Category: Travels and Public Appearances

My grandfather was born in Iasi (pronounced “Yash”), Romania. He came to the United States with his parents, Max and Sophie, and his older sister Natalie, as a little boy. Max and Sophie had two more American-born sons after their emigration.

In 1941 the Jewish community in Iasi lost many of its members to a terrible pogrom. Soon after that, the rest of the Jews of Iasi were sent to die in Nazi camps.* What had been a center of European Jewish learning and culture now has a tiny Jewish population and two synagogues.

This knowledge was a shadow over my childhood. My father never spoke of it, but it haunted him. He had been too young to fight in WWII as his brothers had. Oh, how he wanted to.

I will be visiting Romania in May on a pilgrimage tour with the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council. It just so happens that I will be flying into Bucharest with a few days to spare before being expected in Sighisoara to travel from there to my congregation’s partner church in Kadacs, Transylvania.

Iasi is a 7-8 hour train ride from Bucharest, but I have decided that I must go. Through an organization called Couch Surfing, I will be spending three nights in the guest room of a Romanian family.

What do I expect to see, to feel?

Nothing. I have no expectations. I am going simply to see what sites I can see related to my relatives’ existence and to pay my respects. I want to stand where they stood. I want to say to them, “I came to meet you, even if in spirit.” I want to read them the long list of names of their Weinstein kin who live today in the United States.

I want to read it twice, and to tell them that another little one is coming in June.

L’chaim.

*This is apparently not true. The Romanians found their own solution to the “Jewish problem” independently of the Germans and murdered their Jewish citizens locally. I am grateful (?) to PB reader Bill Baar for referring me to Radu Ioanid’s chronicle of these horrors: The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944. http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Romania-Destruction-Antonescu-1940-1944/dp/1566632560.

I am reading an interview (on page 10 of this pdf link) between UU minister Wayne Walder and popular spiritual author Thomas Moore. It is giving me a lot to think about, especially in the context of the meaning and worth of my sabbatical :

Wayne Walder: We often try to fix things as Ministers. We might see a broken world, a broken people, or difficult circumstances and we try to facilitate, support, create and improve the situation. Yet the world always requires fixing. So many of us try harder, we might even work longer hours. We get sick or burnt-out as we continue to help. We don’t take time for real self care. Our families suffer.

Thomas Moore: The first thought that occurred to me when you said that was that I usually work (when I work in Ministry) in the model of the spiritual teacher. In many different traditions the spiritual leader is not really called to fix the world. That’s not what he or she does. Rather that person is called to be a holy person – a person who has a special degree of contemplation or reflection. They have the ability to see the world in a certain way and have shaped their life and a personality out of that. People come to that person to be in their presence because of what he/she has achieved and who he/she has become.

So the idea is not to bring your problems to this person. I mean you wouldn’t do that to so many of the spiritual leaders of the world. You don’t bring your problems to them. What you do is you come to them seeking a depth, a vision and a personality that has been really transformed by preparation.

This is the model for me. I’m not saying that a Unitarian Minister ought to suddenly become a guru in the mountains. I don’t mean it that way, but I think that there is something in the model of the holy person that could be used. I bet there would be less burnout too. Less burnout because the point of spirituality is not to keep giving out and doing the impossible, but to constantly “be” somebody…. A “way of being” can be one of the most useful things we can do.”

I am grateful to Moore for making this point. I would never claim to be a Holy Person, but I am a person who, in Moore’s words, has spent most of my life cultivating depth, vision and a personality that is centered on the Holy. Even on the days that I do not feel at all spiritual, I am always a woman of faith, and I am always a religious woman. That makes a lot of UUs uncomfortable — this “faith” and “religious” bit. If anything has contributed to our lack of excellence in ministry, it is that, folks. It is that.

It has occasionally occurred to me over the years that this work alone (“being someone,” in Moore’s term)is intense and demanding of time and life energy, but until I went on sabbatical I had no idea how right I was in that assessment. Even free of all parish duties, my days are full, rich, and demanding. Paying close attention to the world, praying, contemplating, praising God, trying to integrate new understanding with old, reflecting on moral questions on the personal and the global level — I now understand that all those inner workings can comprise a full-time occupation.

