The 40th Anniversary of the Dance Between the Towers

Each year, on the anniversary of the day that the French wire-walker and street performer Phillipe Petit danced for forty-five minutes between the towers of the World Trade Center, I watch the wonderful documentary about le coup, Man on Wire.  And each year I am once again inspired.

I am inspired by the raw courage and sheer lunacy of this feat.  At one point in the film Petit says of his attitude on first actually seeing the towers, "It's impossible, that's sure.  So let's start working."  Petit's confidence in his own abilities is mindboggling -- that anyone could imagine that they could do such a thing!

But this was not a solitary venture.  Although Petit was the one on that wire a quarter of a mile above the streets of New York City, in truth he was only there because of his friends.  In the dedication of his own reminiscence of the event -- the book now also called Man on Wire but originally called To Reach The Clouds --  Petit names twenty-one individuals, and leaves at least a few unnamed.  He says that it is to these that "this story belongs."  It was not just Petit's faith in himself that's inspiring.  He also had a seemingly innate, unquestioned faith in those who were working on this project with him, and they in him.

That's something that comes through if you watch the film closely enough, or read the book for the story within the story -- each of these people believed in this crazy idea as much as Petit did.  Each of them thought it was worth doing.  Each of them thought it was possible.  Each of them thought that she or he was just the person to make it happen.  They were not merely his assistants; they were his collaborators, his co-conspirators.  It was not Petit's coup; the walk belonged to all of them.

Storytellers love a hero.  Audiences want to see one woman or one man with the courage and the skills to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles and do what no one else can.  (This is true, at least, of American storytellers and audiences brought up in the dominant culture of the United States.)  We want there to be a pinnacle -- to inspire us, to give us something to aspire to.  And so the images of Petit on that 3/4" wire, alone, touches something in our souls.  It's nearly impossible for us to imagine anyone else out there with him.

But there were.  Yes, only he had put his life on the line, but they had put the life of a dear friend on the line knowing that if something were to happen he would die a poet's death whereas they would have to live with if for the rest of their lives.  It was the skill of his feet and that insane concentration that kept him aloft on that early Tuesday morning, but it was the skill of his friends and their insane dedication that got him there in the first place.  There is another story -- a less mythic, perhaps, yet deeper and more true story -- about le coup.

It is also, I think, an ultimately more inspiring one.  When I was younger it is quite possible that I aspired to be that solitary hero.  (I don't know for sure, I'm old enough now not to really remember!)  Now, though, I aspire to be part of a community that's doing daring things; to be one of a group that believes that, together, nothing can stop them.

I used to call this day "International Phillipe Petit Danced Between the Towers Day."  I will call it now, the Anniversary of the Dance Between the Towers because those who were on those roofs with him, and those who'd been with him in the planning and were now down on the street, and even those of us who merely watched and wondered ... we all were dancing too.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

UPDATE:  When I first wrote this post I was able to find photos of three of the team that were involved that day -- Jean-Louis Blondeau (who planed and organized the whole adventure), Annie Allix, and Jean-François Heckel.  I wrote to Jean-Louis, with whom I've previously been in touch, and he told me that there were three other people who really needed to be mentioned -- Jean-Pierre Dousseau (who is never even mentioned in the film yet who drove the van into the Towers' delivery area and who was an integral part of the feat), and both Jim Moore and Barry Greenhouse (who do feature in the film).  He also sent me photos of these three so that I might honor them and their role as well.

So this year -- the 40th anniversary -- I salute them.

Jean-Louis Blondeau

Annie Allix

Jean-François Heckel

Jean-Pierre Dousseau

Jim Moore

 

Barry Greenhouse

Revelation 8:16 8-6-45

Today is the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.  As my first sermon back after a month away from the pulpit of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist, this is what I had to say on the subject.  (As always, if you want to listen to the sermon, just click here.)

Opening Reading:  from Ray Bradbury's short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains"

“Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint- the man, the woman, the children, the ball- remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.”

