PeaceBang

Excellent Book for Training Pastoral Associates

It has been a real joy to train our first group of Pastoral Caregivers at my church. As I prepare to go on sabbatical, it means the world to have a terrific team of lay pastors to “walk the parish” and to make calls and visits on behalf of the church. We introduced them to the congregation this past Sunday and will do a formal Commission in the fall.

But for now, I just want to share that although I read a ton of books in preparation for the training sessions, and have taken many classes, seminars and workshops on pastoral care, I found this book to be the best guide of all in organizing our sessions.

A Pastor In Every Pew: Equipping Laity For Pastoral Care by Leroy Howe. I just think that, chapter for chapter, Howe’s book is the most conversant with the realities of pastoral caregiving, that it anticipates all the most significant questions and anxieties that arise for laypeople learning to do pastoral care, and that, although written from a strictly Christian perspective, it is the most useable for Unitarian Universalists.

It looks like ChristianBook.com has them on sale.

Four stars and two thumbs up!

Shopping For Religion

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe seems surprised — or maybe discomfited would be a better word– to learn that Americans these days go shopping for their religion.

She cites a recent study by the Pew Forum that reports that 44% of Americans have left their religion of origin and are presumably currently unaffiliated or out shopping for a better fit. Of course Unitarian Universalists have known this for a long time. The overwhelming majority of Unitarian Universalists are “come-outers” from other faith traditions and have been for decades. Both Philocrites and Dan at Yet Another Unitarian Universalist have more to say on the number of Americans identifying as UU. Do read Philocrites, and the comments. They’re very provocative and will lead you to the link for Dan’s blog, and to Ms. Theologian’s excellent (if depressing for this minister) entry about why she doesn’t go to church.

So where are the 400,000 Americans who identify as Unitarian Universalist but who never appear in our churches or fellowships? Out golfing or in bed reading the NY Times? Shopping, doing errands, catching up with family, cleaning house? Disappointed in our too often uninspiring, cliquish, self-congratulatory, sloppy worship services? Working their second job? Intimidated or put-off by our snobbery and haughty liberalism? Offended by the wide gap between who we claim to be on paper (or on the internet) and who we are in person? Sure. I have no doubt that we’re guilty of losing many, many members for our most besetting sins. But there’s also our laissez-faire attitude toward membership, joining, and commitment to spiritual growth that leaves us bereft of many folks who desire a deep and demanding religious life. We’re getting a lot better at lifting up the virtues of community along with the sanctity of the Individual, and that helps. Many of our congregations are putting membership processes in place that appeal to the “joiner” in people who find that, contrary to what they believed about themselves, they do crave a serious and intentional bond of fellowship with other seekers. Also good.

But since we’re still allergic to evangelism, and because our ad campaigns and too many of our members and our outdated promotional pamphlets and books still frame us as the alternative TO religion, we’re bound to stay teensy beensy. If there are so many interesting, intellectually provocative, or just relaxing alternatives to religion that I can do on my own, why in the world would I join a congregation or church so that I can pledge my money to, give my volunteer hours to, and send my children to Sunday School (or religious education) an institution that is still trying to convince the world that it’s a legitimate religious institution … but not really religious?

Is this, for example, really the best statement we can make to seekers who want to know who we are religiously? Why wouldn’t I just spend the afternoon at Barnes & Noble skimming through the religion section if that’s all these people are offering? I can sit in a comfy chair and sip coffee while I’m doing it, too!

Somewhere God is laughing.

Mark Bittman’s Meatloaf Recipe: Super Huge, Fat Thumbs Up

Please allow me to share with you the most delicious meatloaf recipe I have EVER used. Vegetarians, my apologies for what is to follow.

Mark Bittman’s Meatloaf Recipe
from How To Cook Everything

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup plain bread crumbs, preferably fresh
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 pounds mixed ground meats: beef, veal, lamb, and/or pork (I used half pork and half beef)
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
• 5-6 crumbled, dried fresh sage leaves or 1 tsp dried (I used about six dried leaves from last summer’s garden & I think it was the winning ingredient)
• 1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 small onion minced
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 3 slices bacon optional but good, especially if the meat is very lean

What’s Next:

1. Preheat the oven to 350. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk until the milk is absorbed, about 5 minutes.
2. Mix together all ingredients except bacon. Shape the meat into a loaf in a baking pan (I baked it on a rack to keep it from soaking in its own fat); top with bacon if you like ( I did).
Bake 60 minutes, basting occasionally with rendered pan juices. When done, meat loaf will be lightly browned and firm, and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of a meat loaf will read 160 F, cook for 1 hr.