I never came into ministry thinking it was my job to “fix” anything. In fact, I find that concept offensive. And it is for this reason that I feel profoundly uncomfortable in many UU collegial gatherings, surrounded by well-intentioned men and women who seem to feel or believe that their/our job is to impose “our” version of righteousness onto the world. I feel alien in these gatherings because I believe that God is the Fixer and that our work is to discern God’s will both for ourselves and for our larger communities, and to do it in the spirit of healing, love and reconciliation — not Fixing. For me, Justice is just our human name for God’s will for the world. It is our privilege and our responsibility to be instruments of that justice in the spirit of “Thy will be done” — not “Let’s go fix the broken world because we uniquely know what’s wrong with it.”
Now we see but through a glass, darkly. I’m frightened of people who march off to Fix things merely on the the authority of their own intellects. As Thomas Moore says later in the article, “Knowing something is not incorporating it.”

(Digression: I have met no less than five seminarians this year who went from the UU to the United Church of Christ ordination track because the Regional Sub-Committee warned them that they used “God” or referred to the Bible too frequently in their interviews. That would “be a problem,” they were told.)

I said to a friend yesterday that I had felt no need to schedule specifically “spiritual” retreats during my sabbatical because I was in no way burnt out on the spiritual level when I began my sabbatical. My faith is strong and sustaining, my prayers and devotions energetic. I love being relieved of preaching duties but I look forward to resuming them. Meetings at my church are generally enjoyable and even inspiring because of the joy of watching good lay leaders in action, and so I did not go into sabbatical sick to death of them, either.

I did need a break from pastoral care. I needed to grieve all the losses of beloved parishioners over the years. I needed to let go of the constant worry and concern that every pastor carries. I needed to not answer the phone for a long time. This has been good for every part of me.

I was not called into ministry to fix. My ordination vows say nothing about “fixing.” My installation vows speak of walking with a community “the path of understanding, righteousness, peace and spiritual growth.”

I am not asked to mow the church lawn, to cook the Easter breakfast, to fix the steeple clock, or to wash the tablecloths. I am not required to lobby for any cause, to feed the self-righteous anger of my mostly politically liberal congregation by delivering partisan screeds from the pulpit (excused as such by being labelled “prophetic” by those who take satisfaction in them). I am not expected to be the solution for every dysfunction or challenge that comes along in our congregation.
I am expected to be the minister, to keep before myself and the congregation the “moments of our high resolve,” (Howard Thurman) to articulate our values and to model them, and to be a presence of love and reverence within the community in a way that is authentic to my personality.

When I do preach difficult, critical sermons that are my attempt to be prophetic, and when I do lobby for causes,my congregation — whatever their personal theology — trusts that these actions are a result of my faith in God’s justice, my daily discernment of God’s will, and my deep belief in the freedom of individual conscience. My congregants do not start from a place of “UUs fix these problems in this way in the world, and that’s what our minister should be doing.” CULTIVATING REVERENCE is the first promise we make each other in our congregational covenant. To promote spiritual growth and ethical commitment is the second phrase. Note that even there, the spiritual grounding preceeds the ethical action. “To minister to each other’s needs and to those of humanity” is the third phrase. We are bound in community first, where we learn how to love. Thence we are called to MINISTER to humanity, not to Fix it.

I appreciate Wayne Walder and Thomas Moore for helping me to better understand why the energy between me and my congregation feels so life-giving. Until I began meeting monthly with a small cluster of local UU colleagues, I often avoided our UUMA gatherings because I felt so exhausted by the frustration, anger and bitterness I heard expressed by my colleagues. It is obvious to me now that too many of them are expected to be Fixers by their congregations, or who expect that of themselves, and want to make of their congregations communities of Fixers, too. Our whole denominational culture, in my opinion, has been focused of late on Fixes — expensive ones, at that.

Meanwhile, Thomas Moore says that “the only solution is to deepen the place from which your people think and live.” The minister is not someone who is the resident expert at this or that — CEO, marketing genius, fundraising guru, community organizer — a minister is the person who (to paraphrase Thomas Moore) incorporates wisdom into themselves and is transformed by it in such a way as people will notice.

