PeaceBang

C-

I had lunch today with a UU seminarian who is in discernment about what religious tradition she really wants to affiliate with on the path to ordained ministry. I like her a lot — she’s a terrific person and a bright spirit — and I hope she stays in the Unitarian Universalist family. She’s not really a Christian theologically but she finds many Christian experiences and worship services deeply moving in a way that parallel Unitarian Universalist offerings have not been. Some of her reflections really depressed me, though, as she shared typical questions like”what do I do as a UU in this or that situation” or “how can I do ministry in a UU way” — always assuming that the UU way was non-theistic, uncomfortable with explicit belief, and other-than-Christian. She herself isn’t anti-theist (although not theistic herself), nor is she uncomfortable with people having a strong faith stance (or being Christian), but she has clearly internalized that these positions are mainline “UU.”

I’ll tell you what I told her, which is that it’s such a shame that Unitarian Universalism has become identified with such limiting, rejecting mentality as that. Instead of being known as the religious tradition where theologically diverse people can sincerely support one another in community, we’ve become defined as the perpetually suspicious, pre-offended people. She said to me, “The only time I’ve ever heard another religious tradition insulted in the UU church was when the minister made a nasty joke about Christians.” She said it was so disappointing to her that she almost walked out. I told her that she should have, that it would be good for us as a movement if more people walked out in protest whenever we egregiously violated our own vaunted tolerance and acceptance. I told her that, in my opinion, Unitarian Universalist hypocrisy around tolerance and acceptance was as hurtful to the growth of our movement as the clergy sex scandal was damaging to the Catholic Church. I don’t mean to compare the degree of immorality in both cases; my comparison is one of relative impact. I truly believe that for every one person who walks into a Unitarian Universalist congregation on a Sunday morning and feels immediately at home, there are three or four who say to themselves, “Oh, these people were great on paper but in person they’re an incredibly close-minded, judgmental crowd.”

Let me be clear: our “crimes” of hypocrisy are no more common or reprehensible than the hypocrisies committed by any religious group. The difference with Unitarian Universalism is that we have given ourselves a very high standard to live up to, and aligned our public identity with the very principles of tolerance and acceptance. Therefore, people come to us with very high expectations and are therefore, I think, doubly crushed when they observe that we are no better than anyone else at living up to our own PR.

We’re just as fallen as any religious movement. We billed ourselves as the saviors, the reformers, the ones who would purify the church, and we failed. We just don’t see it, because the ways we have tunnel vision are so in sync with so much of liberal, secular culture, we have no idea how deeply and regularly we violate our first principle.

I said to my seminarian friend, Look, in most houses of worship, a good number of people have no belief in God or Christ, don’t see the value of the rituals, and don’t like the lyrics to the hymns. The only difference between Unitarian Universalists and these other groups is that we’re honest about those realities and don’t attempt to bring everyone together in a conformity of faith. We just hang out in the open with our skepticism and difference and wondering. We make it a point of strength (on our good days, we do). Yet for all our eternal protestations of being something truly different and exotic in the religious landscape, we’re incredibly similar to mainstream liberal Protestantism in almost all the important cultural ways. I hope your generation of ministers will help us get over our terminal uniqueness, I told her. And I hope your generation of ministers will help us find a way to truly grow up and grow beyond our blinders. Right now in our history I give us a C- on our report card and the comment, “Unitarian Unviersalism is not living up to his/her potential.”

O Come Emanuel

I am reading Donald Miller’s popular book Blue Like Jazz right now and really loving it. It’s so refreshing to read an unapologetically Christian reflection that isn’t icky-pious and doesn’t have a political agenda and isn’t trying to prove a point in some dry intellectual way and isn’t trying to do anything but share a person’s spiritual struggle.

(You thought I was going to say spiritual journey, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t because I made a pact with myself recently that I wasn’t going to use the word “journey” or the word “dance” as a metaphor for the struggle for spiritual growth. I’m just tired of ‘em both. Overdone to death.)

Miller tells a story that both he and I both suspect might be apocryphal, about a team of Navy SEALS busting through the door to save a group of American hostages, who were so traumatized that they could not trust the men enough to get up and leave with them. It wasn’t until one of the Navy SEALS got down on the floor and curled up next to one of the hostages that they got the idea that this was their people, and that they were being rescued. Getting down on the floor and curling up next to them was something the hostages knew their captors would never have done.

Miller makes an analogy between the Navy SEAL and God (talk about strange bedfellows!) getting down next to us in a little curled up ball of compassion and empathy in the form of Jesus. I thought that worked pretty well for me as an Advent reflection, as I spend much of this season thinking about what the world would have been like if Jesus had not been born as he was, and if the ideals he incarnated had remained divine little flecks through the universe as they are now, without a sacred story and religious tradition to enact and remember and worship them again and again.

Would the world be a better, more peaceful place if these godly beings (and this One in particular) did not take on flesh and dwell among us? Without the life of Christ, would the world be a more whole, less divided and frightened, place? Have we failed so miserably to live faithfully to the vision of the Kingdom that Christians past and present have actually, in a hard, cold real sense, made the world less blessed and holy?

If so — and of course it is something that could never be proved either way — I hope we will not forget that crazy, locust-eater John, who leads us into the season of Advent with his raging call to repentance and awe, and his reminder of how desperately we need the one who comes to us at Christmas.

Simple Joys

geese
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I’m glad we still live in a world where people take their childrent to feed the ducks.

