First Tinky Winky . . .

J.K. Rowling, author of the wildly popular Harry Potter books, recently announced that she'd always thought that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is gay. (Click here to see how Publisher's Weekly reported this story, and here for a New York Times piece about how the blogosphere is responding.)

Some are saying that she should have been more explicit about it; others are calling it much ado about nothing. I, for one, am glad to know and glad that it was never more of an issue. (I'll happily admit to being a huge fan of the series!)

There are so many things that go into a person's identity and our sexual orientation--or "affectional preference"--is but one piece of it. Does my being a one-time french horn player make me unfit for military service, underserving of the same opportunities to rent or buy real estate, or unable to make a life-long commitment? Does my being a lover of comic books make me a poor choice to be a preacher? (There are impressionable youngsters around, you know.)

I know I'm being silly. One's sexual orienation is considerably more important an element of a person's identity than whether or not one plays an instrument or follows the exploits of the Batman. Still, it is only one element, no matter how vigorously some try to make it the defining element.

I am glad to know that Dumbledore is gay. It's one more think I know about this "person" I've come to admire. And I'm glad that I didn't know before this, because there was absolutely no way in which his sexual orientation played any part in the story.

As is so often the case.

In Gassho,

RevWik

All Work and No Play

One of my favorite quotations comes from the poet Louise Bogan. She wrote,

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering;
surely the strange beauty of the world must somwhere rest on pure joy."

I had to post this photo of the Elders as a counterpoint to the more formal shot I used in my last post.

RevWik

A New Day Dawning

I have written before about stories from the news that have given me hope--that someone somewhere is crazy enough to get into a lawn chair rigged with balloons and go for a ride, that someone else will get on a Torro mower and drive from Alaska to Maryland. These things, I've said, have been for me like the sight of a blade of grass that has pushed its way through the asphalt--a reminder and the promise that life will always be free.

Yesterday I came across a story that I had heard nothing about but which fills me with true, deep hope for our future as a species and which feels to me a signal that a new day is indeed dawning. In July, on Nelson Mandela's 89th birthday, Mandela and several others announced the formation of a new group--The Elders. Like traditional elders for our global village, these women and men have come together to "support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict, and inspire hope where there is despair."\

The list of founding members is indeed illustrious: Nelson Mandela, Graça Machel, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Lakhdar Brahimi, Gro Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Fernando H Cardoso, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson, Muhammad Yunus.

"This group," quoting Mandela again, "can speak freely and boldly, working both publicly and behind the scenes on whatever actions need to be taken."

A brief video introduces the group, and a press release gives more details (see "Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu announce The Elders .")

I think a remark from Desmond Tutu, the group's chair, puts it in perspective for me:

"Despite all the ghastliness that is around, human beings are made for goodness. The ones who ought to be held in high regard are not the ones who are militarily powerful, nor even econcomically prosperious. They are the ones who have a commitment to try and make the world a better place. We--the Elders--will endeavor to support those people and do our best for humanity."

This may sound corny, but I really do think I'll sleep better tonight.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Many Lives

I was recently reading a friend's blog and was reminded of the reason Henry David Thoreau gave for leaving his little house on Walden Pond. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." (See chapter 18)

My friend, David Heald, was writing about his decision to leave the parish ministry--check out his Transparent Eyeball Blog entry, "Many More Lives To Live." I've also known people who left careers to become parish ministers. My own older brother, after many years in the computer field, recently became a social worker. All around us there are people who, as Thoreau also said, are living "lives of quiet desperation," yet also all around us there are people who have the courage to strike out and do something new.

One of the things that always appealed to me about the Highlander TV show was the idea of these immortals who'd had "many lifetimes" in which they could pursue many different paths--the same woman or man who'd been a concert pianist, a surgeon, a mercinary, a monk. I always thought it would be a wonderful thing to have the opportunity to live many different lives, and here's old Henry David talking about doing so within his own, limited, lifespan; about leaving one life for any of the "several more" that were waiting for him. And, as it turns out, I've known people who've done it.

I haven't before solicited comments on my blog, but I'm going to try it out. I'd really love to hear from people who've "changed lives":

• How did you know it was time to move on?
• How did you go about doing it?
• What was it like to do something new?
• How do you feel about it now?

There are so many reasons for despair in our world, and there are so many reasons for hope. Which stories would you rather hear?

