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. 

radical religious ideas from 16th C Italians

1.  Christ is not God but man, born of Joseph and Mary, but filled with all the powers of God;
2.  Mary had other sons and daughters after Christ;
3.  There is no angelic being created by God, but where Scripture speaks of angels it means men appointed by God for a given purpose;
4.  There is no other Devil but human prudence [i.e., cunning], for no creature of God is hostile to him but this;
5.  The wicked do not rise at the last day, but only the elect, whose head is Christ;
6.  There is no hell but the grave;
7.  When the elect die, they sleep until the judgement day, when all will be raised;\
8.  The souls of the wicked perish with the body, as do all other animals;
9.  The seed of man has from God the power of producing flesh and spirit;
10.  The elect are justified by the eternal mercy and love of God without any outward work, that is, without the merits, the blood, or the death of Christ; Christ died to show forth the righteousness of God, that is, the sum of all the goodness and mercy of God and of his promises.

[the resultant points of doctrine agreed to at a mid-sixteenth century council held in venice by antitrinitarian anabaptist groups who had organized throughout italy, ordaining ministers and bishops.]

--from for faith and freedom:  a short history of unitarianism in europe by charles howe

out of the flames, endlessly crackling: a unitarian hero

where this book really comes to life is in its descriptions of books--the manuscripts and early editions and incunabula (what a wonderful word!) and fakes and the tracking down of old titles and their provenance.  which only makes sense.  the goldstones are bibliomanes and at their best writing about other bibliomanics.  their thumbnail of what the book business was like in the 17th century is pretty indicative too of modern rare book selling.  I've read two of their previous books--used & rare and slightly chipped--both of which were focused on the oddities of bookcollecting and those were wonderful.  they try something a little different here--tracing a single author, the spanish author michael servetus, from his influences to the influences he had on others and the fate of his books, which were supposed to be destroyed but as we discover thrillingly nearly at the end of the book, "[john] calvin [who had ordered the burning at the stake of servetus along with all his manuscripts and copies of his books] after ordering every copy...hunted down and destroyed, after threatening anyone who harbored a copy with the same fate as that of its author, could not bring himself to destroy his own copy [of servetus' most heretical work]."  this is a satisfying coda to an author's life and death.

but the book doesn't entirely satisfy.  the goldstones are on solid ground when, say, tracking down  provenance (their section "the trail" detailing the assumed trajectory surviving copies of servetus' last work took in order to end up in various national and private libraries), but less so when trying to explain philosophic concepts or theological arguments.  and their views of calvin and the holy roman emperors, all of which are the villains to servetus' scholarly hero, are tellingly simplistic:  they operate primarily out of a basis for attaining and holding onto power, as if their beliefs and theologies are beholden to that and not the other way around.  the reason john calvin remains a potent religious force to this day is because of his genius for combining scripture and human needs in the service to providing the religious discipline most people acknowledge they need.  he remains influential because his strict dogma answers a god-sized hole in people, not despite it.

aside from this and a few other caveats--among them one that has nothing to do with the goldstones but my kindle version of the book often substitutes symbols for numbers when it's obvious there's meant to be a date noted (so it looks like the authors are cursing someone) and sometimes nonsensical numbers appear (for instance, in describing the devastation of the 30 years war, this appears:  "no statistic is more chilling than this: there were 11 million people living in germany in 1618...;by 1648...only 13 million were left."  what?)--the book is serviceable in delineating a seldom-known precursor to unitarianism as well as providing a sketchbook explanation of what unitarianism is and its expansion from the council of nicea to 19th century america.

not hell, but hope and courage

this is the sermon I delivered a week ago to the UU congregation I serve in the hub.  it's not in quite the form I'd like--there are still some tweaks I want to do.  I'm delivering it again to another congregation in november and hope to have it in a shape I'm happier with by then.

“NOT HELL, BUT HOPE AND COURAGE”
A Sermon Delivered September 2, 2012,
to Dakota Unitarian Universalist Church

I want to ask you to open your hymnals to the page that explains who we are. There’s no page number but it’s after the table of contents and the preface and then the title page. The lower part reads “The Living Tradition we share draws from many sources.” Paul Gaugin famously said that every tribe asks themselves “Who are we? Where have we been? Where are we going?” Today’s sermon is an attempt to answer two of those questions.

