GA ID Issue Round-Up

I will be posting about this myself in the next day or two. In the meantime, while you breathlessly await one more opinion on this matter, you can read other takes on this issue at the following UU Blogs: Philocrities, Trustee Talk, UUA Politics, iMinister (and here), RadicalHapa, The Chaliceblog (here and here), the Yes Church, Boy in the Bands, Ministare, Transient and Permanent, and Making Chutney. Feel free to add posts I’ve missed. You can also read about it at UU World here and here. Finally, see the memo from UUA President William G. Sinkford, Moderator Gini Courter, and GA Planning Committee Chair Beth McGregor, where they respond to concerns about security checkpoints at the 2008 General Assembly here, and have your Frequently Asked Questions About Security in Fort Lauderdale answered on the UUA website.

Blog by a Member of the UUA Board

I have been a little out of the blogosphere lately, consumed by learning Latin (oh, what a great joy) and so I missed this blog titled the UUA from Berkeley which is a blog by a member of the UUA Board of Trustees. Today she posted one of a series of posts from the Board of Trustees meeting that took place this past weekend. You can also see more info on the Board of Trustees meetings here: minutes, agendas, and other stuff.

Doing the Hard Work of Love and Justice: Where is energy best spent?

I wrote meditations and prayers for my internship congregation each week when I was the intern minister there.  One theme that came up over and over, for me, was to remind us what was involved and pray for what we needed to “do the hard work of love and justice.” The idea that it is important for us to remember that if we are going to talk about love and justice, as most UUs like to do, it is important to remember that it is about hard work and not just righteous talk or token actions. As I think about what it means to do this in my own life, I often wonder where my energy is best spent to bring about the most good. I know for me, it is often easy to convince myself that what I want to do, or what appeals to me the most, is the best use of my time, especially if what is appealing can seem righteous or really worthy.

All the hub-a-bub about General Assembly, and the not too distant brown bag controversy as had me thinking about what it means to be part of a faith, part of an association, and just what I want my life to look like and where I want to put my attention - how to live out my own call to do the hard work of love and justice.

I think it would be really easy for me to get involved in UUA politics (by this I mean both the important, good work of our Association, and also the somewhat jaded, gossipy politics). I could very easily be a snarky blogger making fun of all the unique and maybe less than common-sense seeming things that happen at GA and in UUism in general. In fact, I do this in my head more than I want, but I try to stop myself.  I think I could have written a scathing post on the whole brown bag thing. But I’m trying not to do this, and put my frustration, anger, and energy into those parts of my life and my faith that seem like they will make the biggest difference.* The question of course is what the best allocation of my time and energy is.
Not that General Assembly or language issues (how we talk about things, for instance, lunches where people need to bring their own lunch) aren’t important, but I am feeling more and more like there are a lot symbolic politics that I could really make a lot out of and that would be sort of fun and feel really important, but I’m not sure if that is where my time and energy should be spent.  And of course, there is the important question of being able to discern symbolic politics from actual important stuff that makes a difference in people’s lives (and makes a difference big enough to be justified, relative to the time and energy spent on it, since time and energy, institutionally and individually, is limited).

All that said, it also seems like one needs to keep one foot in institutional worlds, and bigger questions. I can be a bit leery of the potential for political correctness to run amok. But, then again, some people might tell me that using only male language for God is one of those areas, and what is all the fuss about? And of course, I would argue that it is an important area to be attentive to. Maybe all that happens at UUA headquarters in Boston is not earth-shattering, but certainly some things that happen there and some of what happens at our General Assembly is really important.  The question is how to manage my energy and time - how much can I/should I/must I give to these things that are sort of scarily appealing to jump into, yet at the same time, softly whisper to me that this is not where my energy should go? I think it is so easy to criticize what is not going right or well. It is so much harder to do something different that wouldn’t be make-fun-of-worthy.

Just some reflections on this. No conclusions yet.

*When I talk about making the biggest difference, I don’t mean to imply that UUism is some sort of big social service agency or something that is meant to change the world via our Social Action Committees. For me, I feel like my connection with the divine is, in many ways, through bringing about the kingdom of love/god here on earth. I feel a call to unconditional love, which in some way, I feel emanates from the divine to the world’s beings. This is not meant to be Elizabeth’s Spiritual Treatise on Divine love, but just to clarify that unconditional love is a guiding force in my spiritual journey, which, for me, translates to reducing the suffering of others in both spiritual and material ways, thus the whole thing about “hard work of love and justice.”