I made this for dinner tomorrow night but of course SweetieBang and I had to “sample it.” We had to wrap it in foil immediately and treat it like plutonium because it was so heavenly delicious we knew it wouldn’t last the night if we left it on the counter for one more second.

Yes, I’m still on Weight Watchers. Yes, this is one big fat and cholesterol bomb. But dern it, a gal likes to make a big ole meat loaf now and then, and we’ve been all about big salads and roasted vegetables and small portions of pasta for weeks (except for that one Oscar night pu pu platter situation).

Liberals Should Not Be Dissin’ Hope: Ugly Moments From the Campaign Trail

I’m sure you’ve seen the clip of Hillary Clinton at a recent rally in Providence, RI, looking like a big, angry bumblebee in a yellow and black outfit, throwing her hands in the air and dramatically mocking the hope and change message of Barack Obama’s campaign. In the most acid, bitter tones and with a face twisted in an expression of total disgust, Hill (badly) mimics the stance and cadences of an African-American preacher as she describes “the heavens opening up” and a bolt of lightning coming down to save the world — or some equally dramatic rhetoric that is supposed to express her utter contempt for Barack Obama’s naivete and inexperience.
She concludes by saying, “But WE KNOW HOW HARD THIS IS GOING TO BE.” And that is supposed to make me feel that she, rather than Obama, is the leader I want.

Instead, it makes me loathe her, and I have never loathed Hillary Clinton before.

I’ve seen the spot several times now and my blood pressure goes up every time (good thing I’m usually on the treadmill at the gym when it happens).

It is one thing to mock someone’s specific policy ideas. It is one thing to exchange harsh words about past voting records, hypocrisies on substantive issues, unethical behavior with lobbyists, and political choices you feel your opponent has screwed up. It is another thing entirely to express total contempt and disgust that your opponent has managed to inspire HOPE among a significant portion of the population, and to make that mere fact the focus of your ire. Especially now. Especially now.

I can’t think of a worse misstep for a liberal politician to make, because liberal ideals are, at their very essence, intimately tied to hope and vision. I know that Senator Clinton is no progressive, but for her to throw her arms around in an (perhaps unconsciously) racist parody of the preaching tradition of the Black Church (remember, she was specifically mocking Obama here, not Mike Huckabee or a white evangelical) and to sneer at Hope itself is one of the ugliest moments I have yet seen during this campaign. She has sunk lower in my estimation than I ever thought possible.

This, by the way, is equally ugly but I thought you should see it:

I guess I’m naive, too, but I had hoped that this kind of despicable racism and sexism would have come from the opposing side, not from within the Democratic party. Haven’t we yet learned that the Republicans are brilliant at putting aside differences and uniting behind one candidate when push comes to shove? Let’s not start splintering now, liberals, for God’s sake. And Ralph Nader, if you seriously think of running again I swear I will find you and personally and securely duct tape you to your bathroom wall until November, you quixotic tick.

[Thanks to the readers who directed me to the YouTube clip. - PB]

The Dying Gaul: A PeaceBang Review

Did anyone see “The Dying Gaul,” based on a Craig Lucas play by the same name and directed by the playwright? It was a 1995 production starring Patricia Clarkson, Peter Skarsgaard and Campbell Scott. Reviews and a precis are here.

This was a finely acted piece about a Hollywood producer who seduces a gay writer into selling his beautiful screenplay (also called “The Dying Gaul”) to the studio for a million dollars on one condition: that he change one of the lovers in the story to a woman. After the deed is done, the pair easily move into a sexual relationship, and soon after that into a triangular intrigue of manipulation, lies and a lot of internet chatting. There’s some New Age bathos, a touch of Lucas’ earlier screenplay “Longtime Companion,” and an obvious attempt to create something that at least touches the hem of the garment we call Greek Tragedy, but which, in my opinion, does not succeed. If you want to see a brilliant contemporary Greek tragedy, rent “House of Sand and Fog.”

Aside from a very badly directed and written, truncated ending (SweetieBang and I both far preferred the “alternate ending” provided by the DVD extras), the film is diverting enough, well-acted and brings up great, let’s-sit-up-and-talk-late-into-the-night-about-it moral issues. However, it seems that none of the movie reviews I’ve read even mentioned what was, for me, the salient point of the movie, which is that people who dabble in spiritual philosophies totally alone and apart from a religious community are playing with fire, and risk deluding themselves in terrible ways, twisting the message of their chosen path to suit their own ego needs and even to justify acts of evil. God knows that we who live in religious community are easily enough deluded together, but “The Dying Gaul” was, for me, a chilling reminder that calling oneself a disciple of any tradition while flying entirely under the radar of a disciplining and discerning community can be a dangerous path indeed. Especially in Hollywood, standing in for Sodom and Gomorrah in today’s popular consciousness.

