PeaceBang

Speech by Executive Director of Amnesty International

I commend to you Bill Schultz’s marvelous Berry Street Essay from General Assembly this year. I just read it for the first time. I was at the zoo when he delivered it in St. Louis.
Why?
Because I knew that what he had to say would make me sick, make me angry, make me woozy and nauseous with over-identification, and would too sorely tempt me to stand up and scream, “TELL IT, Bill!”

Having just finished it, and indeed feeling woozy, nauseated and totally vindicated by Schultz’s condemnation of the Theology Lite being perpetuated by so many UUs today, let me recommend it to you. But let me also warn you: if you don’t like what I’ve been saying about UUs and sin, you’re not going to like this, either:

http://www.meadville.edu/Lectures/Torture.pdf

Now You Can Hear Sweet The Sound!

Check this out:

http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/ktf/default.htm

A few weeks ago, the Rev. Tim Holder (”Poppa T”), founder of the Hip HopE Mass in the South Bronx, was supposed to be the guest on Keepin’ The Faith, a religious talk show through the University of Illinois.

However, because Tim had a pastoral crisis arise, he was unable to be the guest on the show, and host Steve Shoemaker replaced him with a feature about Sweet the Sound, the group I sing with. He plays several cuts from our CD on the show. I don’t think we sound very good on “Bright Morning Star” (it sounds stagnant and too heavy on the alto to my ears), but I guarantee that you will totally dig the second song, “Laying Down.” It was written by our director, Matt Meyer Boulton.

In the “It’s a Small World” department: Tim Holder is a dear friend of mine from Divinity School.
Don’t even ask how we wound up substituting for Tim. Turns out that was due to yet another strange connection. Sometimes it seems like the liberal religious community in America is so tiny.

PeaceBang And Ministerial Jesters

We’ve caused quite a stir over at Beauty Tips for Ministers,
http://beautytipsforministers.blogspot.com/2006/07/its-gender-ambiguous-liturgy-dude.html
Check it out, y’all!

As it turns out, Gender Ambiguous Liturgy Dude is Rev. Jack of the Midwest Discordian Ministry, and was ordained (he says “registered” on his own website) through the Universal Life Church. The argument in the comments section runs along the expected lines of “What nonsense, he’s not a real minister if he’s ordained over the internet,” to “But if you knew Rev. Jack you would realize he’s the real deal,” etc.

What do I think about all of this?

I am a congregationalist in body, mind, heart and soul. To me, a divinity degree does not make a minister, although I heartily believe that seminary training is essential to clerical formation.
I acknowledge, however, that theological education can be had elsewhere.
I believe that God calls us to the ministry, our own nature and temperament outfit us for it with varying degrees of effectiveness, and that our congregations ordain us to it. If communities accept Rev. Jack as a minister, if they ask him to preach to and to counsel to them, to marry them when they love and to bury them when they’re dead, he’s legitimate to them, and my opinion matters very little.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that I will probably never consider someone ordained through the Universal Life Church a colleague in the true and full sense, while I may sincerely support their ministry. In that way I am an institutionalist. I also fully support the importance of collegial vetting through the MFC, for the Unitarian Universalists reading this.

There is something else, though, and it has to do with the sort of Holy Fool element in all of this.

I am not a fan of the Holy Fool approach to ministry, which embraces the wacky ways of the Holy Spirit over-against the orderliness of tradition, however unintentionally silly and nonsensical tradition may be.

Ministers who create a kind of holy fool persona for themselves mostly strike me as a jejeune lot — dramatically and publicly ambivalent about the grave responsibilities of the office of minister. As a committed irreverent reverend myself, I can see the allure of the jester role. However, it’s too easy to stay on the sidelines as a self-appointed mocker of tradition and etiquette; to make big clown eyes when you feel like it and say, “Gosh, I’m just a joker here. Don’t take ME too seriously.”
Yuck. My eyebrow cocks in suspicion just writing about it.

