PeaceBang

Why I’m Getting More Calvinistic, Part Deux

First of all, if you’re interested in this issue you should read all the smarty-pants comments and recommendations in the previous post.

I’ve got a lot of good summer reading to add to the pile, including Dorrien’s essay.

So I’m puzzling through this, and I suspect some of the recommended readings will help me. It also helps me to consider what both Philocrites and Fausto have said: namely, that what’s missing from UUism is careful discernment of theological claims we’ve been fairly casually making for a long time (too long, really), and realism in our religion. What I see in contemporary UUism is this kind of pushing back the night with our humanist will, i.e., “we know it’s terrible but you and I can make a difference!”
And we can, and of course we need to keep preaching and living that.

But we’re I’m coming down is that while I believe in natural religion and an instinctual sense of the Moral Law (because,as Channing so beautifully posited, we’re possessed of God’s own nature), what I’m coming down to is a personal conviction that –whether within religious communities OR left to our own devices — we’re more prone to delusion and justification, sin and erring, than to virtue.

Why? Not necessarily because that’s how we were made (a la the Puritans’ idea) but because our age is so fraught with toxins of body, mind and spirit that we are functioning less well morally as a species because of them.

Many of our daily practices (like spending hours on the internet, for instance, gathering points of view, articles and conversation) subject us to such an onslaught of perspectives, while our lack of sleep and sabbath rest, overstimulation, environmental and dietary poisons, goods and services to feed our myriad addictions available 24 hours a day (a new thing under the sun, indeed!) and rampant materialism — not to mention the dozens of other temptations and anxieties to which our age is prone — have what I am certain is a highly deleterious effect on our moral sense.

As a modern gal, I do believe that a lot of our moral sense is developed along with our cerebral cortex, and I think that not only are our children’s attention spans shrinking due to Electronic Childhood, but their moral reasoning also suffers. Meanwhile, their parents are spinning out on life lived the speed of light, with constant media buzzing in their brain, every possible entertainment, pleasure, distraction and indulgence available to them in either fact or in fantasy, and daily evidence that the seven deadly sins aren’t so much deadly as just great fodder for consumption over the Stairmaster via Dr. Phil.

I suppose every age believes it’s especially corrupt. Don’t think that while I’m writing this I don’t feel like a 21st century Cotton Mather. Which I’m not sure is such a bad thing.

Why I’m Getting More Calvinistic

As I was watching a PBS special on Dietrich Bonhoeffer last night, followed by a special about Auschwitz (or perhaps documentary would be a better word, as the terms “special” and “Auschwitz” should never appear in the same sentence together), it occurred to me why my theology has become more and more Calvinistic over the years: I just don’t think we can’t be trusted with just plain Self-Culture in the manner that Emerson preached it, and toward which Channing and Henry Ware, Jr.’s optimistic Christianity pointed us.

Left to our own conscience without the instructive influence of authority and tradition, and a sense of obedience to a Moral Reality beyond our own conscience, we’re just too prone to delusions and justified cruelty, and insanity.

This isn’t to say that religion doesn’t prompt humans to some insane cruelty and delusions. Duh. I know that. I’m not proposing a religious solution to humankind’s innate depravity, I’m just saying that more and more, I believe we ARE innately depraved. My own personal solution is a serious Christian life, but I don’t believe that’s the universal solution for anything.

For such an Emersonian as myself, it’s been terribly sad to read some of his late sermons and to think, “Oh buddy, you’ve really got your idealistic head up your posterior.”

Obviously I have to think about this a lot more (I’ve been thinking more this week about why I came out and said that I believe Jesus was dead, dead, dead, and why he made a later JESUS: LIVE AND IN PERSON! appearance to his disciples).

For a bit of comic relief: As I was watching the Bonhoeffer special I thought of a minister I know who fancies himself quite the saint and savior of humankind, and quite the exemplary Christian. I snorted to myself, “He thinks he’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but he’s not even Marlene Dietrich.”

Okay, it was funny to me at the time.