**Side note II: This is not to be some sort of broad criticism of snarky criticism or critique of things in general. I think sometimes it is good and needed and constructive. Sometimes it can just be too much, too frequent, and mean. This is mostly about my approach to things.

What makes someone Unitarian Universalist?

One part of my final papers involves looking at a lot of religious demographic figures. I was looking at Religion in a Free Market which analyzes the data from a survey of 51,000 U.S. Americans and then figures out what that means for the whole U.S. population. It is helpful in some ways, very unhelpful in others (but that is for another post).

The survey is based on self-identification. And according to the survey, there are about 600,000 Unitarian Universalists in the country (as of 2001). As many of us know, this is a tad more (like about three times more) than our survey of congregations shows. And this got me thinking. I’ve read where a UUA president (I want to say John Buehrens, but it could have been Bill Sinkford - I forget where I read it) commented on such a number and said that it was flattering that 600,000 people would identify as Unitarian Universalist, all those people don’t really understand what we’re about (or what it means to be Unitarian Universalist) because you have to belong to a congregation to be a Unitarian Universalist. I’ve also heard this by some of our ministers - “You can’t just be UU. You have to be active in congregational life and part of a Unitarian Universalist community.” And I see where this is coming from - the idea that we are not just some random collection of liberalish people with no core set of beliefs. We stand for something and we aren’t the catch-all for people who don’t know what else to be.

Yet. Imagine if a Christian church or denomination was like, “If you are not a member of one of our congregations, you do not count as Christian.” Or if a Buddhist group insisted that if you were not a member of one of their Buddhist communities, you were out. To me, Unitarian Universalism is not a club. It is a faith. And, for me, it is about how we live our lives, not if we are a member of a congregation. This does not mean I encourage people not to be members of a congregation. Like with Christianity, I believe that our faith is best lived out in community, but that the core of what it means to be Unitarian Universalism does not mean belonging to a congregation, but means living out the principles of love, justice, kindness, and equality in your everyday life.

So now when people ask how many of us there are, I won’t say 200,000-ish. I’ll say 600,000-ish, realizing that congregations count in many different ways and that many Unitarian Universalists out there - for whatever reason - are not involved in a congregation at the time. And, realize the work that we have to do to make our congregations feel like an essential part to our faith. Not because people “have to join,” but because they want to be part of such healthy and thriving community.

Christianity and the UUA

So Shawn at LoFi Tribe (sorry, no time to link these - you can google them) has left the UU path and is going to be straight up Christian (he didn’t say what denomination he is switching to). I’ve read the blog some here and there and find it a fine blog to read. I just hate losing cool people. But, the main point of this quick post (I’m trying not to make posts need to be perfect and essay like) is that he writes:

The UUA is a new age smorgasbord that does not - and will not - resonate with the majority of people living in this country (especially young adult families w/ young children). It will appeal to a very small segment living on the fringes of our culture and society. That’s it.

Okay, so I don’t love my beloved denomination (with all its flaws) being called a “new age smorgasbord” and I would not say it appeals to “fringe” people (there are some, but not most), but the main reason this stood out to me is because it could come across that our faith needs to get with the program and resonate with more people… um, like, say, fundamentalism or evangelicalism? As CC says, if all the Methodists jumped off a cliff, would we? The thing is, Jesus’ message was not so popular in his day. Didn’t quite resonate with that many people. But a lot of people stuck with the Jesus tradition because they believed in it - they thought it was the right thing to do even when it was way unpopular and people called them weird. And when people tried to come up with new ideas, and they didn’t fly, they were thrown out or killed. I don’t want to throw people with new ideas out of our faith. Even if they seem new age-y to some. I think now folks might like to call us “new age” to say “Hey, they aren’t the real thing” and/or “Those people are WEIRD” (this may not be what LoFi Tribe is doing - but I’ve seen it done other places). And I think also people are called and have been called heretical or pagan or heathen over the years to say “Hey, they aren’t the real thing - We’ve got the answer. And it involves a particular path. That we set.” My point is not at all to pick on Shawn at LoFi Tribe, but just to point out this sort of criticism that takes place in multiple context, blogs and otherwise. I’m not saying that Unitarian Universalists in general cannot be a little cooky seeming. Okay, it happens. But it isn’t as if they Catholics or Baptists don’t have cooky people or institutional issues similar to those that the UUA might have. I think it is totally cool if someone feels that they need a Christian faith to be ordained in or attend church or be a minister in or whatever. But I reject that Unitarian Universalism is “new age” in a clearly not good way or that it is for people on the fringe and that (by implication) we need to get more mainstream to attract less fringe-y people. More people in general would be fine, but not if it means we have to tell the people with new ideas or less traditional ideas (those new age people) to get out. Oooo, I’m dying to write more and articulate this more clearly but I must must stop. Anyway, just some quick thoughts. Don’t yell at me if there are mistakes or this isn’t articulated perfectly. If I’m going to blog these days it must be fast.