( Clarification: This is NOT to presume or insinuate that Rev. Jack sees himself as a Trickster/Joker figure in any other ministerial matter than that of his ordination. Although he’s obviously a non-conformist, he doesn’t seem to be presenting himself as a Holy Fool. But reading his website reminded me that I wanted to write about this phenomenon some time ago. I just wanted to make that clear)

Perhaps this is a gender issue. Women in religious leadership can hardly afford to wear the motley cap when we’ve struggled for thousands of years against sexism to earn our authority in the first place. That may be why I hold my jesting male colleagues in something close to contempt, although my heart wants to be far more generous. I want to say, “How dare you monkey around with this cutesy persona when human lives and souls are at stake?”

“But Jesus was the Lord of the Dance!” people say. “He was the ultimate Fool!”

Sure. But let’s remember the full lyrics of “The Lord Of The Dance,”

I danced on the Sunday when I cured the lame,
The Holy people thought it was a shame,
They whipped and stripped and hung me high
And left me there on the cross to die.

They cut me down and I leaped up high
I am the light that will never, never die,
I’ll live in you, if you live in me,
I am the lord of the dance said he.

Being the Lord of the Dance — wild, eternal, unkillable, insistently joyous and unquenchably charismatic — is far different from the role assumed by too many self-appointed Holy Fools of today, some of whom I have personally experienced as pathologically passive aggressive (”Hey, ya can’t take a joke, can you?”), egregiously irresponsible (”I’m the Joker, I’m the Holy Fool, you do the work. You answer to the people’s expectations.”) and basically just full of baloney.

I believe we have some authentic Holy Fools and Sacred Rebels among us, and that the twinkly and reportedly beloved Rev. Jack Ditch might be one of them.
I don’t know. He lives in me as Gender Ambiguous Liturgy Dude. And wherever he may be today, I’m grateful to him for giving me the chance to spout off about Jesters I Have Known And Not Loved.

Dance on, everyone. I’m dancing off to Quebec tomorrow early afternoon and will not have access to a computer for nearly a week.
Comment away, but don’t be disappointed if I can’t keep up.

Another Word for Disciple

I’ve been skimming Tom Schade’s blog “The Lively Tradition” tonight with one bleary eye with the promise to read every stinkin’ word soon.

Just one thought. I believe that the purpose of a worship service is to make a community of disciples out of a disparate gathering of seekers.

What’s a good UU-friendly word for those who don’t resonate with”disciples?”

One word, now.

Life In An SUV

As you may recall, I got a 2002 Honday CRV a month or so ago.

I’m paying a little bit more for gas, but since I’ve gone into a bigger vehicle I’ve noticed a few things:

1. People don’t tailgate me as treacherously as they used to. In fact, they hardly tailgate at all, and that was a constant terror in my Honda Civic.

2. I can see much better for night driving.

3. I am a much calmer, and therefore probably safer, driver. For example, I don’t white-knuckle the steering wheel when driving next to jersey barriers or when a big truck roars up alongside me.

4. Long drives don’t leave me feeling all crunched up and sore.

5. I can cart big things around with the greatest of ease.

As much as I hated to do it, the bigger car was absolutely the right choice for me. Which is exactly the thinking that contributes to global warning and our demise as a species. Don’t think I don’t know it. I know, I know.

ISO Bead-Making Friend

Sometimes I get so many e-mails that I go on a little bit of a deleting frenzy and delete important things by accident. Like that e-mail from a few weeks ago from the sweet and lovely reader of this blog who offered to make me a set of prayer beads, who mailed me her photo and was just a doll.

O Sweet Prayer Bead Maker, please forgive me and write to me again! When I get back from my friends’ cabin Canada I will answer you immediately!!

Know Thy Greeters

PeaceBang goes to church, part deux.

