PeaceBang

"When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts"

I saw most of this Spike Lee documentary the other night on HBO. If you get a chance, I hope you’ll see it.
The way I felt watching it reminded me of the way I feel when Lena Horne sings “Stormy Weather” in her “Lena Horne: A Lady And Her Music” Broadway recording. Something about the beauty in righteous rage that makes you cry and feel hopeful all at once. I can’t really explain it, but please see it if you can.

Here’s an interview with Lee:

http://tinyurl.com/yfogc4

‘Tis the Season For Terminal Uniqueness

It’s one of those seasons (Easter is the other one) when Unitarian Universalists are most prone to practice extreme Terminal Uniqueness in their worship and conversations:

“People say that Jesus was the Son of God, but UUs believe that…”

“Advent is a time when Christians wait for the coming of the Christ child. But for Unitarian Universalists…”

“Jewish people celebrate the festival of lights, Hanukah, this month. UU’s don’t believe in miracles, but…”

This Advent season, I’m making it a point to try to avoid this kind of phrase, believing as I do that if Unitarian Universalism is to survive the coming century, it will do so not by making its exclusive brand more appealing to the masses (”The Uncommon Denomination!”) but by moving beyond its stifling isolationism into a more ecumenical position in our culture. No matter how far we have moved from our Christian origins, our theological heritage is in liberal and heretical Christianity. We are still unmistakably culturally Christian in our forms of worship, our congregational structure, and our theological identity (how can you tell? If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be fighting so hard against it).

Whether or not we can move into a more inter-faith position in our culture is not only up to us but up to the faithful of other world religions, who may know of our desire to be regarded as their spiritual kin, but may or may not appreciate our dabbling in their prayers and practices.

Unitarian Universalist questions about the existence of God, the relative “divineness” of Jesus, the divine spark in humankind (is it in everyone? Is it in Hitler and the BTK and Saddam Hussein?), the afterlife, the integrity of the Church, the worth of the Bible, the efficacy of prayer, and how to square scientific knowledge of the material world with mystical intuitions of the spiritual realm, are shared by practically every non-fundamentalist religious person in our midst. Yet we persist — especially this time of year — in acting as though these questions are unique to us, examining commonplace theological questions with a gee-whiz naivete, as though we were the first to think of them.

Is this really the best way to minister to our faithful? Yes, it may appeal to those who are walking through the door for the first time (”Wow! I’ve never heard this suggested out loud in a church before!”), but it does not give much spiritual sustenance to those who are beyond the negations of their old traditions and seeking a faith based in affirmation.

Unitarian Universalists are not the only religious people who doubt very much that a virgin got pregnant by the Holy Spirit approximately nine months ago, that angels visited shepherds the night he was born, and that a star shone in the East that beckoned Wise Men to bring gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They are not the only ones who mostly don’t believe that God literally filled the lamp of the Maccabees with oil to last the eight days it took to reconsecrate the Temple. Our religious heritage has so much more to offer than dismantling Bible stories, kicking at christology and debunking miraculous tales.

This holiday season, I hope we will seek not so much to take our place outside the religious world as gadflies and myth-busters but as weavers of an especially strong and beautiful vision within the religious world.

“Don’t be cynical, Algy. It’s perfectly easy to be cynical.”
– from “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Oscar Wilde

THIS’ll Preach

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1413.html

Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. And there I was thinking that our own Richard Gilbert originated the phrase, “Practicing the Scales of Rejoicing!”

Google is a wondrous thing.

Was Isaac Watts a Proto-Unitarian Type?

Hey, brainiac history types, help me out here.

I read that Isaac Watts’ father was a non-conforming minister in England, and that Isaac served an Independent congregation in the mid-17th century.

So what are we saying here? I know I can look this up and that I should, but I’m planning services right now and don’t have the time. However, I want to preach on “Joy To the World” and to remember with my congregation the year that we accidentally included this verse in the Christmas Eve program:

“No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found!”

