PeaceBang

Boston Unitarian on Hinduism (and Unitarians)

I love the Boston Unitarian blog (anyone who starts a post with, “We left Henry Ware, Jr. guarding our thoughts” is adorable in my eyes). He’s writing some really interesting stuff about Hindus and Unitarianism. World Religions folks, I think you’ll find this of great interest. Scroll down for a few posts on Hinduism, based on Wendy Doniger’s new book on the subject.

The Kidete Woman’s Cooperative

[I read this post on FaceBook today. Suzanah is a friend of mine. You can be sure this is legit. - PB]

Dear Friends Near and Far:
Greetings from Tanzania where I am participating in maternal health listening circles. What I have seen and heard is incredible. I am learning so much from amazing Tanzanian women. Body Theology has taken on a whole new meaning to me here. So much of every day life, for the women with whom I meet, is hard labor. Every drop of water is carried from a well or a stream. Every meal is cooked from gathered fire wood. Every piece of clothing is hand washed.

Here is the bottom line . . . education = economic development. economic development = increased maternal health. to have an education, one must have economic development. to have economic devleopment, one must have an education. to have maternal health . . . it is a circle.

My teachers - the women of Kidetete Village - have started, The Kidetete Women’s Cooperative. Their goal is to increase maternal health in their village.

The women are in need of startup funds. They need needles, thread, and cloth. There is no electricity or running water in their village. The items they create wil be hand made. The Women of Kidetete will begin by hemming traditional African cloth to sell as wraps, throws, and table cloths. I am enchanted with the patterns chosen and will be bringing some home with me mid July.

If you are interested in partnering with The Kidetete Women’s Cooperative, please send a check for $10 - $25 to my grandmother who will collect the money and send to the women through my bank account. Her contact information is:
Mrs. Mildred B. Rodgers
321 Allen Avenue
Panama City, FL 32401

Please make the check out to me, Suzanah Raffield, with a note at the bottom of the check,
Att: Kidetete Women’s Cooperative

$100 to $200 will launch the cooperative. I love cottage philanthropy. Please consider this oppotunity and share with all who might be interested.

Maternal health matters!
Many, many thanks,
Suzanah

Lily Dale: Talking To the Dead

I just returned from Lily Dale, New York, a Spiritualist community. It was a real trip in every way. The long car ride flew by as three of us shared driving and non-stop gab. We stayed the first night in Hamburg, New York (conveniently close to The Jell-0 Museum!) and then arrived at the little colony of Victorian houses occupied by psychics and mediums.

An interesting group. Guests and mediums both, I mean. Lots of seekers, skeptics, moonbats, mullets and smokers. A group of Tibetan monks who had come to create a mandala. And a crew from HBO filming a documentary. I was very offended by their intrusive presence and feel strongly that the Lily Dale Association should have made every effort to tell their visitors that their privacy would be compromised by a film production crew, including one treacly-sweet producer whose obvious aim (it seemed to me) was to exploit vulnerable people for her cinematic gratification. What a snakey character she was. If this documentary comes out at some point and you think you see me receiving a message from a dead friend at Inspiration Stump (one of the group readings where mediums randomly pick people out of the crowd to give messages to), yea, it is me.

Anyway, I had two medium readings that were so bad I cannot even begin to tell you. They were also hugely entertaining and will provide decades of belly laughs for me and the two girlfriends I went with. I’ll resist commenting on the first reader (he seemed a very kind man who is aware that his gifts are fading) except to say that he was deeply dedicated to violent deaths.

My imitation of him goes like this. You have to provide the Southern accent:

“I have a message here from someone in Spirit. I’m feeling a head injury, a death in a fight? Maybe a blunt instrument? (the crowd is silent) “I feel, I feel, was there a stabbing? Did someone die from a knife injury?” (silence) Okay, folks, I’ve got someone coming through in Spirit, I know this could be a painful memory, but there’s .. did someone get crushed by a piano?”

I mean, not that ridiculous but almost. His reading for me included the insights that I give in too easily, that I am looking for a job (”I see you sending out resumes”) and that I have problems completing projects. He assumed that I was married with children, he said he had a message for me from a relative who died recently in a motorcycle accident (NO ONE), he was absolutely stabbing in the dark at every moment. His 40 minutes with me was more like the patter of a used salesman than of a focused medium. However, I felt very strongly that he once had a gift of spiritual insight and had lost it over time, and that he and I were both aware of that. I walked out with a chest tight with stress and pity. Not good.