I remember those days Mom would say, “Come on, we’re going to Meade Park!” and we’d pile into the car and drive over. We always fed the geese and then Mom would swing us on the cool, extra-big swings. She was great at it.

Man, I forgot how much I used to love swinging. It was an extreme sport back then. That and the monkey bars, which were serious because you pretended you were Olga Korbut, and the blisters were monumental.

O Bacchus

vino
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I’m going to another wine tasting in about an hour or so. I don’t know why I’m so interested in wine now. I love reading about it and trying to connect the taste of wine with the florid descriptions of it in the pages of, say, Wine Spectator magazine.

I don’t love wine madly, or at least not all the time. The best bottle I ever shared was in Canada, at the home of my friend P’s in-laws in Montreal — an inky, gorgeous red from France that had been given as a gift to the father-in-law, a doctor. It was just a glorious thing, that wine.

Most wine is just fine, that’s all. It’s okay. I’m not crazy about it. But then you’ll get that one bottle that’s just heavenly and go off again to understand what makes it so.

I have a hard time considering white wines real WINE. I like them fine with a nice meal and everything, and sometimes they’re downright yummy, but to me the sexiness of wine always means reds. I was so disappointed when I bought a Croatian red for Thanksgiving that, when I tasted it, was totally masculine and leathery with side notes of cigar and horse. But when I uncorked it at home it was just a good red. Some of the notes never really appeared. I don’t know why.

I can’t really explain why cigars and horses are a good thing to taste in your wine, you just have to trust me.

So I’m going to another tasting to learn more and to hang out with other foodies for a warm moment in the midst of this cold, cold night.

P.S. I still loathed “Sideways” and always will: http://peacebang.blogspot.com/2005/02/dumb-and-dumber-go-to-wine-country.html

PeaceBang Pays "Rent"

(SPOILER ALERT)

Well, I finally dipped my toe in the “Rent” cult last night by finally seeing the flick, which friends have said is a faithful representation of the stage show, and in some regards even better.

I thought it was entertaining and sweet, and the performers — most of whom had starred in the show in New York a decade ago — were incredibly comfortable in their roles and with each other, and very assured as singers and dancers.

It’s a re-telling of “La Boheme,” of course, which is why I was greatly disappointed in the New Age White Light ending. When I attend the opera, I expect the diva to die a gorgeous death, dammit, not to pop her eyes open so that she can sing a reprise of her theme song and live for more sweaty romance with her blow-dried man love. I loved the incorporation of “Musetta’s Waltz” into Larson’s score, although the fact that Musetta is the healthy blonde comedic foil to Mimi’s tragic consumptive makes the allusion confusion and artistically a bit sloppy. Mr. Larson died of an aneurysm immediately before the New York premier of “Rent,” which makes it a bit hard to argue with him, or to expect revisions of the score for the film version.

It was nice to finally get a sense of why everyone worships Idina Menzel, currently of “Wicked” fame, who truly has monster pipes and a curiously angular bone structure that grants her that “She’s-Not-Exactly Pretty-But-I-Can’t-Look-Away” allure. I didn’t believe in her as a lesbian, nor could I believe that two sets of conservative parents (one white, one African-American) would have thrown their daughters a lavish commitment ceremony at the country club in 1989, but I like Menzel a lot anyway (she has a really nutty peformance art number called “Over the Moon” to get through, which was an interesting failure). I also liked her girlfriend, Joanne, played by Tracie Thoms (and clearly an outsider to the original cast). The gay male relationship between Collins (the swoonable Jesse L. Martin, now of “Law and Order” fame) and Angel was likewise unconvincing to me, even if lovely and tender.

Wilson Jermaine Heredia as Angel moved me the most - he had the most heart and subtlety, and I was brought to tears by his demise from AIDS.

Adam Pascal, in the leading role of Roger, was so pretty whitey white white boy that I found his uber-soulful crooning just irritating in the end. He has a great voice, but there’s no there there. Adam, a hint: when your facial expression remains empty and dissinterested as you screech with passion vocally, it makes us less likely to believe the voice.
Likewise Anthony Rapp as his best friend Mark Cohen couldn’t have been more skinny blonde suburban Minnesotan if he tried, and his vehement insistence on living “la vie boheme” just struck me as ludicrous. A striped scarf that never leaves one’s neck does not one a Boho make. I could say this of most of the cast, except for Rosario Dawson as Mimi: they were just so darned clean, shiny and well-fed. Everyone’s skin was luminous. They looked well-rested, sleek, successful and as though, if you could stand near enough to smell them, they’d smell of Moulton & Brown soaps. *My* struggling artist friends who had AIDs never looked like they had daily facials and lived on an entirely organic diet.

Anyway, Chris Columbus did a nice job directing, even if I thought he used the whole “now everyone will stand to show their solidarity as the music changes keys” device two too many times. The only real clunker of a number, for me, wasn’t his fault: it’s the signature tune, “La Vie Boheme” which is such an egregious rip-off of “Hair” from (guess!) “Hair” that all a Broadway buff can do is scrub her toe on the movie theatre floor and try to remember that imitation is supposedly the sincerest form of flattery.

If you didn’t know that the preppy villain character Benny (Taye Diggs) is married to rebellious bi-girl Maureen (Idina Menzel) in real life, well, now you know.

Should you see “Rent?” Probably only if you’re a theatre person, or if you loved it on the stage. I really liked what Ebert had to say about it:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051122/REVIEWS/51116001/1023