Free at Last!

FREE AT LAST! 
A Sermon Delivered to the
Dakota Unitarian Universalist Church
January 20, 2013

Events have occurred since I announced the title of this sermon that make me wonder if I should have used a question mark instead of an exclamation point. The title itself, of course, is a direct quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 1963 March on Washington Speech also known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. And tomorrow many of us have the day off in celebration of King’s birth. It will be a perfect day for watching the televised second inauguration of President Barack Obama who will take his second oath of office on Bibles previously owned by Abraham Lincoln and Dr. King.

What makes me wonder if, indeed, there’s a reason to ask if freedom is questionable is that yesterday was a different celebration. You may not have heard about this one or you may have heard about it but paid little attention to it. It was Gun Appreciation Day, the first nationally set-aside day to “rally support against anti-gun legislation and to show America that gun owners aren't 'radical crazies.'”

I know a lot of gun owners—my wife’s entire family is composed of hunters and she has explained to me that when her dad dies she will inherit the rifle he taught her to shoot with which she wants to display, which will be the first time I’ll have ever had a gun in my home—and many of us, if we don’t hunt ourselves, rely on family or friends who do to provide us with meat. Some of us served in the military where we learned to handle a weapon and use it in the way it’s meant to be, as a killing device, and took away from our service an appreciation for the power and use of guns. There are many former and current military members of my extended family and I have a friend who’s a gun rights advocate with whom I argue often about gun control, but who I also love and respect. I don’t think of any of them as either radical or crazy.

But the designers of this new-fashioned Gun Appreciation Day—or GAD as it’s called on friendly websites (and it may not be entirely coincidental how easy it is to slip from “GAD” to “God”)—while they may not be radical crazies, are at least tone deaf to the mood of most of the country, including the mood of many gun owners.

Gun Appreciation Day is the brainchild of Larry Ward, president of Political Media, Inc., a D.C. PR firm. In his announcement, Ward solemnly warns, “If the American people don't fight back now, Obama will do to the Second Amendment what he has already done to the First with Obamacare; gut it without a moment's thought to our basic constitutional rights.” How exactly a Gun Appreciation Day will accomplish that is no more explained than how the President, and the Congress and Senate and Supreme Court, all of which either voted in favor of or endorsed the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, did anything to, let alone gut, the First Amendment, but we’ll let that slide for now. The tone deafness comes from the choice of January 19th for this day, two days before both the President’s second inauguration—this president who has been the target of more death threats and animosity than any other in more than a century—and our celebration of Dr. King’s birthday—this man who was cut down by an assassin’s bullet—and a month and five days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

I don’t think I need to remind you of what happened that day or of what you felt. But I may need to remind you of how the rest of the country felt. Most of us were decimated. That a young man could get hold of a semi-automatic gun and use it to kill, in seconds, dozens of children and adults was the stuff of nightmare. For many of us, it was the culmination of the fear we had always had.

I say “for many” and not “for all” because for some people, the idea was too fantastic, too outside how they see reality, to have happened so easily, and so has been ripe for conspiracy theories ranging from suspicions the massacre was carried out, not by Adam Lanza alone, but with help from professional snipers or Israeli commandoes in order to hasten the Obama administration’s invoking the massacre to confiscate all weapons, to the conviction that no one actually died at the scene but that it was all staged by actors who got up and walked away, and in one case supposedly even sat on the President’s lap during his appearance consoling many of the victim’s families, again with the intent of providing an excuse for confiscating guns. Is it naïve of me to point out that, if confiscation were the rationale, it would have happened by now? One similarity all these events—the Sandy Hook shooting, the shooting of Dr. King, and the President’s inauguration—have is that each has been the subject of multiple conspiracies. Perhaps then it should not be a surprise that Ward feels more comfortable suggesting the President is fomenting a clandestine shredding of the Second Amendment and not, say, recognizing his own efforts to exacerbate a poor decision about timing into a tragically demented one.