Worth noting: in the over 100 messages I heard delivered by a medium for the guests at Lily Dale, only one included the possibility that the person receiving the message might be partnered with someone of the same sex. The Lily Dale mediums tend to be very traditional in their assumptions: women almost always get the message that they put others first, that they need to “get going,” “switch gears,” “go for that thing you wanted to do” and “stop deferring your own happiness.” Men get the whole “you’re really a beautiful heart underneath it all” thing. EVERYONE gets sent lots of love and light and God’s blessing. That’s nice, and I suppose psychically sound (who wants to invite in a negative, angry spirit?). However, the mediums of Lily Dale need to get with the times. Not every woman is a pathological care-giver, a wife, a mother, a nurturer, a teacher or a nurse. Some of us are even leaders; a possibility that not one medium ever suggested to one woman within my hearing. I was disappointed that all the messages I heard delivered were so limited to one socio-economic and cultural perspective. I have to think that was a limitation of the mediums and not the Spirit. Not everyone has a warm, rocking-chair granny in an apron (the other variations: “someone who was a real talker; she’s talking so fast your grandpa can’t get a word in edgewise” or “someone tall and stern, she’s very strong, she was the real matriarch.”). Physical descriptions were mostly vague and always contained a qualifier (”She’s kind of heavy, but not too much”) and quickly amended in response to someone’s clarifications.

My second reading was a 4-star performance in self-indulgent eccentricity and a real insult to my intelligence and my reader’s integrity as a medium. My reader assured me that I wouldn’t need to record our session, as she was going to “give me everything visually,” in the form of what turned out to be a huge pastel drawing of a PINEAPPLE, which she drew while under the influence of Spirit guides. She hummed, she talked to herself, she reached for various colors (they were the COLORS OF MY AURA, of course) while questioning her invisible guides in extravagantly theatrical tones: “Oh, you want me to do this? REALLY?” All of which was calculated to enthrall me with her mystical powers. She was 100% bull—-, this white-haired lady. Before playing with her crayons, she explained an elaborate system of how the image she would create would be a reading for my life over an 8-year period. Hoping for a true Spiritualist message (they talk to the dead, right?), I was disappointed but thought her method sounded cool and stayed. I had overheard her berating her previous client and didn’t feel like risking her wrath, either. Pastel Lady subsequently ignored the entire 8-year projection thing and never referenced time at all, except to ask me how I had changed my life 6 months ago and that I had started a spiritual project on May of 2007.

She insisted that I was deeply connected in some way to Hawaii (never been there, don’t know anyone there, don’t have anyone Hawaiian in my congregation, never had a Hawaiian friend to my knowledge, I mean, LET IT GO!). I am apparently destined to go to Hawaii and work with children in some kind of medical capacity. Right. All of the GREEN sprouting from the top of the pineapple represented (wait for it…) MONEY that would come in to support my fundraising efforts.

Yep. Right. Sure.

She also dragged through the basements and attics of my life trying desperately to connect me to the number 16, which was the number of dots she punched onto the pineapple’s surface. “There are sixteen branch offices of your company.” No.
“Sixteen people under your supervision?” No. No. No. No to all her subsequent suggestions.

She gave me nothing, but nothing that wasn’t generic and that I hadn’t essentially fed her. I walked out with my $65 Pineapple and found out later that night that two other guests had been similarly hoodwinked by her. The gal who went right before me got a big $65 pastel of a chicken. Her name is Peck, as it turns out. “Well, there you are!” our Medium had crowed (pun intended). Ridiculous. Insulting.

My first reader started our session by saying, “If I don’t connect with ya,I don’t read for ya.” A good practice, but neither of these people connected with me at all, yet both were happy to take my money. I think the Lily Dale Association needs to freshen its corps of readers. They’re a venerable Spiritualist community and it’s not going to benefit them to have angry guests going away thinking that their readers are frauds and that the Association is just out to take money from credulous idiots. They should have a money-back guarantee of some sort. I mean, one of the gals who had had a terrible reading with Pastel Lady had traveled from Los Angeles to be there! I hope her reading today was much better.