Somewhere Xenu Is Laughing

Brooke Shields and Katie Holmes had their baby girls on the same day.

http://www.delmarvaheadlines.com/deweybeach/stories/20050803/2187169.html

Reportedly, Suri means “princess” in Hebrew and “red rose” in Persian. It apparently means “pickpocket” in Japanese. (Betcha Tom didn’t think of that!)
Gawker.com sez it’s not a Hebrew name at all, but means “Lord Krishna.” I’m all confused, but that’s how TomKat wants it, so Katie can sneak out to the garbage can and throw out the fake pregnancy pillow she’s been wearing for like a year while I scratch my head and google the name “Suri.”

Grier means “little privileged white girl whose mommy was a child star.”

Reviewing the Principles and Purposes

Philocrites and Boy In the Bands and all kinds of UU bloggers are talking about it and commenting on it.

I will too, as soon as I get some time.

I grew up in a Unitarian Universalism without the Seven Principles. I think they’ve been a help to us in the past ten years, and have become a hindrance in the past five or six. Why? Because too many overly-earnest UUs have adopted them as a quasi-creed, and because we generally grossly misinterpret the first principle and use it in a disturbingly, narcissistic “Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Say/Do That Cuz I Got Inherent Worth And Dignity” way that violates its original intent.
And because they lack poetry and they’re comically verbose (ever tried to memorize the first Source? I always start with the “transcending mystery and wonder, known in many cultures… bla bla bla” and just say, “In other words, GOD.” Which always gets a big laugh, and we move on).

And because worst of all, congregations don’t think they need their own covenant becuase “we have the Seven Principles!” Which are part of the covenant between member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, possums, not your own congregation’s covenant.

And PeaceBang is a big believer in the power of the congregational covenant, and not a behavioral covenant, either, which is a whole ‘nuther thing.

Well, I guess I found the time. That’s that.

Easter Sermon Excerpt

I’m sorry that we won’t be having any sheep this morning. Just us, and I’m so glad to see you all.

We’ve just heard [our DRE] read the story of the original Easter morning, when Jesus’ dear friend Mary of Magdala, and another friend named Mary, went to his tomb where they had the sad task of burying him. That was woman’s work back in the ancient times. But, as you know, they found the tomb empty, and an angel announcing that Jesus was alive. The best way to describe their reaction in today’s language, children, would be to say that they “totally freaked out” and ran to tell the other followers of Jesus, or the disciples.

Now, it doesn’t say this in the gospel of Matthew, but it does say it in several other versions of the same story that the other disciples thought that the women who came running to them with this news were absolutely crazy. They didn’t believe them at all. I suppose they figured that the women were suffering from being over-tired and they had cried so much their eyes were playing tricks on them. They brushed the women off. The gospel of Luke says, “These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”
It wasn’t until the other disciples experienced the living presence of Jesus themselves that they were able to enter into this miracle and believe.

And that’s really how miracles work.

One person may experience something tremendous, life-changing, even seemingly supernatural, but it’s when a community of people hears the story and chooses to enter into it with full faith that a miracle occurs.

I bet some people here today are experiencing the miracle of resurrection in their own lives. In fact, I know they are. The rest of us can share their joy and when we do, some of that resurrection rubs off on us. I know, and you do too, that it’s one thing to have a wonderful blessing happen in your life, but when you bring it to your community, it can take on miraculous proportions.

Maybe a baby is born. The parents hold that baby and they think, my god, this is beyond belief! We have made ourselves a baby, or we have got ourselves our very own baby! But when they bring that baby to the community, the community knows that this is more than just their baby; this is a new person who needs to be loved and nurtured and urged into being a good member of the human race. Everyone who sees that baby sits up a little taller in their seat, feeling the responsibility of making a good example for that child, thinking about what they have to teach him or her, what values they will pass on to him or her. When this happens, a very personal miracle becomes everyone’s miracle.

Maybe someone get news from the doctor that their latest tests show no signs of a disease they’ve been struggling with for a long time. It’s amazing, they sit in wonder and awe that this could have happened. They are so grateful. Then they bring this news to the community, and others who care about them feel the joy and wonder with them. Everyone who hears the news has their heart opened in relief and gratitude. Their news isn’t so personal any more, it’s everyone’s miracle.