Yesterday’s Gun Appreciation Day included at least three separate incidents of what are called negligent discharge—what the rest of us would call accidental shootings—in three states. Fortunately, no one was killed. (This is, of course, not including others who were victims of gun violence.) Unfortunately, the last time I spoke here for MLK Day, two years ago, I was also talking about another recent shooting, this one Jared Laughner’s assault on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that resulted in six deaths, among them 9 year old Christina Taylor-Green. La plus ca change…

Unlike Gun Appreciation Day the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday has a long history. I remember the battles that were played out over the choice to give MLK a holiday that involved giving working people another day off. It’s always been interesting to me that it was Ronald Reagan, a president I would never associate with progressive causes, who signed the bill into law making the third Monday of each January the day we pay honor to Dr. King. King’s actual birthday, you may know, is the 15th. But by 1983, the year Reagan signed the bill, the push to honor Dr. King, which had been building since his assassination in 1968, had reached a crescendo that simply was impossible to ignore.

Perhaps it’s a function of the “only Nixon could go to China” concept, that Reagan, a stalwart conservative Republican, would sign a bill honoring Martin Luther King. Reagan would reference that commitment to and success preaching nonviolence when he said, “Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man…Where others - white and black - preached hatred, he taught the principles of love…”—and we could make a point here that, with so much involving Republicans even when they get the idea right, the focus was not on King’s accomplishments for black people but what he did for white people; but let’s let that lie—but as Lou Cannon in his magisterial President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime writes:

[Reagan] spoke movingly about King’s contributions at an observance of his birthday on January 15, 1987, urging American youth “to accept nothing less than making yours a generation free of bigotry, intolerance and discrimination.” And he took other symbolic steps…When the Washington Post reported that a suburban black family had been harassed, Reagan visited the family. He twice visited a black high school in Chicago and paid tribute to black scientists, businessmen and military heroes in a commencement address at Tuskegee University in 1987. But blacks, the most conspicuous dissenters in the “Morning Again” landslide of 1984, never gave Reagan high marks. And the skepticism about Reagan’s commitment to civil rights was not limited to blacks alone. Reagan was simply reluctant to use federal authority in the cause of punishing discrimination of any sort.

This is neither to condemn blacks as being ungrateful for his signing of the MLK bill or any of his other symbolic gestures, nor to condemn Reagan for relying simply on those symbolic gestures. When you think about it, symbolism is often a president’s only effective tool. What he focuses his attention and energies on becomes important, not only politically but culturally. For a negative version also involving Reagan, consider his response or lack of response to AIDS.

Be that as it may, the bill, which had first been introduced by Democratic congressman John Conyers and Republican senator Edward Brooke in 1968, brought to the floor of the House of Representatives in 1979, and finally passed both houses in 1983, was signed by Reagan. But that was not the end of the struggle. From the outset, there was tremendous blowback against the new holiday, primarily from Republicans (ironic, in hindsight, given the attempts by the Republican Party in the last two elections to reclaim King as one of their own).

Reluctance was spearheaded by Jesse Helms of North Carolina who insisted, based on privately obtained FBI documents, that King had been a Communist. Reagan himself, citing costs, had rejected the bill for most of his term, until it won a veto-proof majority. Most famously, Arizona’s governor, Evan Meacham, and later a 76% majority of state voters, refused to honor Dr. King but recanted after losing its place as the 1993 home to the Super Bowl. Interestingly, it wasn’t Arizona that was the last state to recognize MLK Day but New Hampshire, which had ignored the holiday throughout the 80s and created a Civil Rights Day in 1991 that it reconfigured as MLK Day in 1999. Perhaps fittingly, it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that all fifty states celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. 2000 was also the first year all fifty states recognized it as a paid holiday for all state workers.

What do we celebrate when we celebrate a holiday? We recently celebrated New Year’s Eve, a time when the clocks and the calendars take on an added importance because we have made another complete circuit around the sun. We’ll soon celebrate Presidents’ Day which is the combined honoring of two important American leaders, Washington and Lincoln, for what they accomplished—in the first case by leading the country in a war for independence and in the second for leading a war for reunion. Then we’ll start celebrating a while slew of secular holidays honoring the Irish (St. Patrick’s Day), Mexicans (Cinco de Mayo), Italians (Columbus Day), and veterans (Memorial Day). There are also what we might call holidays of the state like the Fourth of July and Flag Day and Labor Day and Thanksgiving. There are holidays devoted to the seasons like the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and winter and summer solstices and to a lesser extent Halloween, Arbor Day and Earth Day. Then there are multiple religious holidays ranging from Eid al Fitr to Yom Kippur to Diwali to Samhain to Easter and Christmas.