Okay, but this, too:

I also saw mediums pick names and details out of thin air, appear to be in a comfortable, working trance state through which they accessed extremely specific messages and visions from Spirit, and minister to people who were obviously deeply moved by the communications. This happened probably 30% of the time. Observing them over a two-day period, I could see that some of the mediums were very “on” at some times and just didn’t receive much at others, but were making an effort to read something valuable for the crowd. I am uncomfortable with the expectation that mediums can always access Spirit on the spot, and I don’t believe they can. I believe that they can access something sometimes, and that to do so requires different conditions than 100 eager souls sitting in hopeful expectation of being thrown a bone by the spirit world.

As far as seeing a steady stream of clients at 40-minute intervals, I think it’s an insult to Spirit and to the integrity of mediumship. Spirit is not a trained pony and I don’t care how gifted a reader is, to expect to peform like that is irresponsible and unrealistic. Both of my readers gave perfunctory prayers before our readings but my second reader was more interested in collecting my money than in doing anything to prepare herself emotionally or spiritually to “serve Spirit,” as they say in Lily Dale. I find it of some interest that the gal who went before me with Pastel Lady actually had very close ties to the Huna tradition of HAWAII. Interesting, eh? The other disappointed client and I joked that I probably wound up with HER pineapple!! Who knows? The reader did mention something about Huna to me, which neither of us knew anything about, but she felt compelled to mention it. I think that’s intriguing.

Also this:

I received two messages from a dear friend who died this past year. She announced herself by name, and she doesn’t have a particularly common name. The messages came with lengthy and specific insights that were so true to her character, her concerns, her relationship to me and her way of expressing herself that I couldn’t reject them as coincidence, bunk or good guesswork if I tried. Both times the messages came through, my face became flushed and tingling (I have the blisters to show for it). I have felt this friend around me constantly since she died, and I talk to her frequently. I hear her voice in my head whenever I need her (not in a clairvoyant/clairaudient way, just in the form of memories). I went to Lily Dale with an open mind. As I said to a colleague tonight, “I remain a reverent skeptic.”

Lily Dale is a beautiful, magical spot on a lake. There are gorgeous woods (some with a delightful Fairy Path decorated for about a half-mile with amazing fairy houses) and a nice old hotel. There are two cute cafes with very affordable and good food, and the community is less than half an hour from the Chautaqua Institution, which now has a Unitarian Universalist house that you can rent for $300 a week!! I’m hope I can go there next summer. It’s more my speed. Not because I treasure the intellectual over the intuitive, but because I don’t like the dog-and-pony show aspect of Lily Dale.

Paradise

i have just finished reading Toni Morrison’s novel PARADISE and I am blown away by how disastrously bad it was; like some mean parody of her other novels.

Wow, just wow.

From Lily Dale
i-Touch update

What I’d Prefer To See

Someone asked me what I’d like to see rather than the “soft-core” spots I’ve been cringing over lately. Fair enough. I’m in a rush right now, but let me toss these ideas out before I pack for my road trip:

Commercial

Montage:
Image of congregations in worship.
Image of people visiting prisons.
Image of people raking a church garden and laughing.
Image of a minister preaching and shot of a congregant leaning forward, listening hard, and obviously disagreeing.
An image of someone lighting a candle during “Joys and Concerns,” shot of congregation listening.
Image of minister or lay person sitting bedside with a hospitalized person, just holding hands in silence.
Image of a large group of people voting at a congregational meeting.

(voice over)
All our lives we are in need,
and others are in need of us. - George Odell
And then a tag line about UUism and finding a congregation near you at www.uua.org.

OR, if you want to highlight our activist side or diversity more…

Images of a minister doing a baby blessing, a traditional New England church on the green, a Woman’s Allliance tea, a congregation singing hymns.

Short clips of people talking about what faith or God is to them, eg:
“God, to me, is the spirit of justice. My faith is all about trying to work for justice.”
“God is not a word that means anything to me. I belong to this congregation because I want to belong to a community of care and ethical commitment.”
“My religion is centered on the here-and-now, on celebration and service. I love our traditions but I love that we’re always evolving, too.”

