Turtle mitzvah

It's a small thing, but isn't that what life is composed of? For my birthday I took a short road trip, just a day out and a day back, spending most of both days driving because I miss driving distances. I drove what William Least Heat Moon called Blue Highways, the state and local roads where you have to slow down when you're near a town or church or school. I wasn't in a hurry to get where I was going.

Where I went is Alabama, where I noticed 3 things: even middle aged men in nice cars don't mind losing a hub cap as one I followed for a length of time did so on a corner, and it bounced off a tree and flew back between us, missing my car by a couple feet; there were many houses, both in and out of towns, surrounded by fences, some houses nice but also many that were obviously abandoned, and often those were fenced in by stronger materials, leaving me wondering if the place was a former or current meth house; and near the Georgia border there was a stretch of about 10 miles with fire hydrants spaced every half mile where there were no houses in sight, and even between abandoned and tumbled down buildings.

I love that sort of driving, listening to the radio and watching the trees and trailers and folks in their yards go by slowly enough I could see them in detail. There was a thunderstorm I drove through for hours that closed 3 roads and a bridge I'd intended to take. I'm glad too because on one of those swtched-to roads I was on I crested a hill and made out a turtle crossing ahead of me. Or starting to cross, as he or she was just off the shoulder and aimed at the opposite side. I couldn't see any water on either side but that wasn't any of my business.

I stopped on the shoulder beside the turtle, who turned about and scurried under my car. I found it behind a wheel and picked them up with both hands and carried them across the road and a few feet past the shoulder where they splayed out all 4 feet and head and contentedly continued on their way. 

I'm not a believer in being directed by God or Fate or the Universe into doing something that makes a difference, but as I got back into my car I felt I'd done something that mattered, that left me feeling blessed. Jews say this is what we feel when we have done a mitzvah. It is a good feeling.

Plant the Sapling First

I've been reading this book, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India by Rodger Kamenetz, for about a week. I've been looking forward to doing so since I saw it, what, 25 years ago, as I was stocking copies in the Religions-Judaism section in Barnes and Noble. I had somehow thought of it all these years as an exploration of Kamenetz' own experiences in India, but he was actually operating as a journalist traveling with a Jewish delegation meeting with the Dalai Lama. Doesn't matter, it's a good book. 

It's in his position as the outsider, secular Jew traveling with rabbis and their coterie, that he raises fascinating and difficult questions about both Judaism and religion. The Dalai Lama had requested, after a visit to the US, to meet with Jews who might commiserate with him regarding being a part of a diaspora, recognizing  the reality of Tibetan spiritual homelessness. There are many good segments but this one comes during the presentation by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the Orthodox representative, who takes the Dalai Lama through the early history of Jewish diaspora. 

[The] Babylonian story offers...hope. But I knew why Yitz chose instead to make a parallel with events surrounding the Roman destruction. The Tibetans might well be facing a long exile. And not far from his mind was also the Holocaust and the theological questions it raises...How can Jews affirm faith in God and his covenant with the chosen people after Auschwitz? The question is settled for most secular and liberal Jews--they can't. Obviously such a position is unacceptable to an Orthodox Jew...In contemporary Orthdox Jewish theology, Rabbi Greenberg's own substantial contribution has been the concept of the "voluntary covenant." According to [sociologist Arnold] Eisen, "The word 'voluntary' is crucial...It emphasizes that the initiative--now, more than ever--is on the human side rather than on God's. It suggests that we will be faithful, we will uphold the covenant, even if God in the Holocaust did not." 

Here, I would add a massive exclamation point to the text if I could. This is radical Orthodoxy as I understand it. 

[Rabbi] Greenberg told the Dalai Lama that the covenant is "the most seminal idea" in Judaism. The covenant that began with Abraham has not been abrogated--even at Auschwitz. Instead..."The creator God seeds the universe with life. Humanity can become a partner with the divine in making the world better or perfect." 

What has changed is the human role in the partnership. And that happened, not in recent times, but "about nineteen hundred years ago, halfway in the history of the religion. The Jewish people in Judea were conquered by the Romans and their Temple destroyed by the Roman  empire. It was devastating." 

...In the first century, many interpreted the Roman destruction as abandonment by God, the end of the covenant. "And since the whole Jewish idea of covenant is that the world can be made better, this would be such a victory for evil that many Jew simply gave up. They assimilated and joined the very dynamic culture around them, Hellenism. Another large groups, the Zealots, put all of their energy to recapturing and rebuilding the Temple..."

The Romans not only destroyed Jerusalem, they renamed the capital and drove her people into exile. More than one million Jews died at that time...But Judaism did not die..."There was one great rabbi of the time, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. The Talmud says, when the Romans had Jerusalem surrounded and were about to destroy it, he was able to break through to the Roman emperor and was given one wish. He said, 'Give me Yavneh and its scholars. I want to set up an academy there.'" There he told his students that they would outlast the exile by teaching, interpreting, and preserving the tradition.

"Yochanan ben Zakkai basically said, 'If we don't have our Temple, but we have our learning, our texts--our Bible with us, we have the power by learning to create the equivalent of the Temple. It's a portable homeland.' 

"It's not enough to preserve...[As] partners in the covenant, fallible humans have the authority to add new insights, so that their activity was the equivalent of a renewal of the covenant. Their courage to renew preserved the past."

[Yitz said the first-century rabbis] did not choose to believe that God had abandoned them, and they insisted that the Torah was still fully binding and valid. They interpreted God's nonintervention with the Roman destruction as a sign that, henceforth, in history, the human partner in covenant must take more responsibility for the outcome...God was no longer going to step in and do the miracles for his human partners.

...The memory of the Temple was never lost--but it was turned into literature...More--the magical side of religion, especially the yearning for a messiah--was subdued, if not basically suppressed, by the rabbinic sages. And this became a dominant cautionary note in rabbinic thought for centuries to come, extended not just to messianism but to mysticism in general...Reason became the keynote of Jewish religion, and though some of the rabbinic sages were themselves mystical practitioners, the Talmud certainly expresses strong caution against too much interest in mystical topics.

