PeaceBang

This Just In From The Max and Ermengarde Situation Room

This just in:

The cat and the dog have spent time together in the same room this evening.

They hung out in the living room together. She was wary but maintained eye contact with him without hissing or growling. He slept in my lap as I read. I make a circle with my legs and he cuddles and snoozes there for hours. It’s my own little yoga pose: Beagle Leg Circle Pose.

They hung out in the guest room together. He curled himself on the bed while I tidied up, and she GOT ON THE BED WITH HIM.
Later, on the floor, she paw-whapped him three times in the face while he stood submissively with his eyes closed, obviously praying for her to spend her wrath sooner rather than later. She, satisfied to have asserted her authority and demonstrated superior paw-eye coordination, backed off after I calmly told her that was quite enough.

The are both fast asleep.

For those who have kindly inquired — he is doing marvelously well. No mistakes in the house, has not chewed or destroyed anything but his little sheepskin crate liner (some nimrod at the local Petco said that it was “indestructible”– and yes, we’ve spoken to the manager) and water bowl holder (we got him a little water bottle to clip on outside the crate), is sleeping in his crate pretty well through the night, and is a total delight. He sit/stays already and he smells like a warm hamhock. She is eating well, still feeling loved, and not acting out in any way against the humans.

And now, back to you.

“God Is Optional. You Are Not.”

Ian Lynch writes in the recent comments on this post,

“So if the UCC says that God is still speaking and you are suggesting that the UUA is still speaking does that mean via the transitive property that the UUA is God?”

Although I think my friend Ian probably asks this question with his tongue-in-cheek (since he calls himself a “closet UU,” we can assume that he’s a fan and a friend of our movement), I think a legitimate question to ask Unitarian Universalists is: What or whom are you worshiping? I have heard Unitarian Universalists of many different theological stripes answer this question beautifully, but I feel like asking it again because I just heard about a California congregation that has a big sign outside its doors stating,
GOD IS OPTIONAL. YOU ARE NOT.”

What an interesting claim.
Does it sound inviting to you, or inane? Provocative or puerile? Or something in between that you’d like to share with the rest of us? I am still mulling it over. As a theist and a Christian, I would certainly find it an attention-getter if I was walking down the street looking for somewhere to attend Sunday services, but I would also find it a definite deterrent to attending worship. God is optional everywhere in the secular world. On Sunday, I’m looking for a place that affirms that the presence of something beyond the human community; something that my colleague Barbara Pescan called “The Unnameable Magnificent Intensity.”

The “you are not optional” message is good, though. Because as I say to my folks on a fairly regular basis, the church is the people. And whether or not the sermon topic sounds sexy enough to get one out of bed that morning, Church doesn’t happen until the congregation gathers. I could stand in the pulpit and give all the prayers and sermons that I wanted to, and that might please God and the spirits of our venerable congregation, but it wouldn’t be church.

Here, the affable Rev. Greg Stewart invites folks to visit the congregation. I love the line, “We are a living, loving faith for the 21st century and we’re holding a place just for you.”

Friday Cat Blogging

Hello readers,

This is ERMENGARDE and I has a few tHINGS To say.

FIRST I would like to say that it is going to take some TIME for me to accept this dog that came to live in MY HOUSE that has been MY and ONLY MINE for six years also I am a CAT and excuse me but we naturally don’t LIKE DOGS. So people who say that I am a spoiled princess are not VERY WELL INFROMED about the nature of CATS- we are not mean we are just PARTICULAR (please don’t say PURRticular because I am not in a very humorous mood) about some things mostly like how we like our HOUSES to not have DOGS IN THEM.

I am living in a room with my food and litter in it and at night I go and sleep with my Human Lady who is my most favorite human mostly except for when SHE ADOPTS DOGS. She says tonight is the last night and I will be on my own after that to sleep alone in my bed, cry outside the door or come in and sleep on the bed as usual even though there is a DOG in the room in a little crate.

This should be interesting. Maybe we might get some sleep. I will have to think about that. Should I sleep on the bed on my little bed or should I smack the dog in his crate? Which would be more fun? This is a hard decision.

Human Lady doesn’t know that I know she is plotting to put catnip on the dog so I will like him. oh boy, I hope she doesn’t do that soon because I need some time to just hate him for awhile. He doesn’t do anything to me and he is appropriately subservient but STILL HEs A DOG, ISN’T HE.

Everyone loves him except for me. I am a non-conformist.

Still Speaking!

I just loved this ad campaign that came out from the UCC a few years ago, based on Gracie Allen’s marvelous quote, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”

Some of us were wondering the other night what the Unitarian Universalist version would look like, since we’re not overly enamored of the current ad campaign:

(With apologies to Joyce Poley, whose music I love. This is not my design, but it was too good not to share with you all. If we can’t laugh at ourselves…!)