Or maybe the news from the doctor isn’t good. Someone is going to be facing a very difficult time, health-wise. They are worried. They bring that worry to the community and everyone who hears it puts that person in their heart, holds them there, worries with them, thinks about ways they can share their strength with that person. Some do it silently, with prayers or loving thoughts, and some do it out loud and in tangible ways. They write cards or they bring soup or they make a phone call or they give backrubs. Either way, that person’s spirit gathers all this in, and they have moments where they just know they can endure whatever comes. They know that they are not alone and they are not forsaken.
There is a Spirit of Life and Love that is with them even as they lie in the hospital bed recovering from surgery, or enduring some other painful trial. How do they know they are not alone and not forsaken? They know it because they’re a part of a community, and because they are, their own body is just a smaller part of one bigger body. That’s a miracle, too.

We just don’t think of it that way, because we’re the ones who make it happen.

The Bible is full of ancient stories about God making miracles happen. Some of them are quiet miracles that happen to one person, and some of them are big Cecil B. DeMille productions like the parting of the Red Sea, where a whole community of people experience the miracle together. The thing is, though, even those little miracles that occur to just one person always – and I mean always– have an impact on a community of people.

If the miracle is, for instance, God speaking to one person, that you can bet that that one person is going to go on to be a great leader of a larger group of people. If the miracle is one woman praying for a baby late in life, and getting pregnant, that child is going to be a real gift to humanity. That’s how it works in the Bible, and I think I’ve finally figured something out about miracles, something that the Bible means to teach, and it’s this: the miraculous thing isn’t God doing some big supernatural magic trick. The miraculous thing is how a community of people changes for the better because of something that happens to all of them together. A miracle is something that cracks us open so more love can get in.

…

The story [our DRE] told us earlier is so right: the messiah is one of you. If we can hear that and take that in, how much that can change us! What a miracle that would be, to live every day as though the messiah was one of us. It could be you. It could be your irritating neighbor or co-worker. It could be your child. It could be your mother-in-law. What if we treated one another as if one of us was the most blessed and holy person this broken world was waiting for? What would our communities look like? Our nations? Our planet?

Here is another story, also told by my friend Carl Scovel in Never Far From Home: Stories From the Radio Pulpit:

You remember that El Salvador was a nation on the verge of civil war in 1980. This is a story of one of the major events of that time.

On March 24, in 1980, the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, was celebrating mass in the small Chapel of Divine Providence attached to a small hospital. He had just finished reading the Words of the Institution: ‘This is my body, which will be given for you…’ when a man waiting in the back of the church shot and killed him. Those were terribly dangerous times. He knew he might be assassinated. But Bishop Romero believed in resurrection. He believed in the miracle of community. He said, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”

At that time of his death, there was a traditional crucifix hanging in the Chapel oDivine Providence where he said his last mass. It was a carved figure of Jesus with a crown of thorns. But at some point after Romero died, the crucifix was taken down. In its place the nuns in the hospital put up a cross, and at the intersection of the crossbar and the vertical, they set in a frame of golden rays flaming out from the center, where we usually see the figure of Jesus, a mirror.

When the people saw the cross and reflected on the triumph of love over violence, they didn’t see Jesus. They saw themselves.

A miracle doesn’t have to be a big supernatural production to be a true miracle. A true miracle is something that cracks us open so that more love can get in. A miracle happens when a community of people hears the sacred, ancient call to love our God with all our hearts and souls, all our minds and all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, and chooses to enter into that sacred story with full faith, letting it change them for the better.

You want to know how God works the greatest miracles?
[here I held up a mirror to the congregation]
It has never been any other way.

My friends, believe me when I tell you that truly, you are the resurrection and the life. Take that good news with you. Believe it, share it, and live it, today and all the days of your lives. Happy Easter, alleluia, and amen!

