in every element of every picture as if it was the dinner I was waiting for.

Eventually the murmuring outside the room grew quieter with a few scattered single loud words. I grew more transfixed by the pictures and then by the silence I experienced in the room. And it dawned on me, this was the prana I was receiving. The food was nice, the food was what I needed, but equally necessary was this silence and meditation I was allowed in the hundred year old bathroom of a Hare Krishna commune. I had been invited to share time and food with them and all they’d asked for in return was a little of my time to listen to them. I had that time to give; it wasn’t as if my life was going anywhere fast anyway.

I jumped up and put the book back on the stack next to the toilet and hurried back out to rejoin the group as the Krishna convert finished his narrative. There were appreciative mutters from people gathered in the room. The eyes of the shave-headed girl were on me as I returned to my place on the floor next to her: she had seen people hide in the bathroom before, I knew, people for whom the only prana was food and someplace warm, and my epiphany was that I wasn’t there only for that. I was also there to be given space to develop into something or someone I needed to become and the immediate path was to take me through these people.

I tried to explain that to her during the conversation after we ate. It wasn’t nearly as well-articulated as it may seem now. She smiled and nodded as if she understood but I had no doubt she’d heard something like that before too. But it was real, I assured both her and me; I wouldn’t join them but I’d like to remain near them, learning what I could. (And, I admitted, seeing her and eating on a regular basis.)

When we stood to chant I chanted and then danced with abandon. That summer I returned to the commune for days at a time, staying in my car and studying with the ascetics there. The girl, whose name I’ve forgotten, eventually left to seed another commune in New Jersey. I was asked to join the group moving there but said no. I hadn’t found a home but I had found one of the landmarks I recognized on the way there.