It brings me almost to tears to understand now that my congregation has known these things for a very long time, and that I am just realizing them.

B’shalom.

So I’m sitting here in a beautiful hacienda and plan to climb into a hammock real soon. It’s quiet and I’ve had a BIG day. We are so close to the lake that I can hear it lapping on the shore even though there are no real competing noises from the shore. I’m sitting at this table post-dinner hanging out with an American guy named Andy (who owns a minor league baseball team in Washington, which makes him cool in my book). Andy I are bonded for life, and I’ll tell you why in a minute.
At the other table, smoking and talking quietly, is a guy from Greece, a gal from Bulgaria, another gal from Majorca, Spain and one from Holland. This might be Dimitri’s entourage; he is very hot (“Como un MANGO!” as we say here).

I may have forgotten to mention that there are two or three major volcanoes within spitting distance.
There is also a burro wandering around along with the obligatory starving, beat-up looking dogs. The burro’s name is Fiona. I don’t know if the dogs have names. I’ve been warned not to pet them because they have giardia. That’s going to be hard. I probably already have giardia; I’ve been petting stray Nica dogs all week.

Today marks two important anniversaries for me: the first is a personal one with my Underworld Consort, DCM, and the other is with the Unitarian Universalist ministry. It was twelve years ago February 8th that I went before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee and sweated out my “one.” A happy and humbling experience. I still remember certain moments very well; of course what I remember best are all the glaring errors that I thought would cause the MFC to send me back for more preparation. My friend Mark, a student at Harvard Law School at the time, was with me, bless his heart. He is now an official do-gooder, fighting for human rights in the international court. I like to think that we both made good in our own ways.

This past weekend also marked the anniversary of my congregation’s gathering in 1642. Some of the original signers of the 1642 covenant had come over from England a few years earlier on a ship called “The Blessing.” I just love that. I have been thinking about my dear church a lot this week.

But today I woke at 6 AM to the sound of roosters crowing and decided that if I was every going to get to Isla Ometepe, it would have to be this morning. I was full of resolve and so sad about leaving my Nicaragua family and the wonderful town of San Juan del Sur that I had to stay focused and get packed. I went out into the morning to take one last turn around the town, say my goodbyes to some locals, get a pile of money from the ATM, and pick up a bunch of banana-chocolate muffins from El Gato Negro for the kids. The wind was still pretty high but not nearly as bad as it has been, so I figured the ferries would be running.

Haycel, one of my Nica sisters, served as taxista for my German housemate Alex and me and we arrived at the ferry terminal by 10:15 (for our 10:30 ferry) to see waves smashing onto the shore. Mild consternation. There was no big, new ferry in sight ( I have a video of this moment that I’m having trouble uploading, but I’ll include it when I can). What to do but wait it out? Word came quickly that there would be no ferry; waves were reaching heights of ten feet.

While Alex went off to find some breakfast, I (after having taken a Dramamine) fell asleep on my bags for awhile. I woke at about 11:30 and ate a delicious cup of comfort food being sold by some kindly abuelitas — some kind of delicious rice pudding they obviously make at home, put into Dixie cups, and come sell at the ferry terminal.

Travelers chatted amongst ourselves in a variety of languages. “Do you think they’ll go?” “Will you go in one of the little lanchas?” “I think it’s too dangerous.” “Do you think it’s too dangerous?” “Did you hear that the big ferry almost capsized last week?”

I made the acquaintance of a nice guy from Spokane, Washington named Andy and we tossed around the idea of crossing the lake on one of the little death buckets, also known as “pequena lanchas.” I looked at one of them, LA REYNA DEL SUR (Queen of the Ocean, my, how grand!) sloshing up and down on the surf. And I thought, “What the hell.”

(LA REYNA!)
I exchanged my ticket for the “good ferry” (60 c, or approximately $3) for a 30c ticket on the death bucket. I gamely strapped my on my knapsack, hefted my overnight bag in hand, plunked my silly sun hat onto my head and pulled the geeky strings to hold it tight, and walked over to the gang plank. An enormous wave hit me in the back even before I got on the boat and I almost turned back. Andy called from inside the boat, kindly: “You changing your mind?”