In Gassho,

RevWik

What a Wonderful World (cont'd.)

Okay, so we have Paul Woods, the guy who's riding across the country on his Torro mower. Now we have Kent Couch, a 47-year old gas station owner who recently settled back and traveled nearly two hundred miles . . . carried by the 105 large helium balloons he'd attached to his lawn chair! [Read the AP story here.]

Mr. Couch is not the first person to go flying in a lawn chair. That honor goes to Larry Walters who, in 1982 flew for a distance of only about ten miles but acheived an altitude of three miles on a lawnchair to which he'd attached forty five weather balloons. This put him up where the airplanes fly, and two pilots radioed air traffic control to report seeing a man flying on a chair. The FAA took this seriously and immdediately reported that they would charge him "as soon as we figure out which part [of the FAA code] he violated." [Check his story out here.]

I've written this before and will no doubt come back to this theme again: we live in a wonderful world.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Doing the Numbers

In every broadcast of American Public Media's Marketplace a point comes when the host says, "Let's do the numbers." And every morning, on my way to work, I hear the media doing numbers of a different kind: the number of casualties from the latest suicide bombing in Iraq, the number of American military killed in the most recent skirmish.

I suppose it's important for us to know about these numbers. They help us to understand what's called "the human cost" of our species' penchant for violence. And if we can think of them as people and not just numbers, perhaps our hearts will be moved to really work for peace. (Remember Stalin's famous remark, "The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.")

Yet it seems to me that if we need to know these numbers, there are some other numbers we should know as well:

• The number of children who died since yesterday because of a lack of access to healthcare;
• The number of people of color who were harrassed and arrested simply because of the color of their skin and a police officer's assumptions about that;
• The number of gay, lesbian, and transgender kids who were taunted, shunned, and even beaten just for being who they are;

And better yet, what about these numbers:

• The number of alcoholics who lived one more day of sobriety;
• The number of stressed out, overworked parents who didn't hit their kids;
• The number of people facing seemingly impossible odds who made a decision to change their lives . . . and began to act on it;
• The number of acts of kindness performed without thought to recompense;
• The number of strangers who became friends;
• The number of people who's lives were saved by acts of love

Surely there are many numbers we need to know about in order to make sense out of the world we live in. And, as it's often been noted, what we choose to make the focus of our attention helps determine our experience of that world. So next time you "do the numbers," think carefully about what numbers you do.

In Gassho,

RevWik

What You See Is What You Get

Okay, so let's assume that we agree that the fundamental Big Question is whether or not there is a Go(o)d. What if the answer is both "yes" and "no" and the determination is made when we choose our answer? What if this question is like the poll that's been on this site for so long--is the glass half full or half empty? The answer to that one, of course, is that it is both, or either, and that you and I get to choose which it is.

This may seem to be some kind of wishy-washy cop out. How can there both be and not be a Go(o)d? Certainly the theists or the atheists must be right, one or the other. Certainly there is an answer, how else can we possibly act with any kind of assurance that the answer we've "chosen" is the right one?

I know that it's dangerous to take scientific theories and apply them to philosophies or social constructs, but religious language is essentially poetic; it doesn't deal with facts and figures but with the sense of things. So it seems perfectly appropriate to apply the language of science--as poetry--to the Big Questions we face in our living.

And one of the things we've learned from modern science is that we live in a pretty weird world. The scientist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark once wrote, "The universe is not only more strange than you imagine. It is more strange than you can imagine." And it does seem that we live in a fundamentally both/and universe.

Consider light. Physics tells us that there are essentially two distinct states--waves and particles. Yet quantum physics tells us that light appears to be both or, perhaps more confusingly, it can be either depending on what you're looking for. If you conduct an experiment to examine light as a wave, then it shows up as a wave; if your experiment is designed to look at light as a particle, it is there as a particle. And taking this a step further, physicists tell us that it is more accurate to say that light is either, or neither, wave or particle until you look at it as one or the other at which point it becomes precisely what you're looking for.

Hard as this is to wrap our heads around, it seems that it's not only light that can exist in two seemingly discreet and contradictory states simultaneously. Even more weird than the state of protons there is the famous thought experiment that has come to be called Schrodinger's Cat in which a cat is placed in a sealed box along with a mechanism that creates a 50/50 chance of killing the cat. According to an application of quantum law the cat can be meaningfully said to be both alive and dead until an observer opens the box. (Here's an explanation of all this . . . in verse no less!)