What’s to come…

The next post will be of the foster kittens (finally!). I’ll link to it from Craigslist where we advertise for potential adopting families.

Otherwise, I have a few things I’ve been meaning to write about but thanks for a never-ending paper, it just hasn’t happened yet.

Here is what’s to come after the paper is done (or, should I say IF it is ever done):

In UU World Bill Sinkford writes about what he calls the central act of religious community. You can see the article here. He says that the central act of the religious community is worship. I’m not so sure.

I’m going to the reproductive rights conference sponsored by Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom in DC next week. SYRF is a subgroup of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. I’m interested to see what it will be like and to learn more.

Now onto the foster kittens. I hope soon I’ll be back to my regular blogging self.

It’s Here!

I’m sure, like me, you’ve all be waiting with bated breath for the GA schedule. And here it is! http://www.uua.org/ga/ga06/program.pdf. Aside from attending all sorts of exciting and fun workshops, I’ll also be volunteering at the UUFETA* (Unitarian Universalists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) booth and hocking, er, I mean selling stoles made by my mom! She has volunteered to donate part of the proceeds to UUEFTA (the booth is expensive - I think around $800!) and then she’ll keep the rest. This is her attempt at a post-retirement job. She retires in December. When I get a chance, I’ll post pictures of her wares. She is really an amazing seamstress (and I’m not just saying that because she is my mom) and has taken her stole-making career seriously and done all sorts of research about stoles and Unitarian Universalism. Need a stole? My Mama will make one of the most beautiful ones you’ve ever seen for cheaper than you can get them elsewhere. More on the stoles, GA and…. our new foster kittens (!!!) soon. Enjoy the beautiful weather. Elizabeth :)

*Officially, UUFETA is named UFETA. However, as one little way to guard against what I see to be an unfortunate trend of Unitarian Universalism being shortended to Unitarianism, I call it UUFETA to guard agianst the slippery slope of one U. Not that it makes a big difference - but it makes me feel like I’m doing my little part. :)

Some UU Thoughts

It is times like this that I wish I would have made this blog anonymous-ish, like some other UU bloggers out there, which would give me (at least a bit more) free reign to just rant. (I know it is hard to believe that I might be able to do such a thing…) So no ranting here. I will try to be calm, collected, and reasonable. I went to the Ballou Channing District conference today. It was a good reminder that I need to get out and about in UU land more. It was also a good experience to help me understand why so many other bloggers can be so critical of UUism. (For instance, you can find a collection of critiques of the UUA and UUism ideas about “fixing” UUism here at Chalice Chick’s blog or you can read one of many posts that are pretty down on the UUA and/or UUism in general here at Boy in the Bands blog. I could go on, but there is an abundance of not very satisfied UUs out there who offer lots of criticism, generally, I think out of love, but still it can be a bit much sometime.)

Anyway, I guess throw me in the mix of loving critiquers. I think a lot of my previous feeling of wondering how oh how could anyone be harsh about UUism/UUA etc. comes from being a part of two really great congregations — my home church and my internship church. There has been very little if any bickering at these places, great leadership, and lots of respect and flexibility about and around people’s various beliefs. Like my early time being involved in a Christian church in high school, I freely admit I tend to come at a lot of religion stuff a tad naively. That said, it is good to learn the hard lessons of religious community — it is, of course, messy and really should be no other way because life is messy. Anyway. Onward.

