Recently an organizer asked for a meeting and I went to pull out my phone to check my calendar. “My calendar is the boss of me,” I joked. She looked at me oddly, but said nothing. And in that nothing I heard the strangeness, the madness of what I had just said.
I am not sure what she was thinking, but here is what I have been thinking since that awkward moment. A calendar serves as the representation of and reminder about the commitments I have made for and with my life energy, with my love. Just as a glance at your checkbook or credit card statement can give you insight into where you commit your financial energy, a calendar can be a window of insight into life values.
What a calendar probably should not be, and should not be thought of as, is the boss. Just as my checkbook and my credit card – while requiring true mindfulness – should not be the boss of me. I do not serve as a minister in the name of a calendar or a bank account. Those are important tools for sustaining my ministry, no doubt. They cannot be the source of my call.
I serve in the name of love. Love for the world that is and the world that can be. Love for the wonder of creation and respect of destruction. Love for a faith community that meets us where we are and doesn’t leave us there. Love for you. Love for me.
It is easy in the days of overloaded calendars and underloaded bank accounts to forget. And it absolutely matters that we remember.
In 1951, Universalist mister Albert Ziegler wrote: “It may be that we have lost sight of our mission. Primarily, the church is not for social or political pronouncements, nor for the fashioning and dissemination of erudite philosophical doctrines. It is for the generation of love. The church is the only institution in society so purposed. We strike at the heart of our very purpose for existence when we neglect that major aim.”
Clearly, it is time for me to remember that love, not a calendar, is the boss of me.
Our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations will be gathering in Providence, Rhode Island beginning June 25th for General Assembly, the annual meeting of UUs from around the world, with the theme “Love Reaches Out,” inviting congregations to reach out beyond their walls and to engage in new ways of sharing faith.
In the free church tradition of Unitarian Universalism, “we do not just go to church, we are the church.” Beloved, this faith is called to live in the name of love. Let us commit ourselves anew to this call. In the immortal words of poet Maya Angelou, “I know for sure that love saves me and that it is here to save us all.”
Imagine
I’m sometimes asked how humanists can have “church” without invoking god. Here’s how I think about it:
Imagine this scenario: When Imhotep in ancient Egypt invoked the great god Ra, he was invoking the human consciousness, not Ra Almighty.
Imagine this: When Zadok, son of Ahitub, entered the holy of holies of Solomon’s brand new temple, perhaps he was talking to the greatest power on this earth—the human imagination.
Imagine this: When the evangelist Billy Graham made his vast alter calls in stadiums across North America, the Christ that thousands flocked to . . . was the human psyche. Whatever you think about powers beyond, imagine this for just a moment.
Entertain the thought for just a moment that every shaman, priest, and prophet who has ever lived . . . has created worship without god because . . . there never has been six or three or one to begin with.
Shared Subjective Reality
But wait! Isn’t there more to the question? Because, even granted the accuracy of my imaginings, didn’t Imhotep and Zadok and Billy Graham each have the advantage of speaking to people who shared a subjective reality?
Didn’t the Egyptians of Imhotep’s time have a mental image of Ra and the Hebrews of Zakok’s time have a notion of Yahweh and the Christians of Billy Graham’s time a common picture of Christ the Lord?
Good question. Did they really? Are people really like that? Or did the priests and preachers have, rather, the apparatus of worship embedded in a particular place and time—Ra’s temple, Yahweh’s temple, or the vast football stadiums of Jesus with great PA systems?
Could it be that what they all had is an apparatus for worship that individual psyches journeyed to . . . . Can we seriously argue that each ancient Egyptian had an identical psychological understanding of Ra? Not likely. But they did have a temple, didn’t they? Doesn’t the very fact of the rabbinic tradition argue that Hebrew worshipers exited Zadok’s services with very different views of ultimate reality? Still, they had that temple, didn’t they?
Weren’t there as many Christs as there were Christians in Billy Graham’s vast alter calls? Yet they came to that structure of power and fame called a stadium or an auditorium, didn’t they? They came to hear Billy.