Alive and dead; wave and particle; half full and half empty. To paraphrase the Preacher of the Jewish book of Ecclesiastes, "Paradox, paradox! All is paradox."

What if God is the same way? (And here I'll just start using the three-letter version because I hope it's evident by now that I'm not talking that God when I use the term--whatever "that God" is for you.) What if God can be meaningfully said to be both existent and non-existent, both real and a delusion with the determinant being what it is that you're looking for? Like the scientist looking at light it's a particle if that's what the experiment is looking at and it's a wave when that's what's being studied. So God is for those who seek God, and equally is not for those who don't.

Perhaps this is what Jesus meant in the phrase he is remembered as saying so often, "for those who have eyes, let them see . . ." or where comes the certainty in the encouragement, "seek and you will find."

In Gassho,

RevWik

Is There A Go(o)d?

I've often said that one of the purposes of religions is to help us wrestle with life's Big Questions. (And thanks to A.A. Milne and Pooh for the idea that Very Important Words should always be capitalized!) The Big Questions are things like: Why am I here? What's the meaning of life? What happens when we die? How should I live? Things like that.

It seems to me that one of the biggest Big Questions is, Is There A God? Now, by this I am not meaning is there an anthropomorphized deity, a big daddy or big mama in the sky, or, as a teen once put it, "a buff Santa in a toga" looking down on us from the heavens. That question, it seems to me, is too specific. It's like wondering if there's something called water but asking if there's Perrier.

So let's start at the most general. A philosopher's definition of God might be, "That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived," because whatever other specific attributes have been conferred on humanity's various god and goddess images, all religions have held god to be the ultimate, the absolute. So whatever else might be said about something deserving of the name “god” it must be the best, the preeminent, the unsurpassable.

And this, it seems to me, is the foundational Question we need to wrestle with: is there an absolute, preeminent, unsurpassable, ultimate . . . something? Plato called it “The Good,” and for him it was an ideal, a conception, not a tangible thing. Theists, obviously, call their "good" God and give it consciousness and will. Taoists see it as an impersonal flowing movement, the Tao. What all of them have in common is the assumption of an underlying, all-pervading, ultimate.

This question is foundational because if you believe there is a "go(o)d" then that in which you believe can provide order and meaning for life. If there is no "go(o)d" then this is a truly relativistic universe and there is no direction. Answering this Big Question, then, provides a basis to help with answering all of the others.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Where It's All About You

A colleague recently posted a link to a video from the website SermonSpice.com. It's a Christian source for short video clips preachers can insert in their sermons. One of them, the one linked here, is called "MeChurch" and, well, it speaks for itself.

I am often tempted to root some of the problems I wrestle with as a parish minister in Unitarian Universalism itself. (And some no doubt are rooted there.) Yet watching the MeChurch video reminds me that the "cult of the individual" has been enshrined not just within UU congregations. Another clip from the same site is a mock ad for a new collection of worship songs called It's All About Me which features such songs as "Now I Lift My Name On High," "I Exalt Me," "How Great I Am," and, "O Come Let Us Adore Me." It's definately aimed at a Christian audience.

So how do we combat our culture's emphasis on the individual without going too far and dismissing the individual? How do we reconnect people to the power of the whole without letting go of the much needed affirmation of the parts? And, more specifically, how do we change the culture in our congregations so that individuals know themselves to be part of something larger than themselves--so that the first question isn't "what do I need?" but, rather, "what do we need?" I think of this in terms of such endemic problems as: low levels of financial support; one "interest group" battling another; those without kids wondering about the importance of religious education for our kids and those with kids wondering about the importance of resources for our elders; people leaving the church in a huff over this slight or that slight. I see this in church after church after church.

How do we make that shift? No answers; only some of the questions that I'm wrestling with.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Size matters

Back in 1776, the United States of America consisted of 13 colonies, and there were roughly 2.5 million people living here. Today there are 50 states, and an estimated 301,139,947 people. This may not seem like an overly insightful observation, but we're a whole lot bigger than we were when those "founding fathers" established the forms of government which by and large are still in place today.