My church secretary and I were dying when we found the error and dying when we caught each other’s eyes at the service that night.
Not only is it, um, unusual theology for us, that phrase “He comes to make his blessings flow” confuses people musically at first, so the whole thing is rather a train wreck.

“I wrote many hymns, and I had pretty wigs.”

"Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith"

The cat was acting very strangely this morning, slinking around with a worried expression on her face and acting like the place was full of land mines. I would have put more consideration into her strange behavior but I was preoccupied by the fact that there was no hot water, and I was running late for church. So after accusing her of being quite the eccentric girl I kissed her goodbye and thought no more about it.

When the sexton and I discovered about 18″ of water in the basement later this afternoon, the cat’s behavior was suddenly comprehensible. Now I have to wonder what she thought of me when I had sniffed the musty air like a total dolt, murmuring “Gee, what’s that damp smell?” I’m sure I’ll find the little kitty-cat sized evacuation rowboat around here someday.

Anyway, that’s how I came to read Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith this afternoon: I couldn’t very well study for exams or write my newsletter column or make phone calls while the plummer was here and intermittently chatting with me, could I?

I really love Barbara Brown Taylor’s writing, but here’s the thing: she has always irked me as she thrilled me. Know why? Because she always seemed so damned holy I wanted to pinch her. No matter how much I loved the ministry, she loved it more, and in more exquisitely articulate terms. No matter how much I loved God, Barbara Brown Taylor had a much sexier, more intimate thing going with God. No matter how many insights I gained from the Bible, I could never be nearly as insightful about it as Barbara Brown Taylor was. No matter how deep my encounters with parishioners, she always had much more death-defying, tears-inducing stories to relate.

Remember in “The Brady Bunch” when Jan has that little middle child fit and says, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!!” Remember that?
I began to have that middle child tantrum in my mind every time I read something of Barbara Brown Taylor’s:
“Barbara, Barbara, Barbara!”

Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, the story of Taylor’s total burn-out from the parish ministry was therefore somewhat of a strange relief, and I don’t mean that in an unkind way. I mean that I somehow knew it was coming. As holy as she seemed to be, and as gorgeous her prose, Barbara Brown Taylor never seemed to have any real fun with her work, and that spelled doom to me.

This is a beautifully written book, but as dressed up as it is with deep insights and memorable phrases, it’s still just a book about extreme clergy burn-out. It seems to me that she almost could have left this topic well enough alone. I sense a contrived quality to her writing here that is totally absent in her other books and articles, suggesting to me that this was not the book Taylor so much wanted and needed to write, but felt she owed her readers by way of explanation.

You didn’t owe us that, Barbara.

I am no longer jealous of Barbara Brown Taylor. It is clear to me that her perfection as a writer had a clear parallel in her perfectionism as a parish priest, and no one can bear the burden of such perfectionism and stay juicy and vital enough to do the work. Parish ministers, read this book and let it be a cautionary tale against taking yourself and your work too seriously, trying to be holy rather than whole, and allowing your collar to strangle you.

More on "Vague Buddhism"

http://peacebang.blogspot.com/2006/08/humanism-or-vague-buddhism-part-ii_10.html

Thanksgiving Scenes 2006 Casa De PeaceBang

The First Happy Meal

I forgot to tell you…!

A member of my congregation came up to me at coffee hour on Sunday and said that she had had one of those very weird flu-induced dreams, the kind where you’re sort of feverish and definitely flying out in Weirdoland. I said, Oh goodie, because I’m a champion weird dreamer myself and I knew she’d have something hysterical. I remember taking Nyquil in college and getting so tripped out I would actually sleepwalk.

So Joanne (who happily gave me permission to post this) said that she had a very vivid dream where she was viewing the Last Supper from a kind of cinematic vantage point, and just as she was realizing and appreciating what she was looking at, the perspective “pulled away” and she could see that the meal was taking place at a McDonald’s!!

And then she heard an announcer’s voice say, “THE FIRST HAPPY MEAL.”

We both cracked up over that, of course. My god, the ultimate product placement! I said, “Was Jesus eating a quarter-pounder with cheese?” She thought not. I’ll have to ask her if we can do a Fries Communion at Easter.
I think we’re going to get a lot of mileage out of this one!