* * *

At 8:14 there was a clear blue sky.  Birds flew in the morning sunshine.  Children laughed as they made their way to school.  People were doing tai chi and calisthenics in a city park.  There’d been a scare earlier in the morning but now it looked like everything was okay.  Even when the world around you seems to be going crazy, days like this can make you feel alive and grateful.  The air is clean; the sun, warm.  You can forget the insanity.  On a day like this.  For a moment everything makes sense.

And in that moment—31,000 feet above the birds, and the children, and the men doing tai chi—the bomb doors on the Enola Gay opened and let loose a metal cylinder.  Ten feet long and two-and-a-half feet in diameter, it would change the world.  Not just for the people below or the people in the plane, but for every man, every woman, and every child who lived or ever would.

Forty-three seconds after it was flung loose that metal cylinder was 1,900 feet above the ground and it exploded with the force of 15,000 tons of TNT.  15,000 tons.  The birds burst into flame in mid-air.  So did combustible things like paper—as far as a mile away.  Instantly.

The people in the park right below turned to ash.  Instantly.  42-year old Mitsuno Ochi was sitting on the steps of her bank, waiting for it to open, when the bomb exploded.  She was reduced to nothing but a shadow.  You can see it today in the Hiroshima Peace Museum where they moved those steps so that she might not be forgotten.

Next came the blast wave.  Moving at a rate of two miles a second, people were blown from their feet, buildings were blown to the ground, trolleys and cars were blown from the roads.  Glass shattered twelve miles away.  A boy was blown through the windows of his house and across the street; his house collapsing behind him.  Within minutes, nine out of ten people half a mile or less from ground zero were dead.

And then the numerous fires that erupted around Hiroshima soon joined together creating a monstrous firestorm that engulfed nearly four and half square miles of the city.  In its heart it is estimated that this beast reached temperatures of over seven thousand degrees.  (For comparison, the surface of the sun is just under ten thousand degrees.)  An interesting fact:  a postwar study showed that less than 4.5 percent of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima suffered leg fractures.  That’s not, of course, because those injuries didn’t occur but because those who couldn’t walk died.

It’s estimated that somewhere around 100,000 people died as a direct result of the blast and the fires.  100,000 people. 

Yet these are just numbers:  15,000 tons of TNT.  Seven thousand degrees.  100,000 people dead.  60 million dead if you add in all those—military and civilians—who died during World War II.  The war after “the war to end all wars.”

When I was in my twenties I got to spend a couple of months in Tokyo working with a Japanese mime troupe.  One of the few regrets I have of that time is that I never made it to the Hiroshima Peace Museum.  Like so many I have been haunted by what happened at 8:16 on August 6^th, 1945.  The suddenness of it.  The enormity of it.  The … I don’t know … the comprehensiveness of it.  Everything changed in that moment.  Everything.  And the shock waves continue to reverberate in our world and in our psyches. 

Who are we – as a people, as a species – if we’re capable of this?   And not just once, but again two days later?

In 1903 the incomparable George Benard Shaw wrote a play called Man and Superman.  It’s a four act play, but most often only Acts I, II, and IV are performed together.  The 3^rd Act is almost always performed as a stand-alone piece and even has its own title: Don Juan in Hell.  I grew up listening to a recording of Don Juan in Hell that was one of my parents’ prized possessions and one of my greatest pleasures – a recording of a 1952 readers’ theater production staring Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead.  Oh but those four could have been reading the phone book, their voices are so marvelous to listen to.  I recently found this recording on iTunes and have been listening to it, enraptured, since.

The play is a philosophical dialog about the meaning of love and marriage, men and women, life and death – pretty heady stuff, really.  It takes the literary figures of Don Juan, Doña Anna, and her father the Commander, and sets them in Hell having a conversation with the Devil.  It’s full of wonderful Shaw-isms.  An example?  “An Englishman thinks he is being moral when he is merely uncomfortable.”  There are also some tremendous monologues, one of which I’d like to quote at some length here, germane as I believe it to be.  This is the Devil, countering Don Juan’s assertion that man’s (this was written in 1903) that man’s brain is the pièce de résistance of creation.  And so the Devil says:

And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine. The peasant I tempt today eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvelous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. […]

The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair; of sword and gun and poison gas: above all, of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.

