Spiritual Drought & Restoration
I have to be mindful of the baskets of flowers that hang below the eaves. Even though it has rained for four days, the eaves have sheltered the flowers from the rain. This means that though the road is washed out and water sits upon the ground with no where to go, even though the dock is below the lake’s surface and the warbler flycatchers have to hunt not in the air but up and down the hemlocks seeking mosquitoes for their chicks, even though I am living in a surfeit of good cold rain, the flowers might die from thirst.
Spiritually, this is also true. How many spiritual leaders and regular religious adherents have I met who are going through a tough spiritual drought while all around them is running lush and wet? When we’re in those spiritually dry times, everyone we meet and the world around us can seem tremendously fresh and full and juicy, making our own thirst worse, somehow crueler.
Watering these hanging baskets by hand, refreshing the water in the dog’s bowl, I stop to pour myself a glass of cold water, knowing that I can ignore my own thirst for a very long time. I’m busy attending the thirst of plants that cannot draw up their own water, or the thirst of a dog who remains puzzled as to why there are no paws-alone working taps in the house, or to the spiritual thirst of a seeker, a stranger, or a friend. That needs doing. I also need to drink a glass of water, too, stopping to refresh my body and stopping to refresh my soul.
I’ve been quieter than usual lately, largely due to the acuity of an illness I live with – and expect to live with for the rest of my life. I’ve been learning my new limitations, adapting to what has emerged as patterns. Adaptation is just what human beings do, and I believe spirituality is our biggest adaptive response. The Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church taught: “religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” That may be so. I have found that spirituality is my response to the challenges of living. We innovate, we renovate, we create, and these are all forms of adaptation to change, to opportunity, to energy, to possibility. This season of my life has been a wet one, rich with opportunities to grow spiritually, full of change, most of which are not ones I would choose, welcome, or wish for someone else.
Yet, despite all these rainy blessings, I grew thirsty, inattentive to my spirit, my attention absorbed by other changes, by the needs of others, by loss and by the physical difficulty of each day. If one lets a basket of flowers dry out completely, a flood of water will wash off the top of the dry soil. One has to rehydrate the basket slowly, with sips, with gentle attention until the soil is full and spongy again. The same is true with our spirits. When we have gone through a drought or neglected to tend our spirits, we have to return with small, regular sips of life-giving blessings. As we do, our senses come back into balance, and we are more able to serve, more able to struggle well with what is needful, more able to laugh generously and to forgive, more able to fulfill our faithful promises and love this life sparkling in wonder and growing in hope.
Flower Communion
This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of what is known today as the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians. Its first minister, the Rev. Dr. Norbert Fabián Čapek, created a ritual that is celebrated by Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists all over the world, Flower Communion. Čapek described the ceremony in a 1923 letter to Samuel Atkins Eliot II, president of the American Unitarian Association:
We have made a new experiment in symbolizing our Liberty and Brotherhood in a service which was so powerful and impressive that I never experienced anything like it… On that very Sunday…everybody was supposed to bring with him a flower. In the middle of the big hall was a suitable table with a big vase where everybody put his flower…in my sermon I put emphasis on the individual character of each “member-flower,” on our liberty as a foundation of our fellowship. Then I emphasized our common cause, our belonging together as one spiritual community… And when they go home, each is to take one flower just as it comes without making any distinction where it came from and whom it represents, to confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who is a human and wants to be good.
The marvelous natural beauty of the flowers that are brought to these ceremonies is certainly inspiring, but it is of the utmost importance that we continue to learn the broader and deeper lesson this rite teaches. The idea that we should accept one another, with all our differences, and that we should even celebrate one another’s uniqueness, is a radical notion in any age, but in Europe in the 1920s it was downright dangerous; it became ever more so, of course, in the decades that followed, especially as Czechoslovakia found itself among the first nations to succumb to the opportunistic infection that was Nazism. The Nazis, of course, represent the polar opposite of Čapek’s ideals. Flower Communion is a defiant No! in the face of the brutal racism of Hitler and of the fascists’ craving to erect towering, horrific empires upon pediments of subjugation and terror, and it is a joyous Yes! to diversity, equality, and liberty.
As Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists all over the world celebrate Flower Communion, as so many of us to at this season of the year, we do well to consider what it is that we are saying No! to, and where our joyous Yes! is. Do we continue to defy the forces of intolerance that would seek to deny same-sex couples their civil right to marriage under the illusion of “defending” heterosexual marriages (like mine)? Do we stand together clutching bouquets of righteousness and justice in our hearts as we persevere in demanding compassion for immigrants, for laborers, and for the poor? Do we say Yes! to a future for our planet in which we will coexist with all life harmoniously?