I’ll start with the thing that could, in and of itself, be enough to complain/lament about in and of itself. Our every-so-loveable keynote speaker Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr (bio here) called people who believed in the resurrection of Jesus “idiots.” This is not an exaggeration on my part. He was making fun of how, in his opinion, Western religions think that their myths are literally true, while Eastern religions know that their myths are not really true and just a way of understanding the world. (I would question this blanket statement. And, as a side note, he also said that there are no gods in Buddhism, which is wrong. You can read a little about that here at wikipedia or here at www.religionfacts.com). And in this context about myths, he said something along the lines like “A dead guy actually rising again after death? Come on! Give me a break!” and then the bit about idiots. I don’t know if it might have occurred to him that perhaps there are UUs who believe this (like Peacebang who wrote about just that recently in this post) and he actually doesn’t care about calling fellow ministers and fellow UUs idiots or if he simply didn’t stop to think about this. I don’t happen to believe in the bodily actual resurrection of Jesus, but certainly I don’t think those who do are idiots. I must say, by the end of the Rev. Dr. Loehr’s talk I was really too offended to listen to much of what he was saying. But he seemed to argue, as well, that we shouldn’t believe in God in the traditional sense anymore, or, rather, that we shouldn’t call what is not actually God-in-the-traditional sense God because that is being untruthful or inconsistent. Really what we should say is that this ground of being (a la Tillich, or whatever language you might use to talk about the divine or holy) is not God. He seemed to understand that God must equal “a big guy in the sky.” I’m sure I’m not saying this well and that maybe the way I’m saying it doesn’t help my reader understand how annoying this was. Maybe someone will produce a transcript of this and I can then quote more accurately. The point is that I find making fun of other people’s beliefs, say, like the belief in bodily resurrection or the actual belief in God, not so helpful. And, if he is all concerned about rescuing UUism and growing the faith (as it seems he is concerned with) then I would say that calling people who believe in Jesus’ resurrection idiots and making fun of people who believe in God-in-the-traditional-sense or who just like to say God because it makes sense to them, is not a step in the right direction since in 2004 about 80% of our country self-identified as Christian. Anyway.

Onto a second, and slightly less problematic part of his talk, but still, on top of the other stuff not pleasing to yours truly. He told the story about how Friedrich Schleiermacher (an old theologian guy whom you can read about here) gave the sermon at his nine year old son’s funeral and instead of saying that Nathaniel was “playing soccer in heaven with Jesus” (these are the exact words from Dr. Loehr’s talk, of course FS would never had said such a thing anyway) instead FS said that it was really sad his son hadn’t lived a full life. Rev. Dr. Loehr’s point here was that Schleiermacher was being honest about what he believed — that his son wasn’t in heaven and rather than comforting everyone at the funeral with sweet lies (ie heaven) he instead had integrity and was honest. Hmm.

First, one of my favorite images happens to be imagining my Pappaw and Mammaw, Grandaddy, my cousin Bob, my and cats Puffy, Helaina, Tyler, Nicole, Twinkle Eyes, Linda, Harriet, Tiffany and Luke frolicking around up in heaven. I know of course that my vision of what this might look like is probably quite a ways off from what it actually looks like, but my theory is that no one knows what the afterlife looks like, so all we can do is give our best guess at imagining it. If it works for you to imagine reincarnation, fine. Soccer up in heaven, great. If you like to imagine your cats becoming friends with Jesus and the Buddha, that is just fine, too. It is not a matter of being dishonest but rather saying we just don’t know and so we might as well think about what works best for us. And this is what I think about most religious things, including the idea of God and heaven. We just don’t really know and I get really really annoyed with people (ah-hem) who think that they are super-enlightened and like to make fun of people who believe CRAZY stuff like that their cats are chasing mice in heaven and hanging out with all their departed family members. Instead these oh-so-enlightened people tell us how it really is because of course they really know that there is no such thing as heaven. Did I say I wasn’t going to get sarcastic? Sorry, I know I shouldn’t and I will stop.

