“The Unitarian Universalism Association was formed in 1961 with the merger of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. It promotes the tolerance of all religions and respect of all religions writings.
Congregation members vary in their religion and personal beliefs and ideas, but they share the concept that individuals have their own path of fulfillment. The goal of the church is to help them find that path.
“We talk a lot about ideas because everyone’s beliefs are valued and their ideas are respected,” said Miller. “We believe in the community and the ability of people to come together to do good things.”
There are more than 1,000 Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America alone, consisting of more than 205,000 members.”

It made me reflect on the fact that many UU congregations have as their primary goal something like “to help individuals on their own path of fulfillment”.   As a mission that seems a little thin to me, and too self-centered. The article also talked about the congregation’s tolerance and creating “A place for people of differing beliefs to dwell together”. Coupled with a belief that all people can come together to do good things, this could be a powerful vision of the Whole World at Peace, but it is often the expression of a much narrower sanctuary for a small and edgy few to do small works of kindness and limited generosity.  I don’t mean to say anything negative about the Schuylkill congregation, I know nothing about them other than they fed a reporter rather bland lines.

We remain small because our vision and mission is small. To serve a few overly educated people is nice, but to change the world and capture the imagination, passion, and commitment of at least one in every thousand people requires a deeper purpose: to create deep peace in individual hearts and in human relations, to nurture virtue: courage in hard times, hopefulness for humanity’s future, compassion for other beings, transforming love in action, a fusion of science and faith.

My previous church said its goal was to create for all humanity, yes all humanity, an ever greater heritage of freedom, justice love and mercy. I would like to see those words appear in articles about UU congregations, or words like them, more often than our diverse beliefs, tolerance of beliefs, and vagueness of belief.

Do you agree?

After the great food and good conversation the Baptists gave me a certificate as a parting present naming me “An Honorary Baptist” and I conferred on them all honorary UU status.

Looking back over Wright’s writings I came across this quote:

“Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a being they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire…decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped believing in hell. The first group decided that because they couldn’t believe in childish images of God, they must be atheists. The second decided that because they couldn’t believe in childish images of hell, they must be universalists.”
— N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)

It made me laugh. In part because after the meal one of the Baptists told me that in all the decades of his ministry, in several different cities, he had heard of Unitarian Universalists but he had never met one.  ”Never met one” were his exact words.  It seemed sad to think of how many opportunities had been missed over the decades because UUs who should know that the light shines everywhere had not reached out to find this person who had been for me an ally and friend.  Through these sorts of ecumenical groups I always find that the Beloved Community has more members than we usually can see.  From Anglicans to Baptists the universalist spirit lives.  If we have that spirit then we all have the right stuff.

This past Sunday was our “Animal Blessing” Sunday. The title of the day is a pun on the fact that we bless the animals (show our approval of them and our hopes for their well being), and the fact that all non-human animals are a blessing on and for us.   Our very dedicated Director of Youth Programs told the story of “St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio” (the saint helps a village and a wolf become friends) and she added many thoughts about animals in our lives.  Then she went around and touched each dog, cat, rat, or etc. with a little water on the tips of her fingers.  It was very positive and life affirming ritual.  I was proud that my dog Socks was perfectly well behaved, considering he had a box of kittens sitting only three feet from his nose.

The sermon this day was given by the very talented and smart Rev. Barbara Child, visiting as our Ministerial Settlement Representative.  The sermon was perfect ministry to me and the congregation facing our last Sunday together before I move to a new (to me) city and congregation. Her sermon was titled “Boldness in the Face of Uncertainty”.

In-between the ritual and the sermon I had planned a meditation, but the story and blessing of so many animals took longer than I had expected. So I moved on  and let “Spirit of Life” be the time of meditation. Barbara also ended her sermon with a brief prayer/meditation also, so that was good.

