PeaceBang

The Meaning of the Crucifixion

I’ve just started to read Elaine Pagels and Karen King’s book on the Gospel of Judas and I’m already getting lost in my own thoughts on every page. I’ll read like two paragraphs and get all snarled up in christological musings –because I’m such a DEEP GIRL and that’s the sort of thing I do — when I’m not reading celebrity gossip blogs and playing “psycho mousie under the covers” with my cat, that is.

No, seriously.

Today, after having attended a two-hour worship service at a local American Baptist church, I was thinking about how little they actually taught about Jesus even though the two hours were full of enthusiastic, percussion-heavy shout-outs to him. The basic assumption was that you came into the church already having established a very personal relationship with Jesus. There was no need to dwell on the Bible stories about him, to focus specifically on his sayings or actions, or to analyze him in any way.

Of course this is light years’ difference from the way we treat the J-Man in the UU church. If we mention him at all, we have to carefully set the context and explain the heck out of our analysis because we assume that either (a) people are wigged-out former Christians whose hair stands up on the backs of their necks when they hear his very name or (b) our listeners don’t give a fig about Jesus, so you’d better make this interesting and smart or (c) we have to make sure to make this clear to the unchurched, who may have no Biblical knowledge whatsoever.
The end result is that there’s very little enthusiasm involved in talking ’bout Jesus. We’re very bookish, little owls blinking behind our pages of research.

Which is all rather a shame, of course, because a good number of our UU seekers these days have lots of good feeling about Jesus and come assuming that we do, too. They’d like to learn about his spiritual philosophy beyond the basics and they don’t understand why we walk on eggshells around the Christian tradition.

Part of why we walk on eggshells, of course, is that a whole bunch of us have no acquaintance whatsoever with Unitarian and Universalist christology and assume that to be Christian — or even to talk about Christianity as an insider — means to believe that Christ died on the Cross as a human sacrifice for our sins. Which is abusive, sick nonsense, they say, and what kind of irrational, credulous ninny would put their faith in a God who makes this necessary?

Conversation over!

So I’m reading The Gospel of Judas this afternoon and I’m thinking there are so many deep ways to consider the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ. I’m so sorry that so many of my co-religionists reject the entire tradition because they can’t move beyond the orthodox treatments of this event.

I would think, in fact, that a religious humanist would potentially be very drawn to this story because it’s such an incredible tale of the human struggle. Take God the Father and what He might be doing out of the picture and it’s still a breathtaking story: one courageous itinerant preacher of healing and justice being nabbed by the authorities, brutally beaten and then crucified. A community of friends and disciples running away in horror, and shame. A reappearance of the dead man: who knows how? Communal psychotic break? Something funny in the wine? Who knows! And then a subsequent passionate re-emergence by the formerly traumatized community of friends who then proclaim that the love will overcome violence, that the world has totally misunderstood the nature and uses of power, and rushing off to spread the good news and to get decapitated for their trouble.

Fast forward to 2000 years later and the story is still going strong! Wow, what’s going on here? Are all those billions of people just crazy, nutso, just plain dumb? Wouldn’t any respectful student of the human history of meaning-making delight in digging into this story, and this figure? Doesn’t he beckon in a personal way, this cipher? Haven’t we figured out by now that purely academic study of whether Jesus was a real dude or not, or whether or not he actually said certain phrases is kind of fruitless?

I’m sorry that so many people who are secretly thirsting for living waters of Christian life are still living in the arid desert of the Jesus Seminars. I mean, it’s a great place to start reading if you’re tentative about Jesus, but I wouldn’t stay there. Current theological offerings are much richer than that, anyhow.

Someone asked me recently what I thought it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus. For me it means (1) to seek instruction by him through studying the most reliable reports of his life and teachings and (2)to agree to be part of the “you” he was talking about when he said, “I will be with you always.” The former commitment is about being a disciple of Jesus the living man. The latter commitment is about embracing the cosmic Christ as a spirit that manifests in the world through a combination of the grace of God and human willingness to have faith in its reality. To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to say to him, “I am going to look for you today out there. I am going to try to be more influenced by you than by Madison Avenue or the Rupert Murdoch empire.”