There are as well many days given over to celebrating specific individuals, days devoted to remembering Rosa Parks and Malcolm X and Susan B. Anthony and Father Damien. But Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is different. It is a day when we are given national time off to celebrate—what, exactly? Well, MLK’s birthday of course and the things he stood for. But what exactly is that? What are we celebrating when we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day?

One of the protestations against honoring Dr. King’s birth as a national holiday is that he was a private citizen. He never held office. He did not make legislation. His birth was unremarkable and while his death was a tragedy neither is the basis for a religion or a national day of mourning. He was by all accounts a great man but he was also by many accounts a troubled man. He was instrumental in helping society see certain other people in a new and better way but he didn’t do that by anything other than the force of his speaking voice and his writing and his personality. And he didn’t do it alone. He’s a minister but he isn’t a religious figure. While he was a force for change he didn’t bring change about by himself or even introduce method for making change. He didn’t even have the standing to have brought civil rights legislation to a state government. As a citizen, he could suggest changes he thought the United States needed, but only on the local level. At most, he should have been a person who made an impassioned speech at a city ordinance meeting, perhaps that black city workers should have been paid on par with white city workers.

But he did something, something ineffable, something more than that. He led a movement—and by led I don’t mean to suggest he created the movement or gathered its people together—but he led a movement that made a major change in the ways Americans treat one another and love one another. The difference between a Gun Appreciation Day and MLK Day is that the former is a day intended to react against misplaced fears and concerns—that individual’s guns will be confiscated, that access to guns will be made more difficult—while the latter is a true appreciation to the influence an individual can have. His influence was not in having legislated treating one another well but helping us to recognize when we fail to.

new year's eve wedding homily

I've made it plain I love doing weddings.  If I could plan, write, and perform weddings every day, that would be my ideal work (and if I could do that for the homeless and street folks, even better).  I was honored to be asked to do a New Year's Eve wedding this past Monday, my first one.  This is my homily for that.

Wedding Homily

It’s fitting we come together on this New Year’s Eve, a night of promises and resolutions and hopes for new lives, as we are privileged to share with [this couple] their moment of supreme joy in the new life they begin together.  [My friends], you’ve expressed to me that for you tonight is the end of a search and the start of a new adventure.  That is exactly what marriage is, an adventure.  One embarked on, like many treks into the wild, not alone but with companions.  Many poets and commentators have written that weddings are not for the bride and groom but for the guests, and to a certain extent that’s true.  However, the focus and the hour of exultation is yours. 

Still, I would speak of new hope for them.  [My friends], in the years ahead I hope for many things.  That your wisdom will be steadily increased.  That your love for one another, strong as it is now, strengthens and matures even more.  That your dreams for the future grow larger and more fully.  We don’t choose our children or our parents. But we do choose our companions. We choose our partner. We choose one another. Today you look one another in the eye and say, “I love you and I want to be with you, and I want to share my life with you. The good, the bad, the swiftly-moving giddy days when I’m happy just to be with you and the long, never-ending nights when it seems I will never like you again. I want to share my greatest, my least, with you, because only with you do I feel complete.”

You’ve shared with me during our meetings together that you want to think of your marriage as a perpetual motion machine.  You said, “Our energy circuit should be self-maintaining.  We won’t be dependent on an outside source for our energy.”  That’s important because that is precisely what marriage is.  An energy-producing mechanism providing the magnetism that brings two people, already attracted to one another—perhaps, like the little magnets of our childhood, our southern and northern poles juttering one against the other—into proximity.  But it’s also as often an energy-sucking appliance that can drain the last residue of strength from you just when you need it most. 