Arrested by the Nazis for the “crime” of listening to foreign radio broadcasts, Čapek spent fourteen weeks at Dachau before being martyred in October of 1942 in the Nazi gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim. He is remembered around the world for how he died, but more so for what died for — and what he lived for.
Professionalism and Pluralism in the Military Chaplaincy
In the fall of 2011 I was honored to attend the first ever OutServe Leadership Conference. This was the first time for this organization of LGB persons actively serving in the military to gather publicly, since such public gatherings and recognition was made possible by the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Harass, Don’t Pursue. It was held in Las Vegas, Nevada… and even with the setting it was as professional a military conference I have ever attended… and I have attended more than a few Chaplain Corps Conferences.
It was an honor for me to be able to sign one of the official copies of the Repeal of DADT “Chaplain David Pyle” (see picture, above).
I was attending the conference as an ally, and in my role as a member of The Forum on the Military Chaplaincy. With a fellow UU Military Chaplain, I spoke in a workshop about Professionalism and Pluralism in the Military Chaplaincy, and how LGB service members can engage more conservative Chaplains in dialog about what it means to be an LGB person serving in the military.
More than this, I listened. I had numerous conversations with LGB service members about their experience. Several of those I spoke with were Unitarian Universalists. I heard stories about service members who had been “outed” by their Chaplains. I heard stories about service members feeling they had to care for their own religious needs while deployed, because they did not believe their chaplain would support them. I heard stories about joyously finding that there was one Chaplain at their base who was welcoming and affirming of LGB persons, and building a relationship of trust with that chaplain, after having had hard experiences with other chaplains.
More than all of this, I heard a perception from many that the Chaplain Corps might be wonderful for many service members, but it just was not there for them. They were excluded from the requirement that military chaplains “perform or provide, and care for all”.
As I flew home from the conference, I sat thinking about our Military Chaplain Corps, and the realization that Chaplains had been failing all of these service members for decades. Their distrust of chaplains was an earned distrust… chaplains had wounded many of these young men and women. Chaplains had, often with the best of intentions, said thing to and about these young women and men that were soul-damaging. In hoping to “save”, what had been done was to separate… to make someone feel that they are outside of God’s love, and outside of those whom the Chaplain Corps cares for…
And for that, I am sorry. I cannot apologize for the whole Chaplain Corps, but I can apologize for my complicity in it… I realized that many of these young men and women had never had anyone apologize for the way Chaplains have treated them. And so, for myself and for whatever it might mean, I did apologize… and I committed myself to helping the Chaplain Corps grow into the fullness of no longer treating LGB service members in such shameful ways.
I was flying home to move back into my role as a Parish Minister for a UU Congregation (I went right from the Airport to an event at the church I serve), and it had me thinking about the difference of role I have in these two ministries, and how my faith plays a different part in each of these roles for me.
As a Parish Minister, my Liberal Faith as a Unitarian Universalist Minister is what I wear on my sleeve. I preach the gospel of interdependence and inherent worth. I lead a congregation in social justice actions. I speak the saving grace of universal salvation whenever I am given the opportunity. My faith is a public faith that I present to the world, and encourage the congregation I serve to join me in doing so.
Yet, in military chaplaincy, and indeed in any chaplaincy, my faith plays a very different role. My Liberal Faith as a Unitarian Universalist is the inner strength I need to be with people in the best and the worst moments of their lives. My Liberal faith is what calls me and allows me to be with someone else, focusing on what their faith asks and requires of them in a particular place and time. As a military chaplain, my personal faith is of utmost importance… for me… for how I have the strength to be with someone else in their confusion, pain, loss, grief and hurt. As a military chaplain, I am called to be with them in their religious faith… not to import into the moment my own.
As the plane was landing in Los Angeles, I realized that perhaps the issue among military chaplains is that we do not understand or accept these two very different understandings of ministry. Many of the behaviors that wounded so many of the service members I spoke with this weekend would have been completely appropriate coming from a Parish Minister of a conservative tradition in a civilian setting… but were inappropriate (in my opinion) from someone entrusted with the responsibility and authority of military chaplaincy.
So, when denominations and seminaries teach only the Parish/church model of ministry, how do we inspire ministers who wish to be Military Chaplains to understand and accept this different role for their personal faith? I do not know. Perhaps we need to change the standards of who can become a military chaplain. Perhaps we need to require Clinical Pastoral Education. Perhaps we need to take a look at what denominational endorsers are telling their chaplains their role in the military should be.
All I know is that, as I listened to the stories of the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Guardians, and Marines I spoke with, it was apparent to me the cost of not addressing this in our Military Chaplain Corps.
For, as I listened to the stories, I felt ashamed.
Yours in Faith,
Rev. David