To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to stand where he stood — even in those terrible moments under the Cross — and to ask myself, “What does this mean? How can I live with this? What am I supposed to do about it?” Even if I had no belief in a transcendent God whatsoever, I believe I would still be drawn to the Jesus event in much the same way. I ask myself now and then how we as a human community would react even today to someone who rejects the things we all tacitly agree matter most (home, family, possessions, worldly goals), who breaks down barriers of class, gender, race in an impolite and even disdainful fashion, and who dares to insist that no matter how popular they become and how amazingly they influence people for the better, they have no agenda but to bring about a new world order based on peace and love. I’m thinking the slammer, the psych ward or an assassination.

To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to sit eating peanuts with him at the kitchen table, throwing the shells on the floor and saying Man, we are still so totally not ready for you. And when he says, “Well, stop eating peanuts then and GET ready,” you sigh and brush the shells off your lap and keep trying because you think he’s the most rightest person who ever was.

P.S. I’ll be away visiting MotherBang for a few days so don’t freak if your comment doesn’t show up right away. She has a dial-up connection and I won’t be online much. — xoxo PB
P.P.S. Please don’t yell at me for suggesting that you can have Christ without God. A lot of Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in God and I am trying to do what the preacher said to do this morning, which is to bring someone the gospel today. You dooz what you canz. I personally thought Jesus was the Way way before I believed in God, so I’m living proof that theological righty-osity doesn’t matter much to the Holy Spirit.

Couldn’t Wait To Get To Church, Or Why I Love the Bible

I went to bed really late last night, as is my wont in the summer time. It was 2:00 AM before I really tucked in, although I knew I’d want to wake up at 8 AM to get to a 10:00 church service in the city.

As I had my breakfast and got ready to leave, I realized that I was filled with a feeling of thrilled anticipation to go to church ! What a wonderful feeling! I wondered if my own congregants ever felt this way: this kind of first-day-of-school excitement. I certainly hope they do on occasion.

I climbed into the car for a fairly long drive and almost popped in a tape of a sermon from the Festival of Homiletics but decided to wait to hear the word from the preacher at the church I’d be visiting.

And then it hit me: I can’t wait to go to church because I’m so psyched to hear what the preacher has to say about the Bible!

How did THAT happen?
Me, a serious Bible lover?

Well, apparently so!

I have been studying Christian and Jewish scripture formally and informally, on and off, for about twelve years now. Suddenly, in the summer of 2007, I look up and realize that the stories and characters in the Bible are real to me, and precious. I care about them. They are people with whom I have a relationship, and whose experience of the living God helps me encounter the living God, too. I honor their interpretation of their experience even as I vehemently disagree with it at times. They were, as I am, products of their time and place. Their vision, as is mine, was limited. “Now we see through a glass, darkly.”

I realized this morning that it makes so much sense that I would come to madly love the Bible. Books in general have had a tremendous influence on my life and are like food and drink to me. If you could gain weight from reading I’d be 500 lbs. by now. So it’s no surprise, duh, that The Good Book would worm its way into my heart, soul and mind and draw me into deeper engagement with not only its stories, but its spiritual power.

Duh, again. The Bible does have tremendous spiritual power. Are you kidding? All those billions of people over all those years diving into that text and looking to it to address the deepest questions of their lives? Yeah, there’s a little bit of powerful mojo there.

I knew that this morning in church we might be hearing lectionary texts about Naman from 2 Kings, or the wonderful story from Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells the disciples to shake the dust from their feet if a community doesn’t want to receive their ministry. I knew that there was a chance the preacher would talk about that bizarre moment in Luke 10 when Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall down from heaven like a flash of lightening.” What a great moment; a trippy mystical vision following all that eminently practical pastoral advice. I was downright excited.

As it turns out, the preacher preached on Psalm 30, and that was fine, too. I’ve grown to love the psalms over the years, too, although I initially thought them a bizarre, dreary collection of violence and complaint. Now I see them as a record of sacred kvetching, but also as a beautifully crafted, poetic account of one individual’s troubled and transcendent relationship with their inscrutable God. Before we had psychotherapy, people had the psalms. They are deeply healing and integrative. There isn’t one emotion I’ve ever had that the Psalmist didn’t have. There isn’t one spiritual question, doubt or ethical dilemma I’ve had that the Psalmist didn’t address.