I drove into the city today to drop off L’il Flava for her rehearsal at the Paulist Center and had an hour to decide where to attend services myself. After having coffee and a bagel, I stood for awhile in front of the Park Street Church, which identifies as conservative Congregationalist.
I decided I wouldn’t go there, having seen that the sermon topic was something about the Church Fathers. YAWN.
But not only that, I realized that I felt a little fragile this morning, and that I wanted to be sure to go somewhere where the Christian message being offered would not offend my soul. Sometimes I like to worship with conservative churches because I feel I need to know what they’re saying and what kind of spirit they’re raising. Today was not one of those days. I didn’t feel like a confident minister and student of religion.
I felt like a slightly tired, spiritually hungry seeker who just wanted church.
My decision not to go to Park Street reminded me how much of a risk it really is to walk through the doors of any church for the first time. I was doubly glad that almost every Sunday in my own congregation, I greet our guests from the pulpit by expressing just that sentiment, and thanking them for taking that risk.

Next, I walked across the street to the big Tremont Street Baptist Church and asked a man outside if it was an American Baptist congregation. He said that it was. I went inside and saw that I was the only white person around. A woman at a desk in the foyer asked me, “May I help you?” I figured, it’s 10:45 on a Sunday morning, what do you think I came here for? Her question caused about thirty heads to swivel my way, so I lost my nerve and walked out after bidding the woman a good day and kind of waving a pathetic little wave at everyone who was staring at me.

Another learning: I realized that I didn’t have the energy or courage to be the only white woman in the place this morning, that I didn’t like being asked “may I help you?” in a church, and that I didn’t like being stared at. Funny, because there’s a bit sign outside the church that says “First Integrated Congregation in America.” I will certainly take some of those lessons back to my own church. What’s it like to be one of the only brown faces in my own congregation? Do we ever stare like that? Do people ever show up at the door come Sabbath day to be asked, “May I help you?” All worthy questions.

Finally, I walked over to one of our historic Boston churches, which is not just a worshiping community but a tourist site. It was the stroke of 11:00 and there was a sign in front of the church that said, “No Tourists: Worship Service In Progress.” A large man, ostensibly the Church Bouncer, stepped in front of me and blocked the entrance. Perhaps assuming I couldn’t read the sign, he growled, “Are you here for church?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am,” I said. I was dressed in a skirt and sweater; not your usual tourist get-up. The man was a bit non-plussed. “Oh, okay,” he said and stepped aside.

“Listen,” I said to him. “That’s not really the nicest way to greet people for worship, blocking their entrance and interrogating them like that.”

“Well, you try keeping 5,000 tourists out of here on Sunday mornings,” he snarled at me.

“I understand that.” I said. “But it would have been so much nicer if you had said good morning to me and asked me if I would be joining the congregation for worship.”

The man practically spit at me. “Oh, okay. I’ll work on that.”
“You really should work on it, for real,” I said as I walked in to worship with the community, ticked off in the extreme. NICE way to start the worship service. Very pleasant.

I had a lovely little chit-chat with several concerned members of that congregation after the service, and I’m sure Mr. Bouncer won’t be occupying such a prominent place in the doorway come next Sunday morning. Turns out he’s on the church staff and that he’s not well known for his hospitality and people skills. There was a fair amount of hand-wringing about his treatment of me, and I’m sure the good stewards of that church will see to it it doesn’t happen again. Which is to say, if something like that happens to you as a worshiper in any of our churches, please do let us know. We care, and we want to make it right.

This reminds me of a horrible story I heard from two women who came to my church for the first time last spring. They said that they visited one of our very historic UU congregations nearby and that when they introduced themselves as a couple, the greeter said, “People like you usually find that they prefer to attend church in the city.”

Ministers and lay leaders, I recommend that we have a serious start-up every year with our membership committee, greeters and ushers. So much hurt and offense has been caused to sincere seekers from those first encounters. Even perfectly confident, sassy ministers have been hurt by them.

So Many Churches, So Little Time

I’m trying to figure out where to go to church this morning and am fascinated by the fact that none of the websites say anything specific about Sunday services, just general descriptions of what goes on.
Is it too consumeristic to want to know, as a potential visitor, who’s preaching and what they’re preaching about? Even the big, famous churches in the city don’t include this in their websites, which are often huge, confusing affairs with thousands of links.

Good Sabbath, everyone.