Too funny. Dreams are such strange things.

Happy Thanksgiving

massasoit
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I have started to set the tables, and am finalizing the menu. All shopping is done. My friends arrive on Wednesday and Thursday. Some pies are being baked tomorrow, and the trifle assembled. Some pies arrive with friends on Thursday evening.

The wine is chilling, the guest rooms ready.

I wish you all a beautiful holiday with people you love, a lush harvest table set before you, a grateful heart, and a solemn remembrance how it all began. Love. Peace. Bang.

(Personal: Hey honey, will you remember to bring the carving knife? xoxo Your TGF)

More Thoughts On Blogging, Written Under The Influence of Benadryl

Chalice Chick wrote in a comment that she wishes that the tone over at Beauty Tips could be more sedate, while the tone over here at PeaceBang be more outright sassy.

CC, that was very sweet, and your observations are always valuable to me, since I love your own “voice” over at Chalice Chick.

As I indicated in one of my recent posts, I’m fascinated by the blogging phenomenon as a whole. I’m fascinated by the interplay of “real life” with blogging personae, and by the community that gets formed, sustained, evaluated and re-evaluated on our blogs and in the comments.

I was quite naive when I began blogging, thinking that perhaps 15-20 people were reading my reflections. Back then, I thought of PeaceBang as a kind of journal that a few folks might have some interest in eavesdropping on, as it were. I dove into on-line controversies with total passion, ranting away as I would at a dinner table conversation where all parties, whatever their differences, are on the same basic playing field and really, no harm done however hot the disagreements.

My full and fulfilling life at church and my relationship with my family and friends has always been the Big Story, with my social life and theatre and music involvements and pathetic attempts to date and happy travel adventures and civic involvements secondary. My blogging and on-line stuff was a very tiny part of that second tier of what we broadly call Life. I let it rip with abandon, adopting a very sassy on-line persona, never realizing that many people would actually come to think that they know me because of reading my words as PeaceBang.

I soon realized that in some strange way, I was developing a real relationship with strangers in the blogosphere who, to be fair, did know me on some level, albeit a limited and somewhat contrived one.

I came to realize that although all of us in the blogging community had LOTS else going on in our lives, and although all of us had far more to us than our blog entries could ever begin to reveal, this was becoming a community for me (of course, it *had already been* a community for many). I navigated my way through it with increasing respect for its complexity, for the ways it might actually contribute to our individual and denominational deepening, and for the fact that I was getting a lot more than 15-20 readers a day. Both Scott Wells and Chris Walton pretty much had to bonk me over the head to make me realize that a LOT more than 15 or 20 of my friends were tuning into PeaceBang. I denied that fact for a long time.

By the time I started Beauty Tips, I realized that to be true to the relationship that you and I were forming, I would have to reign in the enormity of the PeaceBang persona over here in order to reflect more of the truth of who I am, which is actually not Cotton Mather or Auntie Mame, but just me. I wanted to share my spiritual practices and inner thoughts about the arts of ministry here, and to not rant so much, because ranting is tiring when you feel that everything you write should be at that level of drama and provocation.

The voice I use over at Beauty Tips is ENORMOUS, OVER-THE-TOP and basically nuts. It’s the theatre me, the cackling hysterically at a party with my friends me, the extravagant “DARLING” me, the Auntie Mame and talent agent and diva me I never got to be because I chose ministry. I let this part of me have total freedom over at Beauty Tips, because it’s a perfect subject area within which to let that big, campy theatrical persona flourish. I have *so much fun* doing it, I really do care about the subject matter, and I’m thrilled that others are having fun with it.

When I got the call from the Boston Globe reporter, I knew it was time to really get clear on the purposes of these blogs, and to get them ready for “prime time,” just in case. I know these latest reflections may have read as self-indulgent to some of you, but when I think about my blogs, this is where I do it; at the keyboard, with you.

I thank you for your loyalty and appreciation.