I was thinking about this recently during a presentation about a proposed new governance structure that was being given to the congregation I serve. One of the things noted is that all of the experts agree that when a church with an average attendance of, say, 50 grows into a church of 500 it needs to organize and govern itself differently. The two churches are not just different sizes, they are effectively different animals. (In fact, the church growth expert Lyle Schaller describes different sized churches not as "family," "pastoral," "program," and "corporate," as they're often called in the literature but "cat," "collie," "garden," etc. as a way of accentuating the essential differences of different sized churches.) In short, church experts agree that when it comes to organizational structure, size matters.

Now the growth of a 5o member church into a 500 member church is a ten-fold increase. The growth of a 2.5 million "member" country into an over 300 million "member" country is more than a one hundred-fold increase. Yet we are operating under essentially the same governance structure now that we're a "nation" as when were when we were a "cat" (to use Schaller's terms). Could this be at least part of the reason for why our "body politic" seems so unwell?

Just a thought.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Canceling Each Other Out

It's been a while since I took math in school, but I can remember the sheer delight and sense of "rightness" I had when I was first taught the idea of things canceling each other out. I thought it so cool -- I could simplify a seemingly complex equation by taking away things that were on both sides. As I remember this principle--and remember that it has been a while--it's that if it was on both sides it wasn't really important to the equation at hand and could be lopped off without making any real difference. And by simplifying the equation by removing the extraneous "noise" you could focus in on the real heart of the problem.

I was thinking about this recently while listening to Rush Linbaugh. He was bemoaning the Democratic/Liberal practice of sending out "talking points" to all of the liberal media outlets and talking heads so that there was a lock step presentation of a single perspective. (A perspective, by the way, which was crafted in weekly phone conferences with leftist environmental whackos.) He played clips from various news broadcasts and, sure enough, the same words being used over and over again.

Of course, when I was up in Maine and could get Air America Radio, Al Franken and others made the exact same claim about Republican/Conservatives. (Except that their talking points were crafted in weekly phone conferences with conservative religious wackos.) They showed the same rather convincing evidence.

So what do you say, guys? Can't we agree that these arguments cancel each other out? Wouldn't it be great if Republicans and Democrats (or Liberals and Conservatives, if you prefer) would stop accusing each other of doing the same thing they're being accused of doing? Stop talking about these things or, better yet stop doing these things! Then, maybe, we could focus our attention in on the heart of the problem.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Two Things Everyone Should See

I sometimes encounter something that I want to share with everyone in the whole world. Ray Charles' rendition of America, the Beautiful, for instance, or the energy that radiates from my children when they're really, really happy.

In the last couple of months I've come across two things that I'd like to share with the world. The first is an article titled, The God Fuse: ten things Christians and Atheists can--and must--agree on. (Thanks to my cyber guru the Rev. Roger Otis Kuhrt for once again pointing my browser to something really worthwhile.) This is one of those examples of clear and common-sense thinking that gives one hope for the human species. I wish every single person would take the time to read it with an open mind.

The second was a musical called Just Married (the musical). Jon Arterton and James Mack were married in 2005 ("and the sky didn't fall"), and have put together a beautiful musical that offers a palpable experience of their love, same-sex love, and just plain love. They performed the show at the church where I serve and it was something amazing. I watched as gay couples, lesbian couples, and straight couples were moved to stare into each others' eyes. And you know what? They all saw the same thing staring back--it turns out that love is love. With this, too, I wish everyone could experience it.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Is It Getting Hot In Here Or Is It Just Me?

The Times of London (online edition) reported back in March that Pope Benedict XVI had announced that hell is real and not merely a symbol. He wanted everyone to be clear that eternal damnation in everlasting fire is indeed in the cards for many of us, even if "nobody talks about it much anymore."

This would seem to put Pope Benedict XVI in conflict with his predecessor, Pope John Paul II who in 1999 declared that Heaven was “neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God which is the goal of human life.” Hell, by contrast, was “the ultimate consequence of sin itself . . . Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy." (These quotes from the Times story.)

As a Unitarian Universalist I certainly align myself with my Universalist ancestors who argued (persuasively, I think) that a truly loving God would not consign any of His (sic) children to eternal damnation, just as no loving earthly parent would turn their back on their child no matter what she or he had done. If God is love, then God is all the things St. Paul says about love in 1 Corinthians 13. Such a God would send no one to hell.