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had had good reason for such caution. He had seen that excessive messianic faith had led the Zealots to challenge Rome, only to bring destruction on all of Israel. His is quoted in the Talmud as saying, "If you holding a sapling in your hand, and someone tell you the Messiah has come, plant the sapling first, then go looking for the Messiah." 

See How We Are

SEE HOW WE ARE

A Sermon Delivered to Pathways Unitarian 

Universalist Church in Hurst, TX, June 4, 2023

Some of you can do this and some of you will have to imagine it, but I want to take you back a moment to 1987, when the band X released its penultimate album See How We Are. We’re in the final dying throes of what Mark Green would call Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error, whose cultivated meanness of spirit and deeds we thought we’d never experience again.

          Into this miasma waded songwriters John Doe and ex-wife Exene Cervenka, whose punk group X had achieved some success with their 83 release, Los Angeles, eventually one of Rolling Stones’ Top 100 albums, The title song swiftly became an anthem for the disaffected punk of the times. What was punk? If you watched American TV at that time, programs like Phil Donahue and Quincy and even CPO Sharkey convinced you punk music was music about nihilism and what you hate. On CHiPs its lead punk was portrayed by Donny Most, an actor better known for Ralph Malph on Happy Days. It may have been an accurate portrayal of Donny Most but not of punk.

Punk, rather than being rooted in hate, is rooted in love. You don’t bother singing about what you don’t like. Just for fun I typed “punk rock wedding songs” and received at least one list with nearly 100 options. Admittedly, many of them were about wedding-type love rather than agape. But while Chuck D famously called hip hop and rap “the CNN of the ghetto” and rock historian Greil Marcus wrote “the goal of every rock n roll band is to make everyone listen;” I would argue the goal of every punk song is to make everyone aware what needs to change. Natalie, a young woman in Manchester, England, has said, “’punk’ isn’t just a mohawk and leather jacket, it's about being true to yourself and not being afraid of who you are, being brave and bold and strong.” You can’t change what you don’t love.

        *I cut this section in the sermon for time but it does explain why I call this what I do.  [By the way, what I’ve identified as Punk Spirituality I’ve named that because when I was beginning to articulate my beliefs I was listening to a lot of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, numbered by Marcus among the “cult prophets” of the late 60s and early 70s like Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the New York Dolls and made up early punk playlists. At a different time and in a different mind I would identify my spirituality, as Donald Miller does, with jazz, or like Moya Harris with the hip hop of Lauryn Hill. And while both of them root their revelations in Christianity, my life has had greater spiritual experiences with non-Christians, so my spirirtuality is, I think, faster and noisier.] 

What needed to change in 1987? According to John Doe and Exene Cervenka, crowded jails, women “knowing their place”, dividing ourselves physically and emotionally, the capitalist emphasis on commodification of wants while ignoring kids going without basic needs. An emphasis too on “what can I get out of you, what can you do for me while I give nothing in return?” What little you have is what someone else wants so we’ll push you another rung down, addict you, poison you, literally displace you if necessary to take it. In the ensuing 35 years, how much has changed? A major element of punk is Do-it-yourself, exemplified by the probably apocryphal comment by Brian Eno that the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records but everyone who bought one started their own band. You’re responsible to change what you don’t like, even in music. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, If you can’t find the life you want to live, make it yourself.

There is something in us that wants to be better than we were. A part of our makeup that tries to improve, even if briefly, that gets us up in the morning and puts us to sleep at night. Leaving us unfulfilled if, throughout the day, we haven’t moved otherwise. I’m not talking about ambition. I mean an urge to do, even if it’s “just” thinking or eating, so that we ruminate, if nothing else.

Maybe that’s what theists mean when they say we’re made in the image of God. Taking them at their word, God made everything in God’s image. It might be for this reason they also say, and I agree, that you can’t meet anyone or anything God doesn’t love. Yes, even mosquitoes. Yes, even Donald Trump.

We laugh but let me give you a literary example. Unitarian Universalist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, in his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, includes a character who was a Nazi in life. He describes heaven to us. No one in heaven is singled out for punishment or exhortation. Everyone, even Jesus, even Hitler, spends eternity basking in the sun. Hitler, he tells us, is just another guy playing shuffleboard.

I’m going to leave you with another video. I’m not going to read the lyrics to you, because the lyrics, by Iggy Pop and David Bowie, won’t make much sense to you unless you’re familiar with William Burroughs’ novel The Ticket that Exploded. The song, “Lust for Life”, was released in 1979, somewhat at the height of US punk music but this video is from a concert this past April. Despite its esoteric lyrics, the song quickly became an anthem of punk for its energy. “Got a lust for life”. To add a little extra oomph, the guitarist and percussionist on his recording, who later went on with David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels to form the group Tin Machine, were Hunt and Tony Sales, sons of Soupy Sales. Iggy has famously performed shirtless since at least 1980. You might be familiar with the song if you saw the movie Trainspotting, based on the Irvine Welsch novel about Glasgow heroin addicts. If you saw the trailer for that film you’d have seen a couple dozen men and boys “dressed” like Iggy, all of them flaunting their huge bellies or their chicken wings or their sunken chests. 

In the absence of the lyrics what do I want you to notice? This is a cut-down version of an 8 minute video [the video played during service was necessarily short] and what I want you to pay attention to at first is Iggy. Notice that he’s limping and not trying to hide that he’s tired. The man is 74 years old. His belly is sagging, he’s developing moobs, and his scraggly beard is gray. He rests against a stool before he starts singing. But he has no trouble demanding of his audience that they come up there and dance with him. And they do.

And look at those kids! Fewer than a third of the people who jump up there with him were even alive when the song was released, and certainly not the age to have attended one of his shows. The vast majority of his companion dancers are celebrating and singing along to music released 45 years ago. At best, it’s their parents or their grandparent’s music.

This is what it means to be at one with God or the universe or reality. To  see ourselves as we really are, warts, moobs, and all, the way the universe or God sees us and nonetheless to celebrate our own and God’s lust for life. You’ve heard the phrase “dance like nobody can see you”. My friend’s daughter improved on it: “Dance like everyone wants to see you dance.”

“We Wail, Whether or Not Anyone is Listening”

This is my sermon from two Sundays ago. I was asked to speak on "justice" and ended up taking my text from the Tanakh to illustrate the idea that justice is best served by the people crying out for it in the face of its absence. What I took as my original question while writing it was "What is it we want? And does it matter? 