You know this already; you told me “It’s not always gonna be sunshine and flowers.”  Truer words were never spoke.  Does this mean we should never marry?  Of course not.  It means we go into marriage with no illusions about it or about each other.  You have been together for years.  You know one another’s foibles and fortes.  Just like when you played racquetball together, you needed to serve as one another’s best opponent, not in order to produce a kill shot—that’s not the point of conflict in your relationship—but to produce a consistent rally that makes you a better player, a player who has found his equal. 

Marriage is a community, sometimes comprising hundreds.  We would be less than we are if our lives didn’t include the companionship of our parents or our families.  Our lives would be less if they didn’t include the moments we share with friends.  But the community will always consist at its core of the two of you.  Our lives would be less if they didn’t include the partner we choose beside us.  We choose that partner because the thought of being alone is unbearable.  Whether you think of that partner as Pinky or the Brain, as Fidel or Che, that partner needs to always be beside you even when, for the sake of peace of mind, you need to put a door or a wall between you. 

[Friends], if I can charge you with one responsibility it is this:  Remember this moment in the days ahead. Remember this is the person you love, the person who shares the way the world excites you and wants to be with you as you explore it. “We will sail pathless and wild seas” you promise one another today, and sometimes those seas will be the distance between the two of you. Be as unafraid of crossing those intimate borders as you are to take up each other’s wish to visit every country together.  This person is your friend and is as anxious as you are that you win.

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.

spiritual homelessness 3

Some of you may have read the following portion.  It's appeared, in slightly different form, here.

 

Part II:  What is my vocational calling?

Another story.  This past August I was coming home from seeing my counselor when I drove past an older woman on the opposite side of the road, taking a photograph of the geese who hang out at one of the local restaurants.  She had several knapsacks, so I figured her to be traveling.  I swung around at a gas station and pulled up and rolled down my passenger window. "Sister," I said, "Can I offer you a ride somewhere?"

She was about my age, maybe a little older. She wore glasses that looked small on her big face, braided her long hair streaked with grey in a ponytail down her back.  She wore an ankle-length denim skirt, high-top sneakers, and a flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows.  She giggled when she answered.  She said, "I was just taking pictures of the geese.  You never know when you'll see something like this again."

She asked where I was going.  I said, "Well, I'm heading home, but where are you going?"  She said, “Minneapolis,” and asked how far it was and I told her it was about an hour.  "Oh," she said.  "I guess I'd have a long walk."  She asked again how far I was going and in that moment I could have told the truth and said I was heading about 20 miles further (I did need some dog food there) and then dropped her off at the Minnesota border without an ounce of guilt.  Instead, I said, "Sister, I'll take you to Minneapolis." 

She tossed her things in the back seat and got in and we exchanged names.  Hers was Cora or it might have been "Coral.”  It’s not unusual, when on the road, to name yourself something that reflects how you think of yourself.   I was facing north when I picked her up and she was surprised when I turned around and headed back to the interstate:  "Isn't Minneapolis that direction?" she said, pointing back the way she'd been walking.

"No," I said. "It's west of where we are."  

"Oh, I would have had a very long walk and gotten nowhere!" she said. 

Almost immediately she told me she was a street preacher who ministered to the homeless, and that God had told her to leave her home a year and a half ago and take to the road.  I said I was also a preacher.  We asked what each other was.  She was "just Christian," she said, "Just Jesus out of the book."  She had heard of Unitarian Universalists and had met a few and been impressed by them.  She filled up nearly every second of our drive with talk and questions and confessions. 

She left her abusive husband, she said, about 5 years ago back outside Denver.   She had begun this trip 3 days before at a truck stop in South Dakota.  She was resting between rides and had been approached by a Jamaican woman whose husband was a trucker and who asked if she'd come home with them to help the Jamaican woman get herself together.  But then this woman had stopped taking her meds, Cora told me, and progressively got more and more aggressive, yelling and berating her, finally literally throwing her bags out of the truck when they'd stopped for gas at the station where I turned around.  Cora camped for two nights in the woods nearby, to pray and settle herself, before heading back out.  The night before she attended midweek services at a Lutheran church not far out of town—I know the place, it's a few miles from my house—and she'd heard from people there that there are a lot of homeless people in Minneapolis.  So Cora decided to head there next but apparently hadn't a very good idea of where it was in relation to that part of Wisconsin.  I told her she'd likely traveled through Minneapolis riding with the trucker and his wife. 