Back in 2004, when I attended the Unitarian Universalist Leadership Camp in Beloit, Wisconsin, one of the staff members was a minister names Richard Beal. Richard, who’s retired in Maine now, was then serving Thomas Jefferson UU Church in Lexington, Kentucky, but he didn’t identify himself as a Unitarian Universalist. Every time one of us made some mention of UUs, which we often shortened, as a lot of us do, as “Unitarians,” Richard would make a “u” of the crook between thumb and forefinger of one hand, and then join it to the “u” made from the other hand. He identifies as a Universalist, maybe one of the last remaining Universalist ministers.

 The Universalists have a long American history and I’m almost tempted to say they’re a uniquely American religion, as much as the Scientologists, the Church of Latter Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, except that John Murray, long considered the founder of Universalism, was not native American like the founders of these other faiths, but British and traced his theology to the ideas of another British writer, James Relly. Relly was a radical Calvinist who “held that Jesus Christ had so thoroughly identified himself with humankind that he became completely tainted with humanity’s sins, and that, through his death on the cross, he had atoned for both his own sins and the sins of all humankind, past, present, and future. Relly argued that God the Father could not have possibly forced His Son to die on the cross for sins he had not committed, for that would have been patently unjust.” Historian Charles Howe calls Relly’s and Murray’s theology a “radical Calvinism…in which the concept of the elect was expanded to include all people.” It was “likewise Trinitarian…where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were simply different manifestations of the One God rather than three distinct personalities.” A century later Thomas Starr King would explain the difference between Universalists and Unitarians as “Universalists thought that God was too good to damn them forever, while the Unitarians thought that they were too good to be damned.”

 Charles Howe is also the source for the famous words ascribed to Murray that are written in our hymnals (#704) and taught to our new members: “Go out into the highways and byways of America…Give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling Calvinism, something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”

But as we read in the current issue of UU World, the words are not really Murray’s at all. They appear initially as an exhortation by a fictional Time Spirit conjured up by Alfred Cole in his 1951 pamphlet, Our Liberal Heritage, from which it was transposed as if it was a quotation from Murray into a 1962 Sunday school textbook, Unitarians and Universalists, by Henry Cheetham, and from there added by Howe to his The Larger Faith: A Short History of American Universalism, from which it’s been accepted into conventional lore as something Murray wrote or said.

Still, even if it is not an actual quotation, it is as accurate a condensation of Murray’s Universalism as someone who isn’t Murray can get. And it was this notion, that people deserved “hope and courage” rather than the threat of damnation, that helped both the spread of Universalism and, ultimately perhaps, it’s nigh-disappearance. Like all new ideas, Universalism mutated and not all the changes were acceptable. The Universalists tried several times to get a rein on their increasingly more-Unitarian-like free-range faith by becoming creedal. One such, created during the lifetimes of both Murray and Hosea Ballou, was the Profession of Belief, later known as the Winchester Profession. It asserted that Universalists believed “that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of mankind…[That] there is one God, whose Nature is Love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness…[and that] holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order, and practice good works…” It laid Universalism very solidly in the Christian camp where it was to remain almost to the present day. Only in the mid 20th Century, 1943 exactly, during a bloody World War, would Universalists try to become as interfaith as their name suggests, contending that “Universalism cannot be limited either to Protestantism or to Christianity, not without denying its very name. Ours is a world fellowship, not just a Christian sect. For so long as Universalism is universalism and not partialism, the fellowship bearing its name must…[make clear] that all are welcome: theist and humanist, Unitarian and Trinitarian, colored, and color-less. A circumscribed Universalism is unthinkable.”

Perhaps not unthinkable, at least not historically. There was, in fact, a long period of what Howe calls conservative Universalism by which he means a Universalism of the status quo. While the denomination’s General Assemblies were universal in condemning slavery, for instance, it was generally left to individual congregations to take the temperature of the local climate and determine who ought to say what. This led to the declaration in 1841 of the South Carolina Universalists against “any interference with the subject of Negro slavery by…people…where it does not exist,” and eventually to the schism between the northern and southern universalists over the Civil War which did not fully heal, if it can said ever to have, until the merger between Universalists and Unitarians. Similarly, it was often suggested that the many Biblical injunctions against profit and riches be toned down so that the wealthier congregants in major cities of both the north and south were not convinced to make their donations elsewhere.