“We Wail, Whether or Not Anyone is Listening”

            Here’s a joke for you from the Tanakh. It starts, like most jokes do, with God just walking around and thinking about things, and as God reflects God decides, “There’s this city on Earth that has really got me POed. They’ve insulted me by refusing to show mercy and hospitality, the few things I’ve told people to do, and I’ve just got to set an example. I’m gonna blow this city, smack it down into the soil, rub my hand around until there’s no trace of anything or anyone left. That’ll show the rest of them: Don’t screw with me.”

            Naturally, God being God, God can’t just do this but has to tell someone first. There’s this guy nearby God’s been having occasional conversations with and tells him, “Hey, there’s this city over there and the populace have gotten on my nerves. I’m going to rub them out, literally. Just wanted you to know.”

Now this guy, he’s been paying attention to what God’s told him and how God’s behaved in the past and, ignoring the question whether the city actually is wicked or not, says, “Listen, I don’t want to tell you your business, but what kind of god punishes the righteous with the wicked?  What if there are fifty good people in that city?  Would you ignore the city’s slights for fifty good people?”  God allows as he would.  Guy says, “Oh, but it could be some of them woke up in a bad mood this morning, didn’t have their coffee.  How about forty-five?”  God agrees and guy says, “I wouldn’t presume to tell you what righteousness is but what if some of those good people are having a hard time and I can only locate forty.  Will you accept forty?”  God says, “Okay, forty works for me.”

This guy, he’s on a roll, he says, “Hey, forty people that’s a lot of people, and it’s not like you’re gonna give me forever to find them. And maybe they aren’t feeling so righteous when I find them, y’know, kid’s got failing grades, wife burned the manna. How’s thirty?” God, who by this time is thinking actually destroying a whole city, that’s a big, time-consuming, difficult process, we’re talking environmental impact statements, hazardous waste material, agrees. “Sure, thirty’s fine. I like thirty.” But this guy, God may have made people, but this guy knows people, he says, “Oh, hey, now I think about it, it’s nearly harvest, most of the good people, they aren’t gonna be in city limits, they’re gonna be out in the fields harvesting, reaping, bringing in the sheaves, the whole lot. So maybe twenty is a better number.” By now, God’s not really paying attention, playing a couple hands of  solitaire. “Yeah, no problem, twenty.”

But this guy, he says, “I got it! Listen, what you want is a minyon. Ten righteous people. I find ten righteous, good-hearted people, you’ll ignore what this city’s done?” God’s got the guy on hold by this point, talking with other cultures, God puts him back on, says finally, “Look, you get me ten righteous, just people in that city, I’ll be such a sweet God, hosannas left and right, you won’t even know me. Their grandchildren will be drinking milk and honey straight from the bottle. Ten is my final offer.”

Of course, if you’ve recognized that the guy I’m talking about is Abraham and the city is Gomorrah of “Sodom and” fame, then you know the punchline is a killer. Abraham can’t even find ten just people and God obliterates Gomorrah and in the process we get Lot and his daughters repopulating the plateau, a pillar of salt, and a whole bunch of stuff we’d rather not get into.

Now keep in mind, a lot of writing at this time, it’s got to do double, triple duty, so jokes are going to have a cautionary air to them too as well as parting some kind of metaphysical truth. Here’s another knee-slapper from the Older Testament with which you may also be familiar. There were these two, well, for want of a better term, let’s call them “beings,” God and the Adversary, arguing about a guy who is very devout, name of Job. God’s boasting of Job’s fealty and the Adversary calls God on it, saying, “Of course he worships you. You give him everything. He’s got land, family, prosperity, a secure future. Without that he’d drop a dime on you before you could blink.” God says, “You wanna bet?” So the Adversary removes all those benefits: he kills Job’s family, his crops fail, his livestock develops brucellosis, his slaves run away, creditors take away all his savings, and Job himself gets boils, pustules all over his body.

There’s a lot more to the story, of course, and it’s a good story. But I want to focus on what happens next. Three of Job’s friends, hearing of his misfortunes, his misery, go to visit him. In the story you may remember, after Job himself breaks his silence, they presume to lecture him on what he may or may not have done to anger God.

But an incredible and often overlooked event happens first. These three friends, when they see Job, can barely recognize him, he’s so changed. The Job writer relates that, on recognizing him, “they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. ¹³ They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”

They wail. They tear their clothes. They comingle the dust of the earth with their flesh and hair, perhaps reminding themselves of the state they will eventually return to. And they sit on the ground with their friend for as long as he does. Quietly. Respectfully. Silently. They treat his punishment, which the Job writer tells us is what they think it to be, as their own. They take on the worst their friend has suffered as if they had suffered it. Not in an intellectual way. They shred their own clothing and get into the dust with him to suffer with him.

Job and his friends cry out after those seven days and God, miracle of miracles, responds. But our experience, when everything we have worked for, bled for, some of us have died for, crashes around us and we call out for God, our experience is likelier to be similar to the Psalmist’s, who begins the famous lament of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” We wail at the injustice of it all and there is no answer. No response. There is, at best, silence from the heavens or the depths of our souls or wherever we may be seeking an answer. We wail, and we receive a suggestion that no one is listening.

Where is God? Where is justice?

We fetishize justice in this country, even dressing it up as a woman holding scales and a sword and wearing a blindfold, the suggestion being that she makes no distinction between the people who come to her for judgement. And that’s a wonderful ideal. We know it’s not what happens. We know that too often the blindfold faces one way for one person and another for another person. We know that in this country there are certain crimes for which you won’t be stopped or arrested if you’re white. We know that in this country if you’re wealthy you can afford a lawyer who will help you avoid punishment for whatever crime you have committed. We know that in this country if you’re rich enough, your crime isn’t even called a crime, but a downturn in the market.

Where is God? Where is justice?

Scholar Mel Leaman reminds us that “lament doesn’t guarantee God’s benevolent response,” but what if there is nothing in response? No storm, no earthquake, no mighty wind or even soft whisper. There is nothing. We look on the works in the first month of this presidential administration and, noting the breaking up of families, the fear in the eyes of people who may be next, we ask, Where is justice? Where is God? In response, nothing.