******************************

I just finished my doctoral project proposal. I have been working on it since September and I am so relieved to have it done I could either jump out of my skin or crawl into bed and stay there ’til Pentecost. Off to the gym.

Peace. Bang.

Empty Tomb, Empty Pew

I was sad to see the posting on UU Easter at Ethan’s blog, “Jehovah’s Fitness:”
http://jehovahsfitness.wordpress.com/2006/04/14/easter/

I’m afraid many people think the way he does, and as a minister who pours heart and soul into composing a relevant resurrection-themed Easter message every year, I’m sorry that it may irritate anyone.

I don’t think that the problem is that Ethan’s not listening carefully enough, nor is it that he’s an occasional drop-in to his UU congregation and couldn’t possibly be expected to engage deeply in an Easter observance. Both of those things may be factors in why the people I call “God’s All-Stars” only appear at Christmas and Easter and then go away making snarky remarks about the cliched nature of the service (I don’t know if they do: I assume that some of them do. My family and I were occasional drop-ins to UU services for years, and that’s what we did). It obviously isn’t the case for Ethan.

I think it may be that Ethan is hearing sermons by ministers who are afraid to bring the fire of personal conviction into their Easter sermons because of potential criticism by disaffected Christians who have yet to gain a mature, affirmative faith of their own and so sneer at anything that smacks of their past experience. The flip side of that coin, of course, is that there are plenty of ministers who find no thrilling spiritual meaning at ALL in Easter and nevertheless feel compelled to mount a big production on that day. Neither reality makes for a great experience for either clergy or laity.

I agree with Ethan that to render Easter just Wow, Stuff is Growing Again Day is lame. To celebrate it as such year after year is inexcusably lame. There’s a reason that every mystery religion in the Western world had a dead and resurrected god or goddess at its center, and that those mystery religions had so many devotees for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. And it ain’t just because the daffodils pushed back up through the soil again. And it ain’t just ’cause people are credulous simpletons. I love how UU ministers will discount Christians as superstitious ninnies and then speak of Plato and Sophocles in hushed, reverent tones, conveniently ignoring the fact that both those great geniuses of western civilization believed in, and worshiped, gods and supernatural beings.

It may be that Ethan is hearing messages watered down by worship committees who think Easter should be one thing and a minister who wishes it could be something else. It may be that Ethan is feeling the tensions of a congregation gathered on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, who have a wide variety of expectations, wounds and anxieties about what Easter is or should be. Perhaps that tension is negatively affecting the energy of the worshiping community.

I don’t know. Perhaps Ethan will tell us more.

And meanwhile, plenty of UUs fly the coop for Holy Week observances elsewhere: www.philocrites.com

May Easter fill your heart with resurrection faith wherever you are.

PeaceBang’s New Blog!

Because of extensive prodding and egging on by Sister Of PeaceBang, PeaceBang would like to announce the presence of her new blog,

Beauty Tips for Ministers

http://www.beautytipsforministers.blogspot.com

And now I’m going to have a pious Good Friday, and wish you one as well.

The First Cut Is The Deepest

Scene: A bedroom in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

My brother puts his two baby sons down to sleep in their cribs. He tells them to go to sleep, it’s bedtime.
As soon as he closes the door he hears them giggling and chirping to each other in their little baby language (and what I wouldn’t give for a recording!).
He opens the door. Stern. “Boys, go. to. sleep. Nicholas, you go to sleep.”

As he softly shuts the door he hears from one of the cribs, just as stern,
“YOU go seep, Dada!”

"Capote"

I finally saw “Capote” a couple of weeks ago and was disappointed. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m too old and have seen too many movies. Maybe I wanted Harper Lee to be more fabulously Southern than the wan Catherine Keener managed to make her (and I LOVE Catherine Keener!). Maybe I was too distracted by the technicality of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance (I LOVE PSH! But I would have voted for Heath Ledger, whose “Brokeback Mountain” performance was, I thought, so much more wrenching and less Inside-the-Actor’s-Studio-crafty).