One of the few Universalist jokes I know survives from this period and plays off the conservatives’ intransigence in the face of change. Three men wake up in hell in a boiling cauldron and start talking. It turns out they’re all clergymen and so talk gets around to why they’ve ended up where they have. One admits, “I was a priest and I guess I was a bit of a ladies’ man.” The second nods sagely and confesses, “I was a rabbi and one temptation I couldn’t avoid was a good pork sandwich.” The third stoically stares at them, saying nothing. Finally, the other two say, “We just admitted our foibles to you, admit what you’ve done to end up here.” Finally the third barks, “I am a Universalist minister, this place is not hot, and I am not here!”

Howe attributes one of the changes from this conservative, timid Universalism to a more robust, questioning faith to minister Herman Bisbee of the St. Anthony Universalist church here in Minnesota. In 1864 he began to preach “Emersonian ‘natural religion.’ Religion, he said, is ‘the effort which man makes to perfect himself, not the effort God makes to perfect him.’ His views were soon condemned in the denominational press as being in ‘the high and oracular fashion of our Boston Free Religionists’”, which was a way of accusing him of being religion-free. Suggesting that such free thinkers might be better regarded among the Unitarians, widely considered to have left Christianity, he was called a “thoroughgoing infidel” who mocked the Bible and the Minnesota Universalists were urged to remove him from fellowship. “The Universalist Church is a Christian Church, unqualifiedly so,” the press thundered; “No man has any business in its ministry who is not also a Christian”. Bisbee made a clear distinction that, in accord with Universalist principles, he accepted the Bible as containing a revelation without accepting it as literally true or infallible. The Minnesota Committee on Fellowship, Ordination, and Discipline eventually charged and found him guilty of heresy for uttering “doctrines subverting Christianity, and entirely contrary to the principles of the Universalist church” and ordered him out of the denomination. Bisbee resigned but the St. Anthony congregation not only elected to have him continue as its minister but changed its name. Howe concludes “Bisbee [forced] the Universalist denomination to face up to the issue of freedom of belief…[In]1899 the General Convention adopted [a new creed]…the Boston Declaration [which] identified ‘the five essential principles of Universalism: The Universal Fatherhood of God; the spiritual authority and leadership of his Son, Jesus Christ; the trustworthiness of the Bible as containing a revelation from God; the certainty of just retribution for sin; and the final harmony of all souls with God.’”

Bisbee’s influence can be clearly seen in the predominant Universalist theology of the 20th Century, most clearly associated with Clarence Skinner of the Community Church of Boston. Skinner’s theology, “though expressed in marginally Christian terms, was at heart a social action-oriented global humanism that stressed ‘a spiritual interpretation of the whole of life’ that gave ‘insight into the unities and universals’ of religion…[A] truly universal religion had to be ‘founded upon a twentieth century psychology and theology, a religion which is throbbing with the dynamics of democracy, a spirituality which expresses itself in terms of humanism, rather than in terms of individualism.’” A sermon in 1947 put it plainly: “Is Universalism a Christian denomination, or is it something more, a truly universal religion? This issue…[strikes] at the very base of its religious foundation, for Christianity and this larger Universalism are irreconcilable.”

“Larger Universalism” was a misnomer. Universalism was always a tiny denomination. For the previous 55 years, starting about the time of the World Parliament of Religions, the Universalists had considered merging with the Congregationalists, the Liberal Quakers, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and even, for a while, the Baptists—there remains in some parts of the south a small sect known called Primitive Universalist Baptists, a reform movement numbering about 2000 in 2005—but by the time they merged with the Unitarians in 1961, the first real census was taken. Prior to 1958 a Universalist census was always a good idea that never seemed to get beyond the guesstimate stages, but when the actual merging became a reality, just like with any corporate takeover stock had to be taken of what the two units brought to the table. The Universalist Church of America was comprised of nearly 300 congregations and almost 37,000 members. In contrast, the American Unitarian Association had 606 active congregations comprised of nearly 107,000 members. One later president of the UUA would report of this discovery, the Universalists “met the Unitarians and found that Unitarians are, more or less, just like the Universalists except that there are more of them and they make more noise.”

