alternatives to church: dying in wisconsin

My dad who lives in The Thick has been visiting us here on The Rim for the past two weeks and this morning he and I attended a local church service. It was a Lutheran service, ELCA, and while he enjoyed it or at least didn't find it offensive, I was disappointed by it. 

It wasn't that it was offensive in some way--to the contrary, my impression was that the visiting pastor was taking pains not to be offensive to anyone Christian--and even someone like me, who my wife calls "a good Christian if it weren't for all that divinity stuff," found nothing offsetting.  And that may have been the problem:  it was so desperately inoffensive no one could object.

The message was "we should pray," and during it he made note of recent scientific suggestions that there is a piece of the human genome that seeks something greater than ourselves.  There is nothing wrong with that, but that was the only contemporary information he used.  Otherwise the sermon might have been given ten, fifty, or a hundred years ago.

Nothing else suggested anything beyond the early twentieth century either.  The hymns, except for one from the 1600s(!), were all from the 1800s; his children's sermon was talked at rather than with them, and was itself about what "hallowed" in the Lord's Prayer meant (what kid younger than a precocious 16 year old would care? and why not ask them something, anything, instead of telling them? While he did have the rapt attention of the youngest, a baby, she was staring at the movement of his mouth and the redness of his face, not taking in, as he suggested, his message); and while I counted nearly one hundred fifty attendees--and that is a remarkably small number in a town of 1300 with only three churches in a predominantly Lutheran state--fewer than a half dozen were younger than 50. 

My dad, who is going deaf in one ear, was impressed that despite his having left his hearing aid in the car, he could hear the entire service well because we sat near one of the post-mounted speakers, so there's that.  And the stained windows and vaulted arches and wood interior was tolerable eye candy.  The organist was fine and the solo pianist was pretty good, and while the guitar player, who affected a folksy, Hank Williams charm was also competent, the teenager who accompanied him on sax was barely that, and her singing was worse. 

When the collection came around I gave them a dollar.  I want this church, like most churches, to continue but not for long.  After we left my dad complimented the service but said it went on too long.  I pointed to my car clock:  it had lasted only an hour.  His watch was a half hour fast:  "That's all?  It seemed so much longer!"  This service and this congregation make a compelling argument for the swift death of American institutional religion.

the secret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a brief report from a (brief) time on the barricades

I spent a couple hours on one corner of government/people's plaza in downtown minneapolis, heart of the hub, last evening with an able complement of fellows from my liberal ecumenical seminary and luther seminary. I dubbed us the amen corner, as all of us are future pastors in our different faiths. we were representative of the faith contingent of people in solidarity with the 99%, a crowd of which we are both members and to whom we minister. (neither were we the only ones; several other pastors and students, some in collars, had been there earlier in the day and earlier in the week.)

I had to leave earlier than I'd intended as the fellow clinician I'd taken responsibility for had another obligation. but in my time there we were constantly and consistently honked at and waved at and given thumbs up and shoutouts by commuters in agreement with our signs--most of which had been penned by 2 women, one lutheran and one uu, and most of which were biblical quotations--without a single negative response to them. I was told the only time any of my compatriots had gotten a negative response was on the previous sunday and it seemed to all be from people wearing vikings paraphernalia. I hesistate to repeat that was not the reaction of everyone in vikings paraphernalia.

I had a couple especially good conversations. one was with a young bhikku in a knit cap and pajama trousers who had graduated high school last year and made arrangements to fly to africa and from there to ship out as a cook on a mercy ship. he wasn't a xian he said, or at least not a very religious one, but he wanted to be part of something bigger than himself and he was frightened and excited by what he expected and hoped for. the other was with a sister who works parttime for a tax preparation company and operates her own online design business. she was just overwhelmed by the number of people in plaza that week--her parttime job was in the tower in front of where we were standing and she looked out on the plaza several times a day--and had also felt overwhelmed by the ways life had gotten tougher and less friendly (my words, I can't remember hers) and knew she needed to make some comment on them. she'd been playing around with making a design but that would make no impact, so she'd been inspired by the protesters on the plaza to decide to come down each day she was at work and join them for a few hours a day, just to be there in support, maybe to hold a sign, maybe to march, maybe just to be there among other people.

on our way off the plaza I swapped thumbsup with several of the people who are actually sleeping under the concrete buttresses and overheads of the government building and told them, "stay warm." because of other responsibilities I may not be able to rejoin them physically, unless the occupation goes on as long as the main one in wall street does, but I will be there in contemplation and spirit and solidarity.

we have achieved kafka-hood

"for [zadie] smith, what makes kafka universal is that he captured quotidian experience. his ability to speak to us all has to do with how well he conveyed the very local alienation of being an assimilated german-speaking jew in prague, who didn't fully 'belong' anywhere, rather than with his evocation of some vague modern existential malaise. making much of kafka's famous image of german-jewish writers sticking 'with their back legs' to judaism and reaching 'no new ground' with their front ones,...smith concludes: 'for there is a sense in which kafka's jewish question ("what have I in common with the jews?") has become everybody's question, jewish alienation is the template for all our doubts...these days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. we're all insects, all ungeziefer now.'

"never mind that kafka didn't include himself among those german-jewish authors whom he saw as flailing about with their anterior legs...smith's essay is primarily an appreciative review of louis begley's...the tremendous world I have inside my head...begley's work also relies on some dubious generalizations to make a case for its own importance. one notable instance comes in the middle of its chapter on kafka's jewish identity. begley writes that kafka's 'intermittent self-lacerating and provocative pronouncements,' as well as his oft-mentioned 'qualms' about the ability of jews to write effectively in german, 'have been used by scholars to buttress the argument that kafka was himself a jewish anti-semite, a self-hating jew.'

