PeaceBang

Pressure To Consume

We are having a HUGE discussion about the meaning of clothing over at Beauty Tips for Ministers, with a guest writer from the South weighing in (nicely) on how misguided I am, and me retorting with much fun and vigor.
It’s a great discussion and you should check it out at http://www.beautytipsforministers.blogspot.com

The Rev. Sean Parker Denison writes that he doesn’t like fashion at all because he sees it as part of a big cultural pressure to consume. I think he’s absolutely right.
However, PeaceBang very secretly thinks that the expectation that all adults (and especially women) in this culture should have — or even should want to have — children is a far more insidious pressure to consume.

When I thumb through the pages of In Style and entertain myself looking at all the goods for sale, it has often occurred to me that considering a new pair of Bandolinos is a lot less of an indulgence than carting myself to Babies ‘R Us and piling my SUV with huge plastic stuff I think my kinder and I need to have.

I remember a female acquaintance who sneered at me when she saw my vanity table full of cosmetics. “Wow,” she said. “Conspicuous consumption, huh?”

And I responded, without missing a beat, “Oh yes. And so much more an expression of consumerism than your living room full of Fisher-Price toys and your entertainment cabinet stocked with 400 Disney videos.”

We stared at each other.
“My child will contribute something to the world,” she said.
“He’ll also consume a tremendous amount of natural resources,” saith I. “And as far as contributing anything, let me interview him in thirty years and give you an objective assessment of his contributions.”

And then I went and petted my lipsticks and said to them, “There, there. The mean lady is all gone now.”

Thanks, Sean, for reminding me of that.

Tragic

We overuse the word “tragedy” in our culture.

When someone dies of cancer, it’s a tragedy.

A storm comes up and sinks a ship, that’s a tragedy.

Someone steals your car with your computer in it, it’s tragic.

You get a terrible haircut with bad bangs, you’ve suffered a tragedy. We all laugh.

But this, this strikes me as a real tragedy: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/LAW/08/17/ramsey.arrest/

Patsy Ramsey, dead two months before her daughter’s murderer finally confesses after a search lasting six years.

Just Thanking You, and More On "BUUdhism"

Dear readers,

I just want to thank you all for reading PeaceBang and for leaving comments, and want to say one more time that I do read every single one of them — even if not as thoroughly as I would like — and am truly grateful that you participate in this little cyber-salon. Thanks for your letters of appreciation and thanks for your comments. I wish I had the time to respond to each one personally.

If you haven’t read Jeff’s latest contribution to the discussion about UUism and Buddhism, do travel back to that post and catch up. He’s writing in all the way from Japan, for heaven’s sake! How cool is that!? He and CK have a terrific exchange here: http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=9873156&postID=115547847777688181

If You Can Follow This, You Get a Gold Star

Let me just say this about romance, because I know whereof I speak.

Many of you have had a First Love, a wild love, a love that tore your heart to shreds and taught you a whole lot of what you needed to know about how hard you can fall and how intensely you can need someone.

Maybe you wound up in the lifetime relationship with that person and they’re sitting on the couch across from you now with their toes all corny and every inch of their body as familiar to you as the cushions on that couch. You love this person dearly but you can’t for the life of you conjure up the initial passion of your first years together. It morphed into something warmer and more solid than the original heartthrob.

Maybe you didn’t end up in a lifetime relationship with that person. If that’s the case, there are two options that can occur when you see them again after some time has passed:
1. You can feel nothing much at all and think, “Wow, that sure was a lot of passion over someone I don’t even feel a twinge for anymore.” Or, conversely, you can think,
2. “Wow, even after all this time there is no question why I was madly in love with this person.”

If it should happen that you feel the second option, (are you still with me?), you have two MORE options from there. You can either think,

1. Dang, this is tragic. I will never love me any honeylamb so much as I loved this big galoot, and now I must plot and connive how to get this babe back in my life.
Or, you can think,
2. Dang, I will never love me any honeylamb the way I loved this big galoot, but you know, we just couldn’t live together, and that’s a fact, Jack.

And you just sit there considering that maybe the essence of spirituality is to let go of creating unnecessary storms in your soul. You could, and you’d have every good reason to, but you decide not to because God has better things for you to do.

If you weren’t able to follow, the moral of the story is just this:

Just because the people on the e-Harmony commercial all got to marry their soulmates doesn’t mean you’ll get to. Sometimes your soulmate (or you) marry someone else, and it’s just fine. Just pack waterproof mascara in case the force of that reality hits you all at once while you’re walking in Times Square.

Night Owls Are Respectable, Too!

Just back from NYC, where I had a lovely time with my Ex and with SisterBang.