Despite the inflated numbers that Universalists had bandied around between themselves for a century and a half—sometimes claiming as many as 150-200,000—the number of Universalists probably never exceeded 60 or 70,000, even at Universalism’s most popular era, the early 1800s. One reason Howe touches on for this dilution over the years but doesn’t delve into is the assimilation of the most specific Universalist belief—that the elect is everybody—by mainstream Christianity. Related to the “Is God Dead?” stories of the late 60s was an essay in Time magazine in April, 2011, asking “Is Hell Dead?” Time’s story was a review of and interview with Pastor Rob Bell, the minister of Mars Hill Bible Church, a megachurch in Grandville, Michigan, whose book, Love Wins, is a bestseller among both evangelicals and secularists.

I've read Bell's book. It's not a hard or lengthy read: I finished it in less than a day. Bell writes books in a style probably like he writes his sermons, a breezy, companionable, folksy style, sometimes looking like a prose poem with flights of verse. None of this means what he says isn't important or profound. Much of the Bible is written in the same way.

Bell is pretty controversial in evangelical circles and I understand why. Reading Love Wins and reading about the reaction to it is probably similar to reading a Universalist text a century ago and its response. Bell's message is similar: God is too just to damn someone eternally for sins he or she committed during a finite part of an infinite existence. God, in Bell’s estimation, is too large, too audaciously hopeful, to accept someone’s rejection as final. He asks, “Is God like the characters in a story Jesus would tell, old ladies who keep searching for the lost coin until they find it, shepherds who don’t rest until that one sheep is back in the fold, fathers who rush out to greet and embrace their returning son, or, in the end, will God give up?” The suggestion, of course, and the answer the Universalists provide, is no, God will not give up.

Such a message is damaging to a theology for which the only thing holding people back from committing all manner of atrocities is the promise of eternal punishment. I’m sure Bell is aware of the example of Bishop Carlton Pearson, the black Pentecostal minister who lost his congregation and status for his heretical Gospel of Inclusion, a variant of universal reconciliation based on an epiphany he had while contemplating the Rwandan genocide. Bell and Pearson are often castigated in the fundamentalist and evangelical press not for what they believe, because I think if you press most Christians, mainstream or no, they will admit to a similar belief, but for saying it out loud and making it an element of their dogma. As Bell puts it, “God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it.”

Universal salvation, also called universal reconciliation, and emphasizing substitutionary atonement—the idea that God so loves people that any debt for past or future sins has been wiped out by Jesus’ efforts on our behalf—has become so ubiquitous among Christian congregants as to bleed out what need there was once was having to emphasize it. Murray and Relly, heretics in their times, would today be welcomed by most mainstream Christian denominations, by which I mean nearly everyone to the left of the Jack van Impe ministries.

 Universalist minister Richard Beal is right to emphasize that Universalists proudly remain among us. Howe identifies seven elements Universalists brought to the merger: a theology founded on love; democratic church polity; social justice rooted in the worth of individuals; the belief liberal religion can speak to every person’s condition; female equality in church and politics; the melding of intellectual rigor with emotional warmth; and a vision of inclusiveness. He locates the First Principle, with its emphasis on the inherent worth and dignity of everyone, as a Universalist principle informing all the others.

Who are we? Where have we come from? We are Unitarian Universalists and we come from a segment of liberal Christianity all but subsumed by the modern realization that God, however we imagine God to be, is more interested in unity than punishment. To paraphrase words spoken the other night by our president, our path is hard and long but we travel it together. We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up. But for me, what Universalists remind us of is this. It’s in this spirit we recognize an old Buddhist truth that might as easily have come from a Universalist pamphlet. Heaven and hell are the same place, a long table heaped with food and at which people are seated at places with 6-foot long forks and spoons. In hell the people are miserable and frustrated, trying to feed themselves. In heaven, the people feed each other across the table.