And then I thought of those passengers on board The Blessing who crossed the Atlantic Ocean under similar conditions and thought, “Well, it’s about an hour’s trip. They have my name on a list. If I drown, I drown. Margaret Fuller drowned. I’d be in good company. What the hell. Why waste the Dramamine?”

I braved the gangplank, and then I boarded La Reyna, cramming my tush next to Andy and some other Washingtonians. We were the only gringos on board for awhile, but as the next hour passed (we sloshing up and down with the anchored boat all that time), the boat became extremely packed with Nicaranguesas and other travelers from all over– mostly the backpack set.

I asked someone if they had an empty bag I might use to vomit in should the need arise. They were kind enough to comply:

(So prepared, just like a Boy Scout!)

So how was the crossing after all?

It was terrible. It was insane. The boat smashed around on the waves and women screamed as though we were on a ride at Seven Flags. We lurched left. We lurched right. The engine roared, chugged, died, then roared again.

But Miss Weinstein has learned a thing or two in the past year, and she knows how to breathe now. And so I breathed. I kept my eyes closed (if I opened them for even a brief moment, I was overcome by dizziness and nausea). I breathed. I was glad for the fresh air blowing on my clammy face. When the woman sitting directly behind me vomited, I reminded myself that I was not obligated to join her. Someone cut open an orange or a lemon and I inhaled deeply of the scent. I massaged the pressure points for nausea relief on the pad of my thumb. I thanked God for Dramamine. I felt my bowels shake loose in my nethers, and I breathed.

We rode — if that’s the word for it — for two hours, and I breathed and in my inner eye I focused on an ice cool horizon. As we neared the island, the waters grew calmer and I realized that I
felt really fine. Fine enough to open my eyes. Fine enough to exchange a few “how are you” phrases with my companero. Fine enough to open a pack of baby wipes in my purse and give one to the woman who had vomited into the lake.

Me, the Travel Whimp. I made it.
This is a whole new competency for me, and that’s really gratifying.

I got off the boat on a pair of sturdy legs and quickly obtained the services of a taxista for myself and three other travelers to the same hotel (Andy and the other two Washingtonians). I negotiated a good price, and we settled in for what I thought would be the easy ride of the day. Bwa. Ha. HA!

However, this next part isn’t about me, it’s about my taxista Edelma who maneuvered us in an ancient Nissan over the worst “roads” I have ever seen in my life. These aren’t roads. They’re rock pit paths with treacherous craters every few yards, surrounded on both sides by fascinating flora, fauna and wildlife both domesticated and not. As Edelma illustrated that driving can be a kind of martial art, I hung out the window waving at people in shacks, horses, quetzal birds (they really are magical), pigs, dogs, cattle, oxen, and fruit trees that baffled all of us (“Now what the hell could THAT be?”).

At one point as we chunked along at 15-20 mph, a woman took a dramatic fall off of a bicycle while a man rushed to her assistance, right in the road ahead of us. I spotted bad acting right away. “DO NOT STOP,” I ordered Edelma. She slowed down. “NO ALTO. NO ALTO. ESTE ES UNA MENTIRA,” I told her. “But I saw blood on that woman,” one of my backseat companions mildly protested. “I don’t care,” I said. “This is a classic ruse. If we stop we’re going to get robbed. Keep driving.” I had read about this exact thing in the guidebooks and we did all note that no one else stopped, either. If that was a real injury, I’m sorry. But my traveler’s instinct tells me that it was 100% hooey.

At long last we arrived at this paradise, Isla Ometepe. There’s nothing else you need to know except that you probably are capable of doing things you have told yourself for years you just can’t do. You’re just not that kind of person. Or so you think.

Well, I’m a chicken-guts whimpy traveler with a bad stomach who would NEVER take anything but the biggest, most safe ferry across an enormous lake — especially when the winds are high. But what do I know?
This is me after my adventure, this is how I feel, raggedy wind-blown hair, burnt nose and all:

Who knows? Maybe tomorrow I’ll CLIMB A VOLCANO!

(The view the lake near my room)

As it says in one of my most favorite Lena Horne songs, “Now go out and get yourself some LIVE, you hear?”