How do we interpret the absence of God when we seek justice?

The first thing we must do is to determine for ourselves what it is that we want. When we march in the streets or letters we call out for change and justice, but what is it we want? If it’s true, as Martin Luther King, Jr, asserted that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, what is it we mean by justice? And by “we” I mean us, the people of here and now, this generation of American citizens and people who would be citizens and people who want justice to roll on like a river and righteousness like a never-ending stream. What do we want when we say we want justice? Do we want a return to something good, like the previous administration, which had flaws but we felt someone somewhere listened to us, we felt our leader understood that people demand justice, understood which way the blindfold faced, and what it took to secure our national character? Or do we want something better, a land of milk and honey, a place in the sun, a world where we are judged not by the color of our skin but the content of our character?

As Naim Stifan Ateek, a Palestinian Christian, reminds us, “Power is very closely linked with justice, so much so that the one may be easily confused with the other. This is illustrated daily by the frequent claims of the powerful…that their power is justly gained and used to support justice.” It’s true that the current presidential administration won enough electoral votes to put Donald Trump into office. But a month on we find that win is simply not enough. How often do we hear his boast that it was a record electoral victory, that the opposition may have had millions more popular votes, but that’s because those votes were cast by “illegals,” that the number of people at his Inauguration was exponentially higher than the number of spectators at Barak Obama’s Inauguration or the number of people who came out the day after to take part in the Women’s March? These specious claims are easily refuted and have been multiple times, but he continues to insist on them because power must not only be legitimate, power must somehow be more popular than the opposition. This is what lends it the pretense to justice.

Hannah Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem will be on bookshelves and nightstands for the next four years, reminds us that what she called the banality of evil lies in its actions are uniformly “a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity…[as well as] the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal…who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it…”

Justice, like the famous explanation of pornography by Justice Potter Stewart, is something that, even if we can’t define it, we know when we see it.  It is something too, I think, we recognize best by its absence.  Like oxygen, we might appreciate it best when we don’t have it.

So what is it we want when we say we want justice? I don’t know. Isn’t that lame, I give you the question, I tell you it’s important, it’s what we have to answer first, and I don’t have an answer. Do we want a return or something new? Maybe that’s something for the We generation I mentioned earlier to determine. But I do have a suggestion for what we do in the absence of an answer.

We wail. We wail, whether or not anyone is listening.

Professor Leaman reminds us, too, that “God’s people frequently forget how to live like God’s children.” Like any children, God’s children need occasional reminding that there is a better world that they’re growing up into and they had better get their business straight if they want a better world for everyone. The difference between a Noah and an Abraham, for instance, is that Noah, for all his strengths, accepted God’s determination to destroy humanity. Not once, in the story we have of him, is it suggested he maybe tried to get God to save another family besides his own. He was, in contemporary terms, the perfect right-leaning scold: The rest of you will drown but me and mine will get by.

Abraham, like Job, argued with God and he did so not for himself or his family. He has no kin we’re told of in Gomorrah. On behalf of a comparative handful of people he called for justice. He told God, You are punishing an entire community for the misdeeds of a few people and that is simply not right. It is not just.

Do we dare, like Abraham, to get angry at God? For God’s silence? For God’s inattention? You don’t get angry with someone you don’t care about. You ignore her, you avoid her, you cut her out of your life. But anger suggests you want something in that person to change. Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda reminds us, “Anger implies hope and that fighting is meaningful.”

Now I’m not talking just pissed-off, fly off the handle, how could you leave the water running for three hours kind of anger. That is just uncontrolled egotism, the kind that makes you sit up at three in the morning tweeting your fury at an otherwise resting world. I’m talking about righteous anger, the kind that hits you like a slap, that challenges you to think not only of yourself but of others. It is, like Abraham, to challenge God of behalf of creation, to remind power of its better self, and that if it can’t reconcile its actions with that better self, then it had better step down.

Too often, the one is mistaken for the other. How many times have you been told, Get over it. Your candidate lost, accept it. Give him a chance, will you. The way you feel now is the way we felt for eight years.

We aren’t lamenting the loss of our team in the playoffs, no matter how close the score, no matter how exciting the overtime. What we are lamenting is the codification of prejudice against our neighbors, a barring of our cousins, our lovers, even of ourselves, as if who we are, who we love, what we believe, where we come from, somehow lessens this society, this country we love.

We must get down in the ashes and dust with them, our cousins, our lovers, our neighbors. Maybe literally. We must join them and wail at the injustice they suffer. Our wail and our witness are our most powerful weapons. “Even in the absence of God, silence cannot be our last word.” As always, “We are the people we have been waiting for.” Abraham and Job stood before the Almighty and demanded an explanation. Can we do any less against this administration? 

258 candles-day 131

It's all about the humanity.

258 candles-day 121

When I was younger I saw a movie on the noon TV broadcast in Boston, where I was living, that's stayed with me all these years. It was called The Next Voice You Hear and starred James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). It wasn't a particularly good movie, just one of those you'd probably call "quiet" and "unassuming." Despite its plot, that one evening God starts speaking on the radio, it didn't have a really big message.

Anyway, this is what I thought of today when someone drew my attention to a video by Rabbi David Aaron, Hearing the Voice of God. The 1950 Next Voice didn't have or couldn't use the language that Aaron has but the message, at least as I remember it, is similar: God doesn't speak to us but speaks through us. This is, I think, as profound a message as anything can be, and needs to be remembered as we slog through the rest of this election.

258 candles-day 101

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

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

Today: Mazel tov. A recognition, sooner than I would have expected, and from a group I would not have suspected understood, that b'tzelem Elohim ("made in God's divine image") means just what it says. 

remember you too were strangers

"The central insight at Sinai is this: the God of the universe is the God of freedom and transcendence; the God that has made possible the liberation from Egypt; the God that ensures that the way things will be need not be the way they have been; the God that enables us to break the chain of negativity and pain that links the generations.