It is said that Robert Oppenheimer, known as “the Father of the Atomic Bomb,” responded to seeing the first test of the device he helped birth by quoting the Hindu holy book the Bahagavad Gita:  I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.  We, we human beings, had become death, the destroyers of worlds.

How is it possible that we haven’t stopped fighting yet?  After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Pearl Harbor, the Congo, Korea, Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Sarajevo, Somalia, Northern Ireland, New York City, Bagdad, Fallujah, Allepo, Israel, Gaza—how can we still be slaughtering one another?  It’s been nearly forty years since Edwin Starr shouted out, “War.  What is it good for?”  and answered himself, “Absolutely nothin’.”  How is it that we’re still doing it?

Maybe it’s because we keep talking about numbers.  Joseph Stalin said that the death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a statistic. But there are no statistics.  There is no such thing as “collateral damage.”  There are only people—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents, grandchildren, neighbors, friends.  Strangers, even.  Enemies, even.  But no numbers.  Numbers don’t exist; only people do.  Until they don’t anymore.  Until they become shadows in a museum.

Or maybe it’s because we keep thinking that we can fight our way to peace, that the problem is some bad people over there and if we can just beat them into submission peace will prevail.  We believe that it’s in talking tough, acting tough, that we protect the peace.  We’re told—and many believe—that the best defense is a good offense and that while might might not always make right, might in the hands of the good guys is there to be used.

The revelation of that lovely Monday morning when the birds burned and the world shuddered was just how incredible is humanity’s power to create death.  We demonstrated, irrefutably, just how masterful we are when it comes to being “ingeniously destructive,” as Shaw’s Devil put it.  I think that it was Einstein who said, after seeing the devastation of the atomic bomb, that humankind had progressed so far technologically that we now needed an evolution of consciousness if we hoped to survive. 

Yet I don’t believe that that’s all that was revealed in that blinding flash –  we also saw clearly, and still can see when we look back at it, how important is the imperative for us to work against our inclination towards death and work for life – tirelessly, unceasingly, incessantly. 

We say in our Mission Statement here at TJMC that we, “seek to have a lasting influence on local, national and global programs that promote equity and end oppression.”  Surely work for peace fits that criteria.  So while some of us engage with the struggle for full equal rights for LGBT folks; and others continue the seemingly endless work of striving for racial justice, and economic justice; and some are working tirelessly to end the suffering, the oppression of the earth herself; we need some to be standing up for peace, too.  Peace among nations.  Peace within communities.  We need people to attend protests and vigils, write letters, host community forums, work on legislation, run for office, keep the rest of us informed . . . there so many things we can do.  And we should do those things.  Our own Peace Action/United Nations group is a good place to start.  And there is much to be done.

I’ll end with four quotations that, I think, taken together are a fitting response to the horrors we remembered today and, I hope, are an inspiration for the work to be done:

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
~ Mother Teresa

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.  ~ A.J. Muste

Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.  ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.  ~ Martin Luther

Closing Words:  "Every Day" by Ingeborg Bachmann (an Austrian poet)

War is no longer declared, only continued. The monstrous has become everyday. The hero stays away from battle. The weak
have gone to the front. The uniform of the day is patience, its medal the pitiful star of hope above the heart.The medal is awarded when nothing more happens, when the artillery falls silent, when the enemy has grown invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament covers the sky.It is awarded for desertion of the flag, for bravery in the face of friends,
for the betrayal of unworthy secrets
and the disregard of every command.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

PS -- As the prelude to the service, and to provide an alternative to the grim nature of the sermon, the incomparable Scott DeVeaux performed a rendition of this classic Randy Newman song:

The Last Few Moments

When I used to practice zazen fairly regularly there was a phenomenon that I experienced many, many times.  A moment would come when I would become convinced that the timer -- whether a human time keeper or an electronic aid -- had lost track, had fallen asleep, had stopped working for some reason.  I became convinced that the session had actually ended a while back but that I was going to be stuck sitting there endlessly because there'd be no final bell to announce the session's end.  I'd panic ... real, heavy-duty panic.

This happened a lot.