I find my mind has slowed a lot, and I’m piecing together my Back To Church Resolutions, the first of which is to try harder not to be a Night Person. I make this resolution every August, and keep it for about twelve days.

Night people are just not as respected in our culture as are Bright Early Morning People, who are automatically assumed to be more together and industrious. My main evidence for this is that the typical working day is 9-5, not 6-2 a.m., which would work a lot better for me. And don’t tell me that the working day is tied to the daylight hours and agriculture or something, because who needs daylight to get their work done anymore? Hardly ANY of us, and I am happy to let them be Morning People.

One of the most sorrowful things about living in the suburbs is that just when I’m ready to start really rolling, everything’s closed and all the good people of suburban America are tucked into their beds watching late night TV. That’s why I need to go to New York every now and then: to be with my peeps who aren’t asleep by the crack of 10:45. In New York, you can get Chinese at 1:00 a.m. and the place is packed.

Most of my family are night owls. Left to our own devices — that is, without the expectation that we’ll be functional in the morning — we will stay up ’til about 2:00 a.m. and sleep until 9 or 10. As a kid I never thought a thing of this. I’d go to the theatre in the summer, do a show, change out of costume and make-up, go out with my pals, and get home at 3 a.m. My mom would be up at the kitchen table, smoking Merritt menthols and writing in her yellow pad. “Hi, sweetie,” she’d say, “How was the show?” Then we’d sit up for another hour while I debriefed her. The world was quiet, I was home safe, and I’d go to bed feeling very wholesome and happy. We’d get up at 11:00 a.m. and never feel like slackers, because we weren’t. We were just night owls.

I have learned since those sweet years that the world generally regards Night Owls as a little bit nefarious, as in “What in the world could you be doing at 2 a.m.?”

You mean aside from dealing crack? Well, let’s see: Reading, cleaning house, doing laundry, planning a sermon or a paper, writing a newsletter column, e-mailing friends or congregants, blogging, petting the cat, cooking for the next day. Gardening (I kid you not. I like to garden at night), playing the banjo.

There’s a lot of neat things you can do at night that aren’t illegal or immoral. I get a tremendous amount of work done between 11 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., but somehow I feel slightly sleazy for admitting that. If you’re not fresh as a daisy by 8:-00 a.m. and admit that you went to sleep at 2:30, most folks will assume you didn’t so much go to sleep as passed out in bed with all your clothes on.

I have NEVER fallen asleep with my clothes on. I sleep only in white pajamas in all white bedding, and no matter how late it is, I always wash my face and moisturize. I am a very wholesome night owl.

I do a very good Fake Awake Voice, of course, as do all professionally successful Night Owls who live in a Morning Person world. I can go from fast asleep to Totally Alert in 0.5 seconds, even poised with pen and paper to take down important information. I may even remember it later.

So on the cusp of another church year, I vow to work harder to alter my circadian rhythms and get to bed by 11:30 and up by 7:30. I always feel more virtuous when I do, like I’m Normal, and although I feel well nigh dead by 4 pm and need a nap (which I never do when I follow my own inner clock), I am bound and determined to be a Morning Person.

My goal is to be up by 7:30 a.m. with all the other Virtuous Normal People, and either work out or spend the next two hours studying and praying. I will do one three days a week and one four days a week.
I will succeed! I can do it! And this year, by the grace of God, I will finally wring the neck of my inner Night Owl!

But not tonight.

PeaceBang’s Jetting Again

I’m off to NYC, with a pit stop at SisterBang’s in Connecticut tonight.

I’ll be seeing this on Tuesday afternoon:

http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/124048

The cow is on hold, but mostly done.

Another County Heard From

Oversoul has some reflections on the Vague Buddhism/Humanist question over at http://rootandsource.blogspot.com/

The Gnostics

As you can read over at BeautyTips, the Gnostics are trying to recruit me.

I read about them over at www.johannite.org and was so ticked off to discover that they have a community in MADRID, SPAIN. I was just in Madrid in January and I am kicking myself to have missed a visit to them. I could have had tapas with the Gnostics, and I didn’t. Curses.

It says on their web site that according to the Vatican, they’re “valid but illicit.” And that’s hot.

In general, though, it’s all too esoteric and fancy for my Puritan little heart. If I get more Witchy and eccentric again in my old age (a definite possibility), I will certainly join their merry band. From what I can tell, they have a fun sense of humor and drama, and some of their priests are babes. Also, some of them have an actual communal plan for solvency in old age, and I think that’s terrific. The way I feel now in the UU fold, it’s every man or woman for himself and no one in my geographic area (where housing costs are statospheric and will certainly stay that way for the forseeable future) has a specific plan for how to maintain a decent standard of living beyond retirement. They’re all too busy scrambling like I am to contribute to their 403Bs to assure that they themselves don’t wind up in some rat hole.