"The specific way Torah insists that human beings can break the chain of cruelty is in our treatment of the powerless, the widow, the orphan, and most particularly the stranger...Why would we be tempted to oppress the stranger? Precisely because the children of Israel function psychologically like all other human beings, by repeating the behavior generated by earlier traumatic events, but now from the position of being the agent who is inflicting it rather than suffering from it.

"But...Torah says, 'No! don't do it! You don't have to do it. You can break the chain of suffering, you can transcend it. You do not have to pass on the pain that was delivered to you to the next generation, or to the people over whom you [currently] have power, or to the people with whom you have contact. You do not have to recreate Egypt! The logic of oppression that has ruled every society is not the only possible way things could be. In fact, the universe is governed by another logic. And so, you must not oppress the powerless; one standard of behavior must be adopted for you and for the powerless; not two.'"

--from Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation by Michael Lerner

early morning driving

We are in the process of moving from the rim to another hub across the state. My wife, who is also a minister, but with a different denomination, has accepted a call to pastor to a small congregation in a Wisconsin village of about 1500. This weekend we moved her and two of our dogs to a small room she'll rent until we can buy another house out there.

But this time, instead of living on the rim and working in the hub, which we've done since moving west in 1994, we'll be living in the hub and she'll be working on the rim. This is a different sort of plan for us; while both of us have lived in cities before, and even in one city together, we've never done so while having our beasts (now numbering eight). Fortunately, her sister is buying our house here on the rim, and will retain her dog that we've been hospicing for nearly a year (no one expected her to live this long: she has a spinal disorder that most of us estimated would have progressed to the putting-down phase by now), so the number will be reduced to seven, but that remains six beasts more than we had during our previous city stay.

Yesterday, as I had chapel services at work starting at three o'clock, I left the room she and the small rat terriers are staying in at six and managed to get back here by noon. But what's compelled this post is the interview I picked up shortly after leaving. It was a roundtable discussion hosted by Krista Tippett and comprising the Dalai Lama, Rabbi Lord Jonathon Sacks, Seyyid Hossein Nasr, and Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori. The topics ranged from happiness to suffering, from god to the divine in people, from the mind to the body's role in it, and focused not simply the similarities but on the differences too between the four religions. What I was most impressed by was their exhibited personalities. The Dalai Lama often laughs at his own comments (which has given him a reputation for having a sense of humor often lacking in relligious leaders), but Rabbi Sacks had an impressive British dry wit and nearly every comment was evidence of that (favorite examples: asked about happiness, "Reading through Hebrew scripture and history, perhaps 'happiness' is not the first word that comes to mind..."; and in condensing the teachings of scripture, "They tried to kill us. We survived. Let's eat"). Strangely, to me, as I have read and heard more from them, Nasr and Schori were almost subdued in the presence of these two. Neither, I thought, seemed cowed by the company they were in, but neither did they seem elevated by it. Their comments were dry and so low-key as to have been overwhelmed by the othere two.

But the discussion was fascinating and I resolved to reread Nasr's books I have and find something by Sacks, whose speaking style I hope will be as enjoyable rendered in print. But the early hour, the coffee I drank, the radio signal getting fainter and fainter the further I drove, the large vehicle I was piloting (we'd borrowed a friend's van) and the road stretched out before me for miles and hours was missing only a cigar to have completed my experience of living on the road. For a while I was back there and then, and that felt very good.

what if I gave a sermon and nobody came?

A self-important minister got up one Sunday morning to discover that about six feet of snow had been dumped overnight on the town. He didn't have much trouble getting to church, of course, living in the attached parsonage, so he hurried over to prepare for the morning service. It was about fifteen minutes before service began and he looked out at the pews. There was only one person sitting there: Fred, one of those bachelor farmers of the area, and still bundled up from milking his herd.

The minister dawdled around in the back rooms until it was five minutes to service and then looked out again. Fred was still the only one sitting in the pews. No one else being there to do it, at ten o'clock the minister himself pressed the button that rang the bells in the steeple. They rang a little muffled but enough to be heard. A minute after ten he looked out. Still just Fred. At quarter past ten he looked out again. Just Fred.

Finally, at ten-thirty the minister stepped out from the back rooms and walked to the pulpit and said, "Listen, Fred, as you're the only one here, I suppose we ought to just cancel today's service."

Fred pulled down his muffler. He said, "Parson, when I call in my cows and only one shows up, I still milk her."

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dreaded the empty church on a Sunday. A couple Sundays ago just such a thing happened which, if I was doing a sermon on it, I'd title "What if I gave a service and nobody came?"

For the past month I've been working at a pair of facilities for at-risk and troubled teenagers, one for boys and the other for girls. The boys' facility, with four units, is on the far end of the rim to the northwest of us; it takes me an hour and a half to drive there. The girls' facility, with two units, is a half hour drive to the southeast. I do the boys' service at four and the girls' at six.

As it turned out, the reason no one showed at the boys' facility was a miscommunication in the daily calendar for the units. But the lack of attendants got me thinking. I give a pared-down service, one heavy on participation and conversation, since each service is likely to trigger some response on their part. This below, for example, is the order of service for that day's chapel.

Sunday June 8, 2014

Welcome

Joys and Concerns

Reading: A Fable by Rumi

Song: “What’s Going On”, Marvin Gaye

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Ya

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on

In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Oh

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
Oh, what's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on - Uh
Right on baby
Right on baby

Message

Minute of Reflection or Prayer (Music by Henry Saimo)

Congregation Dialogue

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

Our altar is a simple affair. I cut some flowers growing around my house or on the nearby trail and put them in a glass vase, then set a small, flickering LED candle behind it. This is the message I wrote that was undelivered. It's about five minutes to deliver.

For people my age—for many of you I’m talking about your grandparents and for some of you I’m talking about your parents—1971, the year this album came out, is an important period in American history. All sorts of things were happening that no one had experienced before, much of it pretty bad. You hear some of it reported in the song. “Too many of you dying.” “Picket lines and picket signs.” In 1971, the US was years-deep into an unpopular war in Vietnam that would last another four years before the US declared itself spent and got out. The year before members of the Ohio National Guard at a college called Kent State opened fire on students protesting that war, killing four students. This wasn’t the first time American authorities had killed otherwise peacefully protesting civilians—the previous decade had seen many, many violent responses to demonstrations against the war or in favor of civil rights for blacks or better conditions for people in poverty. And the year after a burglary at a hotel called the Watergate in Washington, DC, would lead to the embarrassing resignation of President Richard Nixon and a cynical, distrusting view of government and politicians that, if anything, has only gotten worse in the following decades.