what my heaven contains

In Matthew 20 the mother of two of Jesus' disciples says to Jesus, "Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and [the] other at your left in your kingdom."  She doesn't want bigger mansions or larger piles of gold for them, because static images of wealth and prosperity were not what filled people's heads when they thought of heaven in her day.  She understood heaven to be about partnering with God to make a new and better world, one with increasingly complex and expansive expressions and dimensions of shalom, creativity, beauty and design.
So when people ask, "What will we do in heaven?" one possible answer is to simply ask:  "What do you love to do now that will go on in the world to come?"
What is it that when you do it, you lose track of time because you get lost in it?  What do you do that makes you think, "I could do this forever"?  What is it that makes you think, "I was made for this"?
If you ask these kinds of questions long enough you will find some impulse related to creation.  Some way to be, something to do.  Heaven is both the peace, stillness, serenity, and calm that come from having everything in its right place--that state in which nothing is required, needed, or missing--and the endless joy that comes from participating in the ongoing creation of the world.

--from Love Wins:  A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell

I've been reading Bell's book in preparation for a sermon I'm writing.  It's not a hard or lengthy read:  I finished it in less than a day.  Bell writes in a style probably like he writes his sermons, a breezy, companionable, almost singsong style, sometimes looking like a prose poem with flights of verse.  None of this means what he says isn't important or profound.  Much of the Bible is written in the same way.

Bell is pretty controversial in evangelical circles and I understand why.  The reason I'm reading his book now is because the sermon I'm writing is on Universalism, the so-called "poorer cousin" of the merger with Unitarianism, and reading Love Wins and reading about the reaction to it is probably similar to reading a Universalist text a century ago and its response.  Bell's message is similar:  God is too just to damn someone eternally for sins he or she committed during a finite part of an infinite existence.  Such a message is damaging to a theology for which the only thing holding people back from committing all manner of atrocities is the promise of eternal punishment for having done it.  Of course, as we've seen, the threat of contemporary punishment has never kept many people from committing all manner of atrocities anyway.

All of which puts me in mind of a great Twilight Zone episode in which a farmer and his dog find themselves dead and when the farmer finds himself at what he thinks are the gates of heaven he opts not to enter since neither his dog nor hunting is allowed there.  And Bell makes me want to answer what actions make me lose track of time, make me think "I could do this forever" and "I was born for this," what actions bring me shalom?

Gardening, specifically pulling weeds; teaching; driving long distances when I have no timetable and the radio is on; long family walks; packing with my dogs in the upstairs window in the afternoon sun; meals with friends; picking up hitchhikers and taking them where they want to go, maybe especially crazy hitchhikers; visiting other people's churches; listening to other people talk about what they believe; doing hard crosswords; playing scrabble with my wife; meals with friends and strangers; writing sermons, delivering sermons, listening to people's reactions to my sermons (although not, I confess, listening to many other people's sermons); cycling; fly fishing; tai chi; walking home in the bonechilling cold after a good class to a warm house and good conversation and a beer.  These are all things my heaven would contain.

coyote on the trail

that there are wild beasts here on the rim is something we all know.  there've been bears spotted a mile south  and one was shot at the local ramp onto the interstate north of here after being struck by a car.  we've seen turkey and deer, of course, and feral cats, some feral dogs, and there's often stories of wolves.  we often hear coyotes at night, sometimes close by, usually in the winter and spring, but this summer we've heard them since late june.

a couple days ago I was out walking the dogs north on the trail when one dog, the younger husky mix, sprang off into the underbrush and didn't return for about 5 minutes.  that's not unusual.  what was so was that further down the trail, just before he returned, I saw an animal I took at 1st for him emerge from the trees and trot quickly south.  when I realized it wasn't my dog I took it for a fox but then realized it was larger than that, and by the time it had jumped back into the trees and darted into the cow pasture to the east I'd identified it as a coyote.

my dog hadn't barked or growled or made any sounds I could hear and then he plowed back out onto the trail, obviously seeking the coyote.  I say a lot of stuff about them but they're basically well-trained dogs and so when I called him he came right over and submitted to being leashed.  I kept him on it although he pulled and whined as we went by the area the coyote had come out from, and when we passed by the spot where it sprang into the field he went absolutely nuts, tugging and twitching and for the next couple yards kept turning around and whining.  at last I turned too and there, about 40 feet behind us, trotted the coyote.  it was an immature one, not a juvenile I think but younger than an adult, and probably a male.  it hesitated for a moment when I turned, affording me a good look, and then darted into the undergrowth and back into the field.  this was fewer than 10 minutes walk from our house and within spitting distance of our neighbor's homes on both sides of the trail.