She had been born in Alsace-Lorraine, she said, but couldn't speak more than rudimentary French and German, and her mother was long dead.  Her father was ungodly, she said, and dead to her.  She'd grown up somewhere out west, she was very vague about where, and mentioned a daughter who was married.  I tried on occasion to ask about her family but it was like trying to blow into a whirlwind.  She was a talking machine, sometimes punctuating sentences with "Praise God!" and "Lord, that's your way!" and sometimes girlish giggles.  

She was attending an online bible college out of Australia run by an evangelical couple that delivered two types of courses, free and paid for.  She was taking the courses for free so she wouldn't get a degree but she didn't think that was important for the ministry she was doing.  She had no idea where she was going or what she would do when she got there except to preach the word to people as she could and if they'd listen and rely on their goodness.  She said that God and Jesus had kept her safe and healthy all her time on the road.  She didn't care much, she said, of what anyone else's opinion of her was, she would just be as crazy as Jesus wanted her in order to do his work.  I told her she was a fool for Christ.  She allowed she'd never heard that phrase but she thought it suited her perfectly, and she repeated the phrase several times during our ride.

She asked me about Unitarian Universalism and I gave her a short answer about no one knowing about an afterlife but we know we have this one and it's important how we treat each other here.  She thought that was wonderful and wanted to experience a UU service so I told her where the nearest congregation was in the area where I would drop her off.  She mentioned her reliance on libraries several times so I told her the perfect spot I could think of was at one end of Nicollet Mall by the county library.  She said that sounded perfect.  When we got there I pulled off to the side of the street and helped her unload and then shoulder everything, We exchanged hugs and "God bless you”s, and I watched her waddle around the corner before driving off and heading back home.

Later, my wife would ask me "Do you think she was crazy?" and I'd answer, "Yes."  Cora mentioned having refused to take mental health exams in order to receive social services, claiming that Second Timothy says you can't be both crazy and a Christian, and since she was Christian she wasn't crazy.  I failed to find this suggestion in Second Timothy or anywhere else in the Bible. 

But on a larger, communal scale, did I think she was a danger to herself or other people?  Not for a second.  She seemed to have a solid understanding of her life on the road and what it entailed, and if she didn't have it when she started, by this time she had.  She seemed to know how to stay safe—she told me she'd never been physically harmed by anyone and I believe her—and when to recharge her energies.  After all, she'd spent a couple nights alone in order to pray and "get herself together."  She didn't seem too concerned about getting anywhere in particular or about getting something done.  She wasn't upset when she found she'd been heading in the wrong direction.  She seemed content to drift along, going where her God sent her and doing what she thought her God wanted her to do.

From what she told me what her God wanted from her isn't very different from what my God wants from me:  Serve people andhelp them be as human as possible.  She didn't want anyone to stop doing anything he or she wasn't interested in stopping, just maybe to think about doing something else and offering to be with them while they went about their lives.  She seemed extraordinarily happy and she said she wasn't on any medications—since she was not crazy—and didn't do drugs or alcohol or smoke.  She just liked people, she said. 

I have known many preachers in my life, and many of them I would model myself after, but Cora’s way of being with people seems the most satisfying for me.  It was on meeting her I began to have first thoughts about shifting what I have always assumed is my calling—that of a parish minister who spends much time on the streets and opens the church to local homeless and troubled—to a minister whose parish is the streets among the homeless and addicted.  It’s a subtle but informed shift as it moves my perspective from bringing others inside with me to being outside with them. 

spiritual homelessness 2

Part I:  What is my understanding of the church and its mission?