Everywhere kids like me turned, it seemed there was little point to growing up because society was shredding. Families were breaking apart, drug use was skyrocketing, cancer rates were spreading, as were crime rates and unemployment rates. Outside, the way we’d learned the country was a place of eternal beauty and resources was having the lie put to it. Our rivers and oceans were being polluted by industries that found it easier to dump poisons into the water than to pay for proper disposal, killing off fish by the millions. The fish not killed made it onto peoples’ plates, poisoning us. The pesticides intended to help farmers win the battle against harmful insects and agricultural diseases were also killing the birds that ate infected worms and pets that ate the birds or rolled on their carcasses, and the herbicides we relied on to keep corn and wheat and apples healthy were killing our lawns and fields and burning trees from the inside out.

Something we hope for as humans is that things that are bad will eventually get better. Have things improved in forty-one years? It’s hard to tell, sometimes. Late last month a young troubled man not much older than you posted a very angry document on the Internet blaming women for his problems and then went out to shoot several people, eventually killing nearly 10, including himself. America is still fighting two wars, one of which has lasted longer than all other wars we’ve ever fought. Last week was the 25^th anniversary of events in China’s Tiananmen Square where the military suppressed a student-led demonstration so forcefully that at least hundreds, and maybe thousands, of people died. We argue whether the world’s climate is changing for the worse and whether people are responsible for it. Our reserves of coal and oil are rapidly depleting and some scientists say will disappear in the next 20 or 30 years and the companies that make money from coal and oil discourage development of other resources. Little is being done to change these circumstances, and the next generation, which is you, is being left to either come up with a solution or learn to live with the consequences.

This is an important weekend celebrated by two faiths, called Shavuot by Jews and Pentecost by Christians. Both celebrate the same thing: a time when god gave them the means by which they could live in the world they found themselves in. Jews celebrate the day Moses came down from Mt Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the holy laws that explain in short form how by not killing or stealing you can live a righteous life, and Christians celebrate the emergence of the Holy Spirit among them, helping them see through the minor differences between them like language or the way they look to see each person’s inner Christ.

How do we live rightfully in a world where people are killed indiscriminately by wars or new diseases or angry people with guns, where because of greed the world changes before our eyes while the people responsible for the changes deny it, where jobs and careers are disappearing and the ones that remain pay so much less than the ones they replace that it’s hard to live at all on what they pay? Jews say the answer is to do justice, to be merciful, and walk humbly with God. Christians say it is to love God with your heart and soul and love other people as much as you love yourself. Those are both very good answers. It’s hard, though, to understand how to do that on a daily basis.

But make no mistake, there are very good things happening in the world too.  People are being born and falling in love and taking care of one another all the time, and just to make it personal and specific, between Bar None and Avanti there were four successful discharges just this last week. People in treatment are getting better and you know some of them. Good things happen all the time all around us, often in very small, very personal ways. In the midst of the painful stuff happening in the world, how do we keep from forgetting the good stuff?

It is, I hope, a teen-friendly and especially fidgety teen-friendly type of service. While they're very curious about traditional religion and ask questions about it all the time, they're also distrustful of traditional answers, traditional ceremonies, church, or anything sounding like piety.

But here is what I got to thinking about. After about twenty minutes, when I realized no one was coming, I started cleaning up around the old chapel where I hold services. I looked out at the late spring afternoon and saw boys canoeing, fishing, playing frisbee, and just walking around. If I were them I wouldn't want to spend a beautiful day in Minnesota indoors, either. I started toying with the idea of holding chapel on a weekday evening, at least during the summer and fall months, when there's more to do on the weekend. Another idea playing around my brain is taking chapel to them. One of the arguments for holding services in the chapel, besides the rather nice rustic charm of the old spare building, is that it gets the boys off the unit for an hour. But when I go to the units to hold groups I have much better attendance that I suspect is both from nearness and from interest in what those who don't start out with us hear from their rooms. It may be, too, that my service format, already scaled-down to take from twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on their interest in talking, needs even further paring. I'm open to doing that if it means greater participation.

And it may be, too, that the idea of chapel is so foreign and even repellent to these kids, who may have been forced to attend their parents' churches in the past, that there is no amount of change in how it's done or on what it focuses that can get them past that resistance. From a purely mercenary perspective that's not an issue for me: I'm paid for having been there whether anyone attends or not. But I'd rather think I am accomplishing something.

 

 

I need to think on this information

"In Judaism the Place is called HaMakom. This is also another name for God."

--from Jewish Dharam: A Guide to the Practice of Judaism and Zen by Brenda Shoshanna

st. juggalo

I don't like the music of Insane Clown Posse but I'm not the audience for it either.  I do, however, like the fact that the Gathering of the Juggalos exists, and further that Juggalos and Juggalettes exist.  As with most distaff communities, it is meant to provide a family into which nearly anyone can fit. 

I don't know if I would attend a Juggalo Gathering myself, although judging from photo essays (most of them provided by Nate "Igor" Smith of the Village Voice) they are not unlike most Rainbow Gatherings, except with Faygo and more cigarettes.  There have been really well-done essays about the Juggalos as well as some trashy, sensationalistic ones.  There is even a backlash against writing so much about them (can a TLC reality series be far behind?). I haven't seen it written about but I've noticed in various photo essays the increase in the number of people of color, both Juggalos and Juggalettes, in attendance.  That pleases me.

But what I am most pleased by is the sense that anyone, of any body type and any ability, can be accepted as a Juggalo (so long as that person is not Tia Tequila, apparently, although to be fair I suspect her shit-tossing critics were responding to their being used for her publicity rather than their tribe's).  This is the impetus behind religions of the Book, that one can be a member of the hospitable desert tribe if one abides by certain rituals and accepts certain beliefs, no matter how one is born or the condition one finds himself in. Where you go I will go, and your people will be my people. There is no Jew or Greek, no male or female. When you pledge allegience to another person you pledge allegience to God.  Will we see in some far-off future a Juggalo-influenced adjunct to Abrahamic religious?  Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope came out a few years ago as Christians, so why not? Why not a Saint Juggalo, a Mother Juggalette? 

what is a who?