All Churchy
What’s so churchy about church? The apparatuses of worship change with time, as do the words and the concepts. It is the human mind and human needs for purpose and meaning that remain that same and come to the temple, the stadium, or the storefront church. These are what remain the same. For humanists, that’s as holy as it gets. And that’s fine: the proof is in the pudding. Ra’s pudding doesn’t do much for many of us. But the pudding of gathering together into community is quite tasty.
Just imagine that the point of worship (humanists prefer “assembly”) is calling individuals into community. Imagine that a community created in this way agrees to agree—despite individual understandings—on particular values that sometimes—in the best-case scenario—lead to objective common actions that may be considered moral and ethical (actions better because they spring from a common purpose).
That’s what “worship”—uh, assembling—will or won’t do. Gathering to invoke Ra or any of the deities or no deity at all leads to the same thing. It’s the human mind imbued with meaning and purpose and communal action that matter.
Turns out there was another school shooting. Yeah, the one in Oregon, not the people who shot the cops in Las Vegas because they didn’t like the government – that was the day before, I think. No, in Portland, Oregon, at a high school, not the university one in Seattle. That’s been a few days ago.
Yeah, it’s a pity, really. The scared kids, the grieving families. It’s a shame. But what are you going to do? I mean, people have a right to have guns. You can’t take that away. It’s in the constitution. I mean, those Cliven Bundy fans who shot the cops and covered their bodies with “Don’t Tread on Me” flags were a militia of sorts, weren’t they? OK, maybe not the most “well ordered militia” in the world, but they had a right to their armed government protest.
And that guy in Seattle, well, sure, it was terrible, but you know he had psychological problems, right? You just can’t fix everything. And if you started taking guns out of the hands of people with psychologi
cal problems, where would it stop? I mean, if I go to a shrink because I’m feeling down, does that mean I should lose my guns? Really, over half of suicides are committed with guns? Yeah, I guess 20,000 a year or so seems like a lot, but what are you going to do? If you took away their guns those people would probably find a way to jump off a bridge or something.
It isn’t fair.
Some idiot is always wanting to take away gun owners’ rights every time a little kid finds a gun and shoots their sister or their friend or their uncle at a picnic. But you know what’s no picnic? A bunch of regulations that say what kind of gun you can have and where you can have it and who is or isn’t allowed to have it. If you want a gun you want it now, not after waiting around for a week while some paper-pusher pokes around in your private business to find out if you’re OK to carry. Why should responsible gun owners have to submit to a bunch of rules and regulations because of a few random events? Thousands of random events? Whatever.
Face it. You know what isn’t cool? The government getting up in your business. You know what is cool? People carrying guns in public. Did you see that picture of the guy carrying an AK-47 around the pharmacy aisle in Target? That’s a bad ass. Nobody is going to mess with anyone while that guy is around. Little children can feel safe when they see that guy with an assault rifle is in the store.
Yeah, I heard about the guy who stopped the shooter at Seattle Pacific University using nothing but pepper spray. Sure, I guess that’s pretty bad-ass in its own way. But then he wrote this pansy-ass letter about praying for everyone involved and how he wasn’t really a hero and how God helped him see that the shooter wasn’t a monster, but a sad and troubled man. What’s with that? Blow away the bad guys, I say. And for that, everyone should have a gun.
Today we bless Tela La’Raine Love as she prepares for her gender reassignment surgery. Every day, Tela blesses this world with her courage, her determination, and her clear vision of a world where transwomen of color live safe, fulfilling, and long lives. Only in her 30’s, Tela serves as an elder, a mother, and a mentor to many young transwomen of color, struggling to survive in a culture that tells them to disappear or die.
Although we hope that “it gets better,” 2012 saw the 4th highest murder rate of LGBTQ and HIV-affected people (LGBTQH) in recorded history, according to the Hate Violence Report released annually by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP-http://www.avp.org/about-avp/coalitions-a-collaborations/82-national-coalition-of-anti-violence-programs ).
People of color, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people continue to experience disproportionately higher rates of homicide. Black and African-American people “were particularly overrepresented in the homicide rates: over half of reported hate murders had Black or African-American victims, even though Black and African American people made up only 15% of total survivors and victims of hate crimes overall.” In 2012, LGBTQH people of color represented 53% of total reported survivors and victims of all hate crimes, but 73.1% of homicide victims. Living at the intersections of racial, gender, economic, and sexual oppression, trans-women of color are told to disappear or die.
