PeaceBang

Single Girls’ Friday Night and Fave New Blog

I had one of those frustrating single girl days today where I really wanted to take a whole day off and do something purely fun, but no one called and no one seemed to be around (I’m almost always the one to generate social plans, to be honest, and I get tired of it), so I went into the city in an effort to get some space in my head that isn’t occupied by work and school. I’m rather anxious about the holiday at church for some reason (probably because there’s Sunday, 12/23 to prepare and the next day is the big production of Christmas Eve). I have two papers due before December 18th. I’m keynoting a church retreat in January — those lectures loom — and am guest preaching for two different congregations in the next months. There’s a christening to think about, too, which I’m doing in three weekends for the daughter of good friends. And a holiday concert with Sweet the Sound that same weekend for which I need to prepare (and attend two rehearsals).

In my quest to shake some new thoughts into my brain, I went to the Massachusetts Historical Society’s book sale only to find that there were only about 20 books for sale. BIG disappointment. For some reason I had envisioned a huge used book sale and hours of happy browsing. I ate some dinner next door at a Thai joint and then walked to look at the decorations at the Prudential Center.

I sat for awhile at Barnes & Noble and read and drank a latte. Restless, lonesome, pathetic. I hate nights like that. I hate that no one talks to strangers. I hate observing human relationships from a distance when everyone seems paired up with friends or family but me. I hate conducting important relationships mostly over the phone. I hate standing on the outskirts of family life looking in, trying to respect everyone’s privacy and need to cocoon with their own. New England is a very invitation-only culture: other places I’ve lived we always had a much more open door policy with friends stopping by and no need to schedule and plan, plan, plan. Not here, though. Here it’s all about getting on each other’s calendars. Things are much more structured; it makes me want to tear my hair out sometimes and wander sobbing through the woods. I have too much pride to call friends and say, “WHATCHYA DOING? CAN I PLEASE COME OVER?” but this isn’t getting any easier with age. A girl doesn’t want to have to have a dinner party or organize a potluck or restaurant outing every time she wants some company, but sometimes it feels like it. Thank God for other single friends who understand. I live in fear that every last one of them will find a Significant Other and it will be me alone, driving around on a Friday night chatting up the baristas at Starbucks just to have someone to talk to.

Please, please don’t write to me and tell me that even married and partnered people get lonely. I know they do. But I don’t want to hear it, because it’s not the same, okay?

When I got home my friend Sari had sent me a link to a beautiful blog called The Daily Coyote. The author lives in a one-room cabin in Wyoming with her cat, Eli and a coyote named Charlie whom she rescued when he was ten days old. It’s so beautiful and it makes me think gee, that’s a romantic and gorgeous life out there but I’m such an extrovert I’d be miserable living like that. If I’m howling at the moon on a Friday night because I can’t find enough human interaction in the city of Boston, can you imagine me in a one-room cabin with a coyote and a cat?

Still, I love the opportunity to read about it, and to peek into that kind of simplicity and peace.

This is Charlie. We love him.

Friday Puppy Blogging

Meet Arden, SisterBang’s mini-dachsund puppy. HER EYES ARE OPEN!

*snerf, snerf*

Thursday Night, 10:30 pm Cat Blogging

I come home from a late night pre-Christmas confab with my Music Director and see Ermengarde’s love-lorn boyfriend, a fat orange cat named Brinks, outside the kitchen window. I kind of love Brinks. He’s huge and fluffy and he’s a sweet preppy guy you can imagine serving you and g & t on the boat. If he was a human he’d be wearing Docksiders and a polo shirt. I like his people, too, but they live across the street and it’s a busy street, so I worry that Brinks is gonna get creamed traipsing over here to serenade my girl. Who isn’t even a girl since she was spayed long ago. She must still has some mojo, I guess, because Brinks is always over here trying to persuade her to sneak out the window and go on dates with him.

So there’s the fluffy guy in the driveway and I see Erm in the window all bristly and upset and I go inside to talk her down. She has Puff Tail and she’s kind of hyperventilating and gasping. As you may recall, she has asthma so this is not cool. I take a broom outside and fake-whack Brinks and he scuttles away, guilty as sin. “Do you want to kill your girlfriend!” I yell at his retreating back.

Then, inside. Me to the cat: “Now, listen. You need to learn to handle the neighborhood boys better than this. Look at you, all hysterical. He’s not going to do anything to you, he just likes to check you out through the window. {pet, pet} You’d better calm down. Stop being such a spoiled princess. Other cats live on the planet, too, you know. And soon you’re going to have a new doggie cousin who isn’t much bigger than you, and you’re going to have to get along with her.”

And then just because I don’t have kids and I never get to say this, “If you don’t behave yourself, SANTA IS NOT GOING TO LEAVE YOU ANYTHING IN YOUR STOCKING!”