Segue image to staunch older Yankee man on ladder carefully placing rainbow flag at front of church building (that’s who did it at our historic congregation!), minister presiding over dedication of Chinese baby girl being held by two beaming mommies, young woman hauling out recycling bin to church curb, choir members cracking up with laughter learning a funky new rhythm under direction of smiling music director, huge wide shot of thousands of GA delegates holding up voting cards.

voice over: Unitarian Universalism: Engaged minds, open hearts. Find a congregation near you at www.uua.org.

I wish I had more time to work on these. Like, I’d love to show the front of a memorial service bulletin that says, “A Celebration of the Life of __________” and show a minister seated at the pulpit while a family member speaks.

Or show an image of a board meeting with all the members genuinely high-fiving each other over putting an agenda item to bed at last.

Or show an elegantly woman dressed for Sunday worship replacing a toilet paper roll in the church bathroom on Sunday morning (because that HAPPENS! Better yet, show her handing it off to a man who then changes it! Funny!). Show the guys in my congregation with aprons on making and serving the Fall Harvest Fair luncheon, because they DO!

The copy could be a bit subservsive and funny, like, “The word heretic comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to question.’ We’ve been asking the big questions together for hundreds of years. We wish you’d join us. Unitarian Universalists: Appreciating diversity of opinion and belief in a congregation near you. www.uua.org.”

Don’t bother unless it looks and sounds contemporary and REAL, and represents what we are doing and being NOW, not some gauzy version of our ideal image.

I’ve said it dozens of times and I’ll say it yet again: you cannot put issues where theology ought to be and expect people to come hungering for that. Empty, empty, empty. Don’t give me an issue, throw a stole on it and expect me to be drawn into your “religion.” What are the eternal, essential, transcendent, sacred values that you teach, embrace and witness to in any and all times? Start there! Don’t invite me through the door to support an issue! That’s an insult to my deepest human needs and a violation of your professed freedom of conscience/freedom of belief/celebration of non-conformity!

Okay, gotta run now. I’m going to Lily Dale, New York, which I believe has some pretty strong 19th century Universalist connections, no?

Soft-Core Liberal Religion

I was talking with an esteemed elder colleague a few months ago about both our resignations from a Unitarian Universalist organization we had loved and supported for many years. She bemoaned the “dumbing down” of the organization’s public presence and I complained of the chasm between its “sweetie, nicie” public image and the reality of its lack of accountability or care for volunteer leaders. We wrote e-mails back and forth for awhile until we processed through our disappointment and sense of loss.

Looking at some of the materials coming out of the UUA right now, I wince in a similar way. It seems like soft-core liberal religion to me: all Kenny G musical arrangements and soft-focus photographs and the use of pious language most Unitarian Universalists heartily eschew in their own congregations. Aside from the fact that our productions values seem to be persistently corny and a few decades behind the times, I am embarrassed by these campaigns, ads, statements, whatever they are — because they seem to me smarmy rather than smart, and sentimental rather than morally powerful.

We are heirs of an intellectually impressive tradition but looking at many of our public materials lately, you’d never know it. Perhaps it is the effort to seem “spiritual but not religious” or to please too many critics, or to appeal to an Oprah-fied (ie, feminized) culture, that we produce these soft-core pieces.

Whatever it is, it makes me cringe. I think about my typical Sunday experience with my own congregation: smart, sharp, articulate, funny, with-it, angry-at-injustice, challenging, hard-working, cool and did I say SHARP? people of all ages and diverse backgrounds — and I am especially embarrassed by the disconnect between them and the PR materials that claim to represent them.

“I hate goodies. I hate goodness that preaches. My goodness must have an edge to it, else it is none.” Mr. Emerson said that, or something like it (I’m quoting from memory), and that’s what I mean. That edge he’s talking about is what I think UUs have, and although sometimes we have it in toxic amounts, it is also what gives us a great deal of our charisma and attraction. Call it the critical edge. Call it the bullshit-detector edge. Call it what you like, but please, let’s see more of it in our PR materials. Not smarmy superiority, not sentimental self-congratulations, but EDGE.

Happy Unpleasant Financial Surprise Day!!

I am proposing a new national holiday.

“Unpleasant Financial Surprise Day!” (The exclamation point is part of its official title,you understand).