From Max the Dog

Dear Readers,

Let me introduce myself. I am Max, the adorably small and tender dog of PeaceBang. Do not allow my preference for playing tug-of- war with a sock, peeing against old tree stumps, and jumping on counters deceive you. I am actually a highly sensitive and intelligent being, and I am amazed that some Unitarian Universalists and other religious people have made such unkind judgments and generalizations about me and my kind on this and other social networking sites in the past few days.

Beagles have inherent worth and dignity, human friends, and we are all individuals. I, for instance, have a particularly sweet temperament and yet I have been accused against all evidence to the contrary of being “hyper” and prone to obnoxious behaviors; all because I am of a particular breed of canine. I assure you that this kind of prejudice toward beagles has not gone unnoticed by the Department of Beagle Acceptance at our U.S. headquarters in Boston, where there have been daily expressions of concern regarding the surge in negative press about beagles since my adoption by PeaceBang and SweetieBang.

Remember, human friends, that love is greater than fear, and kibble is greater than all of these. Because it seems necessary to remind some of you of the proper etiquette regarding the adoption of canine companions, please know that the only appropriate response to the news that a human has taken one of us into their homes is “Congratulations!” or perhaps “Mazel tov!” We assure you that, as we are a grateful and generous breed, we beagles always express nothing more than a hearty “We hope you love your new home” when we learn that one of ours is going to spend their days with one of yours. Yes, we know that some humans are hyper and obnoxious, that you howl and are needy, and that many of you are quite destructive. Yet we would never dream of generalizing about your entire species and ask that extend the same consideration to all of us.

Beagles Are Beautiful!

Thank you for your time.

Hearts and bones,
Max

Max Comes Home

He had a very big day.

“Easter Can Be Small, And Resurrection Come Slowly”

“Easter Can Be Small and Resurrection Comes Slowly ”
The Reverend Victoria Weinstein
Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008

I saw a movie about the events of Jesus’ life when I was a young kid – not too tiny but young enough to be very impressionable. I remember one scene in particular, which appears in John’s gospel and only in that gospel. It’s a miracle moment, and what happens is that Jesus shows up at the house of his friends Mary and Martha to find that their brother and his good friend Lazarus has died. He’s been dead for four days. Mary and Martha are totally distraught, of course, and they yell at Jesus: if you had been here this wouldn’t have happened! The response comes in the shortest verse in the entire Bible. Two words: “Jesus wept.” Because he loved Lazarus too.

So the next thing we know(and I’m still remembering the movie version right now), Jesus has worked a miracle and we see this tall, gaunt figure walking slowly out of the tomb. He’s still wrapped in cotton winding cloths, and he’s really pale and blinking into the sun and walking unsteadily and – this is what really affected me – he doesn’t look like he’s really sure he’s happy about being alive again. Everyone around him is crying with joy and rejoicing and it’s almost as if, if he was in private with Jesus, he might have said, “Hey buddy, you didn’t do me any favors just then.” At best, he seems ambivalent to be among the living.

And aren’t we all. Aren’t we all, at times, ambivalent to be among the living? Aren’t we all occasional resisters of new life, rebirth, all of which requires more courage than we sometimes think we’ve got?

In general, human beings love resurrection stories. We live for them. When painful realities slash into our lives, we trade resurrection stories as medicine: “My friend had this kind of cancer, too, and she got incredibly sick and we feared the worst, but today she’s been in remission for six years and has all the energy she ever had.” Or, “We lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and we got ourselves to Baton Rouge with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and it was a horrible time but we’re doing very well now, we have a house and jobs again, and the kids are going to a good school.”

We love resurrection stories. We cling to them as evidence of reason to hope, we store them in our minds the way a chipmunk stores nuts in his cheeks, so we can nibble on them for nourishment on emotionally hungry days.
Easter is a marvelous resurrection story told for thousands of years about a spiritual teacher and man of peace who was executed by crucifixion for the crime of trying to change the worldview of his community. It is told that he died on a Friday and that his tomb was empty on Sunday morning. His best friends and disciples had a shared experience of his living presence after his death that changed their hearts from fear to the fire of faith. They went forth to spread his worldview all over the place, thereby founding the religion we call Christianity.

The Easter resurrection story is of the WOW, knock-your-socks-off variety – the kind designed to persuade folks that no matter how ugly the world may seem to be, love is among us as a power far greater than violence, and love will have the last word. In my grandparents’ Russian orthodox church, on Easter morning the priest would say “Christos voskres!” (Christ is risen!) And the people would respond, “Voistenos voskres!” (He is risen indeed!) It is the cry of exultation, of celebration, of mighty wonders, in praise of knock-your-socks off miracles that turn tears of sorrow to tears of joy. For believers, it is occasion to say, “God is good, God will bring garlands instead of ashes, blessed are those who mourn, for they SHALL BE COMFORTED! Hallelujah!”