The Bible is, for me, an ancient record of my ancestors attempt to explain the ways of God as they experienced it. I think they got a lot wrong, but I believe that they got so much right, too.

As for Jesus in the Bible, well… just when you think you know Jesus, you turn back to the Bible and realize that you don’t know him at all. I read a lot of books about religion and an awful lot of those books are about what Jesus supposedly was and what Jesus supposedly did and wanted us to do. I read a lot of theology and sociological commentary on what the Church is supposedly about and what God wants us to do, and how God may or may not exist, and all that. I read thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff every year. And yet every time I open the actual Bible and read it in whatever translation, it’s like being doused with a bucket of refreshingly cool water. Let me make this analogy: you can read about music, or you can hear it. You can read about falling in love, or you can experience it. You can look at a photograph of food in Gourmet magazine or you can taste it. If you want to get into the living God of Jewish and Christian tradition, you can read theology or you can read the Bible.

Read and taste. Read and hear. Read and experience.

And there I was thinking that that particular revelation was totally sealed. Silly me. But here’s the thing: it took a lot of work and intellectual commitment before the Bible began to reveal its beauty and power to me. I’m so glad I didn’t follow the example of all the “enlightened” people I’ve known over the years who are persuaded that only fools and fanatics bother with it.

Psalm 90 And the Power of Speed-Reading

I did a funeral yesterday for a man who was born Russian Orthodox and who became a Roman Catholic in his adult years (mostly because there was no Russian Orthodox church around), and who worshiped faithfully at a local Catholic parish.

At the end of his life, his priest refused to visit him. I know the priest, and he’s a cold, hard man. I do not doubt the man’s wife when she says the priest ignored her phone calls. She, the wife, is a child of our parish (hasn’t been to church in a couple of decades but still a child of our congregation) and she phoned me as her husband was in his last days to say, “Would you go do a blessing for him? He liked you.”

It seems that he had seen me officiate at the funerals and memorials of some of his friends and thought I was “his kind of minister.”

Of course I went to the hospital to bless him. You get that for free just for the asking, is my opinion. You don’t have to like me. Heck, you can even give me a Bronx cheer on your way to Heaven. When someone asks for a blessing at the time of death, we’re not talking about mutual admiration societies or even good relations between church and individual. We’re talking about preparing the soul for the ultimate transition. How could his own priest not be there? For one of his own faithful members? It galls me, it really does.

So anyway, we did the funeral yesterday morning and I wanted to include some of the traditional prayers and Scripture from this man’s tradition. We read from Thessalonians and the Gospel of John, lots of resurrection stuff that has nothing much to do with our tradition but has everything to do with Russian Orthodox faith. It was one of those funerals that takes place in our church but isn’t for a UU; leaving the minister with lots of liturgical and theological choices and hard decisions. I did the best I could. I read the things that I thought would have comforted and held him, had he been there. Actually he was there, in a lovely mahagony casket.

I thought I’d do something unusual and start with Sentences from the Universalist Book of Prayer. Then, reading along the night before, I found that I just loved the sentences from Psalm 90 in particular, so I thought I’d start the service in a strong, invocational way with it. You know, very triumphant and faithful and all that, before doing the welcome and pastoral piece (”we celebrate life in the midst of mortality,” and etc.).

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

Not having taken the Universalist Book of Prayer into the pulpit with me, silly me thought a Bible would suffice. And opening my Bible to Psalm 90 and beginning with diaphragmatic breathing and confident tones, I proceeded to lay it on the faithful. Here’s what happened, with my thoughts in parentheses:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. (oh yes, this is great)
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (what beautiful stuff!)

You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.” (oh, this is deep, but it’s a funeral, we can take it)
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. (wow, is this gorgeous !)

For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed. (Holy crap. What? This wasn’t in the Universalist Book of Prayer !)
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. (Panic! panic mode! Lord, this is a SITUATION! Help me out here!)

At which point I took a huge pause because there was NO WAY IN HELL I was reading the following phrases:

For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.