In the midst of a dominant cultural narrative of oppression and repression, Tela Love is living into her journey towards wholeness with a spirit fully grounded in her inherent worth and dignity. She is the co-founder of New Legacy Ministries (http://www.newlegacystartstoday.com/), a grassroots organization striving to raise the voices of marginalized communities, especially transgender women of color, and create a spiritually welcoming and sustaining community.
Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience, will be a documentary of her experience as a openly HIV Positive trans-women of color in the south undergoing gender reassignment surgery June 18,2014. In sharing this personal window into her life, she understands that she is taking a risk. Traditionally trans-women have disappeared into the constructs of a patriarchal society after their surgery, rather than remain targets for hate and fear.
Tela realizes that she is allowing herself to be a target for greater judgment and persecution than that of which she already endures. However, inspired by the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “silence is betrayal,” she has determined that she can be silent no more. She cannot be silent when waking from her nightmares of another young transgender woman being murdered or dying because she’s too ashamed to follow through with her HIV treatment after being diagnosed out of fear of being further alienated. Tela cannot be silent while there are little or no job opportunities for trans-women, while there are little or no housing opportunities (unless HIV infected), while black trans-women walk the streets in order to survive.
And neither, beloveds, can we. Our silence, too, is betrayal. Let us speak into the space of fear and hatred, ignorance and oppression. Let us bless Tela and every one of her sisters with the welcoming arms of beloved community. (https://www.facebook.com/Blacktranswomenarepowerful)
Please support the creation, production, and distribution of the documentary Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience. Together, let’s re-write the narrative of oppression into thriving, joyful beloved community.
Donations to support the creation of this documentary can be made via PayPal or sent to the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal marked “Designated Donation: New Legacy Ministries” 2903 Jefferson Ave, 2nd FL, New Orleans, LA 70115.)
Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey once said, “Growth itself is the only moral end.” To philosophers a word like “only” means a lot more than it does to most of us. And here, in the Twenty-First Century, looking back on the wreckage and horror of the Twentieth, it’s easy to dismiss such a sentiment with a “meh” and move on to the next soundbite. And “self-help”? Fahgettaboudit!
After all, we’ve had it up to our ears with “growth,” haven’t we? Now we know something Dewey did not: that when “personal” met “growth,” sparks flew and wedding bells rang, and out of that union many fortunes and many suckers have been born. It’s easy at this point to cynically dismiss the whole enchilada.
“Development” is an even more problematic word. “Personal development.” Ugh. That’s the personal. And in the communal sphere, some of us live in the “developed world” where we have “developers” producing something called . . . “developments.” These developments have produced a great deal of sterile, ugly space.
Somewhere, sometime, in the last century many came to believe that the “onward and upward” march of humanity wasn’t such a sound formula for growth. Somewhere back there “onward” and “upward” and “developed” too often began it mean trodding on the heads of the poor, over the bodies of animals and plants, across the last bits of pristine earth.
(The spell check tries to prevent me from typing “trodding,” offering instead “trod” and “trodden.” Is there a grammatical conspiracy against admitting that we have trodden and we are trodding still?)
Somewhere in there humanists such as Dewey, who thought that it was all up to humanity itself, not a supernatural being, to do the growing and developing began to be dismissed as naive. Somewhere in there the neo-orthodox, such as theologian Karl Barth, began to say—can’t you see that Satan, or at the least humanity’s flawed nature, is in charge and must be handled with a chain?
When Dewey said “growth itself is the only moral end,” he meant we, us—he meant growing, developing, cultivating the human psyche and human interactions, not the wetlands or the aquifers. He meant our individual and communal selves. Dewey meant development and growth in such things as ethics and art and democracy, not in the grossness of the national product. Or the boundaries of empire.
In this, Dewey was joining a long line of non-Christian Western philosophers who taught that eudaimonia, “human flourishing,” arises through an “examined life” lived in pursuit of virtue. It isn’t about human perfection, but rather about being a bit better than we were born, a bit better than other primates such as we.