The drama of the story is wonderful. And yet we live lives that are not Biblical in scale but mostly far smaller and more ordinary. Our Easters can be small, and our resurrections come far more slowly.

I was talking about this with a friend last night and he said, “I was unemployed for seven months last year. I know all about the slow resurrection.” So does the contractor with the chronic back pain who suffers for years and finally has a surgery to heal him – he knows about the small Easter and the slow resurrection, too. Survivors of life-threatening diseases, those with depression and anxiety disorders that finally abate and give them desperately longed-for relief of mind and soul, they know too.

On Good Friday I attended services at the Episcopal Cathedral Church in Boston and a priest there told another story of a slow resurrection that came after a very hard loss. “I had four good friends in seminary,” he said. “Two of us went into the priesthood. Two are dead. They both died young. Four years after my friend John’s death, I married his widow. And so it came to pass that my godson became my stepson.” He said this in a tone full of wonderment, like he still couldn’t believe his bad luck and then his good luck, and how life is so funny that way. You imagine him blinking in the sun, mourning his friend but coming to realize that he is in love with his friend’s wife.

This happened to my distant cousin, too: he married his best friend’s widow after knowing and loving both of them for over fifty years. That’s not an easy resurrection experience. I imagine these men thinking, “Do I deserve this? Can I adapt to this challenge? Can I rise from my solitary life to embrace relationship? Do I want to?” I think of E.M., our friend E., whose wife died several years back after a series of health crises that left her paralyzed. You remember how E. cared for her, and how we all grieved. Today he’s out in Arizona with [C.A.], a long-time friend whose husband David (also a friend of E’s for over twenty years) died two years ago. Those two crazy kids are in love and E. drove out to get C., to assist her with the tying up of her affairs in AZ so he can bring her to live with him here. Godspeed to them, and safe passage home.

New life is a blessing. But it is also new, and newness means change. Change, even change for the better, can be a real strain on our emotions and our spirits. How does the addict, newly sober, come out of the darkness of alcoholism and into the light of sobriety? Some come rejoicing and grateful, some come dragging their heels and full of argument.

How does the young middle-aged single woman, after a twenty-year history of disastrous romances and literally hundreds of bad first dates, respond from the bitterness of her lonely tomb when fate finally drops a trustworthy and good man into her life? Part of her wants to say “Hallelujah, thank God” and part of her wants to say, “That might have been a lonely tomb, but it was my tomb, and I had it fixed up just the way I liked it.”

Resurrection is hard work. Resurrection says, “Here is life. What you do with it is up to you.”

New life. A new baby to the single mother. She says, “Oh my God,” in excitement and then, “Oh my God” in awe at the responsibility that she knows is now hers. New life. The blind young man who has surgery to repair his sight and who initially finds the world too disorienting to navigate. He is shocked to discover that all people have completely unique faces; something he had not expected. Small Easter stories experienced by people like you and me, waking us up, casting sunlight on our shadow, leaving us blinking into the light unsure of where next to step.

The poet Mary Oliver lost her beloved partner of over 40 years in 2005. Her book of poems, Thirst, chronicles her slow resurrection from speechless grief to gratitude for each new day – even a day without Molly in it. I will close with these words from her poem, “On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Mediate (Psalm 145)”:

Every morning I want to kneel down on the golden
cloth of the sand and say
some kind of musical thanks for
the world that is happening again – another day –
from the shawl of the wind coming out of the
west to the firm green

flesh of the melon lately sliced open and
eaten, its chill and ample body
flavored with mercy. I want
to be worthy of – what? Glory? Yes, unimaginable glory.

O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am
not ready, not worthy, I am climbing toward you.

My friends, Easter with its attendant new life, is not something that comes as planned. Therefore, we are never really ready, and who is to say whether or not we are worthy? New life and resurrections occur constantly; the gift of the resilience of the human spirit and its tenacious longing to be whole, and awake and fully plugged into unimaginable glory. May this glory be yours – whether in fleeting moments or in long beauty and love-drenched stretches of time. And when it comes to you, for however long it does, share the joy of it, share whatever bit of Easter perches in your heart and makes its home there.

You are the resurrection and the life.

Amen.

