My wife has been in pain lately. It has lasted long enough that, though a confirmed atheist, she has begun to talk about making a “bargain with God” if only the pain would go away.  Is this faith development or straying from the path?  The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron of the vajrayana tradition tells us to face the places we hurt, face the things that frighten us, and open our heart to them.  I know from personal experience that this can be a very difficult practice.  Am I backsliding, or growing in faith?  How do we talk about faith development in UU congregations?

Sadly I was not able to be present when our Heartland District leaders gave a report on Faith Formation 2020 at our recent UUMA Chapter Retreat. So I went online to find out what the Lifelong Faith organization had to say.

http://www.lifelongfaith.com/faithformation2020.htm

Their “Thirteen Trends and Forces Affecting the Future of Faith Formation in a Changing Church and World” have all sorts of implication for UU congregations. But what was very interesting to me was their “Four Scenarios for the Future of Faith Formation.”

http://www.lifelongfaith.com/assets/docs/FF2020-FourScenarios.pdf

The scenarios really have nothing to do with predicting the future so much as determining how a congregation serves the faith formation needs of differing people.  In adapting this material to UU congregations, in most cases, just replace the word “Christian,” with “UU.”

Most congregations focus on serving the “people in the pews,” that is, on those who are both committed and active members. But how do we deepen the faith of those who think of themselves as UUs but can not be very active in regular church life? How do we serve people who are very spiritual but not interested in organized religion? How do we nurture the faith of those who see the power of the church and want to use it, but are not interested in introspection?

Long restless with the one size fits all approach of most church membership programs I have long used a two axis graph with four quadrants, to help me and others reflect on how we serve people of different needs.  One axis is level of institutional involvement, the other shows level of commitment to values and ideals.  My chart is very like the ‘openness to religion’ and ‘openness to spirituality’ graph of the Four Scenarios of Faith Formation (on page 2 of their pdf.) The point is to choose one of these quadrants and ask, how do we help these people live a more liberal faith?

Just something to think about when trying to help someone in pain.

A couple of weeks ago, I was happy to have my one day off on Friday, because I had been fighting a flu for two weeks (which was not too bad but made me generally tired all day, and I ached by the middle of every afternoon.) While relaxing at home, I received a call.  After a slow two-year decline, one of our long-standing members had died: peacefully. The family was going to the Mortuary Saturday morning, and then we would talk about the memorial service.

Saturday morning the phone rang and it was from a person at the mortuary calling to tell me that a member of my church had died and the family would like me to do a memorial service. “Oh, I know Marvin well,” I replied, “I have already started talking to the family about a service. “Marvin?” he said back, “I’m calling about George.” A sadness rushed through my body. I thought: “George who went in for minor colon surgery last Tuesday? No,” I realized, “the George who I had visited a week earlier in the hospital, wracked with pain but not talking of death at all.”

Both families had already planned a service for the next Saturday, one in the morning one in the afternoon.  Sadly, the morning service could not be held in our building because our Rummage service would be going then and the foyer was filled with stuff.  Our church Dinner Discussion group was meeting in my home that night, the next morning I had a service on a topic that still required some serious work, including the integration of two video clips, and we had a congregational meeting on Sunday afternoon to discuss a serious financial crisis in the church.  This crisis had generated a number of extra meetings and conversations.

On top of all this I was doing all my regular work: research for a sermon about something I knew very little, calling on people who were in the hospital, talking someone out of depression, meeting with colleagues in my UU Cluster, meeting with colleagues from Christians in my city, meeting with various leaders, planning and preparing, and attending the seek to week events of the church.  I love my work, I love the church, but I was feeling a little overwhelmed by Wednesday;  and, I was still sick.

I realized, not for the first time, how much my sanity and health depend on flexibility built into to my weekly rounds.  Luckily, I had done enough research for the sermon that I could  stop research and go ahead with writing.  It takes a lot of time to go out to visit people, so I insisted that a couple of people come to me at church and I called to talk with some on the phone rather than face to face.  I had two writing projects I could put off to the next week, and there were some events that I could easily postpone or cancel.

Late in the week, after I had been at the church for six hours straight and was feeling  “like butter spread over too much bread,”  I called to tell my wife that I had another meeting on the environment, and then I would be home.  She protested that she had not seen much of me recently and reminded me that I was still sick.  “Do what you need to do,” she said.  After I hung up the phone I let myself be very quiet, took several deep breaths, and then went straight home since resting in her arms was what I most needed to do.

The weekend was beautiful, successful and inspiring.  Thanksgiving break did not come too soon.