The human right to this pursuit may have been what Thomas Jefferson was talking about when he wrote that human beings have three “unalienable rights,” one of which is the “pursuit of happiness.”
That this curious and intriguing phrase gets discussed far less in the United States than what the Second Amendment means, and what it allows, perhaps tells us more than we want to know about the development of the US since that document declared independence. I suspect that Jefferson would have agreed with Dewey that democracy itself “begins in conversation.” That’s the communal aspect of growth.
As another fan of the pursuit of virtue, Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, put it, “I believe the process of understanding the problems is itself a good.” This is not about talk; it is about conversation—and you can’t converse alone. Conversation is democracy. It is communal. And it is growth, when we actually converse rather than pontificate—an ability based in individual growth.
If the pursuit of happiness were defined as the ability to pursue questions of virtue, isn’t it interesting to consider what it would mean for each US citizen to have the right to pursue happiness?
The pursuit of happiness . . . Should I head for the self-help section of my local bookstore to begin my pursuit? Uh, no. The pursuit of happiness—the pursuit of virtue, the pursuit of truth and meaning and democracy—exists as conversation for a good reason—it’s communal as well as personal. Perhaps that’s the biggest reason Jefferson’s line gets ignored—we have defined happiness as an individual pursuit in the United States, land of individualists and of self-help. That solipsism has had its logical outcome in mass murder and misery.
The personal growth Dewey advocated was a personal growth within the larger communal whole. The pursuit of virtue, after all, is about how we treat others far more than it is about how we treat ourselves. Dewey had in mind the ideal of the Socratic dialogue, which isn’t easy to live up to. It can’t be found on TV. Or among pundits.
Growth itself is the only moral end because it is about striving to be a better human being for the good of the whole, for human flourishing. The gods can’t be much help with that. It is a profoundly human-ist thing to do.
Last year, the rhododendron in front of our house was a sorry sight. Spindly branches and yellow leaves, a couple scraggly blooms. I half-heartedly attempted to help it out by sprinkling our used tea leaves on it (I vaguely remembered something about acidity being good for flowering plants). But by the fall, it was in such bad shape that I thought about asking our landlord to just take it out.
Then, in November, just before our daughter was born, my parents came to visit for a week. My father, a masterful diagnostician of people and plants, took one look at the rhodo and prescribed coffee grounds (I was right about the acidity). Every day that week, he dutifully sprinkled coffee grounds around the base of the plant. Then the baby was born; the weather turned colder; the snows came; and I forgot completely about the rhododendron.
Until now! This past week it exploded with blooms and new growth–healthy and vibrant and just beautiful!
My family will most likely be moving at the end of the summer–just as we’ve got the hang of our tiny little shared plot of earth, just as the rhododendron has come to life. I hate to leave it. But I like to think that next family to move into our apartment might just fall in love with this old house because of the beautiful flowering plant out front.
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The word “faith” doesn’t occupy the same place of prominence in Unitarian Universalism that it does in some religious traditions. For many of us, faith has become synonymous with blind acceptance of particular religious beliefs, as in: Jesus died for my sins; God created the world in six days; Noah survived a flood in an ark; a talking snake hoodwinked Adam and Eve.
For most Unitarian Universalists, indeed for most people who live in the modern world and think with modern understandings, such beliefs are neither intellectually tenable nor morally acceptable. Faith defined as religious belief is what Mark Twain was getting at when he said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
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I have a favorite tree that I like to sit in. Going there is a form of meditation for me. I like to climb up into the branches and look out over the Bay. It is one of my favorite places to sit sipping a cup of coffee while I watch the sun set. The birds fly around me and my cares just melt away. I feel like I am in a sacred and safe world. I love it.
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Once upon a time there was a child made all of salt. This child very much wanted to know who he was and where he came from. So he set out on a long journey, traveling many lands in pursuit of this understanding. Finally he came to the shores of the great ocean.
“How marvelous,” he cried. “How beautiful!” And he stuck one foot in the water. But then he saw how his toe disappeared and he became afraid. The ocean beckoned him in further, saying: “If you wish to know who you are, do not be afraid.” The salt child walked further and further into the water, dissolving with each step, and at the end, exclaimed, “Ah, now I know who I am.” Read more →
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