I suppose, in the end, pretty much all the characters were either dull or irredeemably unethical. I don’t know why they had to drag even Wallace Shawn (played by Bob Balaban) through the mud: his own children protested that the New Yorker editor never went out to Kansas to witness the execution or anything as intimately involved as that.

One thing bothered me a lot about the screenplay: how come the other guy, Dick Hickock — the one who didn’t end up a kind of weird crush/alter ego/pawn for Truman Capote, also got executed? According to the film, he didn’t murder anyone. Perry Smith killed the entire family. True, Hickock said, “We shouldn’t leave any witnesses!” but that’s not the same as slashing someone’s throat or shooting them in the head.

I know this wasn’t meant to be a courtroom drama — it was intended to be an examination of the way that an author got drawn into a dangerous subject, and what it did to him. But still, I thought a scene that let us understand that there was never any clear evidence which of the men actually murdered the Clutter family (Perry Smith confessed to all four, but I guess the jury didn’t buy it) would have helped. As it was, I was left with a much more negative opinion of the whole question of justice, and Truman Capote’s interference with it, than was perhaps warranted.

Oh well. That’s Hollywood.

Review of "Wicked"

I saw the tour of “Wicked” tonight and found it to be a disappointment. The most heartening thing about the show wasn’t the production, but the presence of thousands of young theatre-goers in the audience who were clearly in love with the show and adored every bit of it. I’m happy for them. I had Endora; they have Elphaba. She’s even more cool because she sings. And she’s green.

I’m sorry I walked out without my program so I can’t tell you the names of the leading ladies, who did a terrific job with the roles of Elphaba and Glinda. They had a lot of fun out there, were great singers, and brought heart and wonderful comic timing to all their bits. They were also game for a load of special effects and it wasn’t their faults that most of those were just clumsy enough to be distracting. I hadn’t realized how wonderful a role Glinda is: I think it goes down in the annals of theatre as one of the great comedic soprano roles for pretty blonde dingbats with a killer range. Delicious part.

The problem is the script: it’s a mess. Unlike Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” which had the wonderful James Lapine to weave dramatic gold out of a mishmash of well-loved old fairy tales and legends (and some believe that that second act isn’t so much gold as dreck), “Wicked,” which takes its source from Gregory Maguire’s celebrated novel of the same name, just doesn’t manage to make a coherent tale out of this new, sympathetic take on the Wicked Witch of the West.
Therefore, the plot contrivances are often embarrassing and insulting to the audience’s intelligence.

The biggest problem is the show’s constant veering from light comedy to super heavy-handed “issue” drama. It maintains a fairly consistent darkness, and some of Stephen Schwartz’s score has some great moments, but only moments and never lyrically. The musical numbers are nothing special, except for the vocal pyrotechnics required by Elphaba that make “Defying Gravity” the closest thing to thrilling the production manages to deliver. Otherwise, the numbers are entertaining without ever being gripping, and effective without ever being truly moving. Again, in my opinion this isn’t the fault of the performances but of the piece itself, which simply gets too dark and deep but undercuts itself with the silly, unnecessary need to cram in every recognizable aspect of “The Wizard of Oz” into the story. The flying monkeys sort of make sense (although it’s a rather cheap contrivance that gets them that way), but only sort of. There’s a Mr. Tumnus figure stolen right out of The Lion, The Witch And the Wardrobe that just doesn’t work, and the way the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion get crammed into the plot is so poorly done it’s positively cringe-worthy, and should have been fixed out of town.

It’s a shame, really, because the concept is so marvelous and rich for a really brilliant interpretation, but we don’t get that here. Instead we get dreadfully inconsistent secondary characters, and a frantic ensemble who changes costumes so often and so fast, and who dance with such frenzied energy you can’t help but feel they’re trying to distract you from the show’s real deficiencies. The singing is good, the sound is good, the orchestra is good, the costumes are a delight, and the staging is mostly fine (with the exception of one monumental blooper that ruins the magic at a really important moment at the end of the show — all I can say is, why a sheet? Why not a SCRIM? For the love of Oz, a scrim!). The singing is terrific and the performances very committed. The audience loved it, and you probably will too.

Don’t listen to this old witch.