See it and let me know what you think.

Lunar Eclipse

I couldn’t get the photo to come out clear, but here’s a little slice of what it was like the other night during the lunar eclipse. We had just come out of “Jesus for Unitarian Universalists” and the moon was almost entirely shrouded in purply-dark. What a magical wintery moment it was.

“Out Of Control”: A Sermon Excerpt

… But the soul knows that life is not a linear projection of sturdy, admirable achievements or responsible, quotidian tasks but a labyrinthine, spiral journey in and out of clarity and confusion, good times followed by painful emotional or physical loss and suffering, and plenty of days– and even years– of utter inner chaos.

The outer world follows the same patterns. The preacher, Ecclesiastes, said it in these words, “To every thing there is a season. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time for war and and a time for peace.” People hear this reading from the Hebrew Scriptures and they make a face, “That’s awful! A time to kill? A time for war?” But they misunderstand.
Ecclesiastes is not the voice of one pronouncing a vision of what the world could or should be, but the ancient voice of one articulating how life really is. And boy, it’s hard to hear. It’s ugly to those of us who like to think of the trip from birth to death as happy, clean, blessed with good fortune, where this is no time to kill and no time for war.

But the soul knows. The soul is a dark, silent, undulating swampland of mystery, fate, primordial wisdom, will to survive, and sure knowledge of death that lives largely hidden away beneath the questing, linear self. The soul is eternal, it is immortal — it is, some say, breathed into us at our birth, and it goes free of our bodies when we die. The soul knows that the world is a volatile environment for fragile creatures with enormously complex brains to live in, and that for that reason, one of our earliest and more prevalent forms of managing the existential anxiety of the human condition is to cultivate the illusion that we are in control.
And to that illusion, all the great wise men and women who have ever lived have a similar response. It can best be summed up as “HA. HA.”
“Who, by worrying, can add an hour to the span of your life?” asked Jesus, and the answer is pretty clear: “no one.”

The very heart of the Buddha’s teaching is that change is inevitable and all suffering comes from attachment; and particularly to our attachment to control.

The Buddhist author, Sharon Salzburg, whose excerpt from her book Faith we just heard, likes to tell funny stories on herself about how ridiculous we can get about control. She lives in New England and some friends were planning a visit from a region that has no autumn foliage. Salzburg scheduled the visit just at a time she assumed the leaves would be at the peak of their brilliant color. The friends planned their itinerary. But for some reason, very close to her friends’ scheduled arrival, the leaves were not doing their thing. There was mostly green and maybe a little yellow out there. Salzburg found herself driving along urging the leaves to change color already. She’d be stepping on the gas, looking out the window and murmuring, “Come on, let’s get some oranges and reds going here!!”

She said, “I had to admit to myself at that point that maybe I was having just a little bit of a control issue.”

We laugh, but the need to be in control can literally make us sick: physically sick with chronic anxiety, phobias, high blood pressure, back and neck pain, headaches, gastrointestinal illness — all results of our bodies tightening with dread and rejection over what we cannot anticipate.

Sharon Salzburg tells another story about control, a more tender story about her close friend, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, having a stroke, and her subsequent panic and fear and obsession about the outcome of his stroke. She writes that she “replayed each scenario a dozen times, ‘Maybe he’ll be able to speak again but not walk. Maybe he will be able to write but not speak. Maybe he will make a complete recovery.’” Clearly, this was all just the response of a frightened friend, trying to gain some control over the situation — as if by thinking hard enough, she could make the best possible outcome happen. We all do this. We do this about serious crises and small unknowns alike, white-knuckling it through situations we have no control over. Meanwhile, check your medicine cabinet for the Zantac, Xanax, Prilosec, Pepcid, and the odd Valium. There’s some anthropological evidence for us right there.

Eventually, with the help of friends, Salzburg got to the point where she realized that she could not do anything about the situation but pray. She writes, “I called on all the buddhas and bodhisattvas [avatars of compassion] of the universe, those beings who represent freedom to me, who are the embodiment of goodness and wisdom.” Turning to something bigger than herself, she says, made her feel less alone, although still anxious and afraid. Eventually, sitting side by side with her fear of the unknown and abiding with it, she was able to let control go and allow love to enter her heart, a simple compassion for her friend and herself. Her prayer went from “Please let such-and-such happen” to “May my friend know that he is not alone in his time of trial, may benevolence surround him.”