It was kind of fun, actually. She does have her own stocking, of course. She’s received two from members of my congregation and one has her whole name on it in perfect little felt letters. E-R-M-E-N-G-A-R-D-E. It’s that cute, too, hanging in the parlor over the fireplace.

I put the candles in the windows tonight and I swear that’s all the energy I have for Christmas decorating this year. I have never been so not in the spirit of the season. Maybe something magical will happen on the first Sunday of Advent. I’m hoping.

The Story of Carlton Pearson

You might remember this story about the charismatic pastor Carlton Pearson who got slain by the Holy Spirit one night and became a universalist.

I’m preaching on the free and responsible search for truth and meaning this Sunday and listening to his story on This American Life at Panera and trying not to cry. My sermon is called “The Free, Responsible (And Sometimes Shocking) Search for Truth and Meaning.”

I was doing okay not bawling until I hear a recording of Pearson reading some Scripture (I John, 2) to his congregation and when
he says, in a voice full of passionate intensity and love “Listen to this, babies,” I lose it.
Napkins! Napkins!

To think of being named an actual heretic in this day and age. Heart-wrenching.

(It’s a real shame that the reporter doesn’t seem to have the vaguest clue about Universalism — it’s a serious and seriously upsetting omission — when he means Universalists he says “Unitarians” (as in “The Unitarians stopped believing in Hell a long time ago). He also mistakenly reports that the United Church of Christ is “the only denomination that accepts gay marriage.” )

Better Get To Livin’

I saw this video on Jezebel last night and almost keeled over with delight.

Check it out, and share it with your favorite Female Negativo, ’cause that’s what Dolly would want!

Dolly and Amy Sedaris, brazilliant.

Fourth Principle: Free and Responsible Search For Truth and Meaning

I am working on a sermon on the fourth UU Principle: “we covenant to affirm and promote…A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

In agreement with Paige Getty’s fine essay on the principle in the new collection, The Seven Principles in Word and Worship, I am focusing on Unitarian Universalism’s love of freedom in religious inquiry and practice but lack of understanding or agreement about what constitutes “responsible.”

In the older six principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the free search for truth and meaning was the first principle. It read,

To strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship.

Now isn’t that interesting? What I love there is the use of the word “disciplined,” which, to my ears, rings with a kind of integrity and commitment that the murkier “responsible” does not evoke.

For those who see UUism as a smorgasbord of world religions, this seems a particularly important principle. For instance, how do we “responsibly” or in a disciplined way engage with Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Sufism, Native Americans spirituality in our congregations and as individuals? Is it responsible for me to include a Muslim reading in worship? I like to think so. However, it is important for me to take responsibility for the fact that many Muslims would vehemently disagree with me. Therefore, as part of my religious discipline I am obligated to study and try to understand more about the various religions I am quoting or referencing of a Sunday morning beyond convenient “we are the world” sentimentalism.

It’s hard work. And it’s work we don’t do well enough.

It seems to me that UUs have yet to acknowledge the fact that while we have made it our “good news” to affirm and proclaim the essential harmony between world faith traditions, we have done so with little or no input or consultation with adherents of those faith traditions. We therefore operate on the assumption that religions “belong” to everyone and anyone who wants to claim them. I wish this was so, but it is not. Religions can only be responsibly understood in their time, place and cultural context. If we want to be a world religion religion, we must take the study of them far more seriously and make education in world religions a staple of our adult religious education offerings. I know that some congregations do this, but not many. Nor has the UUA provided curriculum to help with this knowledge deficit.

While much of the religious world is entering into dialog based on an assumption that the specificity of tradition means something real which no parties to the conversations desire to minimize or ignore, Unitarian Universalist liturgical materials are still a happy mash-up of phrases, readings and sound bites taken entirely out of a context we neither have the time nor the interest to fully study. Our worshipers go away with the sense that we are a delightful Chinese buffet of beliefs respectfully culled from all the world traditions. It would be more honest to say that we have rather taken attractive bits and pieces from various traditions and employed them in the service of our liberal vision.

Is this wrong, unethical, and sinister, as our opponents charge? Or is it merely optimistic, creative, and charmingly anachronistic?

For all the Unitarian Universalists out there who define our faith tradition as a kind of new world religion among world religions, how can we responsibly theologically educate the next generation of UUs (both youth and come-outers) to participate in that vision?

I ask because I do not see UUism as a world religion, but as an essentially humanistic religious community that gathers in covenanted community to do the work of individual and societal transformation guided by its foundational liberal Christian values, more contemporary Humanist wisdom and the theological insights of various world religions. The insights of various world religions, in my opinion, comes primarily from serious students and practitioners of those world religions, not from the general UU community.

I’ll stop there and let you comment.

Ready to Love Again

Doesn’t that sound like some kind of corny Lifetime movie channel thing?