I tell stories in order to make sense of life.  That’s also the impetus behind all scripture.  I’d like to believe in a personal God, a God who cares about me as an individual or even as a member of humanity.  I envy evangelicals and Pentacostals their experience of a relationship with an outside force interested in their well-being.  My experience has been what Keith Russell[1] describes as the Peterine, a home for the homeless.  It often seems there’s no one home but there’s the need for a home. The God I’ve experienced displays little sympathy for the poor and oppressed and helpless, doling out greater and harsher conditions on them, while offering people like me better and warmer conditions than we deserve.  Such a God shruggingly kills and disappears nearly a thousand people in the aftermath of a typhoon inthe Philippines while caring enough to shift the course of a tropical storm to avoid a political gatheringin Tampa.

            What’s the purpose of worship for such a God?  Is it to placate, to ameliorate God’s anger?  It might seem so if the only reason people got together was to celebrate such a God.  But it’s obvious this God doesn’t take comfort from the worship of people in one of the most religious regions, southeast Asia, or the power of prayer would have had a greater effect on Typhoon Bopha.  “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering,” the Psalmist tells us.  “’The multitude of your sacrifices--what are they to me?…I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats,’” exclaims the Isaiah writer.

The purpose of church, in my experience, is to provide an indwelling for comfort and succor to people by people.  “Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind.  Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing... [Who] will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?  But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed,” the writer of 1^st Peter tells us. While I may not recognize a personal God, one that’s got anyone’s interests at heart, I see plenty to indicate a force that binds us together.  It is a connective spiritual tissue that, like a holy game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” provides a conduit for nurturing the spark that brings me in greater relation with you. 

            When I came to United Seminary, and for most of the time I’ve been here, it’s been with the intention that I would serve a congregation that practiced that ideal, one where the Peterine work of being a home to the homeless was the reason to get together each week.  After all, I had already served as pastor to several congregations where, while everyone knew it was hard work to bring about what Unitarian Universalists call the Beloved Community, they also knew it would be ultimately rewarding and where, while most refused making the difficult changes that we knew could result in what we wanted, they nonetheless paid lip service at least to the need for those changes.  My intent was that if I kept at them, they would make the changes. Incrementally. 

            But as I’ve been here and as I’ve studied and watched the changes in congregationallife, not only in my own faith but in other faiths, I’ve come to realize this:  It is too late for those changes to make a difference.  Of course, congregations aren’t going away in the immediate future—and in the long run, something like what we’ve come in the past couple centuries to see as the common experience of communal gathering will remain in some form—but they are dying as swiftly as their eldest members.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Like Spanish becoming the most-spoken language in the US or the surge of minorities eventually overtaking white people as the dominant Americans, it is simply how things are. 

            But a question I asked several weeks into this class and based on our study of DianaButler Bass’ Christianity After Religion has stuck with me:  As churches are changing, as congregations become less “religious” and more “spiritual,” require fewer experts and authorities to imbue what rituals remain with holiness, what reason will they have to hire ministers?  After all, if it’s true, as Butler Bass articulates, that “Everyone is in the same situation:  a religious bear market.  Indeed, the first decade of the twenty-first century could rightly be called the Great Religious Recession,”[2] then is it any wonder seminaries find themselves in terrible fiscal straits and mainline, otherwise well-to-do denominations must ask their executives toresign if the money just isn’t coming in? My faith has retained a lot of its Christian roots, including its predilection for ministers, but many Unitarian Universalist congregations are proudly independent of regular ministerial oversight, and while there remains the assumption that a congregation that chooses to call a full-time minister has made it, many staunchly refuse to or at best look for someone part-time.

            I’ve had two previous professional horses shot out from under me—first as a bookseller and then as a professor—and don’t look forward, in my early 50s, to having it done a third time.  There’s the money aspect, of course, but there’s also the sense of being a part of something larger and greater than myself, which is why I choose to serve in the first place.  I’ve studied this situation a lot—I’ve even written sermons about it—and none of the answers I can come up with suggest the long-term fiscal viability of parish work.  It’s for this reason I’ve chosen to seek another option.

---

[1] Russell, Keith.  In Search of the Church:  New Testament Images for Tomorrow’s Congregations.  Alban Institute.  1994.