The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of your anger? Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.
So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (now THAT’S in the Universalist Book of Prayer, and I love it, and I’m so sorry I skipped it by accident. But you can see why. It’s nestled between some seriously Calvinistic stuff that to my mind, has no place in a service of the celebration of life.)

After a huge pause, which I tried to make meaningful by looking as though I was just absorbing the power of the text, I continued here:

Turn, O Lord! How long? Have compassion on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
(I skipped this) Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.
(and continued on here)
Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands!

So, friends and pastors, the power of speed-reading, and the importance of marking up your Bible before you get into the pulpit. I’m not a fan of cutting and pasting our way through Scripture just to pick the bits we like (thank you, Thomas Jefferson) or that undergird our own personal view of God, but hell’s bells. You can’t minister to a group of 200 people grieving the loss of their beloved pal by giving them that kind of word. You just can’t. Southern Baptists can write in and slap me up if they want, but it’s moments like those when I think maybe I would rather be burned at the stake than tell a group of mourners that God is angry at them all their lives and that those lives end “like a sigh.” I mean, not without being able to add some words of explanation and interpretation.

Friends, the pulpit is a dangerous place. Ascend it with care.

So, Is This About Anti-Oppression, Or Is This About School Spirit?

Here, I think we get to a very important element of the great Brown Bag debate. Andy, seminarian at Starr King, writes this post, full of anger and hurt about what I, an “apparent” UU Minister in the Northeast (Hi Andy, I’m Victoria Weinstein. I was ordained 10 years ago and I’ve served our congregations in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Massachusetts. No “apparent” about it) have written about a situation that occurred at SKSM.

Andy doesn’t explain how the term “brown bag lunch” is hurtful or racist when used in a campus context. Because it’s really not about that, is it? What Andy does is call me haughty and self-satisfied and then (I love this!) proceed to quote JESUS HIMSELF in an effort to smack down the Big Bad Bang. Along the way, of course, he calls me names and, um, insinuates that I’m a pig (”you shall not cast your pearls before swine.”).

Andy, knowing a good rhetorical flourish when he sees one, even copies my original ending asking for an AMEN.

And then… and I think I love this even more … someone comments that he’s AWESOME, speaking a “powerful language of love.” It sure is powerful. I’m definitely feeling the love out here on the East Coast.

The thing is, and I think this is really important and I’m going to try to say it in a sincere tone even — it always hurts when people outside your community hear about something you do within it and use their God-given freedom to interpret its meaning in a way that doesn’t square with your best impressions of yourself.

When I wrote that post, I wasn’t thinking about Starr King as a whole school. I was thinking, and writing about, one small group of people (or even an individual), who made what I think was a wildly illogical conclusion about a certain trio of words. But boy howdy, I sure am thinking about the school as a whole now.

I got cracked at by several critical commenters for telling the truth about blogs, which is that they’re not the ideal forum for in-depth conversations on important issues. What they’re best at, since I wasn’t clear enough, is trenchant commentary on various issues that pique the interest or get the goat of the individual blogger. As I watch this “conversation” deteriorate in the comments into “YOU don’t get it,” — “No, YOU don’t get it,” dynamics, I have to shrug and say, “Well, there you go. It was just a matter of time before someone pulled out the Gospel of Matthew and called me a pig, or a plank-eye.

(Rev. Sean is never like that, though, and he’s written a really informative opposing post here.)

I also think Fausto makes a nice contribution, weighing in at The Socinian. Don’t go there if you hated what I had to say: you’ll just hate him even more.

And I just caught up with Chalice Chick, who sadly says she’s not “qualified” to discuss the brown bag lunch controversy (why not? Because she’s “just” one of the active Unitarian Universalist laypeople to whom our seminarians hope to serve in ministry one day? Hey, CC? Whattup?), discusses it perfectly well right here.

Brown Bag Lunch

So let me get this straight. Because of an old, racist practice of determining someone’s acceptable level of “whiteness” by using a brown bag, the folks at the Starr King School For the Ministry are now banishing the term “brown bag lunch” from their collective vocabulary?