But it's what came next that was important to me.  Most often when this panic would set upon me I would then find arising in me, unbidden, the thought, "Okay.  So there will be no end bell.  I guess I'll just sit here then."  And I would settle into the most profound stillness.

And then the bell would ring.

But Oh than moment of stillness ....

There is something of an analogous phenomenon with which counselors and therapists are familiar.  Just as the client is walking to the door at the end of a session they will turn and say, "You know ..." and out will come the real issue they'd been dancing around before.  This is so common that some counselors actually call and end to their sessions a few minutes early so as to have room for these "doorway revelations."

What is it about the last moment?

During the month of July I was privileged to have the opportunity to take both vacation and study leave.  I was out of the office, out of the pulpit, out of the church for an entire month.  I return tomorrow morning to preach about, of all things, the bombing of Hiroshima and our need to work for peace.  (Quite a way to ease back into preaching, let me tell you!)  So this is the "last moment" of my time away.

July was spent not in quiet contemplation but in my car driving one kid to camp and turning around to take the other to a a job mowing somebody in the neighborhood's lawn.  (I did get to read a bit while he worked.)  Then I'd go home to take care of the dog, and then drive the now finished landscaping boy to his half-day summer class at the local community college.  A few moments of breathing time and I'd begin picking up the boys from their various and scattered locations.  Once a week I'd also take our dog to the dog park during that breathing time, and once a week he went to "doggy day care" so transporting him had to be worked into the mix.

A pretty busy month.  And because my wife started a new job during this time, the cleaning, the shopping, the cooking was all mine to do, too.  At times I thought that I must be pretty darned wicked because it certainly felt like there way no rest for me.

But now it's the last moment.

And a calm has washed over me.  And from this vantage point I can see all the gifts, all the blessings, all the wonder I had the opportunity to experience over the past several weeks.  I can see the challenges, and how I rose up to meet them.  I can see the unexpected delights and the surprise discoveries.  I feel the sense of rest and rejuvenation that the change in routine elicited.  (I once read somewhere the thought that a change of pace is as good as a holiday.)  I can feel that I am renewed and recharged.

Is there a "last moment" coming up for you?  Can you create one if there's not?

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Teacher, Guide, Companion Ten Years Later

Ten years ago Teacher,Guide, Companion:  rediscovering Jesus ina secular age came out.  It was my first book, and my first collaboration with the good folks at Skinner House Books.  It seems like a wonderful opportunity to look back at what I thought then and what I'd say now if I were to write it again.  There is a marvelous story about Ralph Waldo Emerson.  In his later life he was sometimes was asked to give readings of one or another of his earlier essays.  It is said that as he did so he would occasionally look up and say, "I no longer believe this."  He would then return to his reading.  As I prepared to reconsider Teacher, Guide, Companion I was hoping I wouldn’t have to say "I no longer believe this" too often.

The good news is – I didn’t.  Thanks in very large part to Ms. Mary Benard, Senior Editor at Skinner House, it’s a very readable book.  The prose is clean, and the ideas flow smoothly.  The structure I used for this "rediscovery" came from a passage in the Gospel of Mark.  Jesus is remembered as asking his disciples, "Who do the people say that I am?"  After his friends answer with what they’ve heard people say, he asks the more pointed question, "But who do you say that I am?"  

Teacher, Guide, Companion follows the same general pattern – beginning with what others have said about Jesus, then sharing my own perspective, and then offering suggestions for the reader’s own explorations.   I don’t think I’d change that.  One of the good things about the book is that it is so readable – I was able to re-read it over the course of one evening.  That does, however, mean that there is a lot that could have been included that wasn’t.  And that’s one of the things that I might change were I to write it again – or create an expanded edition.

The section on the historical Jesus could easily be expanded.  Details could be added to the section looking at what we learn from the study of pre-industrial agrarian societies in general, and the Judeo-Roman world at the time of Jesus in particular.  This work is mentioned, yet there could be more details about what has been learned.  Similarly, there is only a passing reference to the existence of – and questions about – a handful of references to Jesus outside of the New Testament, and there has been done some wonderful work attempting to reconstruct the earliest Christian communities.  Both of these would be worth including.  And the discoveries of Biblical archaeology wasn’t mentioned at all!