PeaceBang Reviews "Casanova"

I saw another “meh” movie last night.

I haven’t seen a film that really shook me to the core for ages, or even one that truly entertained me. It’s getting so that I’m tempted just to pull out old favorites, or even to re-view films that wounded or shocked or thrilled me so deeply I never thought I could see them again (”Breaking the Waves,” “Dead Man Walking,” “Monster,” “Enemies, A Love Story,” “Goodfellas,” “Closer,” and “Titus,” come to mind) just for the experience of being blown away again by film.

“Casanova” stars a yummy Heath Ledger in the title role, a dull and dowdy Sienna Miller as his love interest Francesca Bruni (the famously gaminesque and tarty Miss Miller gained, like five or six pounds for the part, let her eyebrows grow in thick and sported a BROWN WIG over her platinum bob because Francesca’s not supposed to be a great beauty. God, the sacrifice), the ever-sumptuous Lena Olin as Francesca’s mother, Oliver Platt in the rich fat buffoon part, and Jeremy Irons in a red fright wig as the Grand Inquisitor.

Maybe one reason I couldn’t love the film is that I just don’t think you can make comedy out of the Inquisition. I’ve studied it too deeply, and comedic scenes featuring torture never work for me. I turn ice cold.

The director, Lasse Hallstrom (Olin’s husband, for celebrity gossip hounds), obviously adored featuring the splendid city of Venice in this film, and from the DVD extras we learned the entire cast just loved every minute of filming there, despite the obvious challenges of trying to set up dollies on gondolas and such things. I said to L’il Flava, “I think they had more fun making this film than I had watching it.”

In the end, the story wasn’t about much, the farcical conventions were thoroughly unclever, and since neither the screenplay nor the direction provided anything special, there was nowhere for the performances to go.

A pleasant enough diversion, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to look at Heath Ledger for two hours.

"Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality"

I finished reading Restless Souls by Leigh Eric Schmidt a few days ago, having marked it up with many emphatic comments on almost every page.

It was a marvelous book for putting what I see as the current UU crisis of religious identity into perspective, only in that it made me realize that what I see as our downward slide into sloppy, sentimental one-world-religion universalism has older and more specific origins than I had exactly understood. I felt that Schmidt writes with sympathetic appreciation for the earliest proponents of one world religion, but even he couldn’t sell me on it. Not even close. One of my margin comments on Thomas Wentworth Higginson reads “WHITE (LIBERAL) SUPREMACY!”
You know me, always so gentle in my assessments.

The book bills itself as a survey of American spirituality “from Emerson to Oprah,” but it really breezes over the contemporary scene in favor of biographical sketches of the bright lights of 19th century Transcendentalism and universalism. I thought it was a terrific — even fantastic — book for my UU ministerial purposes, but if I had purchased it thinking I would get many insights into spirituality today, I may have been sorely disappointed.

Most upsetting among Schmidt’s many contributions to my understanding was that he thoroughly validated my suspicion that many Unitarians and other liberal religionists actually replaced Jesus as their personal savior with men like Emerson and Whitman. I shook my head with the irony of it. Schmidt left unanswered my perennial question: If Unitarian Universalists today claim that their non-theistic worship is meant to instruct the soul as to “things of worth,” how do they know what is truly worthy? By consulting Emerson and Whitman?
God knows I love me some Ralph Waldo, but I get just as tired as can be when we treat his essays as though they were revealed scripture.

I wound up loving Henry Ware Jr. more than ever after reading this book, and am happy as a clam that I have stacks of obscure articles by him sitting on my reading desk this very moment.

I have a lot more to say about this book but since Philocrites hosted a huge discussion on it awhile ago, I think I’ll go become a barnacle on the side of that boat.

That’s it for the oceanic references for now. BTW, has anyone seen M. Night Shamalongadingdong’s new flick about the sea nymph (excuse me, NAIF) yet? I’d like to go see it but am afraid it will be painfully pretentious. Also, I can’t stand Paul Giamatti. But I love mermaids and myths, so if you saw it and liked it, do tell.