Plus, if I affiliate with the Gnostics I can be Christian AND outlaw, which really appeals to me.

Jeff Wilson On "Vague Buddhism"

PeaceBangers, I’m very excited to highlight for you this wonderful and informed comment on the subject of “Vague Buddhism” by Jeff Wilson, weighing in on the subject from Kyoto!!

Hi there, this is Jeff Wilson writing from Kyoto. I’ve been researching this subject for several years and could provide a lot of info, but unfortunately since I’m in Japan until November I can’t really do so at this point.

Suffice it to say that Buddhism is a major source for contemporary UU sermons, meditation manuals, and adult RE activities. It also shows up in our Sunday School materials. Most often, it is Thich Nhat Hanh (originally from Vietnam, but living in France for many decades at this point) or the Dalai Lama who are referenced, or some (often uncredited) “Zen master” from ancient or modern China, Japan, or even the USA. These are the Buddhist thinkers/traditions that are most assimilated to upper-middle class American culture, so it’s no real surprise their adapted versions of Buddhism appear in our pulpits etc most often.

I have recorded not dozens, but hundreds of instances of UU sermons in the past several years that draw on Buddhism in some form. In some churches the ministers are personally interested in Buddhism (either as a meditation practice or a way of thinking) and it is virtually impossible NOT to hear about Buddhism on any given Sunday. I’m talking abstractly here but actually I could name names very easily.

I myself do not go in for the “vague Buddhism” of UUism. I prefer my Buddhism to be Buddhism, which is why I mainly go to actual Buddhist temples on Sunday morning (my form of Buddhism is more devotional than most and is universalistic in attitude: i.e. it is about expressing gratitude since Amida Buddha liberates beings without exception). When I go to UU churches I seek out those that do not contain vague Buddhism. I prefer my UU churches to be actually churchy, to tell the truth.

That said, however, I’m not really down on vague UU Buddhism. I don’t mind too much the appropriation of Buddhism by UUs. I do just wish people would take it more seriously if they’re going to do it, to really think through what they are taking, what they are leaving out, and what justifies their appropriations (as well as investigating why they think some things should be left out–UUs always talk about getting rid of the “cultural baggage” of Asian Buddhism, which strikes me as flat-out racist in many cases). And this is not meant to harsh on the many UUs who are deeply involved in a real Buddhist tradition and have demonstrated self-reflexivity. I think someone mentioned James Ford, I would definately count him in this latter group.

I am slowly collecting material for a forthcoming (academic) book on UUism and Buddhism. The thesis will argue that in the nineteenth century there was a net movement of ideas from Unitarianism into Asian Buddhism, especially Japanese Buddhism. Japanese Buddhists even proposed a merger of Unitarianism and Buddhism as a new religion of the future, but Unitarians balked because they considered themselves part of the Christian tradition. The middle of the book charts Unitarianized Japanese Buddhism’s subsequent success in America, where it was perceived as authentic, original Buddhism rather than a pre-packaged, post-contact liberalized modern Buddhism. The final argument of the book is that by the end of the 20th century and into the 21st the arrow of influence had decisively changed, so that now there is a net movement of influence from Buddhism into UUism.
In part, I argue that this 180 change comes because UUism lost much of its willingness to remain in the Christian fold and, lacking a central focus, eventually became available for infiltration (not used in a judgmental way, please note) by alternative forms of religion with more positive associations in liberal circles, such as Buddhism.

This comment may be too long or inappropriate for this forum. I apologize. But I have to warn you, debates about UU vague Buddhism are potential fodder for my work! Random note: Peacebang, if you haven’t seen www.uglydress.com, you might find it amusing based on your Beauty Tips blog. “

PeaceBang here again, thanking Jeff for his wonderful contribution to this discussion. Jeff, godspeed in Kyoto (what are you doing there?) and we’ll all look forward to reading your book when it’s published. Very exciting work, and we’re grateful for your research and your insights!

thanks

Everybody’s writing tips are very good. I am taking a break from the cow, though, because it just got to be too much, and it doesn’t need to be.

I’m taking what I call a “normal person’s weekend,” a rare opportunity for clergy. Going to see The Temptations on the Esplanade tonight and heading to my sister’s tomorrow evening, then NYC for a couple of nights.

Trying not to get too upset about Mom planning to head to London on Tuesday.

I did open the box for the new printer. So that’s a start.