So, too, could the chapter on the images of Jesus conveyed in the five Gospels could also stand some expansion.  There are details in the Gospel stories that, if included, would have more fully illuminated each of the author’s depictions and would have helped create even greater contrast among them.  And while it was an intentional choice to limit consideration to Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and Thomas, it would be interesting to take a look at what messages the authors of the other Gospels we have discovered – the so-called apocryphal gospels – had intended to convey.

Missing entirely is any consideration of how Jesus has been viewed (and experienced) throughout history.  This could involve looking at historic figures – Saint Francis of Assisi, say, or Mohandas Ghandi – and examining the way(s) they related to Jesus.  Or it could consider the ways Jesus has been seen in different times and different places.  Many books have been written about the ways Jesus has been depicted in art – both visual and literary – and a work like Edward Blum’s The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America looks not just at how Jesus has been depicted but how that depiction can have very real-world consequences.  (James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree is similarly eye opening.)  The insights of Liberationist and Feminist Christian traditions is missing as well.

Several scholar/theologians were introduced in the chapter about the historical Jesus – Marcus Borg, Stephen J. Patterson,  John Dominic Crossan, John Spong – yet each has, by now, written about their own personal encounter/experience with Jesus, and these are just as important as their more academic works.  And when I wrote Teacher, Guide, Companion I had not yet discovered the works of Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr, or Ilia Delio, to name just a few.

The chapter on my own personal perspectives could be expanded to include more about how experiences and view have been influenced by my particular situation as someone who was raised Presbyterian and Methodist, studied and practiced Zen Buddhism for nearly two decades, and now is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister.  More of my wrestling with what this exploration and rediscovery means to me  – which, I will confess, has continued fairly unabated since writing the book – might also be worth including.

And then there’s the section on how the reader might conduct her or his own exploration more fruitfully.  I could imagine including what for want of a better word I’ll call “testimonials” – brief stories from readers about how their searching has unfolded.  These could provide not only more details about the various imaginative techniques that are described but also offer some encouragement and inspiration to readers.

I have to say – I have heard some truly wonderful things over the past decade from people who’ve read this book.   I am grateful to each and every person who has written to me to share what Teacher, Guide, Companion has meant to them, as well as to all the clergy and laity who have seen fit to offer workshops and book study opportunities in their congregations.  If you have questions or comments you would like to share, or suggestions for ways to continue and expand on the conversation this book started, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Challenge of Conviction

"It's hard to have conviction in a relativistic culture."

That phrase has been rattling around in my head for the past several weeks.  It started at the end of May when I read this very frank, very jarring opinion column about gun violence and gun control, "There is no catastrophe so ghastly that America will reform its gun law," by Tim Kreider. At one point he wrote:

If gun laws are ever going to change in this country, it'll have to be because people like me, people who care except not quite enough, quit their bitter impotent griping and actually do something about it. We care in the way that carnivores care about the screaming in slaughterhouses or that pro-war voters care about families accidentally blown apart in Iraq. Which is to say, sorta — just not enough to change our minds or habits or do anything hard or inconvenient.  (Italics mine)

 "We care in the way that carnivores care about the screaming in slaughterhouses ... which is to say, sorta -- just not enough to change our minds or habits or do anything hard or inconvenient."

I've seen Food, Inc., King Corn, Hungry for Change, Dirt!, and a host of other films that quite convincingly show the dangers and the devastation of the standard American diet (which is "SAD" indeed).  There is no doubt that the way the dominant culture encourages us to eat, and the way so many of us have become addicted to eating, is not only unhealthy for our own body systems but also for the planetary system we are a part of.  The link between the choices individuals make around eating and issues of social justice and ecological degradation is undeniable.  Whether you've decided to adopt a diet that's vegetarian, vegan, nutritarian, flexitarian, paleo, or something else, it seems clear to me that we can all agree that the way the majority of us have been taught to eat, and are encouraged to eat, is fundamentally and essentially unhealthy for everyone and everything concerned -- except the bottom line of the food industry.  It's one of the reasons that the Unitarian Universalist Association has an initiative concerning Ethical Eating.