Here’s a question for you: Do you think it matters that she got to that point? If you were lying unconscious in a hospital bed, would you rather your loved ones paced the floors with churning stomachs railing against fate and yelling at doctors, or would you rather they sleep the sleep of the peaceful after having filled their hearts and minds with prayers of compassion and love for you? I ask this with genuine curiosity because I think that many of us were raised to confuse love with control, that is, “I want these things for you and I want your life to go in this way, and that means that I love you.”

Today we have had cause to think of those sisters and brothers who live in such volatile environments that even the luxury of the illusion of control is denied them. A life of constant crisis, poverty and civil strife will quickly remedy any human of the fantasy that how the day unfolds is really a matter of their own will and desire. Today, in our special offering for Women For Women International, we sent out a little bit of our energy in the form of money to some of those who live in the midst of this kind of turmoil, support that might mean a little bit more security for them. But let’s be clear about our motives in doing so:

Whether I show up at your door or you show up at mine when the rug is pulled out from under us,

when the planes collide in the sky and fire falls on the city,

when the diagnosis comes back malignant and inoperable,

when the job has been cut and the mortgage comes due,

when the paramilitary troops have come and taken the husbands and sons from the village,

or the heart and mind have slipped into profound, debilitating depression,

we reach out with food, money, words of comfort or offers of help not to provide security but to incarnate solidarity,

not to stand defiant in the face of what we cannot control and pretend that with our good intentions or generous gifts we can make everything right,
but to say, this too, is life, and even in this time of terrible uncertainty or suffering, life goes on, and we are in favor of it.
We are out of control, and yet we say yes to life, and give our hearts to it again and again, day after uncertain day.

Norwell. Nigeria, Afghanistan. Hanson. Sudan. Herzegovina or Hanover. None of us are in control. The wise ones bid us to open our stiff clenched fists, and not only to acknowledge that we cannot steer this ship by tight gripping, but even to put those hands together in an attitude of blessing, and even to bow, with genuine reverence, to the mystery.

This sermon was preached to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Norwell, MA on February 10, 2008 by the Reverend Victoria Weinstein. Please do not excerpt, quote or “borrow” without attribution.

Friday Cat Blogging

It’s just the little white paw that gets me.

Great Blog

I was already a regular reader and fan of most of the blogs that were cited in the 2008 UU Blog Awards, but this one is new to me and I think it’s really excellent. I’ll be returning regularly, and shout-out to the author of Sisyphus.

“God Really Took Care Of Me”

I saw a television interview with Charity Gibson on February 13 or so, a few days after she managed to escape from a carjacker in Daytona Beach, Florida. A guy stuck a gun in her guts, ordered her into the trunk of her car, and while she was in there she managed to keep her cool and remember that her trunk had an interior emergency latch. She grabbed it when the car felt like it was slowing down, got out of the trunk, and ran like a bat out of hell to a friend’s house.

Me, I’m just guessing that would have hyperventilated and been dead by the end of the whole tawdry episode.

Here’s what Charity kept saying on “Good Morning, America,” where she was unfailingly polite to Diane Sawyer, “yes, ma’aming” her every possible chance: “I kept praying, and God really took care of me.”

Doubtless, many Unitarian Universalists and other folks skeptical of this kind of unabashed talk of reliance on a Supreme Being, heard this and thought, “Charity, girl, it was nothing but your own good problem-solving skills and courage that got you out of that trunk! Why give all the credit to some Deity that doesn’t exist, or if It does, certainly doesn’t go around reminding nice Florida girls that they’ve got inside emergency trunk latches?”

But Charity’s got both faith and common sense, and that combination seems to be serving her well. When she bought her car, she said, it seemed a good idea to get to know it “real well” and so that’s what she did: she studied the vehicle and all its features, and it was that bright instinct that eventually saved her life one February day in 2008. Was God in that decision to get to know her car inside and out? That’s not my theology, exactly, but if Charity wants to see the world as suffused by Divine Presence, who am I to shake my head at it? I don’t even know how to change a tire. Who’s the smarter girl here?

The only thing that worries me is what will happen when something doesn’t work out so well for Charity, and she suffers some other “outrageous sling or arrow of fortune,” as Mr. Shakespeare wrote. When that happens, as suffering inevitably comes to all of us, I do hope that Charity won’t feel that she’s been abandoned by God, that she did something to deserve the suffering, or that “it’s all in God’s plan.”

But then, who am I to worry about someone else’s practical theology? Maybe “it’s all in God’s plan” is just the traditional Theistic way of being Zen about stuff, like saying, “When you find the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Maybe it’s one of those great mystery phrases that just means, “It’s all happening as it’s happening, nothing much we can do about it,” and brainy existentialist types should just stop cringing when they hear it.

Anyway, I hope Charity Gibson recovers well and fully from her terrifying ordeal. May her God bless her and keep her through this time of learning to trust an ordinary day again.