But I missed sharing the meditation. As a bridge between the animals and boldness I chose “Bats” by Rev. Lynn Ungar. I know the original poem is set in the autumn, so I would have replaced “Certainly these days” with “It  seems on some days”.  Here it is as she had it published:

Perhaps you have not loved
this miracle–the bats
on their flickering wings
ushering in the night.
Certainly these days the darkness
comes too soon, and dimness
has outlasted color.  But still,
there is the way they love
what you do not desire,
the way the appear, like stars,
without arriving. There is the
way their furred bodies shimmer
above the earth like angels,
the way they hear what we
have lost. Haven’t you always
longed for wings? Imagine
hanging by your toes in some
cave or tree or belfry,
how gently the darkness opens,
how the night is filled
with imperceptible singing.

Be as bold as bats, and as those who love the blessing of bats. Sing, even imperceptibly in your daily work, or be one of those who hear the singing and are lifted by it.

You may know that Indiana is one of those places where they think that “defending marriage” means defining marriage as only legal between “a man and a woman.”   UUs have been vocal in opposition to the bill that would change our constitution in that direction.  Recently, our Community Minister, Julia Hemeyer (the UU Church of Muncie, IN) wrote a thoughtful piece “Why I Stand On the Side of Love.”   She used well considered words and reasonable arguments, as well as a strong appeal to compassion and Love.

There actually were many positive responses in the paper and online.  But there were also the inevitable “God said this is wrong” responses.

Now, I am a very reasonable person and I have always encouraged thoughtful dialogue, but something about the tone of those negative responses hit a chord in me.  I decided that if they were going to say that God was on their side that someone had to clearly state that not only reason and compassion, but God almighty, was on our side.

Here is what I had published in our local paper:

“This is a simple fact: The politically motivated, so-called “defense of marriage” amendment will do nothing to defend marriage. The fact is that it will establish discrimination and bigotry in our state constitution. This is a simple fact: To go against gay and lesbian marriages is un-Christian.  Just because we have hidden our oppression and ignorance for so long is not a reason to exclude the realities of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from healthy respect and the right to engage in responsible relationships. God and the Bible both condemn lustful sexuality and affirm the discipline of marriage.

Since gay and lesbian relationships are as natural, and can be as healthy, as heterosexual relationships, God and the Bible demand that they should be treated in the same way. All marriages should have the same protections, rights and responsibilities as any others.”

The response was quick.  They said I was a kind-hearted pastor who was leading people astray.  They did not argue with me or wonder why I said what I did.  They did not ask me for scripture to back up my arguments.  They just said I was wrong.  That confirmed for me that I needed to say that they were wrong about God and the Bible.  I will not convince my detractors, but as they perceived, I will lead people “who assume  a minister must know what he is talking about regarding the Bible” and I will cause others to wonder and think anew.

My favorite final email about this came from a member of my congregation: “How could I have known I was being led astray by you, a”well-meaning pastor” who “misleads… regarding the Bible”?   Keep up the good work.”

I am quite proud to be a UU and to show that the power of love and justice has many names, including “Bible” and  ”God.”

I have long felt that as the institutional inheritors of American Universalsim we have been hiding a powerful message in our back closets. Lately we have been saying that we “Stand on the Side of Love.” Christian Universalism is the primary root of this idea. So, will we capitalize on Rob Bell’s recent celebrity and publicity by enunciating our ability to affirm and include his message in our lager faith? Will we say to everyone that Origen as well as Arius, Gregory of Nyssa as well as Servetus, James Relly as well as Charles Chauncy, Robert Bell and Carlton Pearson as well as our current Unitarian Universalist leaders are all part of the really good news of inclusion, love and faith?

If we do so then we will gain from Rob’s notoriety and turn even more people to the side of Love.

I recalled an elder member of one congregation telling me all about how her own father, over months, had communicated with her from beyond the grave.  I thought of the three or four UU church members who have described to me seeing auras, including one who told me how my own aura changed as I gave a sermon.  His words reminded me of reading, as part of a college research project, first-hand accounts of Native American shamans going on journeys in the spirit world, and then a few years later meeting a UU who went on similar journeys.  I wandered in thought to  hard-shelled atheists, threatened by the superstition of others, yet who admittedly carried good-luck charms, and deeply rational people who were deeply moved by fantasy worlds. I thought of those who rationally argued that the power of metaphorical Truth was more important than literal truth.  I remember my beloved elder colleague Web Kitchell who ate donuts and philosophized with Coyote.