So ... I know all of this.  And I care.  I do care about the environmental and economic devastation that is directly linked to the way -- and I'll get personal here -- the way I eat.  I care about animals, and I care about our waterways, and I care about the way antibiotics are such a part of our diet now that the problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria is exacerbated, and I care about the nutritional gap that mirrors the income and education gap, and I care about the epidemic of obesity and the lowering of life expectancies, and I care about the possible unimagined consequences of genetically modified crops ...   I care about all of this, but if I'm honest I care about it ... sorta -- just not enough to change my mind or my habits or do anything hard or inconvenient.

So I've been thinking about all of this for a while now, and I keep coming back to that phrase:  "It's hard to have conviction in a relativistic culture."

It's easy for folks who see the world in "black & white" to do the hard and inconvenient thing.  Something is right or it is wrong, and if it's wrong it's wrong.  But when you see the world in shades of grey -- or, even more, in technicolor -- then it's not so easy. There's a line in that great Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It's Worth" -- "nobody's right if everybody's wrong."  The reverse is true, of course, too -- if nobody's wrong, then everybody's right.  And when everybody's right -- or, at least, potentially right or right "in a certain sense" -- then it's awfully hard to get motivated to do the hard and inconvenient thing.

Now I'm not saying that "black & white" thinkers can easily do those hard and inconvenient things.  (Okay.  I did say that, but I really meant that it's relatively easier ...)  And I'm not saying that it's impossible for us technicolor dreamers to do the right thing.  I'm just saying that it's a challenge.

And maybe this is just me trying to justify laziness.  That's certainly a possibility.  Yet I do think that there's something in the liberal penchant for trying to see the value in every position that makes it hard for us to take a stand against any of them.  I mean, really take a stand ... to do the hard and inconvenient thing.

This month, while I'm taking both vacation and study leave, I am going to try to change my eating habits to bring them more in line with my values.  See what I did there?  The way I defaulted to the safety of qualifiers?  "I'm going to try to change my eating habits to bring them more in line with my values"  Why not just say it with a strong declarative --  "I'm gong to change my eating habits to bring them in line with my values."  Of course, if I say it so declaratively, I might let myself down ... or let someone else down.

Because this is going to be hard.  I am physically, psychologically, and emotionally addicted to SAD.  I am culturally conditioned to default to convenience rather than conviction.  Virtually everything around me is arrayed to get me to fail and give up.  So it's possible that I will.  Yet I definitely will if I don't try.  Perhaps you might consider joining me?

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The More Things Change

In the congregation I serve -- the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA -- I hold a drop-in discussion group we call "Wednesday Wonderings."  It started with us using materials developed by Richard Foster to introduce people to the writings and thinking of a variety of Christian mystics.  Each session included an introduction to the person and then a series of bite-sized nuggets from their writing.  Most often it came from a single source, yet usually it was edited to a more reasonable size.  (Each session fit on four pages.)  We would go around the room, each person reading a section and then, although Foster included questions, we would ask each other what had stood out for us -- surprising, confusing, confirming, challenging.

The next year I took it upon myself to create similar materials by mystics of other traditions, and then this year I created three programs, each four weeks long:  one looked at the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, one looked at four key teachings of Christianity, and one looked at four texts from the Unitarian Universalist (tradition.)  The last session of this most recent program was a bit of a teaser for next year's course, in which we'll spend the year with Clinton Lee Scott's book, Religion Can Make Sense.

Scott was the Superintendent of the Massachusetts Universalist Convention.  During his career he gave a series of radio addresses, and these have been collected into this volume.  Next year we'll work our way through the entire book -- 37 chapters -- taking a chapter a week.  This past Wednesday we looked at the first chapter, "What does it mean to be religious?"

In this chapter Scott challenges the definition of religion that was prevalent in his day -- the book was published in '49 -- and which is still the majority's understanding:  that religion has to do with holding certain beliefs and engaging in certain practices.  Rather, he says,

"Religion is not the invention of priestcraft, neither is it given into the custody of any church.  Religion is inherent in our nature and has been the companion of our human kind since the beginning.  ... To be religious is to know that your highest experience is a religious experience.  To be religious is to act your best in the presence of the highest you know. ... To be religious is to take the high road when the low road beckons.  To be religious is to seek by every means of inquiry and of investigation for the truths that come not by magic or miracle, but by the only means for their reception -- the open, the eager, and the humble mind."