The government will have to choose the actual date, of course, but why not today, June 25th?
It’s a perfect time of year. People will have just found out that they owe the IRS a huge bundle of money because of their innocent accounting errors, parents will get a look at that first tuition bill for college, students will receive the $500 phone bill from their recent spring break, and God knows millions of other Americans will get bad news from utilities, health care providers, car insurance companies, banks, mortgage providers… and all that retail therapy that got us through the winter will come home to roost in the form of credit card balances that just won’t go away. (”Honey? Why haven’t we paid this off yet!??”)
Auto damage from Memorial Day fender benders will be assessed at exorbitant fees and grandma will find out what she owes on property taxes. Someone will find a receipt in the car for a $600 expenditure they forgot they made and realize that they’re about to bounce seven checks.
So I think we need this.

On Unpleasant Financial Surprise Day, everyone gets the day off work and gathers in public places. Public transportation is totally free and no one is allowed to drive (except for emergency vehicles). At noon, everyone attends a huge community picnic comprised of food you just happened to have in your pantry, and everyone shares.

At this huge picnic, everyone wears a big sign announcing their Unpleasant Financial Surprise:

“$10,000 Tax Bill!”

“Our Only Car Needs $2,300 of Work!”

“Uninsured and Just Broke My Leg”

“Wife Cleaned Out Our Bank Accounts And Left Me”

“Harddrive Crash Cost Me $96,000 in Sales”

“My Kid Got Into Bennington and Isn’t Eligible For Any Scholarships”

Everyone would mill around and tell each other their stories, and musicians would bring instruments and play and sing. Artists would paint faces and folks would pass around photos of things they love that costs no money at all: flowers that grow wild on their street, a picture of their dog and cat grooming each other, a copy of their latest healthy blood pressure read-out, an old quilt their aunt made.

The idea would be to celebrate things that aren’t financial, and gather strength from knowing that no one is alone.

What do you think?

Calling: A Sermon

Dad

My father died twenty-six years ago, and he is a distant memory by now. What I mean by that is that I have thoroughly incorporated his being into my own in some ineffable and permanent way. It’s just plain truth that I was shattered by his death. I have never “gotten over it.” The loss changed the course of my life in what I believe are positive ways, and life goes on.

Twenty-six years is a lot of birthdays, anniversaries of his death and Father’s Days without him. Usually, I’m fine.
This year, I’m extremely depressed and missing him painfully.

And there’s nothing I can do but cancel my plans for the afternoon (I’ve had a terrible few days and don’t have the energy to fake a social appearance with theatre buddies, or to drive 45 minutes and see a show), take a nap, go get Maxfield from my friend’s house, bring him home and feel sad.

Right now I just feel like I would literally give an arm to pick up the phone and hear my dad’s voice, have a conversation with him and meet him somewhere for a hug. Just to smell his coat lapels. To see his hands and feet. To know his face so well, still, that I wouldn’t even need to look closely at it. To walk on the beach with him and see his thinning hair get ruffled in the wind and to talk about all the things we used to talk about — mainly, about what kind of person I was going to be, what he saw in me and for me. He would have so much to say by now. We would just fall into step beside each other as we always did, and he would tell me how his perspective had changed as one of the ancestors. He would make everything clear for me.

I would say, “Dad, can you believe that I’m now DATING men your age? And that I’m just seven years younger than you were when you died?” And he would look at me with those coffee bean brown eyes and say in that wonderfully wry, deep radio announcer’s voice, “Ah, bullshit. You’re still my baby.”

What’s Your Favorite Museum?

I read with great interest today’s New York Times article about the opening of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. I missed the opening by just a few weeks; a great disappointment but I’m irrationally happy for the city and for the lucky tourists who won’t know this wonderful collection as a messy construction site, as I did, but as a treasure trove of ancient history.

I love museums. Some of my favorites are:

The Musee D’Orsay in Paris
The Glyptotek in Copenhagen
The Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston
The Fine Arts Museum in Philadelphia (there’s a very angry ghost in the China collection, though,so prepare yourself for that if you’re psychically sensitive!)
The Frick Collection in NYC
The Ethnographic Museum in Kolosvar (Cluj Napoca), Romania
The Archeological Museum in Mexico City
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
Williamsburg, Virginia
Shaker Village, Hancock, Massachusetts
The Freer and Sackler Galleries and National Gallery in Washington, DC
The National Archeological Musuem, Athens
Musee Rodin, Paris
La Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid
The Uffizi, Florence

How about you? What are your favorites, and why?