At the end of his review Rev. Thom says:
“Hiding behind and hiding within all those things about the Transcendentalists that we lovingly admire, there is an obvious secret that is uncomfortable and necessary. We are the rationalists who dance with irrationality, the naturalists who live amongst the supernatural. We are both repulsed by and drawn to the image of Emerson and Fuller and their cohorts hanging around with mesmerists and seeking communion with the spirits of the dead.”

This is why I am as much a storyteller as a theologian, as much a lover of mythos as logos (as Karen Armstrong puts it,) as much a nurture of dreamers and dancers as scientists and engineers.  I wonder if an “obvious secret” is really a secret.  I wonder if we should shake off our heavy identification with rationalist rejection and broadcast instead our engagement with the fullness of human personality and human experience.  I love the phrase “Rationalists who dance with irrationality.”  It speaks of wholeness, of love and reason blended.  Perhaps, if we claim the mesmerists as much as the scientists and US Presidents we will become the religion of our time, the faith of the naturalists and rationalists who dance, not chaotically but gracefully and joyfully, with dream and irrationality.

One of my roles, as I see it, is to help generate thoughtful and informed conversation in the midst of a sea of sound-bites and shallow reactionary “talk.” But the currents of pop culture, like the currents of the ocean, are terribly powerful.

One of the blogs I am happy to subscribe to is ‘Sightings’ from the Martin Marty Center.  On January 27, 2011, Omid Safi posted an essay on this subject, “Good Sufi, Bad Muslims.”  He speaks clearly of the American pop cultural tendency to lump Muslims into two groups, either the violent type and their supporters, or  the non-political and “spiritual” Sufi type.

“There are many versions of this game, but the basic contour stays the same: The assertion that the general masses of Muslims are evil, terrorist-supporters, anti-western, patriarchal, misogynist, undemocratic, and anti-Semitic; and that these masses are set off and defined against either the solitary, lone Muslim good woman or man. The “Good Muslim” is often an individual, or a small circle, because to admit that the larger group of Muslims could be on the right side of the human-rights divide is to have the house of cards of the Muslim demonization game collapse on itself.”

Professor Safi, goes on to invoke the Islamic ideal of prophets and of prophetic speaking truth to power, both ideals that are central to Unitarian Universalist culture and theology as well.  He ends with these words: “If our public discourse about religion and politics is to evolve to a more subtle, and accurate, space, it must get to the point where religious voices that speak from the depths and heights of all spiritual traditions can do more than simply acquiesce in the face of the Empire. They can, and should, speak for the weak, and give voice to the voiceless.”

I hope that we all become agents of good conversation about the needs of the weak, that we affirm those who nurture justice in giving voice to the socially voiceless.

Lots of people are talking about the fact that he read Hitler’s book, few point out that he also liked reading the Harry Potter Series, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Siddartha.  If only he had decided to obsess about the Buddha rather than the U.S. government.  Read the reports and you will find lots of talk about improving political discourse and almost nothing about improving our mental health systems.

When this young man was kicked out of community college, and told he needed a mental health review before they would readmit him, it was clear he was on one of three tracks.

One: if he had lots of money or very rare and good insurance, and a network of family or friends that would work with him, then he would have gotten counseling, if he was lucky a useful diagnosis, and if very lucky some long term counseling, medication and guidance.

Two: if he did not have those resources he would burn out his friends and family till he became a homeless “troubled” individual shuffling in and out of various shelters and food programs until he either found a good ministry that would give him a place to land or continued to drift downward and out of human community.

Three: he would become more and more frightened, angry and anxious, and would find a way to lash out at the world that he saw as the source of all his suffering.

In a better system the Community College could have brought this man to the attention of local mental health workers who could have begun tracking him and working with him to set a better course for his life.  I know that mental health science is still in its infancy, but we know at least something of what anxious and angry people need and it is not being ignored till they go away.