Earlier, in a passage that appealed to most of us, he write:

"As a matter of fact, no preacher, priest, bishop, or other professionally religious person has any inside information.  Truth is discovered by the ministers of religion.  It is also discovered by scientists, poets, prophets, garage mechanics, and housewives."

Sounds kind of like the stance of Unitarian Universalism 65 years later, no?  As he French say (and yes, I had to look this up):  plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  (The more it changes, the more it's the same thing.)

Another passage that stood out to us because of its apt description not just of his day but of ours:\

"[O]n any week except Christmas and Easter, if we were to count all the people who attend churches -- men, women, youth, and children -- the total would be less than the number of persons -- men, women, youth, and children -- who attend no religious services."

We may see the large number of "nones" as a relatively new phenomenon, yet it's clear that we're not the first to experience it.  And as for the "spiritual but not religious" dichotomy?  I think that the way Scott understands religion could serve as a bridge.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

What is "Enough"?

In the UUA's new curriculum The Wi$dom Path:  money, spirit and life, there is an interesting graphic.  It's called "The Fulfillment Curve."  The intention of this image is to suggest that if you graph the money a person spends along the x axis of a graph, and the level of personal fulfillment along the y axis, that the resultant graph would form a parabola.  Along the upward part of the curve you would pass through the point at which you have taken care of your survival needs, and the point where you have taken care of comforts.  At the peak you reach a point of "enough," after which increased spending results in a decline in fulfillment.

It is interesting to consider if this is necessarily true.  I believe it is, by the way, but I can imagine someone arguing that this would create a straight line graph, onward and upward forever.  Interesting, too, where that "enough" point would be located.  Is it a fixed point, or would it be dependent on other variables?  Might a middle-class family of five living in an upscale neighborhood, for instance, place it at a different spot than would, say, a Franciscan friar?  More precisely, I'd imagine that the "enough" point would remain in the same relative place -- at the top of the arc -- but the shape of the curve might be different.  It might be flatter for some and "spikier" for others.

But that's not what made this graphic interesting to me when I first saw it.  I imagined a similar graph, but while this one still has a sense of fulfillment along the y axis, it has "Congregational Size" along the x.  In other words, I found myself wondering if there would be a point at which congregational growth -- at least its numerical growth -- would reach an "enough" point and that from that point on more members equaled less fulfillment.

This is, I know, a bit of a heresy.  "Grow or die," we are told.  "Increase or decrease" -- this dichotomy is declared as if self-evident.  Yet I wonder.

I know that church growth consultants have long offered ways of understanding that congregations of different sizes are different not just in size -- so called "family," "pastoral," and "program" congregations need to have different organizational systems, are able to do different things, and have a different "feel."  That they are not merely different sizes, that they are different "animals," if you will, is why one consultant has described them as "cats," "small dogs," "large dogs," "gardens," and "farms."  The popular wisdom is that as long as you can navigate the real differences there is no reason that a small family-sized church (cat) can't grow into a mega-church (farm).

But should it?  Is there an "enough" point?  I've heard that congregations within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints do not grow beyond 300 members -- once they approach that threshold they birth a new congregation.  

As I say ... I wonder.  I don't know.  But I'd be interested in hearing what you think.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

What to do now?

(c) 2004 The Center for Economic and Social Justice

The fourth of the Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism, as articulated by the Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh for the Order of Interbeing, is this:

"Do not avoid suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images and sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world."  

Over the past few years I've been doing increasingly more of precisely this, albeit, I must confess, primarily from the safety of my home.  Even so, I have had my head and my heart stretched wider than I'd thought they could be.

While I was still in my position at UUHQ, we were gearing up for a "common read" of The Death of Josseline:  Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands by Margaret Regan.  The stories she relates make all too painfully human the face(s) of the battle over illegal immigration. Principles and policies are exposed as really being very much beside the point -- human suffering on a scale nearly unimaginable (at least by me, then) is what's ultimately at issue here. How can you read stories like these and not take them in?  And having taken them in to your heart, how can you be the same?