Which reminds me of one of my favorite true stories. Some years ago I was on a fun weekend outing in Williamsburg, VA with Scott Wells (TheBoyInTheBands) and we were in our hotel room unpacking. We turned on the television set and ignored it while we chatted and put our things away. At some point I asked, “What channel is this, anyway?” And Scott replied, “Oh, it’s probably Lifetime Channel or something.” “Naw,” I said. “If it was Lifetime it would be a movie about Mare Winningham as an abused wife fleeing her sociopathic husband.” Scott grabbed the remote control and turned on the volume just in time to hear the actor on screen say in a sinister fashion to another actor, “Are you insinuating the I BEAT MY WIFE?” Moments later, Mare Winningham came on screen. We laughed so hard I threw my back out.

ANYWAY, Ready To Love Again isn’t a Lifetime channel movie. It’s SisterBang’s excitement over this little gal born on November 10th:

Some people say when their dog dies that they can never have another dog because it hurts too much to lose the first one. I can understand that, and I respect it. But SisterBang and I both feel that doggies need loving people to care for them and that if you’ve made room in your life for a dog, it’s a wonderful thing to just keep welcoming them for as long as you can, if you can. Gordon was such an extension of SisterBang’s life — the rhythms of her days and weekends were synced to his needs. They were a team. Watching him decline from a robust, shiny-coated canine stud to a deaf and blind, winter-faced, creaky old gentleman was very hard on both of them. He was such a good boy, pushing himself to stay active and to engage with her until he was just too sick to do so. It hurt her terribly to watch him suffer. She will miss him always.

But all kinds of dogs need homes, and SisterBang has been talking to breeders of miniature dachsunds for some time now in preparation for the time she would no longer have Gordon (who was a shelter dog). She may be going to get this pup in February and I’m so happy for both of them. Look at those ear buds! And just imagine the puppy smell.

Wouldn’t it be great if the love between humans was so pure and uncomplicated that, after the loss of one relationship we would feel bruised but immediately ready to love someone again? Cripes, I didn’t dare date for about 6-7 years after the end of my last terrible, tumultuous relationship with a man who turned out to be a pathological liar and a cheating skunk. I figured if my judgment had been that poor (couldn’t have been worse unless it had been a Lifetime Channel character), I shouldn’t trust myself to fall in love with anyone. I haven’t since, and that little debacle was over in 1997. But there’s no need to do that with dogs. Dogs don’t have baggage — if you love them enough and can devote enough time to them, you’re pretty much guaranteed a true romance.

The Fabulous Booger Boys

The funniest thing is that the cat was really confused by these two. I don’t think she has ever encountered children before. She hid so well I couldn’t find her for the life of me, but every night when the boys were in bed she’d come creeping down the stairs, sniffing where they’d been, trying to figure it all out, bristling slightly. When the car pulled out of the driveway today I heard a strange crinkling sound in my study and walked in to find her extricating herself from behind a file box and a stack of books, carefully, stealthily, as though coming out of hiding from marauding vandals.

Well, everyone, we made it though another Thanksgiving. Tired preachers, my thoughts and prayers are winging their way to you as you tie up preparations for tomorrow morning. We have a Youth Service tomorrow at our church, and I look forward to it.

Actually, after a few days of almost purely domestic focus I am really eager to get back to the work of ministry without having residual turkey anxiety flying around in my brain. I still have a few loads of laundry to do (bed linens and towels) but most of the dishes and pots and pans, thank the good Lord, are done and put away. Most of the leftovers have been et (and some packed up to send with the boys to SisterBang, the next stop on their whirlwind holiday tour), and the cat and I are going to head to bed early.

(By the way, remember the movie “The Fabulous Baker Boys” starring Jeff and Beau Bridges? That’s the inspiration for my brother’s fond renaming of his two little dudes. Thanks to Michael Hammond for the adorable photos, taken yesterday at a playground in Holbrook, MA )

Gordon, R.I.P.

Gordon, Gorgonzola, Dr. Smoothenstein, Dordy, who died today at noon, we will always love you.

(Halloween 2006. “Pleashe remove this ridiuloush hat as shoon as poshible. Itsh not a good shtyle for me at all.”)

Thank you for the being the best, the handsomest, the sweetest, the most velvety-eared, most loyal, precious dog in the world. Thank you for being my sister’s canine familiar, therapist, beloved companion, wing man, and best four-legged friend for over a decade. Thanks for being there at all times and in all seasons. We thank God for you.

I’m so grateful that you won’t suffer any more, but we sure will miss you. Say hello to Dukey and Pippin and Henry and Trilby and Buster for us. Great spirits, all. Dearly beloved and sorely missed.

Big hugs to Aunt Kiki. As Lucas said just now to me (as I sit here typing and crying) with that special tilt of his head and in his typically dulcet toddler tones, “DON’T BE SA-AD!”

Happy Thanksgiving

Before

After. And that’s what it’s all about. For one day, at least.