258 candles-day 56

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: I'm more sympathetic, I think, than many other people when it comes to Jehovah's Witnesses--I abide their visits because I understand their focus is not on conversion but on witnessing--and while I share with Prince the childhood Seventh Day Adventist church, I can't say I understand his decision to join the JWs. However, this is a good exploration of their beliefs in the light of the death of their most-famous member, and an attempt to explain exactly that attraction for him.

I've been everywhere, man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

what 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.

teach naked

this is an essay written for a class on christian education expanding on an earlier essay defining the term.

“Now I Know Why I am an Orthodox Jew”

A recent issue of The Jewish Review of Books contains this anecdote to make clearer late neo-conservative founder Irving Kristol’s identification as a Jew “with an abiding interest in and respect for religion” first and as a political creature second.

A good clue to the answer [why he identified himself as a “neo-Orthodox Jew”] can be found in one of his later essays…Kristol there recounts an experience that his wife [Gertrude Himmelfarb] had while teaching a graduate course on British political thought in which she had spent several sessions on the writings of Edmund Burke. At the end of one class, she was approached by a “quiet and industrious” young woman. “Now,” this student said, “I know why I am an Orthodox Jew.” Needless to say, this wasn’t because Burke had supplied an incontrovertible proof that the Oral Torah had been revealed at Mt. Sinai. “What she meant was that she could now defend Orthodoxy in terms that made sense to the non-Orthodox, because she could now defend a strong deference to tradition, which is the keystone of any orthodoxy, in the language of rational secular discourse, which was the language in which Burke wrote.” (Soloveichik, 19)

This lengthy quote explains nicely, I think, what religious education ought to do: to inculcate in the educated not the dogma of the religion but a way of explaining what it is he or she believes to the non-member of the faith. As Judith Berling writes, “We not only learn through conversation, but we learn how to converse” (emphasis in original; 80). In my previous essay for this class, “We are Church when We are Gathered, We are Church when We are Dispersed,” I defined religious education as follows:

It’s a way of teaching children and adults how best to affect their world in order to make it more reflective of the type of world where they would want to be citizens. It reflects how they think a world of justice and equality ought to be (in Christian terms, bringing about the realm of God). Religious education determines the communities children and adults want to be a part of, discerns what is holy and how to talk about it, and most importantly, what the ethics, morals, and behaviors the members of such communities should participate in.

To this I would now add that in addition to helping the student make sense of the world it should also help her or him to explain to others how he or she sees the world. For many students, one of the most important questions revolves around how they can affect the world (hopefully, in a positive fashion). Craig Dykstra’s retelling of Philip Haillie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, for example, provides

a story of how the gospel can be taught when the church comes alive to face both the dangers that beset it and the concrete needs and hungers of the specific world in which they live. It is a story of youth groups and schoolchildren, of classroom teachers and adult Bible study groups. It is a story of how worship and preaching and studying and acting all come together to make a community into a people of God. It is a story of how people read the Scriptures, lived their life with one another, and opened their doors to strangers as essential elements in their being the church in the world. But most of all it is the story of what happened to and in these people and in the world in the midst of what they themselves did. (57)

I’ve argued that religious education, in order to make plain the opportunity for learners to hear the questions that should be demanded of them, must emphasize the holiness of life and experience. Everyone’s life and everyone’s experience. Dykstra notes exactly the sorts of questions that we ought to expect students to ask: “Of what value are human beings, and how is that value secured? What is worth dying for? What is worth staying alive for? How should our lives be spent?” (7). If, as Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore points out, holiness is found in the very “rhythms of life,” the stuffness of daily, average life—and I think it is—then it’s in that very experience of everyone’s daily life, its celebrations and atonements, that learners begin to articulate what holiness is.

For the graduate student in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s class, holiness resided in her ability to articulate her faith to someone outside it. To make this particular to my faith, in his pamphlet entitled Should My Child Go to Sunday School?, Unitarian Universalist minister Tony Larsen explains

We teach our children what Unitarian Universalism stands for today so that when people ask them about their faith, they can feel confident answering [their] questions. We help them understand that the inspiration of the divine is to be found not in one book but in many; that we are born not in sin but with the potential for goodness; that the doctrine of hell implies a cruel god, and salvation for members of only one religion would be unjust; and that we have a duty to cherish the earth and revere life instead of sitting back and waiting for some divinely sanctioned cataclysm to come and end it all.