About a year later, in the summer of 2012, someone turned me on to the book Take This Bread: a radical conversion by Sarah Miles.  This is the story of how a self-described "lesbian left-wing journalist" (and professed atheist) came to a deep connection to a religious/spiritual understanding she'd never known, in a Christianity she'd never imagined.  The vehicle for this was her work through the food pantry program at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.  Her book is a beautiful spiritual memoir, and this dimension touched me deeply.  But she also provides a window into the world of urban poverty (at least as experienced by this woman, in that place, at that time).  Again, humanizing what can so easily be for so many of us something of an abstraction. And oh man, was it inspiring to see how love can be made palpable and what it then can do!

Near the end of that year came The New Jim Crow: mass incaration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.  This one was not so much inspiring as enraging.  Alexander rather convincingly makes the case that our current system of mass incarceration -- largely synonymous with our "war on drugs" -- is an intentionally designed new strategy in an age-old effort.  Slavery maintained a very clear caste system in our country, based on race.  With the end of slavery, Jim Crow laws were enacted which perpetuated essentially that same caste system.  Once Jim Crow was overturned some new mechanism was needed, and the war on drugs was born.  She did not provide as many moving narratives, but her clear and convincing arguments made me see differently when I encountered people here in Charlottesville who'd been caught up in this system.

2014 started off with me watching the movie Dark Days, a documentary film by Marc Singer.  (This was quickly followed by watching the documentary short called Fragile Dwellings, based on the work of Margaret Morton, which was included as an extra on the DVD of Dark Days.  In quick succession, I then read Teun Voehoten's Tunnel People, and two of Morton's books -- The Tunnel:  the underground homeless of New York City and Fragile Dwelling, the print version of the short I'd watched earlier.) All of these tell the stories of some of the unhoused women and men who came to make their homes in a stretch of deserted Amtrak tunnel beneath the streets of New York City.  Once more human beings took root in my heart instead of simply finding more concepts in my head. "The homeless" had a more human face. 

This past month I read Tattoos on the Heart:  the power of boundless compassion, by Gregory Boyles.  Fr. Boyles -- known affectionately as "G" by the people with whom he lives and works -- tells story after story about the ways he has found God, and ways he has found to share God, in and with the gang youth of one of LA's most gang-ridden neighborhoods. It is astonishing to me that anyone's heart and psyche could survive the kind of ministry he's found himself called to do, yet perhaps not so surprisingly his testimony is that the "secret of his success" has been in his refusal to see labels and, instead, to be with these youth. His humanity meets their humanity, and they embrace each other.

And now I have just finished reading Finding God in a Bag of Groceries:  sharing food, discovering grace, by Laura Willis.  This time it's the story of rural poverty -- 'though again it's the ministry of a food bank at work -- and once more I've found myself looking into a world I could not have even fully imagined, so different is it from my own, yet finding there more of the "we" that is revealed when we let go of divisions between "us" and "them."

From undocumented immigrants in the southwest, to the urban poor in San Francisco, to people of color caught up in a (legal) system of oppression and dehumanization through the US, to homeless women and men making homes for themselves among society's refuse in NYC, to inner city gang youth in LA, to the urban poor in Tennessee -- it's been quite a ride. I've "seen" things, and been allowed to "listen in" to experiences so radically different than my own, than any I've known. 

And yet, what has struck me most is not the differences; it's the common humanity all of us share. One thread that runs through all of these books and films is that our guides into these "other worlds" recognize, witness to, and affirm what we Unitarian Universalists refer to as, "the inherent worth and dignity of every person."  (Often said as if we, alone, understood that phrase!)  Over and over again the message is the same one I preach so often -- there is no "us" and "them" ... there is only "we."

So a question rises up in me -- what to do now?  How can I -- and how can we as a faith community committed to ending oppression and affirming the inherint worth and dignity of all beings -- respond? That's a question I hope we'll all wrestle with, dance with, for a good long time.

Pax tecum,

RevWik