Over the past weekend I was the guest preacher at a mid-size Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Bismarck, North Dakota, where I sermonized on the recent Personhood Bills passed there (and in other states).  I was not only welcomed and given an enthusiastic ear, I was fortunate to happen to have come when students (several of them pictured on the school's website) from the local Seventh Day Adventist academy came to visit.  That's not sarcasm:  I was raised in the church and I took a few moments to introduce myself to the group before the service and offer to talk with them afterward as someone who had left the church at about their age but not out of anger or hurt but because I was looking for something it couldn't offer me.  Half the group took me up on that and we had a wonderful discussion in the hall.  That was probably the highest point for me in a weekend full of high points.

WHAT IS A WHO?

A Sermon Delivered to the

Bismarck-Mandan (ND) 

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and Church

On April 8, 2013

            If we had the technology available to us I’d show it to you, but since we haven’t I’ll have to settle for telling you about this movie I saw a few days ago.  It was called Cargo, and at seven minutes long it was a finalist in Australia’s Tropfest short movie competition. 

            It’s entirely wordless although not silent and signs are written in English.  Our protagonist wakes from a car wreck and in the first minutes we begin to understand he’s in the midst of a zombie infestation.  Now, stay with me here, especially if you don’t like zombie or horror movies, because unlike most of them this film has an upbeat ending. 

            Anyway, he wakes to what we assume is his wife zombified and kept away from him only by the seatbelt she’s wearing.  He flings himself out of the car but returns to do two things:  to kill his zombie-wife and to retrieve the cargo of the title:  their infant daughter in the back seat.  He hoists her onto his back in one of those backpack baby carriers you probably remember from the 80s and 90s and pushes himself to start walking.  There are zombie snuffles and groans and such sounds all around him as he makes his way through a forest.

            Before long, though, as he stops to catch his breath, he sees something that the viewer has already noticed:  There is a nasty gouge out of his left arm; his wife, or someone, has bitten him.    We realize by the look on his face what this bite means, and he begins preparations for his transformation.

            Now if you, like me, are a watcher of zombie movies, this is something we have never seen before.  Someone preparing to become a zombie.  What he does is the following:  he makes notes on the map in his pocket, x-ing out some areas previously labeled “safe” and marking some other places previously unmarked as “safe”; he writes on his left arm the amount of time since he was bitten; he collects from an interrupted child’s birthday party a balloon that he hands back to his daughter to hold; and then he pulls from somewhere below the screen so we don’t see where he’s getting it from some bloody, gory viscera we assume comes from a recent victim.  This last he puts into a regular plastic shopping bag and attaches to one end of a tree branch he carries.

            We follow our pair for a while through the forest, his gait getting slower and slower, his shoulders hunching further up with the weight of his child on his back, until finally he stops as he hears his daughter cry.  He turns and in that moment we discover what has happened.  He has fully changed and in our horror we know he is scenting his daughter on his back. 

            But his attention is drawn instead to the viscera dripping from the plastic bag just out of reach at the other end of the branch he’s shoved between his shoulder and the carrier strap.  It’s this smell that keeps his attention away from her and keeps him moving forward. 

            Finally he reaches a rise and the balloon dislodged from his daughter’s hand catches his eye and he follows it as it ascends.  Suddenly there’s a sharp pop and at first we think the balloon has burst but instead it is a human sniper who has targeted and shot him.  A moment later three armed survivors approach him and determine he is a zombie and fully dead.  For a moment we think they will leave his body there, but they stay back a moment longer than maybe they ought to and hear the hidden child’s whimper.  They find his daughter strapped to his back; across her belly is written “My name is Rosie.” 

            In the final scene we see two of the survivors digging a marked grave for the zombie while the third holds the baby to her like it’s the last salvation anyone has.  What has happened in this seven minutes is that the director and writer, Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, have managed what no horror film has managed before:  they have remade a stock horror trope into a complex, multifaceted, fully realized character.  Reversing the process, they have made a zombie a person.

            It is an odd juxtaposition to what has been done in North Dakota by the governor’s signatures affixed on March 26^th to HouseBills 1305 and 1456 and Senate Bill 2305, the so-called Personhood bills, which effectively ban legal abortion in the state after a fetal heartbeat is detected—most experts agree that is at about six weeks after conception—and denies allowances in the case of rape, incest, or genetic disorders.  In effect, the state of North Dakota has bestowed personhood on fetuses in many cases before the mother has even realized she is pregnant. 

            To his credit, Governor Jack Dalrymple recognizes the probable fate of these bills:  The bills’ requirements “greatly increase the chances that this measure will face a court challenge [while] the likelihood of this measure surviving a court challenge remains in question.”  However, he has also stated that “this bill is nevertheless a legitimate attempt by a state legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade [and represents a] new question for the courts regarding a precise restriction on doctors who perform abortions.”  That is certainly one way of putting it.  Another might be to suggest this is a shot across the bow by a greatly emboldened, massively financed conservative party whose cries against wasteful government spending and intrusion by big government into the lives of the governed ring hollow when it pushes an agenda like this.

            But in the words of the sainted Arlo Guthrie, that’s not what I came to tell you about.  You know more about that than I do.  You live this and I’m just watching it from the outside.  I came to talk about where the law got its ideas about who rates personhood and how that accords with our Unitarian Universalist principles and beliefs.   

While it is not true we are a Judeo-Christian nation it is true that many of our legislators subscribe to those beliefs. Judaism, Christianity and Islam follow a simple trajectory to determine who becomes a person.  A person is someone who has been born.  While the writers of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Psalm 139 refer to knowing a person in the womb prior to her birth, this refers to an omniscient God who is also aware of the fall of a sparrow, and not to fallible, unobservant people.   The Talmud explicitly states that “you cannot choose between one human life and another.” Only birth confers personhood.  Until the emergence of the child, literally the crowning of the head, a fetus is part of the mother and she, and not the potential human, has personhood.  Conservative Muslimsrecognize a ‘person’ as someone having been alive 120 days, or four months, the point at which a fetus becomes “ensouled,” although as with much Scriptural writing, the number is probably not meant as a literal time period but a poetic method for naming an uncertain amount, like Jesus’ answer that someone should forgive anoffender seventy times seven times. 