Of course it makes no difference at all that the totally benign practice of bringing a brown bag lunch to a gathering has nothing whatsoever under heaven to do with the pernicious old use of brown bags… but you know, we’re fighting oppression here. So brown bags are out. I don’t know what I’ll use to take out Ermengarde’s poop now; maybe little plastic produce bags. But that’s not sustainable. So we’re in a bit of a bind now. How can I assure that when I ask the cat sitter to scoop Erm’s poops into the brown bags in the mud room, she won’t be offended or oppressed? It might stir up a bad association. It certainly will for me, thinking of students at Starr King, who have so many things to learn about ministry (none of which I heard mentioned in their latest YouTube testimonial, by the way) using up their precious brain cells remembering not to use the words “brown” and “bag” next to each other in a sentence.

The world is awfully full of oppression for those folks. I wonder if it’s got any grace at all in it? Without their help, I mean?

This reminds me of something the dishy Bishop William Willimon said at the Festival of Homiletics last week. He told the story of a woman who came to talk to him after a sermon — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she came to confront him after a sermon. She said, “Pastor, you told us today that Jesus said we must forgive our enemies seventy times seven. Do you mean to tell me that I’m supposed to forgive my husband who abused me and made my life a living hell for ten years?”

And Willimon clutched.
“Ah,” he said. And “Well, uh, they only give us twenty minutes for these things, you know… and of course we can’t cover all the exceptions… and spousal abuse is a terrible evil.”

The woman waited.

He continued. “But, well, that seventy times seven thing. That does seem to be the kind of thing that Jesus said.”

And the woman said, “Thank you. I just wanted to make sure.”

Willimon told this story and he said, “You see, I looked at this woman and I saw a victim. Jesus looked at this woman and he saw a disciple.”

Unitarian Universalists, do I hear an “amen?”

"How Jesus Claimed Me"

This essay of mine appears in the anthology, Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism. I’m glad to be able to share it with you today as the front page article in this week’s UU World online magazine:

http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/22324.shtml

The Harrowing Of Hell

I’m not quite sure what Jesus was doing today the year he was crucified. I believe one of the things orthodox tradition has him doing is harrowing hell and freeing all the souls, very Rambo the Redeemer. Maybe Mel Gibson will make a movie.

But look, I found this great passage in “The Gospel of Nicodemus Acts of Pilate and Christ’s descent into Hell” in Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, Volume One: Gospels and Related Writings, revised edition. In this hilarious exchange between Satan and Hades, Hades bemoans Christ’s ability to restore the dead from the Underworld. He says,

“I have pain in the stomach. Lazarus who was snatched from me before seems to me no good sign.”

Do you LOVE the idea of Satan hanging out talking with Hades? Holy syncretism, Batman!
I have this image of Jesus walking in on them, kind of swaggering in his robe, and saying, “Yeaaaa, Hades, get used to it. I’m gonna be snatching a lot of li’l doggies from your ranch before this is all over.” Then he walks away twirling his pistol.

And Satan and Hades just sit there all dejected on the porch, pouring iced tea from a pitcher and staring off into space.

And….scene.

This Is the Day The Lord Hath Made

You must realize that I have a personal affection for Psalm 118 that comes from the fact that my church choir sang its lyrics at my candidating Sunday and again at my Installation.

This is the day the LORD hath made
Let us rejoice and be glad!!

So I was perhaps more deflated than usual to read of one Unitarian Universalist minister’s translation of the psalm as,

This is the day we are given,
let us rejoice…

My problem is linguistic and theological. There is such vibrancy in the Biblical psalm! To switch from the majesty of “This is the day the LORD hath made” to the passive voice of “this is the day we are given” just kills the poetry for me. As a friend and I were discussing yesterday, the pale language of “we are given” puts me in mind of a weary drive-through attendant at McDonald’s: “Hey lady, here’s your quarter pounder with cheese, and your fries. And here’s a day.”

There’s a good conversation about this small detail of the Rev. Galen Guengerich’s article in the latest UU World –proposing gratitude as the theological center of Unitarian Universalism –here at Philocrites:
http://www.philocrites.com/archives/003420.html#allcomments

I’m looking forward to reading the entire article. Despite my small quibble with the issue of the psalm, it’s always good to have a theological conversation. Does gratitude feel like the theological center of Unitarian Universalism to you? Would you like to see us work on that? Is gratitude at the center of your personal spiritual life or practice? Would you like it to be?