A few weeks back I got a form letter from the Islamic Center of Muncie, IN.  It was to invite all religious people to tour their new facility and share in an open house.  They have chosen as their new worship space a building that is very visible on a major shopping artery only a few blocks from our UU church.

The first paragraph of the note gave basic information but the second paragraph read as follows:

“This life is entrusted to us as a gift and we must live to serve the oppressed and the needy because it is our duty. We must learn to create kindness, compassion and love for each other to alleviate mutual distrust and enmity between people of different ethnicities, races and faiths. The Islamic Center of Muncie hopes that you will support us in this effort.”

Reading this I thought, “This could have been written as a mission statement of a UU church.”  I liked their opening in a stance of gratitude, their emphasis on service, on promoting kindness and love and alleviating enmity. I liked their invitation to cooperation and unity.   I know that not all Muslims, even in this center, are of the same mind, but their current leadership has set them on a progressive course.   Of course a UU statement would also include something about the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  Furthermore I know that Muslims  in general are not thinking of gay or lesbian, bisexual or trans-gender people as among the oppressed.  But they can be our allies in many ways.

For instance there is the Maryland legislator, Saqib Ali, who has considered the oppression of glbt people and has taken a stance in support of gay marriage even though he fully understands and accepts that there can be no gay Muslims [or more accurately, if one is to  submit to Islam one must accept its strict prohibitions against homosexuality]  (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111770008).

As I learned in community organizing, there are no such things as permanent allies, there are no such thing as permanent enemies.  Each may take different paths but the struggle for peace and justice is universal.

I have been studying Buddhist thought for more than thirty years, since I first got a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones in high school.  For more than ten years I have been learning about Buddhist practice, integrating meditation into my life and attending Buddhist ceremonies of various sorts.  Thus, as I was listening to All Things Considered yesterday to a report from Sichuan China, I was surprised to hear about someone who had lost his faith in Buddha.

Some NPR reporters had returned to Sichuan a year after the terrible earthquake.  One year ago a reporter had spent a day with a couple who were looking for their child in the rubble.  The body of the child was eventually found in the arms of his grandparents who had also been killed.  A year later the couple felt too fragile to talk to the reporter, but the man’s sister was willing to tell how her brother and sister-in-law were doing.

What struck me was how she described her brother’s religious thinking.  I paraphrase here: “He says he no longer believes in Buddha.  There is no point in burning incense, no point in praying.  He says, “My parents were good people, they lived a good life, my son was an innocent two year old.  There can be no Buddha or Heaven if such people die like this.” “

I thought this kind of tragicly flawed thinking, that if you pray good things will happen to you (and when bad things happen faith is lost), was only a product of Christianity, or monotheism and the idea that ‘God is in charge.’   I have been trained to think of the Buddha as a man who said, “Don’t put faith in me; test everything I say with experience; hold to the light within as the only light.”  I have been trained to think that Buddhism is about awakening the mind, not about calling upon the protection of supernatural powers.  (Though as I think about it I can remember several counter examples.)

The point is that many things are universal, including tragic and hurtful forms of magical thinking.  Superstition is not a creation of any one religion, or of any, but of the human mind, of our desires, craving, sin or tanah.  Thre will alwys be misplaced faith, trust in the wrong things.  Thus there will always be people who need the balm of a liberal faith, one that explains why we should live by love, ‘agape’ or ‘metta’, that helps us to face death and disaster with courage and an affirmation of life, that does not give us false hope, but an enduring and cosmic hope that transcends all time and tides.

So I was wandering around in my WordPress dashboard when I noticed that someone had linked to my page from somewhere in Mexico.  So I checked out the link and found the Libre Congregacion Unitaria de Mexico.  If that was not cool enough they had translated one of my sermons, “No Immaculate Conception” into Spanish.  How cool is that?  I know some Spanish, enough to get into trouble, as the saying goes, but I could never have done that sort of translation.  Now I can preach one of my sermons totally in Espanol (sorry, but I don’t know how to blog with Spanish accents yet.)

The Mexican Unitarians had even added illustrations.  Wow. I had never thought to add visual elements to my web works.  The translator had added hyperlinks into my text, such as a link to an English language biography of James Luther Adams.   They included links to my Muncie UU website, the photo (now old) from that site, as well as links to my WordPress blog.  I did not know any of this had been done, but as long as they give credit where credit is do I think the whole thing is very, very cool.

As they say at the top of the site: El amor es la doctrina de esta iglesia, La búsqueda de la verdad su sacramento, Y el servicio es su oración.