[2] Butler Bass, Diana.  Christianity After Religion:  The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening.  New York; Harper Collins.  2012:  20.

spiritual homelessness 1

I've been busy writing this past semester, although little of it has ended up here.  But as a final requirement I've taken a course called final integrative seminar which is meant to pull together many of the threads of my years at seminary.  The exam for this course is what's called a "statement of ministry," and while it may be precocious to call it that--I don't have much of a statement to make about something unless I've been directly involved in it for a long time--it's somewhat accurate.  I'll publish it in 4 sections starting today.

Spiritual Homelessness

My Statement of Ministry

Introduction:  What is my understanding of God?

Like all stories about God, this is a story about loss.  I knew an artist named John Wolfe back east in the 80s.  He was one-legged, had had the other blown off in Vietnam, had a family, a wife, a little girl, and an awfully big talent.  One of the few New Paltz artists to have his own studio, separate from where he lived and not on campus.  He worked in oils primarily.  He didn’t want an artificial leg but hobbled around on two metal canes that ended in cuffs on his forearms, his good right leg, and his stump. 

            He told me a story that took place in the 70s.  He’d just gotten out of the service a few years before, after losing the leg, and was down and out New York.  He couldn’t take it anymore, he said, drinking all the time, angry as hell, in pain when he wasn’t high.  He was sick of people, sick of life, and sick of people in his life, so he decided one night to just get out. 

            “I wanted,” he said between puffs from his Marlboro, “I wanted to be away from people, but not away from people.  You know what I mean?  I was tired of civilization or tired of the people in it.”  He took another drag and stared off into the distance, even though all he could see across the street was the library and the bar.  “People shot at me, they took my leg.  I didn’t blame people, I blamed civilization, or what civilization done to them.  I hated that.” 

            He stubbed out the Marlboro and shook another from the pack into his mouth.  He was fair-haired, wispy bangs blown across a boyish face that was too trusting to live for long on the streets.  His eyes pincered up.  “I got together a lot of money, I don’t know, couple hundred.  Be honest, I don’t remember where I got it from.  Saved it, borrowed it.  Might have stolen some, who remembers back then?”

            He lit the Marlboro, took a long drag, and handed it to me.  I took a single toke—that’s all I did with cigarettes—and gave it back.  He stubbed it back in his mouth and talked around it.

            “I’d heard about this place, down on the Yucatan Peninsula.  Tiny town, no one goes there.  I took a flight to Mexico City, took another flight east to another town.  Had to rent a burro take me up to another town where I caught another flight.  Caught a helicopter from there, one of those passenger things, got a fat belly and room for thirty.  Picked me up from one mountain top and took me across to another mountain top.” 

            He was off in another world by then, watching people come in and out of the library and either head for their cars or the bar next door.  We were sitting in front of the bank, the nicer one in town, but the people inside had never seemed to mind anyone leaning against their wall so we leaned.

            “Whole other air up there.  I could feel like, like my lungs were filling up with something else, something I’d never breathed before.  Something people were really supposed to breathe.  I couldn’t wait for them to open the door.”

            A guy we knew came out of the bar and waved at us.  We shrugged back.  “I was standing on the ledge when the dude opens the door.  What do I see directly across the tarmac?”

            I grinned.  I knew it wouldn’t be good.

            “McDonald’s arches.”  John took a final drag like he’d sucked all the bitterness out of the Marlboro and flicked it in the street. 

            “Did you stay anyway?”

            “Course I did.  I’d put a lot into this place or what I thought it was going to be.  But it ended up it wasn’t nothing.”  He grabbed his cuffs and we headed up the street.  “I came back, started doing some reading, some meditating.  That’s when I started reading Buddhism.  Started painting.  That was the only way I could find that place.”

            John’s canvases were landscapes or cityscapes, sometimes abstractions.  He took life drawing classes on occasion to keep his hand in, but his real work was depopulated, places where people had been and gone.

            I said, “No people?” 

            “No civilization.  People I can handle.  It’s what being around other people does to them I don’t like.”

johnny thunders died for your sins!

I don't remember where or when it was that I first heard this song--I suspect it was when I heard about the death of Kristy MacColl--but "Fairytale of New York" is now one of those songs I need to rehear every Xmas season.  It's a reminder, as some of us need it, that there is always another Christmas others experience.