what I imagine happened was that my dog smelled the coyote and came perilously close to it resting.  now, my dog is not a bruiser.  he is a big, knuckleheaded, playbowing, overgrown pup, although to an especially near-blind and unable-to-smell coyote he might look like a wolf.  we checked him all over for bites or scratches after we got home but there were none we could find.  what is especially of interest to me is the coyote's trotting after us on the trail after he'd been safely passed by.  my wife said our dog's twisting and turning was his getting into protection stance but I say he was trying to invite the coyote home for a sleepover.

an important part of me is glad I live in a place where there are still dangerous animals prowling.  would my opinion change if one of them attacked and killed my dogs or cats?  probably, at least for a little while.  but that's my problem, not theirs and not, I suspect, even my pets'.  we should be aware of the dangers that surround us and remember that, despite our current position at the top of the predator list most places, that placement doesn't always hold.  nor should it.  I'm not about, like timothy treadwell, to go live with the grizzlies in order to try my luck--I appreciate my securely closed door--but I like having to be aware that, once I step beyond the borders of my property, and at night, even within those borders, there are animals that could and would do me harm.

fool for christ

some days ago 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.  I noted 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. glasses, long hair in a ponytail down her back, streaked with grey.  ankle-length denim skirt, hightop sneaks, 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 and I said, "well, I'm heading home, but where are you going?"  she asked how far minneapolis 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 dropped her off at the border without an ounce of guilt.  but something suggested I go the extra 40 miles and I said, "sister, I'll take you to minneapolis."

so she tossed her things in the back seat and got in and we exchanged names.  hers was kora (it might have been "coral").  I was facing north when I picked her up and she was surprised 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, that god had told her to leave her home a year and a half ago and go out on the road.  I said I was also a preacher.  we asked what each 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 had left her abusive husband, she said, 5 years ago and back outside denver.  she'd started out 3 days before at a truckstop in south dakota and had been approached by a jamaican woman whose husband was a trucker and asked if she'd come home with them to help her get herself together.  but then this woman had stopped taking her meds, she said, 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.  she'd camped for 2 nights in the woods nearby, to pray and settle herself, before heading back out, and then had attended midweek services at a lutheran church not far out of town--I know the place, it's a few miles from my house--where she'd heard from people there that there are a lot of homeless people in minneapolis.  so she'd decided to head there (but apparently hadn't a very good idea of where it was from the part of the rim she was on).  I told her she'd likely been driven through minneapolis by 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 but her father was ungodly and so dead to her.  she'd grown up somewhere out west, she was very vague about it, 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 gave 2 types of courses, free and paid for.  she was taking all of them 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 said she was being a fool for christ.  she allowed she'd never heard that phrase but she thought it suited her perfectly.  she repeated it several times during our ride.

she asked me about uuism 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 was dropping her off.  she'd mentioned her reliance on libraries several times so I told her the perfect place I could think of to drop her off at was on 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 out to the rim.

later, my wife would ask me "do you think she was crazy?" and I'd answer, "yes."  she'd mentioned refusing to take mental health exams in order to receive social services, claiming that second timothy says you can't be crazy and a christian, so since she was christian she wasn't crazy.  but did I think she was a danger to herself or other people?  not for a second.  she seemed to have a solid understanding of life on the road, and if she didn't have it when she started, by this time she had.  she seemed to know how to stay safe--she said 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."  and she didn't seem too concerned about getting anywhere in particular or getting something done.  she wasn't upset when she found she'd been heading in the wrong direction.  she was content to drift along, going where her god sent her and doing what she thought her god wanted her to do, and from what she told me it seemed what her god wanted wasn't very different from what my god wants me to do:  serve people and help 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 being with them while they went about their lives.  she seemed extraordinarily happy and she said she wasn't on any meds--not being crazy--and didn't do drugs or alcohol or smoke.  she just liked people, she said.