"begley...wants us to see kafka's response to the jewish questions of his day as normal...in commenting on kafka's fantasy of stuffing all jews (himself included) 'into the drawer of the laundry chest' and 'suffocating' them, begley writes that the 'outburst' was probably just a function of the 'fatigue' that stems from living with anti-semitism. such exhaustion might account for a desire to achieve individual release, but kafka is dreaming of genocide, which, obviously, is something else."

--from "misreading kafka" by paul reitter in the fall 2010 edition of the jewish review of books

this question, "what have I in common with the jews?", was asked in not so many words and not about the jews in a discussion I had with some friends from seminary on sunday. they are also uu ministerial students studying for ministry--although both are more interested in chaplaincy--and we were planning the order of service for an advent worship we're leading on thursday.

perhaps it is one of our ways of honoring the jewish tradition we spring out of or perhaps it's just the natural human tendency to kvetch, but when 2 or more uus gather invariably we end up talking about what's wrong with uuism, or more specifically what's wrong with uu congregations. having just come from a service at the congregation where I'm interning, whose minister is a retired english professor and whose intern is still one, and most of whose congregation is made up, like many uu congregations, of lawyers and doctors and teachers and artists and executives and engineers, we naturally fell into the common complaint uus have of the swimming-upstreamness of our tendency to gather in elite enclaves.

one, born and raised in the faith, said it might be very elitist, but she liked that there was a haven to which she could retreat on certain days to have conversations about big ideas and topics that she couldn't have the rest of the week with other people she knows. that resonates with me, as well: most of my intellectual conversations during my workweek exist because of my work as a teacher and by their nature they have to have an outcome, and invariably consist of my explaining a term or idea and requesting feedback on it. they're good conversations, mind you, and I like having them, but it's rare that they evolve on their own or continue for more than a couple minutes without my introducing something new, and because of the constraints of time I have to bring them back to the topic we're studying.

the other, like me born in a trailer but unlike me to parents in the religious mainstream, said that she was at times dismayed to hear people like her dissed. "the people we look down on, the songs we make fun of, those are my people, and it sometimes feels like I am being repudiated; not me personally, but where I come from and my experiences." I appreciate that as well--I am prime religious conservative stock (although my parents never took the more outthere tenets of 7th day adventism at anything other than face value), bred to want more out of life and for my life, who knows the difference between a fiddle and a squawkbox and cognizant of the full dolly parton back catalogue, who knows that you make do with what you have.

the conversation rambled on for a couple hours, and we never got around to diagnosing what the problem was, let alone come up with a solution. it was, in itself, an example of the worst sort of thing uus do when they get together, a curious sort of anti-uuism practiced by, devout (?) uus. but as in kafka's answer to his question what the jews are to him, it's also an example of the strength of uus to straightforwardly confront a problem and talk it to death.

church is the people: easter

yesterday's easter service I spent at my friend pete's little church a mere 5 miles further out on the rim. this used to be my wife's congregation when she still skewed lutheran and we return every once in a while just to see the people there.

pete is a good man, a little older than me, born and bred in tanzania, more liberal in his thinking than he'd like people to know, and whose greatest years he says were spent as a truck driver. it's partly through my conversations with him that I decided to attend seminary.

the little church in gilman, part of a 3-point parish with spring valley and clear lake, was filled up for the service--I counted at least 200 people, not counting kids. many were in their easter finery, and if I'd had a nickel for every little girl in a bonnet I'd have made--well, maybe 50 cents. but there seemed like a lot of them.

we sat behind a couple families that included these, who seemed so busy between looking at one another through the crowns of their hats and dropping, purposely or not, their change they were to put in the offering plate that it seemed like the service was one big very dull commercial and they weren't able to get up or change the channel. it wasn't as bad a sermon as they thought--pete is not a charismatic speaker or pastor but his heart's in the right place (leftward and "religion is about people"-ward). this one was hard to get hold of: he started by praising the local college's winning the national rube goldberg competition and moved from the improbable but effective goldberg contraptions to the impossible but symbolic xtian resurrection to the messy but workable system of organs in our individual bodies. there were a lot of jumps between segments of the sermon's message, but we were in a xtian church and knew where we were headed, and pete is awarded points for being self-aware enough to describe his own sermon as a rube goldberg affair.

it's an old, comfortable church composed of comfortable people. it has a pretty large young adult following, mostly families but a few singles, and is layered with multiple generations. we were witness to the deterioration of one retired farmer who was considerably more befuddled than he'd been when we last saw him, and the tears of one of his daughters when he started down the wrong aisle after taking communion and needing to be steered not-too-gently by his wife at his elbow. but we were also witness to the little girl I'd filled water balloons with at a church block party almost a decade ago, and which I'd forgotten all about, but she said was one of her fondest memories. this same little girl is about to graduate high school and start college in the fall.

this is the meaning of the phrase "church is the people not the liturgy." pete's sermon seemed at times made up on the fly and some changes were evident mid-service. the choir was brought up early and the kid lofting the paschal candle had to be reminded where she should stand and what she should do. but the organist had to expand her communion repertoire from 3 to 6 hymns when it became evident there were so many more people intent on kneeling at the rail than they'd expected and it took 5 minutes to exit the tiny church because so many people were shaking pete's hand. it is a good thing to see and a better thing to experience.