Most often the approach is to do nothing but glare at people who are talking violence, rambling about conspiracies or showing obvious signs of trouble.   We expect their friends and family, and perhaps their own self-control or hunger for community, to reign them in.  If they continue to live in anxiety or anger, if they continue to suffer  by imbibing the poisons of the mind (passion, hatred, anger, fear), we might isolate these people, we might tell them to “get help,” but we do nothing productive.  We wait until they have burned out their family and friends and let them twist in the wind.  Even after that we wait, but do nothing, until finally the person proves themselves to be “a danger to themselves or others.”  Very, very often the first line of mental health care in this country is the police force.  Religious leaders by and large have very little training to know how to respond effectively to mental health issues other than to offer the palliatives of religious doctrine.  I feel frustrated when people come to me with these troubles because the options are so limited.  We have almost no psychiatrists in Muncie because the hospital system drove them all out about ten years ago.  Some things are better than they used to be, but mental health care still has a deep stigma attached and often the primary option is to give up all your freedom and check into a locked facility while they experiment with various psychotropic drugs.  Most people avoid mental health check ups altogether.  The whole system is still very bianary.  They way our society tends to think of mental health is that you are either crazy or you are not with nothing in between.  The explosion of various anti-depressive medication options and their advertising is changing things, but we have a long way to go.

UU Churches have in our heritage Dorothea Dix.  As part of the liberal Christian tradition she decided that love and compassion had to be expressed not just individually but also through our institutions and social structures.  When she was a young adult the approach to troubled people was also to hide them away or give them to the police force and prison.  Through her life she created the foundations of the mental health care system in our country.  Now more change must be made.  Good mental health care is expensive, but it is less expensive than the cost of living in a society where angry and frightened people have nothing to do but hurt themselves or pick up a gun and start shooting.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

However, they give me no clear and obvious information about what is better than “awesome,” or what label they would have given me if my blog was sick.  Looking about briefly I find several WordPress blogs that were rated “Wow.”   According to the “crunchy numbers” the monkeys give me, blog health seems to be based on number of visitors, number of archived posts and the weight of heavy traffic days:

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 45 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 35kb.

The busiest day of the year was April 5th with 38 views. The most popular post that day was Ethnic UUs.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were uuchurchmuncie.org, discoveruu.com, uupdates.net, facebook.com, and uuworld.org.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for thomas perchlik, rev. thomas perchlik, theodore parker, “joel monka”, and “thomas perchlik”.

I rode in an airplane more than four times this year.  So the comparison does not impress me much, and it does not tell me much.

The abstract “painting” one monkey put together is nice, but what does it mean?  What is blue, green or yellow?

Last year I know I blogged at least four times as often.  I wonder if I would have gotten a “Wow” rating in 2009?

The links to my blog have no surprises, except for the name Joel Monka.  After a brief look he seems to be an active UU blogger, but why did a search for him lead to my blog? When I get incoming links to my blog I usually check them out because it is interesting to see who and why people link to my words.  I don’t remember seeing Joel’s blog before.

I have always liked the stats on WordPress.  I like a lot of things about WordPress blogging.  I am glad that the monkeys summarized some of my stats for me.

Finally they end with my most visited posts for the year.  This year I will need to write more so that “About” is not on the top five.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Ethnic UUs April 2010
5 comments

President Obama, Theodore Parker, M. L. King Jr. and God September 2010
5 comments

Jesus with a Gun February 2010
2 comments

Faith Formation February 2010
2 comments

About January 2008
1 comment

Then we came to the thick woods beside the high school and stopped. No wind blew. The cars were stilled since school had started. No one was outside. One clean, unbroken sheet of snow turned the sport fields into shrines for the contemplation of silence. The trees towered in their white-traced elegance. The words of Wendell Berry came to me: “For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

The religious life is like this. Not one of busy activity, nor one of silent contemplation, but of both together. As I stood silently, endorphins from my jogging intensified my awareness. The hyper energy of my dog made his moment of utter stillness awesome. The memory of crowds cheering in the stands, the green of summer, my daughters competing on those fields, all deepened the quiet of that place and time.

Soon my restless dog wanted to be off running. I let him sprint into the woods. before long I had to get back to exercise and the office. This is how it is. We begin engaged in the world. After a time, we must retreat to consider, ponder, and sort. Beyond even that we need to rest in the ultimate grace of life. Then, drawing from that deep well, we are able to return through thought and planning to engage again in the work of our days.

I hope your holiday season is blessed with balance, of vital work and deep peace.