The conversation at Philocrites left me thinking about other things that I think just don’t work in a non-theistic translation. One is a healing service, which I’d like to do at my church for Lent. The only healing services I’ve ever been part of were centered around the idea that God loves us and that Jesus offers healing to all who ask for it. I am wondering how Unitarian Universalists do healing services in a non-theistic way. Do you have any stories of such services, and would you be willing to share liturgies?

Bits of Scripture

Today in class we did a wonderful thing as part of a Communion Service.

Our professors asked us all to bring a short Scripture passage and to prepare about 45 seconds of explanation as to why it is important to us.

In lieu of a homily, people jumped in as the Spirit moved them and read their selections. It was just great. We had Micah and Jeremiah, and Corinthians, Ephesians, Romans. Matthew, Luke, John, The Book of Esther, the Song of Songs. Genesis. One of the Psalms.

I hadn’t realized until then that I have fallen in love with Scripture in the past few years. Hearing all those bits and pieces was like making out with God. My heart fluttered like a besotted fool.

I still feel a little dopey about it, and am going to go to bed early with the Good Book.

There must be a Mae West or Sophie Tucker joke in there somewhere, but I can’t think of it!

Anyway, it was a great exercise and you should steal it all the time.

Sacred Story, Or Sacred Soap Opera?

Last night as I was reading the Book of Acts, I came up on the beginning of Chapter 19, where Paul runs into some disciples in Ephesus and says, “hey, did you get the Holy Spirit when you believed?” And they’re like, “Um, no. We’ve never heard of the Holy Spirit. What’s that all about? We were baptized by John.”
So Paul baptizes them in the name of Jesus and they get the Holy Spirit and go around prophecying and speaking in tongues.

This just cracked me up: “We’ve never heard of the Holy Spirit.” I just see them kicking at the dirt with their toes while Paul stands there thinking, “God, I need a cup of coffee.”
It’s just one of the great comedy moments in Acts, the other (for me) being when Paul preaches on for so long that Eutychus falls asleep and falls out the window to his death. ohmygod, Eutychus just fell out the window! he’s totally lying in a little heap down there on the ground! holy camel patties! someone do something!
You can just imagine this. Of course Paul runs down and resurrects him, and all is well (except that no one asked Eutychus if maybe he wouldn’t prefer to stay dead rather than listen to Paul keep preaching. Maybe they sent him home for a nap. One can only hope so).

There’s another great episode where some charlatans are trying to cast out demons in the name of Jesus, and they get the tar beaten out of them and are thrown out of town bloody and nekkid. And there’s that whole scandal with Demetrius, the maker of the Artemis figurines, and a big mob scene there.

We say that the Christian story is a sacred story, but to me it’s more like a sacred soap opera, and therein lies it’s profound appeal. Whether our lives are dull and uninspiring or full of drama, who isn’t drawn to a massive cosmic soap opera?

What is Unitarian Universalism’s sacred story? A long line of reasonable people thinking smart thoughts?

Yawn. I just fell out the window.
And yet that’s what we so often present in our Sunday Schools and from our pulpits.

Don’t you think there’s a reason we all love to rehash the bloody controversies of our past, and even to perpetuate them through our own passions today? Don’t you think there’s a reason that we savor the stories of the nutjobs among us, telling them again and again over dinner? Don’t you think there’s a reason we perpetually regale ourselves with the tales of how crazy we all got during this or that conflict, and for our fond and constant remembrance of that pistol in Theodore Parker’s desk?

Unitarian Universalists love to emphasize freedom, reason and conscience, and to suggest that our “sacred story” derives from tales of heroes and heroines intellectually embracing those principles. They say that, and then they fail to mention, or to make thrillingly real in the telling of the story, all the blood and guts that came with embracing those principles. That’s a serious mistake, for you will notice that when UUs get together, what binds them in affection and energy is the dramatic stuff, the unbelievably insane stuff, the war stories, the power struggles, the scandals, the times when emotion exploded out and overcame Reason, and everyone actually felt caught up in the spirit.

No one wants to be part of a sacred story that bores you so much you fall asleep and fall out the window. We need something that more honestly reflects the high drama of who we are and what we endure together.