But if Pope Benedict XVI's assertion has you feeling a little nervous about what's in store for you, I heartily recommend the book Go To Hell: a heated history of the underworld. It's by a guy I went to high school with, Chuck Crisafulli and Kyra Thompson. Chuck was a riot then, and I see he hasn't lost the sensibility that made him such a good friend. I'd also recommend (again) going to Mrdeity.com and checking out (especially) episodes 5, 7, and 10.

In Gassho,

RevWik

The 485,460-Calorie Messiah

Here are a couple of stories I wanted to post a while back but got too busy to do so. These were both Easter themed stories, but are probably good anytime.

The first gives this posting it's title: The 485,460-Calorie Messiah. That's the title Esquire magazine gave its piece about the six foot tall, two hundred pound, anatomically correct statue of Jesus Cosimo Cavallaro sculpted out of milk chocolate. Cavallaro called his work, "My Sweet Lord." For other coverage, see the BBC, or CBS. (The Nutrition Facts box that the folks at Esquire put together is my favorite part of their story.)

So, is this a comment on how the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus have been reduced to Easter-egg hunts for chocolate bunnies? Is it a comment on communion?

As a side note: Cavallaro also repainted Room 114 of New York City's Washington Jefferson Hotel in melted mozzarella cheese back in 1999. He also once sprayed five tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home, and festooning a four-poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham. You can check out his own site here.

In Gassho,

RevWik

The Body of a God

Several years ago I saw a T-shirt with this message:

I have the body of a god. Unfortunately, it's the Buddha.

This got me thinking. Why do people assume the Buddha was, shall we say, hefty? Because in the popular mind he is often confused with Hotei, the so-called 'fat Buddha" who is, in reality, one of the Seven Lucky Gods of Japanese folklore. Like other religious traditions, when Buddhism moved into new countries it often incorporated the gods and goddesses of earlier religions into its own pantheon. The rotund Hotei was a symbol of abundance, of joy, of blessing; over time, naturally, he became mistaken for the Buddha.

Yet according to the stories of the various Buddhist traditions, young Siddhartha had spent six years engaged in the most sever austerities prior to his six days beneath the Bodhi tree. In fact, just before he embraced the middle way--not too hard, not too soft--he is said to have been subsisting on one grain of rice a day. That's why he is oftentime depicted as slender or, as in the Thai tradition, completely emaciated, so that one can see his spine through his abdomen.

Jesus, on the other hand, is usually popularly imagined as a slim, even gaunt, man, yet according to the Gospels he was accused of being a "glutton and drunkard." (see Lk. 7.34 and Mt. 11.19). Apparently Jesus never met a dinner party he didn't like.

So we have Buddha who is usually thought to be overweight yet was probably skinny, and Jesus who is thought to be skinny but may well have had a few extra pounds on him.

I don't quite know where to go with this--the issue of body image in Eastern and Western cultures?--but I find it fascinating. What do you think?

in Gassho,

RevWik

A New Link

One of the things that's so exciting to me about the Internet--and I'm really still such a neophyte when it comes to these things--is the way we can make links between sometimes seemingly quite dispirit things, place, people, ideas. It's amazing and really rather awe inspiring to me.

I've just added a new link to the right side of this blog, a link to the blog of the Rev. Szilárd Sándor, minister of the Unitarian Church in Jobbágyfalva, Romania. Jobbágyfalva is the partner church of the church I'm currently serving in Brewster, Massachusetts.

It's amazing to me that you could be reading my ruminations of the death of Kurt Vonnegut one minute and then reading the reflections of a Transylvanian minister the next.

What a world we live in!

in Gassho,

RevWik

Unpacking a Prayer

For the past couple of weeks I've been using a "breath prayer" (one of those short, two line prayers you recite giving one line to your in-breath and the other to your out-breath). Mine has been, "Here I am, Grandfathers / Do with me what you will."

In seminary we used to talk a lot about "unpacking" passages, or phrases, or even words that had a depth of meaning in them that might not be immediately apparent from a look at the surface. I feel that these ten words have much to unpack.

Here I am, Grandfathers . . . Right here, in this time and place of my life. I'm not in a monastery. I'm not on retreat. I'm not at the top of a mountain. I'm in the frequently chaotic, often stunningly wonderful, mess that is my life--kids crying, partner getting on my nerves, me doubting myself. I don't have all the answers, I
haven't (yet?) arrived, I'm just here.