Judeans Rather Than “Jews” — Sensitizing Good Friday Passion Readings

My friend Scott Wells, blogging as Boy In the Bands, writes about a Lutheran Good Friday service he attended that worked very well liturgically. Here, he describes what I want to lift up as a very helpful way to take some of the sting out of the painful anti-Jewish sentiment of the gospel accounts, heard too often by Christian ears across history as justification for terrible anti-Semitism. As a daughter of Jewish ancestry who heard from her own father to “be careful” on Good Friday (because he had grown up being harassed on that day, and had heard many stories from the Old Country that made Good Friday a fearful days for Jews), I commend this to your attention,

But I really mention the Passion Gospel because the reader-pastor made an important and legitimate alteration to the text. It is hard to really get into the story when you get a dose of the-Jews-the-Jews-the-Jews. Sensitive Christians have been troubled about this for quite some time, but I confess I hadn’t come up with as elegant solution as I heard today. (And indeed, it was featured in the sermon.) For Jew (religious identity), he said Judean (political identity). It isn’t a euphemism: Jesus was convicted of sedition for claiming (not to play Pilate) the “Rex Judaeorum” and Judean is already used a toponomic adjective.

There’s enough of a verbal distance to help Christians hear the story without getting coopted into the long history of anti-Jewish violence by Christians, or God forbid, extending it. There’s something to be said by what Jewish friends and family would make of the Passion Gospel. (Indeed, this is the reason I name the congregation, so as to attribute this good practice.) - Scott Wells, BoyInTheBands

I attended Good Friday at the Episcopal Cathedral Church in Boston and was very touched to see these words by Bishop Krister Stendahl on the first page of the Order of Worship,

A Note Toward Repentance

As we gather beneath the Cross of Jesus, we should perhaps also be aware how among Jews and Muslims this our most holy sign has evoked and still evokes memories of the murderous Christian Crusades. And in not too distant times, it was actually during Holy Week that Jews suffered the worst pogroms. Somehow it was the story of Christ’s Passion that gave Christians the biblical sanction for acting out in heinous ways that contempt for the Jews that has marked and marred so much of Christian teaching and preaching. Even today images linger in our minds of the high priests — not to mention Judas — as looking much more Jewish than Jesus. [Mel Gibson, are you listening? - PB] How can that be? Were they not all Jews? Such simple questions should make us resolve to purge our Good Friday worship of all its potential contempt for Jews and Judaism. We do so in a mood of repentance, shamefully aware of how our story of reconciliation often was turned into its very opposite. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. — Bishop Krister Stendahl

Easter Joy With Bologna Ears and a Tail

He is one year old.

He came to us already named Max. It’s a name that I love because of the character Max Bialystock in my favorite movie, “The Producers.” SweetieBang loves it for its reference to “Where The Wild Things Are.”

I have wanted a dog forever but vowed that I would never get one while I was single — too busy, away from home too often, etc.
SweetieBang is just as insane about dogs as I am and we planned to get one this summer; maybe a French bulldog or a yellow lab or some kind of labby mix. But of course that’s never how it works. Greg works right by the local shelter and as anyone hankering after a dog will do, he stopped in to have a look. And there was Max. And Greg fell in love. He came home and woke me from a nap and said, “Come with me to meet Max.” I read his mind immediately, jumped into my coat and we sped off right away, because I know how it is when your animal chooses you. I had to see this little guy. I had to see his little bologna ears. I adore beagles but SisterBang always warned me that they’re a HANDFUL so I never seriously considered trying to be a Beagle Mom until I met Max.

We know that beagles are incorrigible, willful dogs. We know he will bay and howl and dig and require lots of walks, lots of attention, and obedience training. Also an outdoor fenced in run. And a crate. We will spend weeks carefully introducing him to Ermengarde and she to him (he lived with a cat before and likes them — she, of course, will initially hate him). I’m sure he will chew shoes or furniture and pee and poop in the house until he’s potty-trained (what kind of dog owner doesn’t do this immediately with a puppy? We are disgusted! AND… it doesn’t help knowing that Max’s former owner was a local minister!). There will be times I rue the day I ever looked into his brown eyes and saw him nuzzle his whole little body hopefully against Greg even though I was the one holding the treats.

But he is a cuddly, sweet, affectionate pup who might be the tiniest bit not-so-bright but we love him and are brimming over with excitement to bring him home on Tuesday and make him a huge part of our lives.

So this is my Easter joy. At long, long last I will fulfill my heart’s desire to become a doggie mommy. May God bless you all with new life.

(This really isn’t the best photo. He looks kind of funny and bow-legged here and he’s not. But you get an idea of his beautiful markings. Also, jeepers creepers, where’d he get those peepers? *thump, thump*).

To My Preachin’ Buds Out There

Tell the story, my friends.* God bless your Holy Week.

*The video you want is Emmylou and Robert Duvall live. Click on the icon.