I came to UUism in my 30s. While I spent time with various faiths between them, including Krishna Consciousness, Buddhism and Catholicism, I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist, a religiously and socially orthodox group for whom religious education is based

upon the philosophy that students at all levels of schooling possess individuality and should be educated to use their God-given capacities to become individuals of principle, qualified for any position of life. Education was to begin in the home where the basic values of redemptive discipline and mental and physical health were to be balanced with the importance of work…Adventists have embraced the philosophy that education should be redemptive in nature, for the purpose of restoring human beings to the image of God, our Creator. Mental, physical, social, and spiritual health, intellectual growth, and service to humanity form [its essential] core of values…(Adventist.org)

My memories of my childhood Christian education at what we called Saturday School reflect some of this. I remember quite distinctly the emphasis on work and thrift as well as vegetarianism (for physical health) without which I would be unfit for the Kingdom of God, although I don’t recall a redemptive nature to my schooling. It may have been there and I was too young to appreciate it, although I also recognize a strong redemptive flavor to much of my current theology that may have originated there.

I locate much of my theology of religious education in articulating what is holy. To quote Mullino Moore, who cites Orthodox tradition for her definition: “[That] all of life is sacramental, that the church’s sacraments make visible the sacramentality of God’s creation, and that the human calling is to participate in the sacrament of life…[The] power of sacramentality and its interrelated movements…reveal holy presence in the rhythms of life” (emphasis in the original; 217). I would modify this otherwise excellent definition to reflect my UU perspective by substituting “reality” for “God’s creation.” I am especially influenced in this latter view by Joyce Ann Mercer’s early comment distinguishing practical theology from academic exercises.

For example, practical theologians are not content with abstract proclamations that God cares for all persons as God’s children. Practical theologians ask about the meaning of God’s parentlike care for children in contexts in which particular children experience pain and suffering. They work out visions of such children experiencing and manifesting that care in their everyday lives. They combine such visions with action strategies effecting transformation. (12)

Or, as she writes more succinctly later, “The suffering of children must be acknowledged and addressed…” (244). To paraphrase Jurgen Moltmann, a theology that doesn’t take into account the suffering and pain of children—and in religious terms, we are all God’s children—has nothing to say to us.

Doing this brings into sharp relief my earlier assertion that religious education, in addition to helping people sort out and articulate what they believe, also has to give them the opportunity to determine what the beliefs and actions a moral community of which they want to be a part should include. This attempts to answer questions put by Mark Yaconelli:

What would it mean if the goal of our ministries was simply to be prayerfully present to young people—to allow them to be fully themselves? Could we trust that our presence is enough? How would we treat youth if we weren’t trying to convince them of the importance of the faith, the worthiness of Jesus, the necessity fo the church? What would happen if we sought to minister to young people through our ears, through our presence, through silent prayer and an open heart? What would such radical acceptance evoke in young people? (122)

In her pamphlet UU Religious Education and Your Child, Gaia Brown quotes Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in response to a similar question, “How can you teach without doctrine?”

“The great end of religious instruction is not to stamp our minds irresistibly upon the young but to stir up their own…to touch inward springs.” We have a strong faith in the inherent spirituality of children and see it as our task to nurture, not to indoctrinate. Our respect for the children teaches them respect—for themselves, for others, and for this fragile interdependent web of which we are all a part.

An emphasis on the concerns and experiences of students, supporting their abilities for recognizing the holy in existence, a trust in their abilities to come to sound conclusions, identifying themselves as individuals of principle and helping them to articulate to other people of faith what that means: I would argue that the result of such religious education will look and sound a lot like the experience of that graduate student in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s class. “Now…I know why I am an Orthodox Jew.”


WORKS CITED
• Adventist.org. (2011.) “Seventh-Day Adventist Church: Education.” Adventist.org: The Official Site of the Seventh-Day Adventist World Church. Accessed November 30, 2011, at http://www.adventist.org/mission-and-service/education.html.
• Berling, Judith. (2004.) Understanding Other Religious Worlds: A Guide for Interreligious Education. Maryknoll, NY; Orbis Books.
• Brown, Gaia. (Undated.) UU Religious Education and Your Child: Frequently Asked Questions. Boston; Unitarian Universalist Association Pamphlet Commission Publication. Unpaginated.
• Dykstra, Craig. (2005.) Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices. Louisville, KY; Westminster John Knox Press.
• Larsen, Tony. (1993.) Should My Child Go to Sunday School? Boston; Unitarian Universalist Association Pamphlet Commission Publication. Unpaginated.
• Mullino Moore, Mary Elizabeth. (2004.) Teaching as a Sacramental Act. Cleveland, OH; Pilgrim Press.
• Soloveichik, Meir. (2011.) “Irving Kristol, Edmund Burke, and the Rabbis: [A Review of] The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009 by Irving Kristol.” The Jewish Review of Books. Volume 2, number 2; Summer 2011. 19-21.
• Yaconelli, Mark. (2006.) Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI; Zondervan.

clinical pastoral reflection 3rd week

CPE REFLECTION 3

My friends Mandy and Mel have a daily dinner routine for their extended family and guests; each person must voice a concern and a joy from the day before the meal. This week I’ve had two concerns and one joy. I’ll tackle my concerns first.