Here I am, Grandfathers . . . And it's just me who's here, not some saint. It's not the Buddha or the Christ, just the overweight man with too much anger and too little patience; the me who tries hard but often falters and fails. It's just me, here.

Here I am, Grandfathers . . . When the emphasis shifts to this word I am reminded to be present, to be doing more than merely mouthing these words but to try to really be here, all of me, fully in the present reality of my life. To be alive in the "here" and the "I" of this moment. (I'm often mindful, too, that God's response to Moses at the burning bush was to offer as a name "I am.")

Here I am, Grandfathers . . . When I began using this prayer I said, "Here I am, Lord." After a recent men's weekend, when we often invoked the wisdom and the power of the "grandfathers," I found that this new word speaks volumes to me--about my place in the world as a man, of the need to remember my own ancestors, and of the necessity of connecting to something deep and primordial. (And don't grandparents often have a special relationship--at least in the popular conception--with their grandchildren that even the parents cannot access?)

Do with me what you will . . . This is a reminder that I am here to do something, to be of some service, to be useful; life has a use for me.

Do with me what you will . . . But I'm integral to that usefulness; it is a mutual thing. Whatever God (the Higher Power, the Universe, Life) wants me to do, whatever "plans" there are to accomplish it will be done with me, not to me, or through me. (I remember reading that if Mary had not assented the incarnation could not have occured.)

Do with me what you will . . . This is saying that I am not just open to the "whims of fate" or the capricious desires of a despotic deity. The word "will" implies, to me at least, a lot more than merely wanting or wishing. To will something is to put the full force of myself behind it. And so I invite the grandfathers to work with me to accomplish that which they will to be done (and not merely what they might wish).

Such an exercise can be done with virtually any prayer. (Or piece of scripture, or line of poetry.) This is one of the virtues of reciting "rote" prayers such as the Catholic rosary or the Jewish 23rd Psalm--saying the same words over and over again increases the opportuity to find ever new and deeper meanings in them.

Here I am, Grandfathers. / Do with me what you will.

In Gassho,

RevWik

A New Focus

I've been away from the blogosphere for a while and am returning with a newly developing focus. I once knew an artist named Deborah Jones-Buck who would paint a picture and, as soon as it was done would paint another one over top of it. Three, four, or more layers of different paintings would rest beneath the surface of the one she finally showed to the world. She said that she did this not because she didn't like the earlier pictures but that she simply had so many images in her head that she had to get them out or she'd explode. Too many images, too few canvases.

I feel like that a bit, too. There are a million "mini-sermons" that pop and crackle in my little grey cells, and far too few Sundays. So I'm going to share them here. I'll continue to write my commentaries on this socio and political. I'll just add a few more things "spiritual."

In Gassho,

RevWik

Lucky Mud

Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday.

I haven't read a Vonnegut novel in years, but upon hearing of his death I picked up Cat's Cradle and realized just how deeply I'd imbibed him in my youth. As a teenager I drank deep of Slaughterhouse Five (or The Children's Crusade); Player Piano; The Sirens of Titan; Welcome to the Monkey House; Happy Birthday, Wanda June; Mother Night; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; and Breakfast of Champions. Even after all these years the rhythm of his writing, the style as well as the substance, was so familiar yet utterly fresh.

I am supposed to be doing some writing on a project of my own right now, but I could not let his death pass without comment. I suppose I could quote the Tralfamadorians and say, simply, "So it goes." I could refer to the comment Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Slaughterhouse-Five, says of himself at one point, that "he was doing nothing less now . . . then prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls."

But there's a passage in Cat's Cradle which I've long hoped will be said during my own memorial service someday; I hope someone is saying it in his. It's the recitation from the Bokononist Last Rites:

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’
‘See all I’ve made,’ said God, ‘the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.’
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor.
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.

Good night, Mr. Vonnegut. Sleep well. And thank's for the glasses.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Oh, My God!

I have not been as excited since . . . I don't know . . . the last time I was this excited!

Last night, while doing research for an upcoming sermon on humanism I stumbled along a series of hyperlinks that ultimately brought me to MR. DEITY. This YouTube series is laugh-out-loud-even-if-you're-by-yourself funny. I, personally, especially like the episodes about the "really big favor" and the "top ten list," but there was at least something in each of the nine episodes posted to date that really got me.

Enjoy.

RevWik