PhilipMitchell, professor of English at Dallas Baptist University, has articulated a solid summary of how Biblical peoples recognized personhood:  “Being [in] the image of God,” he explains, includes the following elements:  “dignity, glory, and honor…a specific…purpose and end…[whose]  intermediate goal and purpose in this world [is] the furthering of God's shalom--his reign of perfect peace and justice over all humanity…Humans have certain God-given rights, even if we are also capable of voluntarily giving those rights up …[and] our personhood is developed and renewed by the work of the Holy Spirit upon us.”  The great Biblical scholar Dr. Suess encapsulates this definition as a person’s a person no matter how small. 

The Biblical definition is not exclusionary since there is no suggestion that someone’s disability, say, a man blind since birth, is denied personhood, that is, has sinned.  In fact, the writer of John 9 explicitly rejects that:  “His disciples asked [Jesus], ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’” A person’s a person, then, no matter how unabled by disease, injury, or even by choice.  Once conferred on her, a person never gives up his personhood, even in death.

            Historically, Unitarians and Universalists followed the Biblical definition of how a person formed.  There is, of course, a vast difference between belief and practice, and while nearly every nation has submitted its government to one or another theology, probably none actually held fast to the injunction to, as the writer of Matthew put it, “do for the least of these as you would for me.”  Nevertheless, there was a concerted effort in the nineteenth century United States to compel society to live up to its rhetoric.  Unitarian sympathizer Margaret Fuller’s relational Transcendentalism recognized “all persons, regardless of their relative power [or lack of it], as moral agents…often unjustly deprived of the opportunity to exercise self-determination.”  In the bitter pre-Civil War years this included not only women and slaves and natives, but children and prisoners, immigrants and laborers, the ill and the crazy.  The abolition of slavery, a product of Quakerand Universalist principles, both solidly Christian, solidly Biblically based, finally took hold of the popular will and Abraham Lincoln was inspired by it to declare the near-impossible-to-imagine Emancipation Proclamation.  

But it wasn’t until the 1932 drafting of the “Humanist Manifesto” that religious liberals appealed to something other than a Biblical rationale for what makes a person a person.  Curtis Reese, a founder of Religious Humanism, insisted human beings be treated as having inherent worth.  “Whatever purposes…the cosmos is working out, [people] are not to be regarded as a means for their realization.” Our very existence is worthy of celebration, as are our attempts to change our behavior on reflection.  God may or may not have known us in the womb but once out of it our responsibility is to know ourselves.

Religious liberals were confident enough to assert that, rather than its dominator, people “are a part of nature and [have] emerged as the result [of it].”  In so doing, these proto-Unitarian Universalists were convinced that “Nothing human is alien to the religious…the complete realization of human personality [is] the end of a [person’s] life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now.”  Further, “Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life”  and that “humanism will:  affirm life rather than deny it; seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from it; and endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for a few.” 

            Big, heavy, heady words.  We read in them the genesis of our principles of inherent worth and dignity for everyone; justice, equity and compassion in our relationships; the rights of conscience and a responsible search for meaning; and respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part. 

            If this, then, is the way a Unitarian Universalist ought to recognize the personhood of an individual—that is, that the being in question has inherent worth and dignity, has the equivalent rights for justice and compassion, a right of conscience and making a meaningful search for truth, and is a part of the interdependent web—how should he or she respond to the so-called Personhood Bills that seeks to claim these rights for the fetus whose claim to personhood is a beating heart?

            Here is where individual conscience and search for meaning comes in.  It is a hard question. It should be, the way anything worth really thinking about is hard.  My own answer, which may not be yours, is, yes, an unborn fetus is a person, not because it has a heartbeat or looks less like a fish than in an earlier stage or because it can hiccup, but because it is a part of nature no less than eggs and spermatozoa and cells.  Like any of us it has the potential for becoming more than the sum of its parts.

            However, its personhood cannot and should not trump its mother’s personhood, which is not a potential or a possibility but is a real, breathing, thinking, yearning being whose decision-making abilities must be held paramount above possibility.  There is no more moral right to insist a mother carry her charge to full term than there is to insist a brooding hen remain on its egg until it hatches. 

            Return to the story I started this sermon with, the short film Cargo.  Keep in mind it’s not meant to be an allegory or something heady.  Yolanda Ramke is not likely to have meant it to be anything more than a good story worth a few minutes’ think.  Consider all the decisions, most of them self-denying and all of them hopeful, that the unnamed father makes.  He marks a map for whoever finds his body; he takes care to avoid attacking his daughter; he arranges to have her familiar name used, giving her an identity.  I like to think that if the roles were reversed and it was the mother who wakens to the car wreck and lurches out of the door, we would have exactly the same film.  In the final shot we are shown that the survivors are giving him a marked grave, presumably so that an adult Rosie can visit it, probably not an activity most people would stop to do in the midst of a zombie infestation.  The father is himself given an identity even after death.

            A zombie carrying a child, a mother carrying a child. The authors of the Personhood Bills have written them so that a doctor who performs an abortion after a detectable heartbeat is punished, not the mother who seeks it out.  Is their assumption that women, subject to those wildly firing hormones, are incapable of making a balanced decision?  Would Governor Dalrymple and Senator Margaret Sitte and the other proponents of these bills come away from this film with the conviction that a pregnant woman has worse decision-making abilities than a man turning into a zombie?

            Unitarian Universalists are proud inheritors and upholders of humanist principles, of liberal religious convictions, of a historical progressive view that our obligation—maybe not out of the womb but once we are aware of injustice—is to make as much positive change as we can.  In the words of Lauralyn Bellamy, to give back love to a bruised and hurting world.

            A sermon ends with a call to action but I’m not going to tell you what that actions ought to be.  Again, this is your fight and I’m watching from the sidelines.  But here is what I want you to do now.  Take the hands of the people on both sides of you.  Feel the warmth, the flutter of their pulses, the throbbing life beside you.  However you act, whatever you choose to do, these are the people affected by it.