Secondly, when a child dies, I am all for saying what the family needs to hear. Funerals are not a time to profess your own personal theological revelatory truths (such as there is no heaven). If you are doing a Buddhist funeral, you do what the Buddhists need and talk about interbeing and the eightfold path. If it is a humanist funeral, you focus on the person’s life more than what might (or might not) come after it. If you are doing a funeral for your daughter’s cat, you ask what the daughter thinks happen to the cat. If it happens that she thinks the cat is chasing mice in heaven, then you go with that. No one knows what happens when you die. We all come up with different ways of making sense of this. Rev. Loehr said it would have been easier for FS to say that his son was in heaven because that is what people wanted to hear, including the boy’s mom. But this was the time that FS chose to profess his theological honesty? How about when someone commits suicide? Do you talk about how sad his last moments were because that is the honest thing to do? Or when my Mammaw died should I have taken that moment to share with my Southern Baptist family my thoughts on Southern Baptist Theology or Christian theology?

“I know Mammaw believed that she would go to heaven with Pappaw and Jesus, and all of you believe that too, but actually, I go to Harvard Divinity School and have a slightly different take on what her afterlife looks like, and I thought now, in order to be truly honest and have integrity, I would share that with you.”

Anyway. I think I have made my point.

What I mean to say is that I didn’t think that our speaker today was all that helpful because even if he had some valid challenges to make to Unitarian Universalism (like, for instance, that we victimize groups of people so we can feel like the super-hero-rescuers) it was hard to hear that with all of his unnecessary making-fun-of and what struck me as a tad of hubris and oh-look-at-me, I’m going against the grain and challenging you all who are stuck in your old silly liberal ways. By the way, he referred to people who think that God is up in the sky as thinking of God as a critter. I’ve never heard this before. Not only does it sound demeaning to people who think of God in a more traditional sense, it just sounds strange to me. I theorized to a fellow conference go-er that perhaps it was a Texas thing (Loehr is from TX).
As an interlude, I will share, as the evaluation form for the conference asked, “What worked best for you at the conference today?” I loved seeing other UUs from other congregations, talking with some AWESOME young adult women (they were so good I practically wanted to hug them), and learning about UU history in a workshop. It was great to be gathered in the presence of so many beautiful people who I am journeying with and will continue to journey along with. And I’m not just saying that. That was really nice.

Now, back to my loving critiques. There was an award ceremony in the middle of the opening service. There were quite a few awards, and I’m guessing that, like me, most people didn’t know the people who were getting the awards. This could be understood as nit-picky. It comes from my many years running leadership conferences for high school and college students. This would have been something we would have taught them if they were going to have a religious service - put the names of those who are getting the awards in the program. If you must include a verbal announcement, as a way of recognizing those who contribute to the work of our faith in the world, do so in a two minute (not 15 minute) acknowledgement. Second, after the Rev. Dr.’s over-hour-long talk, and after we broke up into small groups for a half-hour (and someone in my small group dominated the entire conversation) instead of going to lunch as would have made sense, they decided to have MORE loooong announcements. Right before lunch. And they were not essential announcements, but 101 reasons why we think you should go to GA. And other stuff that I don’t remember because I was hungry like everyone else and had been sitting since . I really will say that I KNOW this is being nit-picky in a sense. But, I just want to see my beautiful wonderful denomination be run as beautifully as my ultra-professional mega-church of my youth. There is a reason people flocked to my mega-church that I went to in high school. Because they didn’t let a long string of people get up and make long, repetative announcements right before lunch. They were investing in having people come to our church because they thought that their souls needed to be saved. This was a really compelling reason to get their act together really really well and be really professional. I know that we don’t have this feeling of being in a rush to rescue souls from hell and sometimes I feel like this results in not putting our all into things or just not feeling like doing things really well is as urgent. It is sort of like “Whatever we do is good enough because we all have dignity and worth and we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by suggesting maybe a different approach…” And then we have people like Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr who are really concerned about the future of Unitarian Universalism and changing thing, and his way of doing that is by refusing to call himself UU, calling The Seven Principles The Seven Banalities, insulting people’s theologies, going on about Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, and touting Paul Tillich as the best theologian of the 20th century (I happen to not be a fan of old Paul). Sigh.
But I do have hope. And not just because I am truly impressed with the future of UU ministry (that is, recent and soon to be graduates of div. school) but because I believe that there is something compelling about UUism. And that we can learn. We can change. We can take the wonderful things we have, unlearn those not-so-great things, and learn new things. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a Unitarian Universalist who is or was involved in the work of the faith who wasn’t well intentioned. Not that that is everything, but it is a great foundation. I’m truly thrilled to have found this faith and the wonderful current and future ministers, the excited commited people in congregations… And look forward to learning more and doing all that I can to support the work and growth of our faith in the world.