I’m not at all in agreement with the statement reported in her verbatim by a fellow CPE-er. I’ve got serious reservations about a Sister-Mary-Sunshine theology which insists heaven is a wonderful place full of light where elderly women are capable of doing cartwheels once there. I’m certain my fellow intern is sincere in her belief. But I am equally certain that, at the very worst, telling a dying woman what is at best an educated guess is some form of pastoral malpractice and, at the very least, fails to take seriously the questions the woman has about her death and the impact it will have on her husband and family and friends. It also may suggest to the woman that having such qualms is anti-God, since who wouldn’t want to hurry up to join such a lovely eternity? How selfish and spiritually ugly must be the doctors and nurses and husband that have tried to keep her in this horrible condition for so long.

My other disturbing situation was with a woman I spoke with about the death of another resident. She started our conversation by asking if the person for whom we’d had last Friday’s memorial was really dead (and this says something about the way people appear and disappear and sometimes reappear without explanation as the people caught up in the healthcare system, especially its mentally ill members, must experience it). We discussed his death and then her parents’ deaths and her own experience of God and trust issues, and I ended our time together by asking if she’d like me to pray with her. It seemed what she expected. I asked her to do the praying but she said she’d rather that I did, and that’s what left me discomfited. I’m all right in communal prayers but as I don’t pray on my own I’m not at all comfortable with one-on-one prayer. I gave it my best shot, stammering out some phrases she’d said and adding my own takes on them, and she seemed sincere when she thanked me. A few days later I spoke with my Christian wife who is more at home with this sort of thing and she suggested that what someone really wants in that situation is the sense she’s been heard and her concerns noted. She also suggested that I try praying out loud on the drive in each day to get myself in the mindset of doing it for other people. I’ve tried that now and confess that I feel a little self-conscious doing it but she is right about my feeling more at ease the more I do it. I’m not about to become an advocate of intercessory prayer or of praying away the disease, but I am better understanding the peace people feel when they hear their fears or their wishes vocalized.

What I feel good about is a short interaction I had with one resident on my floor who, after he’d refused my invitation to join a 7th-Day Adventist service on Saturday, wanted to explain why he’s “pissed off with God.” He was pretty angry about the deaths of his parents and the suicide of his brother, going into detail about the extreme measures his brother had taken to kill himself, all in the space of one year. “Where was God in all that?” he demanded. I said, “I don’t know. And it sounds to me like you’ve got every right to be pissed.” He immediately calmed down and said, “I’m sorry to get so angry, but it still hurts, y’know.” I said I’d have been surprised if it didn’t hurt and that we could talk about it if he wanted. He said maybe later but he was in a much better mood as he left than he had been a few moments before. It seemed a good end to the week.

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.

new wells, old water

in her essay "to speak of god from more than one place: theological reflections from the experience of migration," nancy bedford writes of the locus theologicus ("the place where god is manifested in a special way") and peoples' conceptions of god metaphorically as water from a well. "certainly we need to drink from our own wells...but what happens when those wells are left behind...do we carry bottled water with us--or will the water become stale? do we drink virtual water using communication technologies...do we get inebriated on water from our wells when we are able to visit our places of origin? can we dig new wells, and are they somehow less hydrating by virtue of the water quality abroad?...where or how can we situate ourselves to speak meaningfully of god?"

bedford is writing specifically about the experiences of migrants in a physical sense, but I'm thinking of migration too in a theological or philosophical sense--if we experience the world differently than we used to and that changes our view of god and religion and spirit, do we need to reconcile that with how we used to see the world? for instance, as an atheist do I need to meld my current view of theology with my upbringing as a seventh day adventist?

the short answer, I think, is I can't help but do so. even if we deny or react violently against our old beliefs we're reconciling the two in some way. I don't react against my conservative deist background, I see people and the world in a different way than I did then, and I like to think I understand the fright some conservative deists feel when confronted with a world or an experience that doesn't conform with the way they've been accustomed to seeing life. on the other hand, I am not that person any longer except in ways that I can't help changing--when I listen to brother r.g. stair or chuck swindoll, even at their most angry and denouncitory, I see the faces of people I loved, and even my parents (who share some of the same convictions, even if they don't talk about them as often).

unitarian universalists are often guilty of defining ourselves negatively, by what we don't believe rather than by our convictions. even as someone who watches out for such faults, I find myself contrasting statements I hear or come up against by saying, inwardly, "I don't accept that," rather than, say, "I accept this." I don't think that's unusual for anyone who has moved from one form of belief to another. I think that, like it or not, we often carry around those bottles of stale water we collected a long time ago, and in the course of digging those new wells from which to drink, it would be best if we poured the remaining liquid into them, letting the waters merge.